2025-12-26 20:00:00
I’m often asked about how I approach New Year’s resolutions. The truth is that I no longer approach them at all, even though I did for decades. Why the change? I have found “past year reviews” (PYR) more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions. I did my first PYR after a mentor’s young daughter died of cancer on December 31st, eight years ago, and I’ve done it every year since. Her passing was a somber reminder that our days here are too precious not to fill them with the people and activities that nourish us most. The PYR takes just 30–60 minutes and looks like this:
That’s it! If you try it, let me know how it goes.
And just remember: it’s not enough to remove the negative. That simply creates a void. Get the positive things on the calendar ASAP, lest they get crowded out by the bullshit and noise that will otherwise fill your days.
Good luck and godspeed, everyone!
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2025-12-25 01:51:19
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Arthur Brooks (@arthurbrooks), a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness.
Products, resources, and people mentioned in the interview
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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: Arthur Brooks, we meet again.
Arthur C. Brooks: Nice to see you, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: Nice to see you. Glad to see the vascularity in your arms is still visible even through the long sleeve shirt.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Because every woman wants a vascular man.
Tim Ferriss: You know, I only take my cues from the internet.
Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. My wife, every day, she says, “I love you. You’re so vascular.”
Tim Ferriss: I could really take this a lot of directions, but I’m going to take a hard left from vascularity, and I’m going to try to pronounce — Brahma Murta?
Arthur C. Brooks: Brahma Muhurta.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Brahma Muhurta. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because I want to offer some candy, much like maybe an E.T., putting the Reese’s little pieces on the floor to lure E.T. out. I want to bring my listeners and diehards into the conversation with a morning routine. And we’ll talk about evening routines at the end as bookmarks, and then we’re going to dive into all sorts of stuff. But what is Brahma Muhurta, and could you describe your personal morning routine?
Arthur C. Brooks: I do have a very strong and very disciplined morning routine. And I studied love and happiness. So it’s not as if I’m going deep into the physiology of actually how I can have the best amount of muscle mass and minimum amount of body fat. I want to have more love and happiness in my life, and it’s not easy. So I’m a specialist in human happiness because it’s hard for me. And that’s the first thing to — I know everybody who does research on happiness in the psychology, behavioral science world, they’re doing it for a reason.
It’s sort of “me-search” more than research. But one of the things that I’ve found is that discipline and an understanding of your own human physiology, the biology and neuroscience, is critical for actually becoming a happier person. I have a morning routine that I dedicate to being both more productive and having higher wellbeing. I’m managing mood, because high negative affect is characteristic of my personality, and I also need to be really productive, because the morning hours are when you’re most productive, especially in creative stuff. Almost everybody experiences this.
And that starts with what you just mentioned, which is called the Brahma Muhurta. And I’ve studied a lot in India. I go to India every year. I have spiritual teachers, but also, I’m very interested in behavioral science in the Vedic tradition. They came to a lot of truths way before Western social science actually came upon this, and one of the ideas was Brahma Muhurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator’s time.
Now, a Muhurta is 48 minutes long. So two Muhurtas, the Brahma Muhurta, is an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. And the whole idea, going back thousands of years, is you get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn and you’ll be more creative, more in touch with the divine, more productive and happier.
This was always the contention. So of course, it’s been put to the test in modern behavioral science research, and sure enough. And we don’t know if it’s two Muhurtas is the right number of Muhurtas, but the whole point is, getting up before dawn has incredible impacts on productivity, focus, concentration, and happiness. If you’re getting up when the sun is warm, you’ve lost the first battle for mood management and productivity is what it comes down to. So my days always start before dawn. Now, I usually set the clock for 4:30 in the morning, which is a lot before dawn in —
Tim Ferriss: Who knew that Jocko Willink was such a fan of Vedic traditions? He also wakes up at 4:30. Please continue.
Arthur C. Brooks: 4:30 is a good time for a lot of different reasons. You try to retrofit your schedule the way you need to do, for sure. And that’s a long time before dawn in the winter, and not that long before dawn in the summer. And our listeners in Helsinki are like, “What do I do in July?” I mean, okay, you have to tailor the routines to what you’re doing, but it’s very clear that this is good for productivity and very good for happiness. And then the most important thing is what do you do right after that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What do you do?
Arthur C. Brooks: I pick up heavy things and run around.
Tim Ferriss: What does it look like?
Arthur C. Brooks: Well, the most important room in my house is the gym. And I’ve always had a good gym in my house, down in the basement of my house. Now, down in the basement of my house is also living one of my kids and his wife and their two sons, so I have to be real quiet.
Tim Ferriss: So lift heavy things that are quiet.
Arthur C. Brooks: I can’t be clanking around down there, because I’m like, I don’t want to wake up my grandchildren. But I do, generally speaking, two-thirds resistance, one-third Zone 2, but I tailor that to what my day is going to look like. So if I have a sedentary day, I’ll do more Zone 2 to start the day. And if I know I’m walking around, I’m walking around campus or whatever I have to do, I know I’m going to be walking seven or 10 miles that day, I’ll do all resistance. And so that really depends. Or if I’m going on a hike with my wife on Saturday or something. But that’s seven days a week. I do an hour in the gym seven days a week.
Tim Ferriss: What would the, let’s just say, prototypical two-thirds resistance, one-third Zone 2, or whatever the ratio might look like as a template, what would that look like? What type of exercises? Free weights, equipment, kettlebells? What type of Zone 2 do you like? Because for instance, like with Zone 2, it’s like, I travel a lot. Stationary bikes can be a real hassle because of the fitting.
Arthur C. Brooks: Right.
Tim Ferriss: But then, all right, maybe you use a treadmill with an incline with a rucksack or something like that. I’d just love to know the specifics.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, for sure. I’m very old school. And my resistance training, actually, I learned the routines that I do when I was in my 30s. I really started lifting when I was in my 30s. And my dad died and I changed a lot of the things in my life. I quit drinking alcohol in my 30s, and I did a lot of things differently than I hadn’t done before, because I wanted to not have the future that I saw in the windshield of my life.
And one of the things that I did was, I started getting serious about my fitness and going to the gym. And I thought to myself, what’s my goal? My goal is not to turn into a statue and be admired. I mean, I’d been married for a long time at that point. I mean, that was sort of done. And besides, my wife doesn’t care. She just wants me to be happy and healthy.
I wanted to be doing that in my 70s. I wanted to be healthy in my 70s. I wanted to be hanging out with my wife and dandling my 11th grandchild on my knee when I was 78 years old. So what I did was, I’ve always been on tour. I’ve always traveled constantly all throughout my career. Every city I’d go to, I’d find the oldest iron gym I could find. Why? Because that’s where the old dudes train. That’s where the shredded guys train. And now I’m the old guy. So my wife says that sleeping with me is like holding a leather sack of ropes, which I think is a compliment. I’m not sure. But I’ve been married decades, Tim, decades. But I would go to these iron gyms —
Tim Ferriss: It’s better than a leather sack of lard, right?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, for sure. For sure. It’s like, ropes. And so, I’d go to these gyms for 78-year-old guys who are completely shredded. They look like old roosters. And they’re working out, and I would say, “Teach me. Teach me, maestro, sensei. Teach me what you do.” And they would give me this advice, and I followed that advice assiduously. And so what it is is, I’m old school. Push, pull, legs. Don’t use a bar.
Tim Ferriss: And is it push, pull, legs every workout?
Arthur C. Brooks: No, it’s push, pull, legs on different days.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Arthur C. Brooks: So it’s not a pure bro split, but it’s near on. Making sure that you’re not getting heroic with the amount of weight. You’re making sure that you’re using dumbbells and not bars, because you can get full range of motion, but you’re super careful about your joints. If you have any pain in your joints, you back off. You do, for volume, you do more reps as opposed to more weight, and always be doing it that way, and dial it down, the actual weight, dialing up the reps as you get older.
And these are these basic ideas. So it’s push, pull, legs. And then I’m doing usually somewhere between 20 minutes and 40 minutes of Zone 2 cardio, which I have an elliptical machine, because it’s super easy on the joints. And every place, every hotel’s got an elliptical machine. I’ve got a nice elliptical machine at home, and that’s what I’m doing.
And this is an hour. A lot of the time I’m doing it without headphones. It’s important because you need to concentrate for — to begin with, that’s your most creative time. That’s like taking an hour-long shower. You get your best ideas if you work out without headphones. There’s a lot of good neuroscience on that, as well. And that’s 4:45 to 5:45 in the morning every single day. That’s the one thing I can really count on that’s always going to be good. Always going to be good.
Tim Ferriss: Do you record your workouts?
Arthur C. Brooks: Like, videotape my workouts?
Tim Ferriss: No. In any type of workout journal, or is it so intuitive at this point that you’re like, I really know, since I’m using dumbbells and dumbbells should be consistent from place to place.
Arthur C. Brooks: I can tell you what I did on this day in 2001.
Tim Ferriss: Meaning you remember it?
Arthur C. Brooks: No. Meaning it’s written down.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. It’s like, wait a sec.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, no, no, no. I’m not.
Tim Ferriss: There’s some people who are like that.
Arthur C. Brooks: Some sort of a Rain Man deal? Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, for instance, people you wouldn’t expect. Arnold Schwarzenegger loves chess, and when I first interviewed him, I was talking to his right hand man and he said, “Oh, he plays chess daily with X number of people over the course of a week or two, and he keeps track of every game and every score in his head.”
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s amazing. So no, I’m not doing that, but I can tell you, I mean, I have journals that go back. I write it down. And so, I know what’s on what day and what I did. There’s a whole lot of things that I keep records of, for sure, just so I understand my own progress in life, making sure I’m not making regress in life. And for some reason, I got into the pattern of writing down every single workout going back until, back to my 30s.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m the same.
Arthur C. Brooks: And now I’m 61 years old. So that’s a lot of date books.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I have workouts going back to 16, and I still have all them.
Arthur C. Brooks: Just to keep them.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t know why I keep them, but I have them.
Arthur C. Brooks: I can tell you behaviorally why people do that. I mean, what you want is record of progress, because that’s one of the great secrets to human happiness. You never arrive. Arrival gives you almost nothing, but it’s progress toward the goal. And this is a record of Tim’s progress going all the way back to 16. It’s evidence that you’re a better man than when you were 16 years old. Let’s hope.
Tim Ferriss: Certainly not as strong as I was when I was in my 20s, but still Zone 2.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Not dying.
Tim Ferriss: Things like this.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, it’s fantastic. And it’s really a great way to start the day, and there’s a lot of research, once again, on this is especially important for mood management. So half of the population is above average in negative affect. Negative affect is strong negative manifestation of mood. And obviously, if it’s the median, half has to be above that and half has to be below. And I’m way above average in negative affect.I’m above average in positive affect, too.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, me too.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. I mean, you’re a mad scientist, which is typically —
Tim Ferriss: I’m a poet. We talked about this last time.
Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, we did this. You are a poet. So you’re below average positive.
Tim Ferriss: Below average positive. High peak negative.
Arthur C. Brooks: High peak negative. So I’m at the 90th percentile in negative mood. And there are ways, typical ways that people self-manage negative mood that are really, really bad for you, like drugs and alcohol, like internet use, like pornography. Horrible negative mood management. Workaholism, awful. People distract themselves because the amygdala of the brain is what largely manages fear and anger, but the amygdala also manages attention. And so if you can distract yourself with something you can count on, like your work, what you’re effectively doing is you’re managing your anger and fear by redirecting the activity of the amygdala.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds right. Checks out.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, but there’s good ways to do it, like you’re working, like developing your spirituality and picking up heavy things and running around.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to stick on the heavy things for a second here, as well as the elliptical.
Arthur C. Brooks: Because we’re not even done with that.
Tim Ferriss: We’re not even done. So we have the waking early, let’s call it 4:30. For me, early, 7:30 this morning, I was very pleased with myself after arriving from travel at close to midnight.
Arthur C. Brooks: Hey, that’s 4:30 on the West Coast.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly, exactly. It’s 4:30 somewhere. And we’ve covered that briefly. For Zone 2, are you wearing a heart rate monitor? Are you doing the talk test? How are you tracking?
Arthur C. Brooks: Talk test.
Tim Ferriss: Talk test.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a talk test. It’s just keeping it as simple as possible. I tend to go insane if I’m over-measured. And so, that’s one of the reasons I use very, very simple biometrics and very simple health monitoring. I’m going to need to move up to something better at some point, but if I get too much data, I’m in trouble.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it’s like having seven different drafts of a piece of writing you’re working on. Now what do you do? I mean, in a sense, there’s data, and then there’s information which you need to analyze. So there is a point of diminishing returns.
PREROLL
Tim Ferriss: Talk test, for people, just very briefly. Peter Attia has videos on this of himself on a stationary bike, demonstrating it on social media if you want to try to find them. But in effect, and please tell me if I’m off base with you approach it, you are able to, while you’re in this Zone 2 on, say, an elliptical, stationary bike, treadmill, you’re able to speak or have a conversation with very short sentences, but you don’t really want to.
Arthur C. Brooks: Right. That’s exactly right. Zone 3, you’re too out of breath to have a normal conversation. Zone 4, you’re gasping for air. So I mean, Zone 1 is just, you’re strolling, is kind of what it comes down to. And your heart rate to be in the Zone 2 is usually around 120 beats per minute. And I’ll also do some periods of some intervals in that. I’ll do two or three intervals during a half hour Zone 2 cardio session. So I’ll take it up to 160 beats per minute for a full minute, then bring it back. I’ll do some of that HIIT training while I’m doing it. But 120 beats per minute is a really, really easy thing to ascertain, because I’m an old musician. That’s the speed of a Sousa march.
Tim Ferriss: A what?
Arthur C. Brooks: A Sousa march. That’s 120 beats per minute. That’s how you know.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, when you put out your elliptical e-course, I think this is the lead in-music.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s my bump music, man.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Actually, before we get to after the exercise, for folks who might be interested in really diving into this, number one, Peter has a lot on it. Number two, if you want to get nerdy, the Morpheus device has been recommended to me by folks like Andy Galpin and others. There are other options, but that seems to be a pretty good device. So in terms of developing, if you’re not a former French horn player, the intuition of what is 120 or 130 beats per minute, you can do, much like I’ve already done with, say, glucose readings or ketone readings, I know where I am, but I’m not yet there with heart rate. The Morpheus is a nice tool for learning what it feels like to be at 120, versus 130, versus whatever it might be.
All right, you have your workout. After the workout, what is your morning routine?
Arthur C. Brooks: I get cleaned up, then I go to mass. I’m a Catholic. I go to mass every day. And that’s the experience of transcendence, which, my path is not the only path, to say, “Everybody’s got to go to mass!” And that’s not going to be effective, because that’s not for everybody. But there is a period of reflection and transcendence that’s very, very important for not just mood management, for productivity that’s going to follow. And there’s a lot of neuroscience behind why that is effective.
But for me, it’s also an opportunity, because my wife gets up at six. And when I’m home — I’m home about half the time, I’m on tour, about half the time I’m home. But I’m home every week. So I don’t go on tour for months at a time. I go on tour for days at a time. Which means that I’ve always got a flight home and that’s inconvenient, but that’s actually part of my life protocols, is making sure I spend every single weekend at home. I’m out maybe four weekends a year. And so that means I have lots of days at home. I have at least three or four mornings at home, and we start the day at 6:30 mass, the two of us do. That’s very important for us.
Tim Ferriss: How long is mass?
Arthur C. Brooks: Half an hour.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Arthur C. Brooks: Daily mass is half an hour. Sunday mass is an hour, but daily mass is half an hour. During the week, after 30 minutes, no souls are saved. According to science, no. So we do that, and that’s a period of prayer and reflection. Some people prefer Vipassana meditation. Our friend Ryan Holiday does a lot with actually studying the Stoic philosophers, but you need what the ancients would call the holy hour. And they would be a full hour. For me, it’s the holy half hour. And that really works. And it’s really good for my relationship, and it’s very good for, it’s incredibly good for focus and concentration.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to bookmark, just to give a shameless plug for our first conversation.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: For people who are like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Well, I didn’t grow up Catholic.” You didn’t grow up Catholic.
Arthur C. Brooks: I didn’t grow up Catholic.
Tim Ferriss: Your parents thought that your conversion was an act of youthful rebellion.
Arthur C. Brooks: Which it might’ve been.
Tim Ferriss: It might’ve been, but it stuck.
Arthur C. Brooks: Fair is fair.
Tim Ferriss: But it stuck.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So if you want the backstory, including some wild stories, then listen to our first conversation.
Arthur C. Brooks: So I’m basically the equivalent of like a freaked out hippie who went to India and got converted and practiced an exotic religion for the rest of my life. But my exotic religion is Catholicism.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, depending on where you start, it’s pretty exotic.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you have the holy half hour.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, our routines have a lot of similarities, although the flavors are slightly different. We could talk about that.
Arthur C. Brooks: Probably the neurophysiological effects are the same.
Tim Ferriss: Very, very similar, I would imagine. So after the holy half hour, what happens?
Arthur C. Brooks: After the holy half hour, now I’ve taken no nutrition except for salty water with some high dose, I take high dose creatine hydrate with my workout drink.
Tim Ferriss: What’s high dose?
Arthur C. Brooks: High dose for me is 15 to 20 grams a day.
Tim Ferriss: That is a lot. Okay.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So the first five is for muscle protein synthesis or volumization of muscles, which is really good for your workout. The other is for this just exploding area of research on the biological benefits of it, the neurobiological benefits of it. And for me, that’s really, really important, because I’m a crummy sleeper. And Rhonda Patrick has done a lot of stuff on how creatine is really good when you don’t sleep.
It’s also really good because I’m trying to bank, neurologically, four hours of concentration, and it’s mostly creativity. So I have to set myself up for optimal creativity, and that’s one of the best ways to do it. That’s the best supplement that I’ve been able to find that affects my creativity later on in the morning. So I’m adding that to my pre-workout drink. I’m taking no caffeine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: This is important. I don’t take any caffeine to wake up. Huberman’s right on this. And this is very contested in the literature, about A2A adenosine and how caffeine blocks adenosine receptors. But I really believe, and Huberman believes this, but I find this the most compelling explanation and it absolutely works for me. I don’t use caffeine to wake up. I use caffeine to focus. Because what I want is, I actually want circulating adenosine to metabolize and to clear endogenously. And I want lots and lots of clarity, plenty of open parking spots for the adenosine receptors, that I can then fill two to three hours after I wake up with caffeine. And this will give me, this is just modafinil. At this point, this is just vacuuming. This is going to vacuum —
Tim Ferriss: Be careful with actual modafinil, kiddos.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, no, I know. I’m saying like that. So it’s vacuuming the dopamine into the prefrontal cortex. So what ADHD drugs do is that they keep more dopamine in the synapse, especially in the prefrontal cortex, such that you can focus, you have more concentration and you have more creativity. And caffeine is great for this. A lot of people like nicotine. I don’t like nicotine only because I was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes early on in my life. All the way through my 20s, I was a smoker, and I don’t want — I mean, I blew it.
Tim Ferriss: Well, a lot of people are step by step blowing it also, with first microdosing nicotine, and then lo and behold, since it’s sort of dance partners in addictive potential with heroin, then those micro doses become something along the line of mezzodoses, and then before you know it, you’re addicted to nicotine.
Arthur C. Brooks: Pretty soon it’s all nicotine, all the time.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Arthur C. Brooks: And caffeine is highly addictive as well, but as a psychostimulant, it’s better studied. It’s much, much easier to self-manage. I get usually about 380 milligrams of caffeine.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s decent.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s decent.
Tim Ferriss: Holy cow. All right.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s a venti dark roast from Starbucks. I grew up in Seattletown.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, 380. For a lot of people, if you have moderately strong coffee, that’s going to be almost four cups of coffee.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s power.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s 20 ounces of good — and again, the darker roasts have less caffeine, but I like them better because I grew up on the north side of Queen Ann Hill in Seattle when there was one Starbucks. And so I’ve been doing that since I was in eighth grade.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So you have the holy half hour.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then after the holy half hour, you haven’t had any caffeine up to that point.
Arthur C. Brooks: And now it’s 7:15 in the morning.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Arthur C. Brooks: So I’m back from mass.
Tim Ferriss: Now what do you do?
Arthur C. Brooks: I brew the coffee.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Arthur C. Brooks: And I know how to brew coffee.
Tim Ferriss: Now, do you have the 380 in a megadose, or is that titrated over time?
Arthur C. Brooks: No, that’s in a megadose that usually it takes me about 45 minutes to drink.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.
Arthur C. Brooks: Half an hour to 45 minutes to drink. I know. Well, part of it is I’ve got this grizzled adrenal system. My HPA axis is like, it’s like a building falling down at this point.
Tim Ferriss: You just have to donkey kick your adrenals.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it. So then you brew the coffee and sit down to —
Arthur C. Brooks: Then I make my first nutrition of the day. And the first nutrition of the day is 60 to 70 grams of protein. And protein is really important, especially with a tryptophan-rich source of protein for mood management. And I’m not going to eat, and I’m not eating a turkey leg or something like that. I’m not like Henry VIII for that. It’s mostly whey protein powder mixed in with non-fat, unflavored Greek yogurt, which is great. And there’s so many — and it’s like, anymore, I just read that the three most, the fastest growing foods in America today are cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, and whey protein powder. Which is extraordinary, extraordinary when you think about it. But you and I got to this much earlier, back when it was harder to find Greek yogurt. And I put a little artificial sweetener in it, because I’m not afraid of artificial sweetener. And I get more micronutrients in it with putting in walnuts and blueberries and things that actually give me the micronutrients that I need.
By the way, I’ve also taken a multivitamin at this point. I take a multivitamin everyday. I’ve been taking a multivitamin for decade after decade after decade. And there’s these papers that were coming out five years ago saying that they’re not only ineffective, they’re bad for you. That’s all been overtaken by events, and the newer research actually says it has neurocognitive protective benefits. Take your multivitamins. And there are a lot of ways to do it. Sometimes I’ll take a good multivitamin in the morning. Sometimes I wait later in the day and take AG1. But you need a good multivitamin. Almost everybody does.
Tim Ferriss: So a few — not persnickety, but detail questions, because that’s how my mind operates. Why no fat Greek yogurt instead of something with fat?
Arthur C. Brooks: And fat would be better for me, to be sure. It’s that the fat bothers my stomach. So just, I don’t like it. It fills me up too much. It’s hard to get to 65 grams of protein when you’ve got that much fat in the yogurt, because you’re just going to be just falling asleep. I only do that because it’s uncomfortable to have the fat.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. And I’ll add just a footnote for some people listening will say, wait a second, I thought you could only absorb 30 grams of protein at a sitting. That is not quite —
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s old school research.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It is somewhere between an old wives tale and just a statement that has been repeated so much that it’s taken to be true, but it’s not true.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s not true.
Tim Ferriss: And in fact, there is, or I should say there are some data to suggest that as you get older, you actually absorb protein more effectively in a larger bolus, meaning more protein at fewer sittings.
Arthur C. Brooks: Right, that’s correct. And I’m completely persuaded by the research. And over the years, I’ve experimented a lot with that in my diet, just in the protocols of my eating. And what I’ve found over the past five years in particular is that I’m most comfortable, because I’m naturally genetically really lean. I’m most comfortable when I’m sub-10 body fat.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, me too. I’m kidding.
Arthur C. Brooks: But it’s just because of my genetics.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve been trying to get there since I was 14.
Arthur C. Brooks: Well, if the genetics don’t want it, then they’re going to go against it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ve got to battle dwarf genetics.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, man, if I had your frame, I mean, I would love that. I would be able to lift heavy. But the way to do that for me is to stay at 200 grams of protein a day. So to keep moderate calories in 200 grams of protein a day, and then I can keep my body fat where I want it, where I feel really good, and I’m never hungry. And that’s the way to do it, is a really protein-rich diet. And of course, now popular culture is catching up with what we’ve known scientifically for a pretty long time.
Tim Ferriss: So you get your colossus of caffeine that can follow the holy half hour, just to keep up with the narration.
Arthur C. Brooks: And not everybody has to drink 380 milligrams of caffeine.
Tim Ferriss: You have your 60 to 70 grams of protein as described, and then you are sitting down to write. What are you doing?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, then I can sit down and write. If I’m at home, then I sit down to write. And there’s no distractions. I mean, there’s no meetings, there’s no Zoom. I mean, if the President of the United States or the Pope calls, there’ll be a morning meeting, but that’s kind of it. And I’ve got a very quiet place. I’m not looking at email. I’m not answering text messages. I’m not reading the Wall Street Journal. And to do this, when I set myself up this way, I get four hours of productivity, and that’s very unusual. If you’re doing things the old-fashioned way, you’re getting up when the sun is warm and you’re having the nice big, three espressos to try to wake up, and you’re not optimizing your brain chemistry appropriately, you’ll get two hours of creativity, max.
Tim Ferriss: Max.
Arthur C. Brooks: And that’s why Hemingway used to write for two hours.
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to bring up Hemingway, also because he would leave things unfinished. He would basically end mid-paragraph so that he had momentum in starting the following day. And I suppose my question is, in a world of ubiquitous interruption and notification, where you have iMessage on your computer, you have ChatGPT, you have research that you might do concurrently with your writing, there are different ways to approach writing, how do you set yourself up, say, the day before, such that you can sit down without interruption, or self-interruption, for four hours and write?
Arthur C. Brooks: To begin with, you need to know what you’re going to do the next day, the day before. You need to make a list of the things you’re going to do, in priority order. And the priority order is not what you like the most, but what actually requires the most concentration and creativity. So the thing that you need to hit immediately, which will be the last 10 percent of that page you were writing. That’s a really good protocol to procrastinate that last 10 percent, because your most creative, most productive, your best quality stuff is first. And so, you want to leave It lasts to be the first the next day. And that way you’ve got consistent creativity. If I’m writing a column, for example, and I’m on deadline every single week for a column, and it’s 1,200 words a week of science about human happiness —
Tim Ferriss: Sounds stressful. Sounds like a way to make yourself unhappy.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, no, I’m hunted. But doing that, if I sit down and write it, the kicker is always going to be worse than the lead. And so, the kicker is always the first thing in the morning, some day. So the kicker is as good as the lead, or better, because I’m leaving it so that my brain chemistry is optimized to the product that I’m trying to create.
That was a very good protocol from Hemingway. His problem was, he was a drunk. And when you’re a drunk, what you’re doing is you’re borrowing tomorrow’s dopamine tonight.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, you’re borrowing, as a friend of mine put it also, you’re borrowing happiness from tomorrow.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. And the reason is because your dopamine is going to be below the baseline and you’re going to have anhedonia in the morning. Anhedonia is the characteristic of clinical depression, which is a deficit of dopamine, meaning an inability to feel pleasure, and is below the baseline when you’re hungover, below the baseline when you’ve popped it really hard and you’re getting the trough the next day. So if you drink at night, and if you want to be productive the next morning, this morning starts last night, and it starts by going to bed at a reasonable time sober, which we’ll probably get to at the end of this conversation.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s why he had two hours of productivity.
Arthur C. Brooks: I’m going to bed sober.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also because if you need any — and this is my kind of repeated realization that should be top of mind all the time, which is if you wear an Oura Ring, a Whoop band, the one conclusion that you will come to over and over again is if you drink before bed, even a few hours before bed, your sleep is garbage.
Arthur C. Brooks: Your sleep architecture is so messy.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just — and for me now, for whatever reason at this age, I’m 48, even one — I had one martini with my brother. I don’t see him that much. We went out to a nice speakeasy, I had a drink, and just shattered my sleep. It was shocking to me. Kind of embarrassing, honestly.
Arthur C. Brooks: The older you get, the older you get. And the truth is that young people are figuring out what people my age didn’t when I was — I mean, I drank very heavily in my 20s and 30s. It’s what we did. I was a musician. It’s what we did. We knew it wasn’t good for us, but the truth of the matter is that all euphorics, if it’s euphoric, if it gets you buzzed, it’s neurotoxic. And you have to be careful applying neurotoxic substances to yourself, because you’re going to pay a price for that.
Now, there’s a cost/benefit analysis to anything. I don’t drive the safest car. I don’t drive a car that if it crashes, I will be completely safe no matter what. I drive something I like. I’m making a cost/benefit analysis. But the truth is that many people are not — they think it’s costless to get buzzed. It’s not. It just isn’t.
Tim Ferriss: So, your routine, I’ll just pause us there, is very, very similar to mine.
Arthur C. Brooks: Tell me more.
Tim Ferriss: Well, right now I’m day three of segueing into ketosis. We’re always producing ketones, but I’m probably, just because I’ve done this a lot, I’m probably at right now 1.2 millimolars in terms of blood concentration of beta-hydroxybutyrate after —
Arthur C. Brooks: You like ketosis? You like how it feels?
Tim Ferriss: I love how it feels in terms of mental acuity. I also, because I have neurodegenerative diseases in my family, and metabolic dysfunction, see doing, let’s just call it four to six weeks of nutritional ketosis once, or twice a year to appear to be very cheap insurance.
Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, what’s your APOE profile?
Tim Ferriss: APOE3-4.
Arthur C. Brooks: You’re 3-4?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 3-4.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And there are other risk factors. I also have relatives who are 3-3, but nonetheless developed early Alzheimer’s. So, I’m like, “Yeah, you know what? I like how I feel. I need less sleep when I’m in ketosis.” I naturally wake up very, very alert, which is unusual for me. So I wanted to mention that first just to set the stage in a way. So I, for decades, did minimum 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. I still think that is a great option. For me now, for a host of reasons that I could get into, but I’ll keep it simple. I almost always do intermittent fasting where I am fasting until 2:00, or 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon. But when I wake up, like this morning, I woke up at 7:30, and I was preparing for this conversation. So, I wanted to block out a few hours to do that.
But woke up, had, now this is mildly stimulating, but I wanted to have a little bit because I’m also jet lagged, and arrived at around midnight last night. Had some cacao with a little bit of cacao butter mixed in.
Arthur C. Brooks: Nice.
Tim Ferriss: Just enough under three grams of net carbs.
Arthur C. Brooks: Because you’re keeping your net carbs to 30 a day probably, right?
Tim Ferriss: I’m keeping my net grams to, for me personally, right now under 10 grams.
Arthur C. Brooks: Under 10. That’ll get you into ketosis fast.
Tim Ferriss: Under 10, yeah. Especially if I am already adapted to intermittent fasting so that I’m doing 16 to 18 hours of fasting with a short six to eight hour window of eating. Once you get to 16 to 18 hours, especially if you’re doing some exercise, let’s just say in the morning, or any other point, you’re depleting your liver glycogen, and you’re going to get into the habit. Your metabolic machinery will develop the habit, and the capability of producing ketones even when you are eating carbohydrates in that limited window of eating. So —
Arthur C. Brooks: And you don’t take exogenous ketones?
Tim Ferriss: I will occasionally on a day like today, because I know that I’m on effectively, let’s call it day two, and a half of segueing into ketosis. I think my natural production is roughly where I mentioned. My natural production right now is probably around 0.9. I took, let me just back up. So, I wake up at 7:30, I have the cacao plus some cacao butter. Then I sit in a — I have a hot tub. This is like one of my indulgences. It’s not actually that expensive, but I sit in a hot tub, and I meditated for 10 minutes with an app, The Way app. Henry Shukman is my spirit animal. Amazing. Mindfulness/Zen-focused practice. Did that 10 minutes, that’s it. Got out. It is pretty chilly right now in Austin. Gets down to, I think last night it was 37 low, got into my pool for a few minutes, and got out, cold shower, came back in, and then sat down, and this was my kind of deep work prep. No interruptions. Then —
Arthur C. Brooks: There’s non-trivial similarity to what I’m trying to do neurocognitively.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. And then on the way here, about 15 minutes prior to arriving, knowing my start time, there were a few other bells and whistles that I threw in nutritionally in terms of supplements, and so on earlier in the morning, but had one nitro code cold brew from Starbucks, and about 15 milliliters of exogenous ketones. In this case, it’s BHB bonded to one three butane dial, which I do have some reservations about. Long-term chronic use I think could be liver toxic, but I’m doing it very intermittently. And so for the, let’s just call it four days of segue into nutritional ketosis, I will use exogenous ketones sometimes as a boost, and that’s it. So that was the moment.
Arthur C. Brooks: And it’s working great for you. And here’s the big takeaway, I think. You got to that through experimentation.
Tim Ferriss: Yep.
Arthur C. Brooks: You didn’t get that by getting it off the internet. You learned a lot about these different variety of protocols, and you tailored it, and tried it, and over a number of years came upon what worked best for you. And that’s exactly what I’ve done, too. And everybody watching needs to treat their life like a lab. Experimentation is king. And so information, experimentation is the precursor to good experimentation is information, is scientific information. And then it’s getting experience through the experimentation, and figuring out what your own protocol actually is because as they say in the ads, your results may differ.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. Exactly. And so for me, if I’m weight training, I will typically weight train late afternoon. That’s just always been my preference. But if we had not had this podcast today, I would have done Zone 2 training.
Arthur C. Brooks: In the morning.
Tim Ferriss: Right, exactly. So, after the meditation —
Arthur C. Brooks: Before you eat.
Tim Ferriss: Before I use —
Arthur C. Brooks: You like fasted cardio?
Tim Ferriss: After the meditation, I do like fasted cardio.
Arthur C. Brooks: I do, too.
Tim Ferriss: Especially when I’m trying to get into ketosis, or intermittent fasting, because it’ll help me deplete the glycogen, stored glycogen at a faster rate. If it is too high, just for people who may be interested in intermittent fasting, or ketosis, if the exertion level is too high, or if it is resistance training, sometimes it will spike glucose in such a way that makes it a little counterproductive if you’re trying to get into ketosis. So, the zones —
Arthur C. Brooks: Because your stress hormones are —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you’re already going to have increased cortisol in the morning. You need that to wake up. And also with caffeine, oftentimes you’ll see a pretty noticeable spike in glucose. So I try not to compound it by doing the weight training in the morning.
Arthur C. Brooks: At this point in the cycle of getting into ketosis, do you have headaches?
Tim Ferriss: I had a mild headache yesterday. I will say that the biggest cheat for me in terms of getting into ketosis quickly, and relatively painlessly is training my body to intermittent fast, intermittently fast. And I have been in ketosis dozens of times in my life, and I’ve done extended periods, six months in ketosis, and so on, particularly when I was actually training for sports, which seems counterintuitive, but I was doing something called the cyclical ketogenic diet, which is really interesting. When I was training for the National Chinese Kickboxing Championships in ’99, that was an amazing system for cutting weight, getting lean, but also maintaining, or adding some muscle mass. In any case, people can look it up.
Arthur C. Brooks: You’re just confusing your system in a cycle, right? You’re staying out of equilibrium in a way, right?
Tim Ferriss: You’re definitely doing that. What you’re doing with the CKD, people can look it up. There are many people who’ve pioneered this. Mauro Di Pasquale with the anabolic diet. There are different names for it. Dan Duchaine way back in the day also talked about this, but you are providing a short window once a week where you are, in my case, doing a glycogen depletion weight training workout, and then you are spiking the hell out of your carbohydrate intake for, let’s call it 15 hours, something like that. And you are really piling in carbohydrate, and you are leveraging insulin as a storage hormone, and anabolic signaling sort of pathway to ensure that you can pack on some muscle while you are in, on average, ketotic state, which is very, very hard to do otherwise. So, that was, I don’t do that anymore because it’s just too much brain damage, frankly.
Arthur C. Brooks: Well, that’s a lot to think about. That becomes a full-time job. The protocol becomes the full-time job.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, which is not the point. In my case, I’m sure, in your case, it’s like the protocol is in service of life. Life is not in service of the protocol.
Arthur C. Brooks: The protocol is supposed to work for you. You’re not supposed to work for your protocol.
Tim Ferriss: And I mean, we’re not going to belabor this point, but in a world, and people, there’s a great Chuck Palahniuk quote that I don’t want to get wrong. People can look it up, but basically says, “Big Brother isn’t watching you. He’s entertaining you. Entertaining you to death,” and just talking about the sort of modern digital ecosystem, and the role of technology, et cetera. But suffice to say, if you can single task for four hours from a competitive advantage perspective, like you’re —
Arthur C. Brooks: Not using pharmaceutical grade psychostimulants?
Tim Ferriss: You’re in an elite group.
Arthur C. Brooks: You’re an absolute elite group, and you absolutely can do it with proper health, and exercise disciplines.
Tim Ferriss: And also, I’ll just say to your point, managing the physiology, had a great conversation with Dave Baszucki recently, who’s the co-founder, and CEO of Roblox, and he, and his wife are the largest, well, their foundation is the largest funder of metabolic psychiatry research, including ketogenic therapy, which includes Chris Palmer at Harvard, and —
Arthur C. Brooks: That stuff’s super interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Ketosis for me, it is like taking modafinil, and all of the kind of short-term powerful but long-term penalty drugs that I’ve tested over time.
Arthur C. Brooks: Have you ever taken a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, an SSRI?
Tim Ferriss: I have never taken one for antidepression. I have taken what is similar. It’s not exactly an SSRI, but I have used Trazodone for sleep.
Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, Trazodone is a monocyclic, right? It’s a really early, early generation antidepressant.
Tim Ferriss: It is effectively a failed antidepressant because it put people to sleep that was repurposed as a sleep drug is my understanding.
Arthur C. Brooks: Like Unisom was supposed to make you not sneeze, and doxylamine succinate actually was supposed to make you, was an antihistamine that was repurposed as a sleeping pill.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go. So, that is it. But why do you ask about SSRI?
Arthur C. Brooks: The reason I ask that is because a lot of people will say that they find that a proper keto diet is better than an SSRI too, for the serotonin effects.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I mean, if you look at, people should look up Chris Palmer. I had a conversation with him as well, but for mood stabilization, mood elevation, but not in a peak, and trough type of way, I have found nothing better than the ketogenic diet.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s interesting. So, for mood management, this is fundamental for you?
Tim Ferriss: It is. It is without exception the number one with no close second.
Arthur C. Brooks: So poets, take note.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, poets take note. And maybe you should just — we have to revisit this. People are like, “What is this math scientist poet stuff?” You want to just explain what we’re talking about?
Arthur C. Brooks: So there are four affect profiles, and affect profiles mean the intensity of your negative, and positive emotion. You’re born with this. So, there are times in your life when you have more positive emotionality, or more intense negative emotionality, depending on circumstances, but this is your baseline state. You can be above average positive, and above average intensity, negative emotion. Those are the mad scientists. That’s me.
Tim Ferriss: You have high highs, and low lows.
Arthur C. Brooks: I’m all about it’s great, or it sucks. And it’s impossible to be married to a mad scientist. My wife reminded me of that this morning. There’s you can be above average positive, and below average intensity negative. These are cheerleaders. These are the happiest people. They have some weaknesses. They tend to be bad bosses because they won’t accept bad news, and they can’t give criticism. Like no bad vibes, man. There are some people who are low, low. They’re just low affect people. These are the judges. They make really good surgeons. You don’t want somebody to cut you open, and go, “Oh, my God!” That’s not what you want. You want somebody who’s going to be like, “Eh, I can take that out.” Or nuclear power reactor operators, or something who are really calm.
Tim Ferriss: Low low means low positive, low negative.
Arthur C. Brooks: Low positive, low negative.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Their side wave is flatter.
Arthur C. Brooks: They’re steady, man. I mean, they’re not freaking out about anything. And then there are those who are low intensity, positive emotion, but high intensity, negative emotion. And these are the poets. And the poets are the most interesting. And the reason is because they tend to be the most creative, and most romantic. And part of that is because there’s this research, all neuroscience research is contested. I should preface this, but there’s a part of the limbic system called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that is involved in your rumination when you’re depressed. Ruminative depression, ruminative sad depression is a heavy activity of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. You also use it when you’re ruminating on a business plan, or writing a symphony, and when you’re ruminating on another person, because you’re falling in love, and that’s why poets tend to be depressive, creative, and romantic. Tim Ferriss, my friends, this is Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss: That’s me in a nutshell.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. And so the whole point is that you need, no matter who you are, you need to appropriately manage your mood. The essence of self-management is mood management starts with knowledge about who you are. And people can go to my website, and take a test, and figure out who they are, which profile you are. And then you got to figure out what you need to do in mood management. Do you need to elevate positive emotion, or do you need to manage? You don’t need to eliminate negative emotion. You don’t want to do that. You’ll be dead in a week. Negative emotion is really important for protection, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, but you want to manage it so it’s not dysregulating. So, it’s not exaggerated. And there are lots of techniques for doing it, but you got to know what your bigger challenge is by knowing yourself.
Then you can proceed to some of these protocols that we’re talking about here for appropriate mood management based on your challenges is how it works. For you, it’s managing positive up, and managing negative down. And ketosis is really, really good for both.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would say for folks who may fit the poet profile, or who are curious about my personal experience that repeatedly, I mean, I’ve done this now dozens of times. It is very consistent. It completely removes the lowest 50 percent of my negative, and bumps my positive baseline up 20 percent.
Arthur C. Brooks: This is really interesting, because this might be the poet’s protocol. Ketosis might be the poet’s protocol. For me, it’s what I eat, how I self-administer caffeine, and it’s actually how I do my exercise. When I’m super fasted, first thing in the morning is incredibly efficacious for managing down my negative affect without accidentally managing down my positive affect.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I want to point out another thing about your protocol, which is by having caffeine later, this is my experience, because I love caffeine.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I love stimulants.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s great.
Tim Ferriss: I have to be very careful.
Arthur C. Brooks: I know.
Tim Ferriss: If I start later, guess what? What an incredible sleight of hand trick. I consume less. Why? Because I started later.
Arthur C. Brooks: Right. And no crash.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And so I will start later, and your total caffeine will be less. Why is this relevant? Because the half life of caffeine is very long. And if you have too much caffeine early in the day, even if you stop by noon, it will still impact your sleep, sleep architecture, and so on.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. And the older you get, so the half life, the metabolism of caffeine, it changes over the course of your life, and the half life extends. One of the things that I find for friends of mine who are like me in their 60s, and they’ll be like, “I’m sleeping. I sleep like crap because I’m old.” It’s like, probably because you have an espresso after lunch. And when you were 30, you could metabolize the caffeine effectively. The half life was probably eight hours, and now it’s probably 14 hours. And it’s still in your system bothering you when you’re trying to go to sleep at night. Take out that after lunch espresso, move your caffeine, stop drinking caffeine after 8:00, or 9:00 in the morning. It’s like magic.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is incredible. I’ve actually, I reserve coffee, caffeine like a nitro cold brew for days like today.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then otherwise I’m using yerba mate, or cacao, or pure tea, or some combination thereof.
Arthur C. Brooks: You like yerba mate? You like what it makes you feel?
Tim Ferriss: I love it.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s very smooth.
Tim Ferriss: I love it.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a smooth buzz, as we used to say in high school.
Tim Ferriss: It really is the smoothest of the smooth.
Arthur C. Brooks: I know.
Tim Ferriss: It’s just also the most inconvenient. I like to drink it the Argentine way with the sipping —
Arthur C. Brooks: The wood cup, and the metal straw that gets really hot.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Yeah. Which is probably a great way to give yourself throat cancer, side note, or mouth cancer.
Arthur C. Brooks: We’ll find out.
Tim Ferriss: But, yeah, we’ll find out. Track the Argies, people are looking at that very closely. All right. We probably should talk about the meaning of life, small topic.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s just a little thing. It’s what I’ve been thinking about for five years.
Tim Ferriss: I want to know why, after your many books, author of 15 books, right? You have Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, From Strength to Strength, which was my first introduction to your books, which is an exceptional book, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. And now The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Why write this book?
Arthur C. Brooks: So, when I came back to academia, I was gone for a long time. I’m sort of a lifelong — I’m a third generation academic, actually. My dad was a professor. His father was a professor. This is the vortex of life. I tried to escape it by being in music all the way through my 20s, but it sucked me in. And so this was my natural habitat, but I left for almost 11 years, because I was the CEO of a big think tank in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute. And when I was gone, I wasn’t paying attention to academia. I left at the end of 2008. I came back in 2019. My memory of my academic experience, going back intergenerationally, is the happiest place in the world. Everybody has the best time in college. They make all their friends. They get a bunch of adventures.
They get exposed to weird new ways of thinking. People loved college. And most people say I was happier in college than when I left college. I come back in 2019, and it’s like the plague had gone through my village. It was completely different. And in point of fact, clinical depression among adults under 30, especially highly educated adults under 30, college graduates, especially the elite colleges, had tripled. Clinical depression up by 3X anxiety, generalized anxiety, 2X. And it’s not because of a lack of therapy. On the contrary, the number of therapists has gone up by about 4X. And so something’s not working. This is what we call in my business as a psychogenic epidemic, which is a simple idea with fancy words because that’s how we get tenured.
And what it means is there’s something that’s contagious, and creates suffering, and has no biological origin, no known biological origin. That’s a psychogenic epidemic. So, eating disorders, and cutting, and many things, they’ll spread around, create tons of misery, but they’re not biological in origin. And so those are harder nuts to crack. The depression anxiety epidemics that we see today are psychogenic. And so we need to understand what’s behind them. So, when I see the data, and I set about my research agenda saying, “Okay, what’s going on?” And that’s a kind of a Sherlock Holmes, kind of a forensic behavioral science experiment. And that’s kind of how I do my work. That’s the most interesting things to do is to figure out this mystery using the tools, or my stock, and trade. I suffered through to get my PhD, applying them a little bit. And one of the things that I do is I just start talking to people, and doing a content analysis of what they tell me, and see the words that start to pop up.
Those are the clues, because the words will start popping up. And when you do that, the word that kept popping up again, and again, and again was, “I don’t know what I’m meant to do. My life feels meaningless.” And sure enough, when you do the survey work, and ask people if their life feels meaningless, that’s the predictor of depression, and anxiety. And so we have lots, and lots of data out there. I mean, lots of pop arguments about why so many young people are depressed today. And people my age are like, because they’re entitled babies, and they’re not tough enough. And people who are my kids’ age who are in their 20s, they’ll say it’s because boomers wrecked everything, and made houses too expensive, and spoiled the environment, or something. But people have been saying that stuff forever. There’s nothing new about that. These psychological effects that we’re seeing are new.
They’re really, really a new thing. So, that’s not it. Or there’s a lot of people, and you’ve talked a lot on your show about technology, and a lot of people say that technology is screwing us up, and technology really has a big role in what I found, but the problem is not the technology per se, but what we’re not getting because of the technology, is what we’re actually missing.
Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s what it’s displacing.
Arthur C. Brooks: What is it actually that we want that we’re not getting? When you have somebody who is deeply malnourished, you don’t talk about what’s actually creating the malnutrition. You might, that’s important, but what they’re not getting.
Tim Ferriss: Right. It’s like, okay, you’re eating all carbohydrates.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, it’s like —
Tim Ferriss: It’s not that carbohydrates are inherently bad, but the dose makes the poison. And by virtue of only eating carbohydrates, you’re not getting any amino acids that you eat.
Arthur C. Brooks: But the problem is the protein you’re not getting for Pete’s sake is what it comes down to. So, I wanted to find the protein that was underneath this whole thing. And the content analysis of these interviews is like, what I’m meant to do, life feels meaningless. I don’t know the meaning of life. I’m like, “That’s too big.” That’s too big. That’s like a big philosophical thing, but I couldn’t avoid it, is what it came down to. So, over the past five years, I’ve been writing a book about, okay, what is the meaning of life? Where do you find it, and how do you have to live differently so that you can actually find it in modern life? And that’s what this book is. And the most interesting part of this was people say, where do you find the meaning of life? Church, the beach, Italy.
Tim Ferriss: Italy.
Arthur C. Brooks: And it turns out that we —
Tim Ferriss: It’s Trenton, New Jersey. No offense to Trenton. I’ve spent a lot of time there.
Arthur C. Brooks: Seattle, my hometown. We know where you go to find it, and then you have to do certain things. I’m a very protocols guy. And so what this book is, the six protocols for once you know where the meaning of your life is, what you have to do to go there, and get it is what it comes about. So, the beginning of the book is, okay, what’s the meaning of meaning? Because it’s too big.
Tim Ferriss: Right. It is big. It’s huge.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s too big. The second is where do you find it? And the third thing is how do you have to live differently? That’s what this book is.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s start with definitions. That’s how I like to roll.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, I know. And that’s the most important thing that scientists almost never do. Throw out a term, and then not define it. So the meaning of life has been discussed forever, but the best philosophical, and psychological definitions, they disassemble it into its component parts. So, the way that you, and I have talked about happiness in the past is that happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. So, meaning is a macronutrient of happiness. And when that’s missing, that’s why you have a happiness problem. So, that’s the beginning of this whole thing. Meaning in turn has macronutrients, has component parts to it as well. Psychologists will refer to them as coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is why things happen the way they do. You have to have a theory of why things happen the way they do, or you won’t know the meaning of your life. Now for some —
Tim Ferriss: Meaning how life, or why life unfolds for you —
Arthur C. Brooks: Things are happening all the time.
Tim Ferriss: — the way it unfolds.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, things are happening. It’s like why?
Tim Ferriss: So, is that picking — I don’t want to dislocate the sharing of the three.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, no, it’s important.
Tim Ferriss: But just to, maybe we’ll come back to it. Is that coming up with, or adopting a story that is enabling?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. It’s adopting a story that actually explains things so that life is not inherently random.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. But it doesn’t need to be objectively accurate when explaining.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, no. It’s just a — it’s your way of seeing things. It’s your understanding of the world. It’s putting things in context, and so things kind of make sense. Otherwise, it’s this random walk through life, which is sort of a definition of meaninglessness. For some people, the model, which is an imperfect model at best, but it’s a model nonetheless, it’s a physics that explains that is religion. For some people, it’s pure on science. For some people, it’s conspiracy theories, why things happen the way they do. But those are different sort of models that explain this. Now, you can also have a hybrid model, which I do. Religion, and science, and all this kind of good stuff, but you got to do the work to figure out the physics of that, why things happen the way they do.
Tim Ferriss: So, coherence —
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s coherent.
Tim Ferriss: — is figuring out why do things happen in my life.
Arthur C. Brooks: Why do things happen the way they do? Why are things happening all the time? The second is purpose. And people often think purpose, and meaning are the same thing. They’re not. Purpose is a subcomponent of meaning, and it is, why am I doing what I’m doing? Why am I doing all these weird things every single day? And that has to do with goals, and direction. If you don’t have goals, and direction in your life, everybody has said this. I mean, there’s like Napoleon Hill said this, and Dale Carnegie said this. You’ve got to have an endpoint. In Spanish, there’s a great word called el rumbo. Rumbo means — in English, it doesn’t have a lot of significance.
It’s a navigational term that means rhumb line, which is where you’re going. It’s the Euclidian path from where you are to where you’re going. And you have to have a rhumb line if you’re going to make any progress, you’re going to have any goals in any direction, it’s what you need to have. It doesn’t mean that you have to be linearly making progress, but you have to have an idea of what that line might be. That’s el rumbo.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Even if the endpoint changes.
Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. And so that’s why you need an intention, and that’s what purpose is all about. Why am I doing what I’m doing? It’s the second why question. The why part is really important, as we’ll see in a second. The third is significance, which is why does my life matter? Why does my life matter? And if the answer is it doesn’t, that’s a problem, or I don’t know, that’s not good enough. People need to have a concept of why your life matters. And the great ways of answering that question are having kids, and being married, and believing that God loves you, and all kinds of ways to have that significance question answered. So, in my work in the book, there’s a test on where you are in the journey to answering those questions, how close you are, how much you’re looking. And so that’s presence, and search. If you’re looking, looking, looking, you’re a searcher, you’re a total seeker. So, your search score is going to be through the roof. Now where you are —
Tim Ferriss: My finding score may not be as high.
Arthur C. Brooks: Well, the presence, that’s presence, right? And what happens over the course of life is that people who search more, their presence score tends to go up, but it might not be that high. So, my presence score is very moderate.
Tim Ferriss: Could you explain this just one more time for me?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Could you just start that over?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So there’s two ways to kind of measure where you are in this journey of finding meaning, of searching, and finding for meaning. The two ways to do it are what’s called search, and presence. Search is how intensively you’re looking to answer these why questions. Why do things happen the way they do? Why am I doing what I’m doing, and why does my life matter? And that’s search. And some people are intent seekers like you, Tim, you’re an intense seeker. This show is an exercise in search, right? And part of it is because this is not just a new hack for getting better biceps. This is a new way of trying to understand why we’re alive. That’s what the show is, kind of the theme of the show. It’s why I listen to the show. This is why I learned things, because I’m a seeker too. But then how successful you are is your presence score. Search, and presence. Presence is, ah, I have answers that are satisfactory to me. As you get older, if you seek, your presence scores should go up. And mine certainly has.
Tim Ferriss: So, is a presence just to —
Arthur C. Brooks: The presence of meaning.
Tim Ferriss: — make sure I’m understanding. One is seeking an answer. And then presence is accepting.
Arthur C. Brooks: Is having something that’s satisfactory.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Got it.
Arthur C. Brooks: Is having satisfactory. Now there’s some people who have sky high present scores, and really low search scores. Those are people who like those fortunate individuals who are born going, “Yep, I know. I know. I don’t need to learn. I don’t need to — I’m not going to leave my hometown. Why am I going to leave my hometown? It’s awesome here. What do we need to do? I’m going to marry my high school sweetheart. I’m going to work in my daddy’s business, and I’m going to go to the church I grew up in.” And they’re very, very stable. We think of these as conservative individuals. Dispositional conservatives, they tend to have low search, and high presence.
Tim Ferriss: Right. And to be clear, this is not —
Arthur C. Brooks: This is not political.
Tim Ferriss: — political.
Arthur C. Brooks: It might be, but that’s not really the point. I’m talking about dispositional conservatism is conserving good things that preceded you. And why are they good things? Because they give you a meaning of life is kind of what it comes down to. On the other hand, you might be somebody who’s a seeker, seeker, seeker, seeker, seeker. And you don’t find it very much. And I’m very moderate in presence. It’s higher than it used to be. My presence of meaning was in the cellar when I was in my 20s for sure. And in my 60s is much, much higher for sure.
But it’s still not —
Tim Ferriss: What do you attribute the improvement to?
Arthur C. Brooks: As being alive, and actually searching a lot, and looking at data, and optimizing, and trying to live a life on purpose, is self-managing. I mean, I’m a behavioral scientist because I want answers, and I want answers for me. And so if I basically — I’m looking for the biggest questions to answer, to at least address the biggest questions of my life, that’s why I do what I do for a living. I mean, my life is an experiment, and a pure on revolving adventure.
Tim Ferriss: So, I’m curious if I can just interject for a second about the present piece specifically, because I think many people listening to the show will self-identify as seekers, but there are traps along the way as you identify as a seeker.
Arthur C. Brooks: And I talk about these in the book.
Tim Ferriss: And I’ll just tell one quick anecdote, and then I’d love to hear how you have improved, or whether it’s just been maybe not a passive, but something that has unfolded for you, the presence piece specifically. I remember talking to a very, very experienced psychedelic therapy facilitator who’s been doing it for many decades, thousands, and thousands of different people in sessions. And they told me a story, which they said is common, and becoming more common, that people will come in, and after their session, they’ll say, “Yeah, I was experiencing so much joy, this beautiful light, this love in this session, but I kept wondering when I was going to do the real work, like when I was going to do the hard work.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And the way the facilitator explained it was in a sense, more and more so she’s running into people who are in pursuit of this durable contentment, satisfaction, joy. But when they experience it in these sessions, they’re like, “Yeah, I’ll get this out of the way so I can do the hard work to reach the joy.” But they’re just pushing aside all the joy as they continue their endless seeking.
Arthur C. Brooks: They’re just not going to take yes for an answer.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So I’m wondering how you learn to take yes as an answer.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So it’s not easy because when you’re a chronic seeker, there’s always something more. There’s always something new. And you can’t be there yet. And so the answer to this actually comes, I have two of my kids are Marines. And so I have one enlisted Marine. I have one officer in the Marine Corps. And my daughter’s a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. And right now she’s at Quantico and she’s going through the basic school, getting ready to do her MOS. She wants to be a signals intelligence officer. My son was enlisted, he was a scout sniper. He was in a scout sniper platoon out of Camp Pendleton. And that’s a super interesting and dangerous job. And as a non-commissioned officer, he led a lot of guys. What they train Marines to do in leadership is to get to 80 percent knowledge and then choose and stop looking. Now that’s really, really important because you’re going to be paralyzed if you’re trying to get to 100 percent knowledge.
Tim Ferriss: You’re never going to have complete information.
Arthur C. Brooks: Which is what the pure seeker mentality does. If you want to seek and get higher presence, you need to go to 80 percent. Now, how do you get to 80 percent? You get to 80 percent by saying, “I’m pretty sure this is right. And this is right enough that I’m going to turn my attention to another dimension on this.” And that means, friends, if you’re in love, you should get married. That’s what that means.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Arthur C. Brooks: That means if you’re in love and you know each other and you think that within three to five years, you really could be best friends. And you have a certain stability of values. Stop looking. Get married. Why? Because the longer you don’t get married, the longer you’re in search for your soulmate, the more you’re putting off the best thing in your life. You’re postponing the best thing in your life. Marriage is the best thing in life for most people. I mean, a bad marriage is the worst thing in life. But for most people, this is for men and women, all this fiction about the fact that marriage is good for men, but bad for women, it’s all nonsense. Brad Wilcox’s research at Virginia is completely clear on this. It’s better for everybody. Being in love and living with the person with whom you’re in love for the rest of your life is great. But you’re not going to get that if you’re trying to get to 99 percent awareness, if you’re going to search all the way to the point, because you’ll never get that.
You’re going to have an argument, you’re going to have a disagreement, you’re going to have doubts, you’re going to digest something in a weird way and think maybe I’m not in love. And the same thing is true with your faith. What am I going to practice? Get to 80 percent awareness and choose, and then decide that that’s what you’re actually going to do. Use the marine rule of leadership and then the search can actually lead to presence.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. This is all interesting terrain, which is why I was looking forward to this conversation.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a lot.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And of course, as I said before we started recording, I was like, “We are not going to suffer from a lack of topics to talk about.” I want to come back to the coherence, purpose, significance, macronutrients of meaning for a moment. Just in quick review, coherence, why do things happen in my life? Having a story for that that you commit to in a sense. Why am I doing what I’m doing? That’s purpose. And then why does my life matter? Significance. Looking at my peer group, my friends, a lot of people in my audience, it seems like number three, why does my life matter, is where people struggle the most, a lot of them. In part, we can talk about the dozens of factors at play I’m sure, but for some people, and I have some thoughts on this, but for some younger people, it’s I don’t know what to do because AI is going to take all the jobs and I don’t know, therefore, how my contributions will matter.
Arthur C. Brooks: I will become less significant.
Tim Ferriss: I will become less significant. The climate is irretrievably fucked, which I don’t actually believe is the case, but a lot of damage —
Arthur C. Brooks: They have certainly heard that.
Tim Ferriss: — a lot of damage has been done.
Arthur C. Brooks: They’ve been taught that.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Nuclear armageddon, that is actually on the list of existential threats, one of the scary ones, in my opinion. Therefore, I don’t know how to conclude that my life matters. How did you personally arrive at an answer to this question or how do you suggest people explore unpacking that? I have some thoughts. I’ll just, rather than burying the lead, I’ll just throw it out there, which is take the time to not just study people who do huge things in short periods of time, but also study people who commit to things that take longer than their lifetimes, like scientists, like people —
Arthur C. Brooks: Clergy.
Tim Ferriss: Clergy. By simply extending the time horizon, the spectrum of options opens up quite a bit, but I would love to hear you explain it.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s a very good point. That’s a very good point. But there’s a compatible point with that, which is stop looking for your significance at the macro level, start looking at the micro level, which is your love relationships around you. This is where people feel significance. People feel significance by having children. People feel significance by getting married.
Tim Ferriss: Or adopting children.
Arthur C. Brooks: Or adopting children as I did. And I did both. We did it by markets and by biology. And people feel significance by working through their religious tendencies to try to understand their relationship with the divine. This is how most people find significance. You don’t find significance by getting a million Instagram followers. You will never find significance by doing that, but that’s indeed what we’re encouraged to do. You won’t find significance by an adequate kind of stable significance by being the world’s greatest angry activist. And that’s the cult that’s actually going on on college campuses all the time, the cult of activism, which is kind of a substitute religion. Significance comes from love. Love is the essence of significance and it’s whom I love and who loves me. That’s what it comes down to. And if the answer is my spouse, my children, my parents, my friends, my creator, those are the big answers that people actually get, but you got to do the work. You got to make the commitments and do the work. And a lot of people today, one of the things that I actually find in this book is that a lot of young people today don’t have those micro commitments and they’re trying to establish macro significance.
Tim Ferriss: Macro.
Arthur C. Brooks: Which is a big problem. You’re chasing your tail. It’s unstable and it’s probably not even real in a lot of cases.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned something in passing that I think is really important, at least I’ve come to believe it’s helpful to at least try to unpack each person for themselves. Substitute for religion. So you mentioned this cult of the angry activist. And activism has its place for sure. There are certain things that you can —
Arthur C. Brooks: Of course. I’m glad we’ve got civil rights.
Tim Ferriss: — harness anger for. But over the long term, it’s not a clean fuel. So this substitute for religion, there’s a place called El Arroyo here, which is famous for its signs that it puts out front. There are books that collect these now. I think it’s called El Arroyo here in Austin.
Arthur C. Brooks: Arroyo means the brook, means the stream.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Exactly. Like [foreign language] for people who might have spent time in Mexico.
Arthur C. Brooks: Nice.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a long one. Anyway.
Arthur C. Brooks: By the way, Arroyo as a surname in English is Brooks.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, there you go. Look at that.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. In German it’s Bach.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: As a former musician, I say, “Coincidence?”
Tim Ferriss: So the reason I bring up this joint in Austin is because they have these signs out front that are very funny that have been collected in books since. Like, “What if soy milk is just milk introducing itself in Spanish?” Very funny stuff. They put a lot of them up.
Arthur C. Brooks: Soy milk.
Tim Ferriss: And one of them is, “If someone is vegan and does CrossFit, which do they tell you about first?”
Arthur C. Brooks: I know.
Tim Ferriss: Which I thought was pretty good. And this ties into, I believe it was something David Foster Wallace said, tragic character, brilliant on so many levels, but in effect, and people could track this down, I put in my newsletter at one point, but that we all worship something and task number one is figuring out what you worship.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s his I think his graduation speech.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: Where he talked about that, right?
Tim Ferriss: Right. So if it’s not religion, it’s going to be something else. Is it money? Is it fame? We talked about this a bit.
Arthur C. Brooks: We did the four idols last time we talked. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: We did. Right. Exactly. Pleasure, that’s where I landed, for better and for worse. And I’m wondering, it seems to me that religion, belief in the divine, might be another way to put it, is almost genetically programmed in humans. I mean, it is —
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s an anthropological empirical regularity. So what we find is that anthropologists, including paleoanthropologists, find there’s no civilization that they’ve ever encountered that doesn’t worship.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Arthur C. Brooks: There are individuals who don’t worship, but there are no cultures that don’t have religious foundation to them. We’re built for that.
Tim Ferriss: So if we’re looking at taking a closer look at that, if people want to make the implicit explicit, the subconscious conscious, which I think is really important because folks are gravitating to these pseudo religions, whether it’s CrossFit, veganism, ketogenic —
Arthur C. Brooks: Harvard.
Tim Ferriss: — Bitcoin, you name it. Harvard.
Arthur C. Brooks: Famous university.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Whatever it might be. So trying to put that on one’s radar I think is helpful. But then the question is, okay, if this is hardwired, if this might actually be a constitutional psychological requirement, how do you satisfy that requirement if you are not going to adopt an organized religion?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. So I’ve looked a lot.
Tim Ferriss: This is a quest for me.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, I hear you. I completely hear you.
Tim Ferriss: This is very present for me.
Arthur C. Brooks: I feel a lot of people —
Tim Ferriss: I feel like I made a lot of progress for myself, but I’d love to hear you talk about that.
Arthur C. Brooks: So this is a question of not of religion, but of transcendence.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. Exactly.
Arthur C. Brooks: Transcendence is the phenomenon in which we move from the me self to the I self in the words of William James, the father of psychology. The I self is looking out and including looking up and standing in awe. The me self is looking in the mirror and thinking about yourself. What we need to actually find meaning, to find significance paradoxically is to look less at ourselves. Significance, the sense of significance comes from being — this is really paradoxical and yet everybody will understand it when I say it. To be significant, to feel significance, you need to be less significant, you need to make yourself less significant. Now, I had this experience where at my university, the most popular class arguably is astronomy one. And they’re not astronomers. I mean, they’re like English majors and business majors, et cetera. And they love the astronomy class. They flock to it. There’s lines for the astronomy class. And so I finally ask a student like, “Why do you love that astronomy one class so much?” She’s like, “I don’t know. But like I go into the morning, Thursday morning at nine o’clock and it’s a 90-minute class and I’m bummed out because I just had an argument with my mom and I think I’m breaking up with my boyfriend and I got a B on a test,” which at Harvard is like the end of the world.
Tim Ferriss: You’re excommunicated from the church of Harvard.
Arthur C. Brooks: “I go in at 9:00 and at 10:30 I come out and I say, “I’m a speck on a speck on a speck and I’m at peace.” That’s transcendence. That’s what it is, it’s to stand in awe. Have you had Dacher Keltner on your show before?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Arthur C. Brooks: He’s one of the great psychologists of our time. He teaches at Berkeley. And he has a book called Awe, A-W-E.
Tim Ferriss: I thought I recognized the name because I was just reading that book.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s a great book.
Tim Ferriss: I was just reading that book just a few months ago.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s transcendence, it’s to stand in awe in the I self looking out in awe of the universe, things bigger than you. And there’s two dimensions of transcendence. The first is to transcend upward and the other is to transcend outward. Which is why worship of the divine, spiritual and religious experiences do this and also service to others, that’s why they both have this kind of transcendent metaphysical experience that people actually get. And that’s why when you see moral beauty, somebody serving somebody else, it gives you that — Rhett Diessner, the psychologist, who, by the way, is Rainn Wilson’s uncle. Yeah. The world’s leading expert in moral elevation and the physiological impact of moral elevation.
Tim Ferriss: Rainn is very philosophical also.
Arthur C. Brooks: He’s great. He’s a great friend. We’re great friends. We grew up five miles apart from each other in Seattle at the same age. We didn’t know each other as kids.
Tim Ferriss: Small, small world.
Arthur C. Brooks: But we bonded over watching Gilligan’s Island on Channel 11 when we were in fifth grade or something. And it’s really important to keep in mind that there are ways to transcend. And there’s some really well established ways to do it. I go to mass every day. It’s a venerable way to experience transcendence. And there are other ways to experience transcendence. Now, I’m not going to speak to the metaphysics of who’s cosmically right. That’s a completely different conversation. I don’t know. But I do know when it comes to transcendence, because that’s research that I’ve done. And Lisa Miller has done that. She teaches at Columbia. She does neuroscience and social psychology at Columbia. She’s the world’s leading expert on how the brain requires transcendence, how you get experiences that are completely inaccessible unless you experience transcendence. Lots of ways to do it. Study the stoics and live according to their dictates. Walk the Brahma Muhurta, an hour in the morning without devices. Starting before dawn, practice Vipassana meditation. Listen to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and stand in awe of the greatest composer who ever lived. Or go to mass.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I wanted to tee this up. I didn’t know what your answer was going to be. But this is an area, it is one of a few areas that have been of greatest interest and focus for me for the last, well, one could argue since 2000 probably 12, but it might even predate that, particularly I would say in the last five years.
And for people who are interested in digging into this, and I suggest that almost everyone should be very deeply interested, you mentioned the book Awe. There’s also some fantastic writing and articles out of Johns Hopkins related to awe. And if awe seems too abstract, I mean, you could think of it as wonder. You could think of it also as self-transcendence. And I’m going to be shooting myself in the foot a little bit because I just wrote 10 pages on this that I need to refine before putting it on my blog. But people think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a pyramid. And at the top you have self-actualization. In fact, the pyramid and that strict hierarchy were created by consultants and other people who commercialized the writings of Maslow who later revised that to have self-transcendence —
Arthur C. Brooks: At the top.
Tim Ferriss: — at the top.
Arthur C. Brooks: At the top. But he talked about it much later in his career too.
Tim Ferriss: Much later.
Arthur C. Brooks: Because he got more religious as he got older. People get more religious as they get older. They believe less in Santa Claus and more in God as they get older.
Tim Ferriss: They believe more in death too.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. And life is messy and they come to terms with that. And Scott Barry Kaufman talks a lot about this, the guy who is sort of the master of the Dark Triad and a lot of pathologies, but he’s also really good on how —
Tim Ferriss: I have to ask about the Dark Triad.
Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, yeah. I’ve written a lot about the Dark Triad.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like a great fantasy novel.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s like anybody who wants to know that, that’s your first husband. Anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m going to have to leave that alone. I’m going to resist the temptation.
Arthur C. Brooks: But next time on the show.
Tim Ferriss: Just for a second.
Arthur C. Brooks: So this is important because self-transcendence is something that tends to happen a little bit later, but it’s not incompatible with lower order needs.
Tim Ferriss: Do you mind if I just play for a second?
Arthur C. Brooks: Please. Because I think this is the point you’re driving at, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me ride the ketones and caffeine for a moment here. All right. So the awe, self-transcendence, wonder, it seems perhaps abstracted, might seem hand wavy for people who’ve already achieved success. I don’t think that’s true at all. And in fact, the happiest people, happy isn’t exactly the right word, but the people who seem most at peace, calmest, with regular joy in their lives, good relationships, all have regular doses of self-transcendence. Whether they are wilderness guides who do not make very much money, but they’re spending a lot of time in nature, a lot of time with their loved ones, a lot of time in expansive landscapes, whether those are musicians and poets who have figured out how to kind of ride the lightning without suffering too much from the low lows, there are regular ways to do this and I cannot recommend strongly enough some form of meditative practice, whether that is prayer with your rosary. Our friend travels with the rosary and also with blood flow restriction cuffs, but that’s a story for another time.
Arthur C. Brooks: I’m not doing blood flow restriction with a rosary.
Tim Ferriss: No, exactly. Right. I mean, you could. I guess that could be interesting. Maybe that’s the next niche on your Instagram feed. But the reason that I bring up meditation is because I think one of the easiest paths to self-transcendence and to significance in your life is training your awareness so that the mundane becomes miraculous. And when you start to recognize how fucking unbelievably insane it is that we are even conscious to begin with having this experience, and you start to notice how incredible the little things are, which require you to not be distracted, requires you to breathe and pay attention, it’s not that complicated, it can be challenging, then you start to perceive almost everything as significant without focusing on establishing your own significance.
Arthur C. Brooks: True. Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: And I have just found that to be such an unburdening when you realize that you can do things and should do things that help you feel like you are contributing, that help you feel like you’re having an impact on something other than yourself, whether it’s someone or something, but that in fact, self-help, self-development can really be a sort of exercise in self-obsession.
Arthur C. Brooks: Totally.
Tim Ferriss: And therein lies the seeds of misery.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, for sure. For sure. It’s me, me, me, me, me. And your point about paying attention to what would ordinarily be thought of as mundane, my father, who is a lifelong Christian, he always said, “People talk about the miracle of walking on water. You know what the real miracle is? Water.” And another point based on what you just said, which is really important, is self-transcendence is really great, being more in the I self, but you also need to do the work to be less in the me self. And that means getting rid of the mirrors in your life. We have way too many mirrors. I had a guy who worked on my back. He was a guy who worked on Tom Brady’s back in Boston. So he’s the best guy. If Tom Brady — and so he was phenomenal. And I asked him, “What did you do before you were this incredible acupuncturist and great physical therapist?” And he said, “I used to be a fitness influencer.” I’m like, “Dude, tell me more. What’s this life all about?” And as a social scientist, I was really interested.
And he would take off his shirt and be on social media and show his abs and then sell supplements or something. And I said, “How was it?” He says, “Awful. I didn’t eat what I wanted for 10 years. I was so lonely. It was so awful. And I was so ill.” And I said, “So how’d you get out of it? How’d you cure yourself?” And he said, “I decided, I said I had enough. I got rid of my social media. I took every mirror out of my house, all of them, bathroom, every one. And then I showered in the dark for a year, so I couldn’t see my abs.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, the cross we bear.
Arthur C. Brooks: No, but that’s like the most Tim Ferriss thing ever is the I self protocol. And he said he was cured. So not just serving other people more, worshiping more, whatever happens to be, but also militating against the me self. And that’s not just physical mirrors, it’s the notifications on your social media. There’s lots and lots of metaphorical mirrors that are making you miserable all the time.
Tim Ferriss: So what are other ways of facilitating self-transcendence? And I, for instance, I’ve interviewed BJ Miller, who’s a hospice care physician. I interviewed him a long time ago. And he talked about, for instance, at the end of life, some of the most meaningful experiences were not these deep conversations about the meaning of it all necessarily, but like baking cookies together. He talked about introducing people who are weeks or months from dying to art.
Arthur C. Brooks: Right. Right. Because he wants to induce a flow state.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s what we’re talking about. One of the great things about transcendence is — so Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the great book Flow.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, that’s how you pronounce his name.
Arthur C. Brooks: Csikszentmihalyi. Yeah, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: A lot of consonants.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s tough, man. That’s a tough name. He talked about the fact that you have a transcendent experience when you’re in a state that is the state of self-forgetting. That’s what flow is. It’s intensely pleasurable for any of us at any particular time. And so we established the first way is worship or meditation. The second is service to others. But the third is really is total absorption, is total absorption in the kind of thing that you do. Which by the way, is one of the reasons not to wear headphones when you’re working out. One of the reasons to be fully there when you’re working out, to establish a mind-muscle connection when you’re working out. It might sound trite, but it really is because you should be able to attain something of a flow state when you’re working out. Otherwise, it’s an hour of misery that you’re going to want to distract yourself from. So what, so you’ve got better calves? It’s just so dumb, which is the ultimate me self kind of experience.
So that’s really the third way to do it, is find your thing, is what it comes down to. And by the way, my protocols lead up to four hours of writing. That four hours goes by in minutes because it’s a flow state and I’m having a transcendent experience. I’m in an I self transcendent experience. It’s not me. It’s like some other guy’s writing this thing. I don’t know what’s going on. Clickety, clickety, clickety, click. And before I know it, my wife says, “You want lunch?”
Tim Ferriss: Nature seems like another option. It’s so simple. Just walk barefoot outside for a few minutes. Look, if it’s two feet of snow, it might be harder. But to the extent that you can, try to get your feet on the ground. Beauty. I mean, beauty, what an interesting bizarre thing in and of itself. I actually wanted to look semi-professional as I try to on occasion. And instead of holding loose paper, I was going to bring a clipboard. Couldn’t find a clipboard. So I was like, “Well, I’m going to bring a book.” And I thought, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this particular artist, but I wanted to pass to you. Have you ever seen Andy Goldsworthy?
Arthur C. Brooks: I’ve heard of this, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So this is —
Arthur C. Brooks: Using pure nature.
Tim Ferriss: This is Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature. Everybody should get this book. But just check out some of the images in there.
Arthur C. Brooks: This is the idea of beauty of working with nature as opposed to against it.
Tim Ferriss: It’s using natural found objects, whether trees, leaves —
Arthur C. Brooks: A circle of dandelions.
Tim Ferriss: — ice crystals, a circle of dandelions. It is the most mind-boggling kind of — if James Turrell were to only work with organic materials outside of a hobbit house, what would they look like? They’re just absolutely entrancing, would be the word I would use. And so this is the book I want to use as my clipboard.
Arthur C. Brooks: I like it. And this is of course transcendent. This is at the essence of using human ingenuity in a flight of fancy. This is pure harmony between who we are and what we’re meant to be. I love it. I love it. And this is harder and harder to do in an environment in which we’re living in the simulation. This is life out of the simulation, effectively. This is who I am, but outside of the matrix, which is why it’s so striking and strange.
Tim Ferriss: So tell me more.
Arthur C. Brooks: So the transcendent experience is the one thing, the one place that they don’t happen is an assimilated experience of human life. Fundamentally, transcendent experiences require being fully alive. There’s the great fourth century sage and saint, Saint Irenaeus, who’s one of these guys where, I mean, today it’s pretty costless to be religious like me. In those days, you might get your head cut off. And so he was doing a lot of deep thinking. And he said, “The glory of God is a man fully alive.” And it wasn’t a gendered comment. A person fully alive is the glory of God.
So then the real question is, what does it mean for me to be fully alive? And I ask my students, are you fully alive when you get up and the first thing you do is you pick up your phone, which is by the side of your bed, and check in with a universe that’s being mediated through the small screen. And then you do your work on the Zoom and then your friends are on social media and your dating is on the app and your progress is made through your score on your gaming and your relationships are stripped of their humanity because you’re looking at pornography. Are you or are you not fully alive? And if the answer is you’re not fully alive, the reason for that is because you’re living a simulated life. And a simulated life just, Tim, isn’t beautiful.
Tim Ferriss: And a simulated life means you’re cosplaying life.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s right. And this is one of the things that I found in my interviews for this book as well. I kept hearing meaning, meaning, meaning, meaning, meaning, but you’re talking to a lot of 27 and 28-year-olds and their affect is very flat because they’re telling you the same story over and over again. And this is where the penny dropped. This guy says, 27-year-old guy, he said, “I really do feel like I’m not living a real life. I really feel like I’m living in a simulation every day. And I don’t know how to break out because my job is fully remote, because I can’t meet women on the corner and say,” like Bill Ackman said on social media the other day, he said, “Men should come up to women and say, ‘I would like to meet you.'” What does that mean? And watch them run in terror.
“And because my friends really are virtual friends, because my sense of achievement really is what I can actually do with this gaming experience or whatever it happens to be that I’ve gotten really good at. How am I supposed to do that? I don’t know how to break out of this. But I know it’s not right. I know something’s not right.” Here’s the funny thing. Your brain, you can kind of be fooled. The Turing test can be passed with respect to the kind of experience you think you’re having, but then there’s a deep knowing. You can’t simulate the meaning of your life. You can only live the meaning of your life. A simulation is a complicated simulacrum for the complex experiences of human life. And that’s a non-trivial use of language.
Tim Ferriss: This is pops over dinner, right?
Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. A complicated problem is that which is very, very hard to solve, but once you solve it, it’s static and you can do it again and again and again.
Tim Ferriss: Engineering problem.
Arthur C. Brooks: It’s an engineering problem. It’s a how and what problem. Complex problems are super easy to understand and impossible to solve. And I’ll give you an example. Making a jet engine is a complicated problem. We didn’t do it for a long time. Making a toaster is a complicated problem. I mean, I defy you to build your own toaster with stuff in here. You’ll burn your house down if you’re trying to make your own toaster. It’s a complicated problem. My marriage is a complex problem. I understand what it means to love and be loved. I understand. I can’t put it into words. I’m not Pablo Neruda. But I understand what it means to love and be loved. But I will never solve my marriage.
Tim, I mean, this morning before we started, Ester texted me, “I love you,” and she does. And when we finish, I’m going to turn my phone back on again, she might be pissed off at me. I don’t know. I don’t know. And part of this is because she’s Spanish and that adds a layer of complexity in and of itself. But that’s the point of my marriage. The things I care about in life are complex. They’re not solvable. They’re only livable. And so if I take a complicated simulacrum of anything, I’m doing it wrong because I’m not going to be satisfied and my brain’s going to know.
Tim Ferriss: How much of the malaise associated with the feeling of being in a simulacrum is resolved just by having more in person human interactions? Because the older I get, and maybe this is just the path of people as they age, I don’t know, but I have one foot in the cutting edge, bleeding edge technology. I’m fascinated by the latest advancements in you name it, doesn’t matter, but I’m very involved.
Arthur C. Brooks: AI, neuroscience, biologics, all of it.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Right. The last 24 hours, I’ve had conversations with three or four scientists all at the cutting edge of different fields. I love it.
Arthur C. Brooks: Me too.
Tim Ferriss: Simultaneously, I feel like we should pay attention. And this is, I guess, I’m not borrowing, but certainly I’m in lockstep with Nassim Taleb on this, which is paying attention to things that have persisted for very, very long periods of time. And also paying attention to evolutionary biology. It’s like we are evolved to be very social creatures moving through physical space together.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Full stop. And if you take that away —
Arthur C. Brooks: If you take one or the other away, you’re in trouble.
Tim Ferriss: You’re in big trouble. And you don’t have to understand all the myriad mechanisms by which this and that happens and 15 different hormones interact to produce some type of subjective experience. It’s like if we have evolved with these things as constants over millennia upon millennia, maybe it’s a good idea.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Keep them as regular ingredients in your daily experience.
Arthur C. Brooks: We know why. We know why the need exists. We know exactly. Neuroscientists know exactly what you’re talking about. And this is the theory of hemispheric lateralization. Again, very simple idea with complicated words for tenure. This is the theory that’s being most popularized right now, but probably the most visionary cutting edge neuroscientist living today is Iain McGilchrist at Oxford.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, smart.
Arthur C. Brooks: He wrote The Master and His Emissary back in 2010. And The Master and His Emissary talks about the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain do many things the same, but fundamentally they get your two needs, which is to figure stuff out, to dominate world’s problems, to make progress, and to feel fully alive by being a beloved person. Why? We have two hemispheres of the brain that do those complicated things. That’s the left hemisphere. How and what? And the complex things, which is the why questions, that’s the right hemisphere of the brain. All of the mystery, the meaning, the love, the happiness, that’s processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. And how you go out and do stuff is in the left hemisphere. The problem is modern life. This gets into the meaning crisis, has pushed us all into the left hemisphere of our brain and slammed shut the door to the right.
Everything that we’re doing from workaholism to hustle culture, to making sure that people don’t study humanities, they only study STEM. And most especially to the simulacrum, the technologized simulacrum for ordinary life, that’s all left hemisphere. And if you’re on the left hemisphere, you’re going to know how and what, and how and what and how and what, and you’re going to be bereft of why, including the big why questions, which make up the meaning of your life. And so the solution, where is meaning to be found? It’s the right hemisphere of your brain. How do you open it up? That’s the meaning protocols. And it really comes down to these very simple ideas that we’ve already been exploring. And it comes down to this. There’s something that I promise you that great-grandfather Ferriss never said to your great-grandmother, which was, “Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today.” And the reason is because it wasn’t a thing.
And the reason is his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. His life was pretty boring, and it was boring from day to day, objectively boring, but he never said my childhood was boring. And his right hemisphere was exercise as well as his left hemisphere. And the result is he didn’t have flooding of the HPA axis. He wasn’t morbidly depressed for no apparent reason. He didn’t live in a world of affluence and yet feel like he was experiencing nothing. And the reason is his brain was working the way it was supposed to work. This was not a policy problem.
This was a neurophysiological problem that he didn’t have and that we have actually today. And so the result is we have to live in an extraordinary way that was ordinary 100 years ago. The simulation we really need is the old-fashioned life is what comes about because almost all of the things that I talk about in my research that people can experience if they actually put some work into it is to open up the right hemisphere of the brain and do what was absolutely ordinary not that long ago, three generations ago, as a matter of fact.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, complicated versus complex. I like the distinction. And also having just come back, I’ll just brief aside, every year I do this past year review, I’m going to be doing that in the next few weeks.
Arthur C. Brooks: Me too.
Tim Ferriss: Look at my top relationships, top defined as dear, close relationships that are reliably nourishing for everybody involved and energizing. And then I book time in the next year, more time with all those people. I established these relationships and then I book more time with them in the subsequent year. And often with extended trips, I just came back from a trip with a number of my very close friends. And I look at some of the basics and I think it’s replicable where three days into it, granted these are my close friends. But I challenge anyone, if you put in 20,000 steps a day and you compliment, let’s just say, two of your close friends and three strangers and tell me by the end of the week that you don’t feel better, right? There’s simplicity right —
Arthur C. Brooks: And check your phone only 10 times.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Right on the other side. And if you do those things, by the way, you’ll probably be checking your phone a lot less, hopefully. I want to touch on something because I know we, as expected, are going to run out of time before we run out of topics to talk about, but I’ll let you pick where you want to go first. So there’s a line here that I have, or it’s more phrasing that I want to hear you expand on. Your suffering is sacred. And then there is a line here, which is treat your life like a pilgrimage that opens your mind and heart so life’s meaning can find you. So those are both interesting to me. Your suffering is sacred and so that life’s meaning can find you. Because most people think of themselves as going out to find meaning if they think about it at all. So dealer’s choice, which one would you like to —
Arthur C. Brooks: We’ll start with suffering, because suffering is the big, most misunderstood thing in most of modern life. We have an eliminationist strategy toward especially mental suffering. We see big increases in depression and anxiety. And if you go to campus counseling at any university and you’re going to say, “I feel sad and anxious.” They go, “We’ve got to fix that.” Well, probably you can have some therapy, there might be some psychiatric medications involved. And I had nothing against therapy or psychiatric medications to save the lives of people in my family. But the truth of the matter is that suffering per se is life itself.
I mean, that’s the first noble truth of dukkha, right? But it also suggests that you have a working limbic system, which is your alarm system for threats in the environment. Negative emotion exists as a threat system, as a threat alarm system. And negative experiences is the only way that you learn. There’s a reason that great philosophers always say that suffering is your teacher, because suffering is the ultimate complex right hemisphere experience that teaches you about the meaning of your life. And if you try to eliminate your suffering, you will inadvertently eliminate meaning. That’s what will happen. The worst mistake that people can make is trying not to suffer. I still tell my students, these are MBA students at Harvard. I say, “You’re studying at Harvard University, getting your MBAs. If you’re not sad and anxious, you need therapy. Something’s wrong with you if you’re actually not suffering.” So the real question is, how can you learn and grow from it? The math that Buddhists have about suffering is this following. Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance, pain times resistance.
Tim Ferriss: That’s good.
Arthur C. Brooks: And it’s really important because what we know about that is that people are trying to lower their suffering by lowering their level of pain. And what they should be doing is actually understanding and putting into proper context and proportion their suffering by lowering their level of resistance.
Tim Ferriss: Resistance. Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s what it comes down to. And every good athlete understands that.
Tim Ferriss: And by the way, just very quickly, the meditation that I was describing and recommending is effectively that.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: It’s lowering your resistance to everything that you would be inclined to resist.
Arthur C. Brooks: And my students have a little mantra they start at the beginning of the day and say, “I am truly grateful for the pleasant things that are going to happen this day.”
In the Psalms, “This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.”
“And I’m also truly grateful for the troubles I’m going to face because my learning and growth will come from these troubles, bring them on.”
And that’s this bracing. And I say this every day because I’m going to suffer today. And Tim, you’re going to suffer today.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Arthur C. Brooks: And if you try to eliminate that suffering, all you’re trying to do is lower your pain level to ephemerally and artificially and ineffectually lower your suffering.
Tim Ferriss: And that Psalm might as well have been also put right next to Marcus Aurelius meditations. I mean, it’s —
Arthur C. Brooks: Absolutely. I mean, Christian thinking is heavily influenced by the Stoics. They were contemporaneous. This is why they sound so familiar to each other. And the whole idea is like, you got a choice. You can learn and grow from your suffering or you can try to avoid your suffering and have the same amount of suffering and not learn and grow. What do you choose? And that’s what it comes down to. So that’s the most difficult lesson, but the most bracing and empowering lesson about how to find meaning in your life is to lean into your suffering and you will find your meaning. And that’s what Grandpa Ferriss had to do because he had no choice. He had no therapist. He didn’t even have Advil. And so that’s what I’m talking about.
Then the second point that you made, the second question you asked is, okay, when you’re in search to get presence, you’re in search, search, search, search. There’s a mistake that people commonly make, was thinking, if I search enough, I’m going to find. Seek and you shall find. Knock on the door shall be open unto you. But the process is a little bit counterintuitive and different. Every religious tradition has a protocol for finding truth and that is to make a pilgrimage in which point it is revealed that your truth finds you. Now there’s a lot of ways that that’s described in the Bhagavad Gita where going to the birthplace of the Lord Krishna in Mathura, in the Hindi heartland, in Christianity for the community of the Santiago, which I’ve walked twice across the ancient root of 1,100 years old, doing the Hajj, if you’re a Muslim. What you find is that when you make a pilgrimage, that’s a metaphor for your life.
And the end of the pilgrimage is the metaphor of the ultimate goal of life, which in Abrahamic religions is heaven, right? And it’s the end of samsara and the karmic religions or whatever it happens to be, is they’re reuniting with a Godhead in the Hindu body of religions. But the bottom line is that what’s most important is actually what’s happening to you in the process of this pilgrimage. And what actually happens to you neurobiologically is that you beat yourself to the point that you have an open aperture so that you’re no longer in a defensive crouch such that you’re weak. You weaken yourself on purpose. This is why you walk 25 kilometers a day and you’re walking on blisters and you’re actually inducing this amount of pain.
And I remember this the first time I walked my Camino, I was in a liminal space in my career. I just stepped down as the CEO of this big think tank. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I was 55 years old and I was spent, dude, I was out of gas. I was burnt out. I’d been working 80 hours a week. I missed a lot of my kids growing up. I’d made mistakes, right? They stuck with me by the grace of God. And I was walking the Camino day after day after day. I was praying. I was tired and I was in pain. And when I entered into Santiago de Compostela, this medieval city in Northern Spain and I saw the cathedral, I realized that my mission was to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas to be a scientist in the public interest, but for love and happiness. And I didn’t find that. It found me.
Tim Ferriss: Question, how did that appear? Was it drop by drop? Was it a Japanese breakfast on a silver platter in your mind? I mean, did it all come at once or was it bits and pieces that you slowly were able to weave together?
Arthur C. Brooks: It was bit by bit because it’s not this epiphany. It’s not like falling off my horse on the road to Damascus and in a temporary blindness, which is probably temporal epilepsy in the case of St. Paul, but it was a realization. It was a realization. It was something that had already existed out there, right? And it felt like it came to me little by little, particularly over the last couple of days, the last couple of days of the pilgrimage. It was, “What am I supposed to do?” I’m supposed to return to my roots as a scientist and to use that as missionary work for greater love and happiness. To get into the mission field as a behavioral scientist, going back to the roots of what I’ve actually learned. Why? What do I want? For me and for everybody, I want more love. I want more happiness. I want more meaning. That’s what I want for me and for everybody because that’s the sustenance of actually what we need.
Tim Ferriss: Did that want come into high resolution in part because of the nature of that particular pilgrimage, the religious connotations and the prayer along the way? Or do you think that that was already just a little beneath the surface and waiting to come out and it would have come out in a different environment, the different context?
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s a good question. It’s an empirical question. But I will say that all of the components of the pilgrimage, not to be metaphysical about it, not to be mystical about it at all, all the components of a pilgrimage, which is the physical difficulty, the strain that actually comes from it, the intense effort that you’re making while away from these technological distractions, the work that I’m doing on my relationship with God and my wife, with whom I’m holding her hand and praying the rosary.
Tim Ferriss: You did the pilgrimage with your wife?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. And I would’ve done 33 days except she’s like, no. So we did the last eight. And all of these things turn out to be the ways that you open the vault of the right hemisphere of your brain, where the mysticism is actually found, the mystical side of your brain, which I believe God creates for a reason. But it might just be nature and it might just be a coincidence. But the bottom line is you must open that door and all the things you do in a pilgrimage open that door.
Tim Ferriss: And also, if it is nature, it serves some very important, at least from an evolutionary perspective, function.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, when we look back at just the history of science, but just to take a slight digression, at all the many things that we thought were junk DNA, all the many things that we thought were vestigial, all the many things that we thought were just leftover and nature forgot to get rid of it.
Arthur C. Brooks: Male nipples.
Tim Ferriss: Male nipples, I still don’t have a great explanation or a great use for. I mean, maybe I’m sure I’ll get some suggestions on X.
Arthur C. Brooks: Let’s watch the comments, Tim let’s watch the comments.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The comments, I’m sure will have plenty of suggestions. But I mean, it’s half your brain, right? So along with the — everyone needs whatever, eight glasses of water a day and can only have 30 grams of protein at a given sitting. We only use 10 percent of our brain, not true. We use all of it.
Arthur C. Brooks: True. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that was a thing when I was a kid in the ’70s.
Oh, if you could get access to the other 90 percent and then a science fiction story will have you, the person who knows how to use the other 90 percent, can fly or something.
Tim Ferriss: So gaining, really embracing and fully utilizing that right hemisphere characterized the capacities that you’re mentioning are — I have just found it to be such an incredible unlock for me in so many ways. And just to deepen the somatosensory and psychological texture of life, you really need that right side, and at least as you’re describing it. And —
Arthur C. Brooks: I’ve seen this in your work, by the way. So I’ve been very aware and familiar with your work for a long time. And the typical algorithm for people who are seekers is to start on the left side, and then they find their way to the right. You become more spiritual, more mystical, more cosmic in your outlook as you’ve gotten older. And so you wouldn’t write The 4-Hour Body the same way today. I’m sure you wouldn’t.
Tim Ferriss: No. I stand by all of the tactical stuff.
Arthur C. Brooks: I love it. I love it. I read that book. I’ve just really enjoyed it. I mean, I learned a lot from it, but it’s a very left brain approach. And you realized in your own life, as people generally do, that you needed the right hemisphere as well. And so that’s why you talk about it’s like, why is Tim getting all mystical again? No, no, no. He’s actually moving hemispherically into the full brain.
Tim Ferriss: Well, also it’s like the how-to, the technician’s side, the engineering problem of, let’s just call it self-improvement. Whether that’s physical, cognitive, psycho-emotional, what is that in service of? For most people, if they ask why a few times, they’re trying to improve their quality of life and the quality of the lives around them they care most for. To do that, you need to do things like distinguish between the me self and the I self. Anthony de Mello has a lot of really good writing on this as well. You need to lower resistance, right? Which you could think of as also paying very close attention to the serenity prayer or stoicism or fill in the blank.
And there’s something to be said, I think, when I also have conversations with some of the most, as far as I can tell, at peace, reconciled, but yet still productive in the world, people. Whether that’s Henry Shukman, who I mentioned, or the Jack Kornfields or CEOs who also pay attention to these things. They are all reading and learning from people, whether it’s the Christian mystics, whether it’s Rumi, so Sufi mysticism. You go down the line, it’s all the same thing. Zen Buddhism, when I check my wifi connection, I always go to dailyzen.com and occasionally you find something that’s pretty interesting. They’re all talking about the same stuff. Maybe we should take a gander.
Arthur C. Brooks: And to put a point on what you just said, the meaning of life comes from the right hemisphere of your brain, and you can’t get to the right by going further and further left.
Tim Ferriss: No. No, no, no.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s probably a political point too. I’m not sure. But this is a problem that a lot of people have. They want more and more and more. I mean, I’ve got protocols. I got protocols up the wazoo, man. But protocols aren’t it. What they can do is they can facilitate — it’s the same thing.
People ask me all the time, how is AI going to interact with happiness? The answer is that AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain. The way that it can bring you happiness is that if you do left brain things with it, thus freeing up a whole bunch of time that you then use to deepen your relationships in real life with real people. That’s an algorithm right there, man.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Arthur C. Brooks: The way that you won’t get it is if you try to use it as an adjunct to the right hemisphere of your brain by making it your love or friend or therapist.
Tim Ferriss: Or if you use it to do certain things more quickly so that you can simply consume the free time you’ve created with more left dominant.
Arthur C. Brooks: By frittering away your time on Instagram.
Tim Ferriss: Which is what I predict most people will do.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, exactly right.
Tim Ferriss: So the idea of this — the era of leisure time is, on its face, pretty ridiculous because that’s been predicted with every advance in technology, but —
Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly. And we started off by talking about the technology that I use, which is my morning protocol. The morning protocol, per se, is not the secret of happiness. It instantiates. It enables. What it is an architecture such that I can actually have the freedom to live in the right hemisphere of my brain and find the meaning of my life. That’s what all of these protocols are. That’s why blood flow restriction is a left brain protocol. But the reason that you do anything like that is because ultimately what you want is more freedom in a way, more freedom to spend it in what really matters most in your life, which is more love. It’s more love, it’s more meaning, it’s more significance, it’s more coherence, it’s more purpose.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to end where I promised we would end. And The Meaning of Your Life, this is the new book, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. I love your writing. I love your thinking. People should absolutely check out the book. I need to ask you briefly about a specific element of your evening routine and wind down. And that is personal evening reading. What do you read before you go to bed?
Arthur C. Brooks: Before I go to bed, I read something that’s not trying to educate me better. But trying to be generative to me. I want to use — and again, this is very left brain thinking. I want my sleep to be concentrated in the hemisphere of my brain that’ll bring me the most meaning. And what you read before you sleep will actually stimulate the part of your brain that you’re going to use most while you sleep. It’s one of the reasons that if you want to remember something, read about it right before you go to sleep and you’ll actually remember it, but you won’t learn something you don’t know, but you will remember something better. That’s the reason that I read the Psalms. Actually, I like to have the Psalms read to me in a feminine Spanish accent.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds great. Sign me up.
Arthur C. Brooks: I read love poetry.
Tim Ferriss: Do you have any favorite Psalms? And then love poetry, what are we talking?
Arthur C. Brooks: Well, actually we are talking about Neruda. The greatest love poet ever. The Chilean love poet in Spanish, which, pronounced in Spanish from your beloved, is like a narcotic and yet it won’t ruin your life. The Psalm, Psalm 121. Any of the Psalms actually, because they have a different flavor as you work your way through them. The first Psalm is like a tree planted by streams of water who prospers in all that he does. The idea of God’s promise and love for you, Tim, and that promise and absorbing that promise of the intense love for you, which is the essence of significance at the metaphysical level and absorbing that and having it read to you, or reading it or having it read to you is so significant. That’s a beautiful thing to do and that’s a great part of the evening protocol. The evening protocol is happiness and better sleep, deeper love, generativity in the nighttime hours. Which, by the way, for me, are a torment. I’m a terrible sleeper. I’m terrible. And you can’t get the machine off, right?
Tim Ferriss: Machine. Are you talking about — you can’t get the machine —
Arthur C. Brooks: There’s no off switch.
Tim Ferriss: Right, the off switch. I’ve become much, much better at it, much better. But that has, for my entire life, been the — ruminative challenge is that I laid down to go to sleep and my mind is like, “I’ve been waiting all day to tell you so many things.”
Arthur C. Brooks: I know. I know. “There’s some things we need to discuss here. This is very important.”
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. “You’re probably wondering why I gathered you here today.”
Arthur C. Brooks: Exactly right. “The boss has something on his mind.” I know. I know. And when your spouse, your partner is a good sleeper, that can be really problematic because then they’ll have a heavy conversation with you and then go —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, no, that’s a no fly zone. That’s verboden.
Arthur C. Brooks: That’s my wife.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that is verboden.
Arthur C. Brooks: Part of the protocol, this is really important for everybody watching us who doesn’t sleep alone, is actually the oxytocin protocol. Which is, as we all know, the love molecule, the bonding neuropeptide that functions as a hormone in the brain. Women have three times as much as men. Side note, here’s how you fix every marriage. You do four things. Number one, you have more fun together as opposed to rehearsing grievance. More fun, less grievance. Therapy is like grievance, grievance, grievance. And have more fun together. Number two.
Tim Ferriss: And how long have you been married?
Arthur C. Brooks: 34 years.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Arthur C. Brooks: Second is pray together because the fusion, one flesh is the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brains. This is the goal. If you get married, Tim, the goal is to fuse your right hemispheres. And the best way to do that is by meditating together, is by praying together, is by doing right hemisphere activity together. The third protocol is to make eye contact whenever you talk. Never be talking without making eye contact. Way more important for your wife than it is for you. Way more important because she gets three times as much oxytocin, which means she’s better at bonding, but it also means that she’s better at starving, when she’s not getting enough oxytocin.
And eye contact from the beloved, which is when you have eye contact with a newborn baby, oxytocin is like the 4th of July inside your head, which is why you wouldn’t leave the baby on the bus because suddenly the baby’s kin, right? It’s an evolved phenomenon. And last but not least is remember ABT, always be touching, always be touching, always be touching. More important for men than for women, as a matter of fact. That’s why when you’re with your beloved and she hooks her arm into your arm while you’re walking down the street and you’re like, “I’m big and strong.” Why? Because that’s super important. So the last thing before you go to bed, when you’re reading to each other or when you’re talking, go five minutes earlier to bed, five minutes earlier to bed and stare at each other.
And it’s hard. It’s scary, it’s like — the eyes, according to St. Paul, are the windows to the soul, and that’s when you know you really feel it. And biologically, the reason is because oxytocin is just like old faithful for her. She will love you more if you have 5 to 10 minutes of intense eye contact before you go to sleep while you’re holding hands under the covers.
Tim Ferriss: And by the way, for anyone who has not tried this —
Arthur C. Brooks: You’ve done this, right?
Tim Ferriss: I have done this. 5 to 10 minutes is so long.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a really long time —
Arthur C. Brooks: Oh, it’s intense. Here’s an exer —
Tim Ferriss: You could start lower, right?
Arthur C. Brooks: You can start lower, but here’s the most intense exercise you can do. If you want the break glass plan for fixing your relationship, right? Here’s what you do. You stand in front of each other, staring at each other in the eyes, silent, and you hold your arms out to the side like in an iron cross holding hands like this for eight minutes. And so what’s going on here?
Tim Ferriss: Is this for the Shaolin Monk therapy school?
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s super painful. And it’s going to be more painful for you because after about four minutes, you’re holding her arms up, right? So there’s like five pound weights in each hand. And so you’re in intense excruciating pain while having your soul opened with a crowbar.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Arthur C. Brooks: And this is intense there.
Tim Ferriss: How did you arrive at this?
Arthur C. Brooks: Well, I’ve experimented with this and also I read the research, right? And I participate in the research. I’ve actually done this a number of times. There’s a number of religious traditions that will do exercises actually that are like this. I did one in Spain last year and it’s called Proyecto Amor Conyugal.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Arthur C. Brooks: And that’s the Marital Love Project. It’s a very big deal across Spain. It’s not in English yet. And so it was in a little retreat center outside Madrid. And we were seeing — Because my wife and I, we do a lot of talks together and we counsel couples that are engaged, et cetera. This is our side hustle, right? It’s helping people fall in love and stay in love. And so we were just like, “What’s this method everybody’s so crazy about?” We were doing stuff like this and it was like, Holy mackerel. I mean, because they don’t know how much neuroscience they’re actually doing. There’s somebody who came up with this and said, “I wonder if this works.” It’s like, it’s really, really heavy. It’s just top-notch neuroscience matched up with — it’s as left and right brain as you can get.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Cool. And also, not yet in English, that sounds like a job for Arthur Brooks and some AI tool.
Arthur C. Brooks: And Ester Brooks, who’s like — she’s the spiritual leader in our family.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there you go. Job for Ester, who wouldn’t need the AI. Arthur, always so much fun to spend time together. Thank you for taking the time.
Arthur C. Brooks: Thank you, Tim. Thank you for what you’re bringing into the world. Even when I’m not in person, I’m with you virtually and you enrich my life.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, thanks, man. This is, boy, talk about lucky timing. All the serendipity required to end up with this job, remarkable. And I get to spend time with people like yourself. The Meaning of Your Life, folks, check it out. You can get it everywhere books are sold. And people can find you at arthurbrooks.com on all the socials.
Arthur C. Brooks: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Presumably, is there anything else you would like to share? Anything else you’d like to say or request to my audience? Anything at all before we wind to a close?
Arthur C. Brooks: If you don’t know what to do today and meaning feels out of reach, turn off your device and go love somebody. And it doesn’t really matter how you feel because love is an act. It’s a commitment. It’s a decision. And you’ll lift up yourself and that person in a little bit of the whole world. Happiness is love.
Tim Ferriss: Boom. I think that is a perfect place to end. And folks will link to everything as usual tim.blog/podcast. Go love somebody, including yourself.
Arthur C. Brooks: Right on.Tim Ferriss: See you next time. Thanks for tuning in.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Arthur Brooks — Finding The Meaning of Your Life, The Poet’s Protocol, The Holy Half-Hour, and Why Your Suffering is Sacred (#841) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-24 05:22:55
Arthur Brooks (@arthurbrooks) is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also the host of the weekly podcast Office Hours with Arthur Brooks and a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly “How to Build a Life” column.
Brooks is the author of 15 books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. His next book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, will be released on March 31, 2026.
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“I’m a specialist in human happiness because it’s hard for me.”
— Arthur Brooks
“If you’re getting up when the sun is warm, you’ve lost the first battle for mood management and productivity is what it comes down to.”
— Arthur Brooks
“You never arrive. Arrival gives you almost nothing, but it’s progress toward the goal.”
— Arthur Brooks
“I’m basically the equivalent of a freaked-out hippie who went to India and got converted and practiced an exotic religion for the rest of my life. But my exotic religion is Catholicism.”
— Arthur Brooks
“You can’t simulate the meaning of your life. You can only live the meaning of your life.”
— Arthur Brooks
“If you don’t know what to do today and meaning feels out of reach, turn off your device and go love somebody. And it doesn’t really matter how you feel because love is an act. It’s a commitment. It’s a decision. And you’ll lift up yourself and that person and a little bit of the whole world. Happiness is love.”
— Arthur Brooks
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Want to hear the last time Arthur was on the show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed reverse bucket lists, the four false idols (money, power, fame, and pleasure), Buddhist and Stoic practices for managing negative affect, death meditation, how physical fitness buys less unhappiness, finding meaning and purpose, the three macronutrients of happiness, and much more.
The post Arthur Brooks — Finding The Meaning of Your Life, The Poet’s Protocol, The Holy Half-Hour, and Why Your Suffering is Sacred (#841) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-18 12:32:46
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Bill Gurley, venture capitalist and general partner at Benchmark. We discuss investing in the AI era, 10 Days in China, important life lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, and MrBeast, and much more.
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: Bill, great to see you, man.
Bill Gurley: Good to see you.
Tim Ferriss: And I thought we would start with a prop that you brought. So there was a very thick book with a tattered cover and I think that is as good a lead in as anything. And what are you holding?
Bill Gurley: I’m holding a book called The Last Laugh by Phil Berger. The reason it’s tattered is I think it may be out of print, like I bought it used because I wanted to see it and have it.
Tim Ferriss: What’s the subtitle?
Bill Gurley: The Last Laugh: The World of the Stand-up Comics.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you have this book? Are you thinking of making a career switch?
Bill Gurley: No. No. No. No. So as part of researching my new book, Runnin’ Down a Dream, my co-writer and I were, we spent six years just diving through stories because I had done this speech at the University of Texas and we wanted to enhance it when we went to the printed form. And one of the stories we came across was Jerry Seinfeld and his decision to pursue a career as a comedian. And he was in New York. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. He had an inkling, an inkling that he might want to be a standup comic, but he didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know if it was a real career. He didn’t know that you could make money. And he read this book and it profiles, I don’t know, it looks like 15 different — it’s got Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Robert Klein.
It profiled them in a way that was very disinhibiting to him. It gave him permission to go do this career that’s not a typical career. When you go to college, they don’t list standup comedian as something that you can go do.
Tim Ferriss: The guidance counselor is not generally putting that on the multiple choice.
Bill Gurley: Exactly. But this book served as something that granted him permission to go do that.
Tim Ferriss: And we’re going to come back to that. I will say that I bookmarked this for future conversations, and of course we’re chatting outside of these recordings, but because two years ago, almost exactly when we did our first episode, you mentioned that you were working on a book idea based on the belief that it’s easier than ever to rise up because access to mentors and information is unprecedented. So we’ll come back to that, of course, and discuss it and the frameworks and the approaches and the stories at some length.
But I wanted to start with some topical subject matter: AI bubble or not? And if so, what does that mean?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. So I think this is super interesting. My partner, Peter, reminded me of a book that we had seen a while ago by Carlota Perez. It has this very benign title, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It was written in like 2002. And what Perez simplifies and notices, which I just find perfect for trying to understand whether there’s a bubble or not, is that every time there’s been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers that want to come take advantage of it, think of the Gold Rush. And so people want to make it a debate. Do you believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if you say you think it’s a bubble, they say, “Oh, you don’t believe in AI.” Like, this “Got you!” kind of thing. And if you study Perez, and I think this is absolutely correct, if the wave is real, then you’re going to have bubble-like behavior.
They come together as a pair, precisely because any time there’s very quick wealth creation, you’re going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that or participate in it. So you get a flood of those types of people coming at it. And so it’s odd. There’s a real technology wave that’s fundamentally changing the world and there’s also massive speculation simultaneously.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they come as a pair. I recall not too long ago, maybe two weeks ago, saw a short interview with your friend, Jeff Bezos, and he distinguished between financial bubbles and industrial bubbles and cited, and I’m paraphrasing here, but 2008 as an example of a bad bubble, financial bubble, versus, let’s just say, the early 2000s, ’98, ’99, 2000, where a lot of very important technology was created that then was durable after the fact and created new generations of entrepreneurs and a lot of economic growth. And he believes that AI would fall into the industrial bubble category of things. But I suppose, given that the dancing pair you described come together, how would you think about investing in private companies, modern venture capital at this point in time? And just, I suppose, as it’s changed since you were most active.
Bill Gurley: Just a quick comment on that industrial bubble thing. One thing that is surprising to me is that even though I fundamentally believe this is an important real technology wave, the big players, even the Mag Seven, have all decided to do things from a deal perspective. You’ve read about these circular deals and whatnot.
Tim Ferriss: Could you explain what you mean by that?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. There’s a lot of talk out there, but it all started when Microsoft invested in OpenAI. OpenAI agreed to buy services from Microsoft, which is called a circular deal because you’re giving them money they wouldn’t have otherwise.
And when Dario was on stage at DealBook last week, he said, “Oh, I can explain this. It’s not that hard.” Amazon wanted us to spend money we didn’t have, so they gave us even more money. And I’m like, “Well, that’s precisely why this is a questionable behavior.” But it’s gotten bigger. NVIDIA’s handed out money and then NVIDIA gave CoreWeave money, but then also agreed to buy any services they have left over. This stuff’s not ideal. Like if you were to say, “What’s crisp, clean accounting?” You wouldn’t do these things. And some of them say, “Well, it’s not material.” And which I would say, “Well, then why are you doing it?” And I’ve asked other people to try and understand how even big, sophisticated companies might get speculative using a word from previous discussion. And I hear things like, “Well, loss aversion tends to go down when you’re winning.” Like if you’re on a hot streak in a casino, you take more risk, things like that.
But it is surprising to me. So when it comes to retail investors, I would be particularly concerned for them at this stage in the AI game because there is a plethora of SPV vehicles, but you’ve heard that phrase, I’m sure, SPV. This is where someone has an in on an investment and they do a one-off VC fund, if you will.
Tim Ferriss: A special purpose vehicle.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. It’s a single entity just for that one —
Tim Ferriss: We have a chance to invest in X. We have an allocation of however much money, and then they can allow Jane Doe and John Doe potentially —
Bill Gurley: And they take a rake on it. And there’s people promoting SPVs in situations where they don’t even actually have the underlying stock, or maybe they hope to get it. It’s the wild, wild west. And most of the people on that edge, I would put in the category of interloper carpet bagger. These are people that have come to this thing, and I just think you got to be quite careful. The investments that were made that have already had 100 X plus returns were made a while ago before this thing started. And that’s not to say there won’t be an incremental AI investment that makes money, I think there will, but your odds right now of that being the case are really, really low.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I would add to that and say, and this applies to me as much as anyone else, but your actual risk tolerance may differ, probably does differ significantly from your perceived risk tolerance if you haven’t had a huge drawdown, right? If you haven’t actually ridden a few of those waves and see how you respond in those circumstances, and you should be, I suppose, skeptical of how you view your own intestinal fortitude with some of those things, or maybe the losses you can absorb. Because I recall, for instance, I’ve seen this many, many times, but with these types of SPVs, people get involved, and let’s just say they’re not typically an angel investor, they don’t have the experience of watching 60%, 70%, 80% of their investments go to zero or become the walking dead, and they sign off on all of the, not necessarily waivers, but they accept, accept, accept the SBV terms of service, which I’ll say, “You could lose all of your investment. This is incredibly risky.” But then when it does go to zero, the financial and psychological impact is catastrophic.
Bill Gurley: There’s a lot of people, and I think this comes from a very good place. I think they’re very well intentioned who look at the world and say — well, first of all, rising inequality, why can’t everyone have access to the same things? And then companies are staying private longer. So they say, we need to institutionalize the generic public’s ability to invest in private companies. And the problem, I think there’s two problems. One you just hinted at, which is most private company VC backed even go to zero, like the majority, which is not something people really — they sense that they want the lottery ticket, they want the Uber, they want the one that goes to the moon, but they don’t understand that that comes along with it.
Tim Ferriss: They don’t want to buy losing lottery tickets for 12 years.
Bill Gurley: Right. Right. Exactly. And the second problem is the information transparency in the private company game is just low. And I think the institutional investors have come to understand that and know what they’re getting into and know how to evaluate things. But if you come at it with a public market mindset thinking, “Oh, every set of financials I’ve been handed is audited and is correct.” And that’s just not the case. It’s super loosey-goosey.
Tim Ferriss: So if you were, this may be a difficult question, but if you were angel investing right now, how would you be thinking about your approach?
Bill Gurley: I’ll tell you a funny story. When I decided to hang up my gloves, if you will, and stop making institutional venture capital investments, I had a whole bunch of ideas about what I wanted to do next. And one of them was, “Oh, I’ll do a bunch of angel investing.” Bezos did it on the side. This would be fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: He did pretty well with his angel investing.
Bill Gurley: I was explaining this to a, I won’t say who it is, but a Silicon Valley CEO, very successful. And he said, “What are you going to do now?” And I said, “I was thinking of doing angel investing.” He goes, “Why would you do that?” He said, “I got 50 of these things. People don’t return my calls.” He goes, “I wish I’d never done it.” So there’s a unglamorous side to it as much as there is a glamorous side. And you’ve participated in this world before. So what would I say? I think if I were doing angel investments, I’d try and find in an intersection of people that are super curious and are playing with all these AI tools, but bring a perspective from a particular industry that gives them an advantage in that area where they could simultaneously be maybe the smartest user of AI in their genre, in their vertical.
Tim Ferriss: So despite the, or maybe because of, because we talked about the pair, the AI bubble, you would still be looking at AI intersected opportunities if you were angel investing.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. There’s a weird reality out there right now, and this could end if ever a bubble has popped or whatever, but the institutional investors have zero interest in non-AI deals. Zero. It’s more black and white than I could be successful in —
Tim Ferriss: And for people who do not know the term, define the institutional investor.
Bill Gurley: People who are paid both a salary and a piece of the return to be active investors of other people’s money, using other people’s money. But the reason that kind of matters is if you angel fund a deal and have any hope of it raising money in the future, if it’s not AI related, right now —
Tim Ferriss: Could die of neglect.
Bill Gurley: There is no interest. I can’t state clearly enough how there’s zero interest. And I could simultaneously make fun of that reality, but I could also justify that reality, but it is the reality right now.
And by the way, while I mention that, I feel obligated for your audience. I don’t care what field you’re in, you should be playing with this stuff. It has the potential to impact your role in your career, and the best way to protect against any risk of your career being obfuscated or eliminated from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can possibly be.
PREROLL
Tim Ferriss: How would you think about, maybe you can give a hypothetical example of looking for someone who has very, very sophisticated domain expertise and experience who’s now intersecting with AI and has a unique, because of the combination perspective on things, to invest in as an angel investor and separate that from something that’s just going to be consumed by the fundamental models and these larger companies that —
Bill Gurley: From a career perspective or —
Tim Ferriss: From an angel investment perspective, how would you pick folks you don’t think are just going to end up working on something that gets replicated in short order by the bigger companies?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. The key is just to stay pretty far away from the edge of whatever. You can go online and see interviews with the people at Anthropic or OpenAI and what they’re working on. If it’s the next thing they’re going to do, I don’t think you’re going to be protected.
But as I think about founders and angel investors, you’re talking about a pretty broad array of things. At this point, as I mentioned earlier, you’re not going to back the next big model company. Besides, if you were, you need a billion dollar angel investment to go make that happen. It’s just really, the game’s changed. There’s so much money involved. And so I think you’re going to want to be off the beaten path anyway. When I think about these deeper verticals, I don’t think it will make sense for OpenAI to go crush every little vertical.
Tim Ferriss: Waste management.
Bill Gurley: And even if the model’s capable of understanding that subject matter, there are workflows, there are data sets that are local to your customer, and that stuff has to be stitched together. So I think having an understanding of a particular industry and one that’s not going to be on the next thing to do list at OpenAI, it would probably be your best bet.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. So is it fair to say, if I’m understanding you correctly, that effectively looking for something that would not be a high priority for one of these larger companies and also a proprietary dataset of some type?
Bill Gurley: Proprietary datasets, the more workflows that exist are better because you can build software around those things that —
Tim Ferriss: What is a workflow?
Bill Gurley: The thing that popped into my head, I’m on the board of Zillow. Zillow’s been investing for the past five years in tools that help the realtor do their day-to-day job. They have a tool called Showing Time that helps you book in person tours at houses as an example, but there’s putting the mortgage together, getting the sign-offs on. There’s just all these tasks that have to be happened that can be automated in the —
And so tasks that can be automated, that can be integrated with AI, the more of that stuff you can build into a system, the better off you’re going to be protecting yourself from a model that just answers questions, which is why I brought it up.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Let’s move on to big topic, big country, China. You spent 10 days there over the past summer. What was your experience? What did you see? What made an impression? What did you do?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. I’d been about six times before, so this is like my seventh trip. It was one thing that was different. My daughter is an Asian studies major, as you were, and she spent the summer in Hong Kong. So we picked her up and then we toured six cities in 10 days. And my objective with this trip, in the past trips, it was mostly just to meet with entrepreneurs and founders and mutual sharing of information, that thing. This time I was more interested in just kind of being eyes wide open and learning. And so we took two of the high speed trains just as an experience that I got a tour of the Xiaomi factory with their new car, the SU7, and was trying to get a feel for what’s most recent there. And we went to Shenzhen, the overnight city, which has gone from, I think, less than 100,000 people in 1980 to 20 million people.
And just to see the scale and scope of the whole thing, there’s a lot of rhetoric in the US about what is or isn’t happening in China. And I just wanted to have a better feel for it. And we’re making policy decisions that are going to impact the global footprint, and God forbid, end up in a World War three situation. So anyway, I just wanted a better understanding. I was aided by the fact that Dan Wang shared his book Breakneck with me right before I left, and I read it while I was there, which was interesting. And then it came out, and of course it ended up on the bestseller list.
But I think China’s misperceived in a lot of ways.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of those misperceptions?
Bill Gurley: The biggest one is that people who have a rudimentary understanding of what is happening there, you use this word communism to infer a lot of other things. And one of the things that’s inferred by communism is top down state run system. And I think they think of Russia and they assume, “Well, that’ll always lead to bad capital allocation, no innovation.” Because they have this picture in their mind of these, I don’t know, brick buildings, like with snow all around them and not much happening.
And the reality there is just far, far different from that. I think Dan Wang did a great job of explaining how the country puts out this five-year plan, but then the provinces, which they’re a lot bigger than a US state, but they’re the equivalent, like it’s how the country segment and they compete with each other. And the effective mayor of the province, if he does well, has a chance to move up in the system, which is not a reality in the US system. But what that leads to is just a massive amount of competition and —
Tim Ferriss: What are the metrics by which they’re being judged? Do you have any idea on a province level? Is it some equivalent of GDP? It’s not the right term, but —
Bill Gurley: I’m guessing probably we could go talk to AI and get a better answer than I have right now.
But yeah, I would think that’s part of it, prosperity, employment, those things. By the way, this provincial competition has also led to overbuild of buildings. It’s not always positive, bridges that aren’t used, there’s a Go cities. Go cities, yes. But you end up with hyper competition. So I think the thing that a lot of people in Silicon Valley love about capitalism is this notion of the invisible hand and competition that leads to innovation and best practice, and the winners rise up and they’re better for it. That is happening there. And if you read about the solar industry or the EV industry or now the robotics industry, they have hundreds of different companies competing in these fields and it’s brutal competition. And as a result of that, they’re ending up with very innovative companies, which once again, I think people wouldn’t prescribe to being possible in a communist world and remarkable execution from an industrial standpoint.
So the price points of the products that will be sold around the globe are well below anything that could be done in the US.
Tim Ferriss: How do you go about getting a tour of Xiaomi factory? I would think that they would be very closed about that. What’s in it for them and how do they —
Bill Gurley: I don’t know if you saw this going around the internet yesterday, but they shipped a car to this YouTuber.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I saw it. Yeah. Absolutely.
Bill Gurley: Which is brilliant. And he did like a 15 — that’s the SG7, that’s the factory I went to. As I mentioned, I’d been there before, so I met Lei Jun, who’s the Founder of Xiaomi in 2005 when he was chairman of Joyo, which was a E-commerce company that Amazon bought. So he’s been around a while. He has evolved into, the best thing I could say is he’s the Steve Jobs of China right now. When he quit doing Joyo and he had this other company as well, he declared 10 years ago he was going to build a smartphone. Just out of the blue, I’m going to build a smartphone. He didn’t have any smartphone experience, but Xiaomi’s now the third-largest manufacturer of handsets in the globe. And about four or five years ago, at about the exact same time Apple hinted they were interested in building a car, he said, “I’m going to build a car.”
Tim Ferriss: Well, not only did he say I’m going to build a car, but that was a response to sanctions. That was an emergency. Well, I listened to the translation of, even though my Chinese is decent, but it’s not as good as it once was. I think it was 2024 company-wide address where he talked about the sanctions coming in saying, “What if we couldn’t make phones? What would we do?
Bill Gurley: But that talk is unbelievable, and it’s translated on YouTube, and I would encourage people to watch from about minute 30 to about an hour 15, which is where he talks about his process for designing the car. I don’t know if you saw that part.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I did.
Bill Gurley: But it’s crazy. He says, he put a note on any car in his parking lot that he had never drove, and he would ask each employee to give him three positives, three negatives and loan them the car. Said he drove 200 of his employees cars. When you hear that stuff, you’re like, “Wow, I wonder if anyone at Apple did that.” It’s just such a bottom up, just ground truth way to start the process. But even still, even if he did that, a bunch of people could do that. How do you have the wherewithal to build a factory? He’d never built a factory before. And I’ve been in other car factories here in the US. It was phenomenal. Anyway, back to your question why I could get in. I knew Lei Jun from way back when.
Tim Ferriss: What does the process look like? Are there a bunch of clearances and you have to get the okay from the provincial?
Bill Gurley: I don’t think we went through the whole factory, but no, it wasn’t that. They’re a public company. I think they’re interested in being well understood, which I think hints at why they enabled this. I think they had to send a car to this guy, the YouTuber.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: And by the way, the President of Ford went over there about six months before I did, went on the same tour, so they let him go there. And he had an SU7 shipped to Michigan, and he drove it for several weeks and he’s talked about how incredible it is.
Tim Ferriss: Well, he also, if I’m remembering correctly, has talked about EV production, and battery dominance or at least component dominance from China and the risks inherent in that. And I don’t want to bleed too far into geopolitics, but it’s hard not to pull it into the conversation.
So this is a question from X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, one of many questions. But I’ll ask, what are your top handful of critiques say of the Chinese tech ecosystem or CCP after going on a tour there? What would you say they’re not doing well or things that complicate their ability to compete?
Bill Gurley: Well, the first one that’s I think been well publicized is when an entrepreneur has risen to a level of success and then uses that as a platform, the government seems uninterested in that.
Tim Ferriss: Exhibit A.
Bill Gurley: The Jack Ma.
Tim Ferriss: Jack Ma.
Bill Gurley: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a saying that I think I heard while I was over there, “Don’t be the tallest tree.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is, Don’t Be The Tallest Tree. Yeah, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down in Japan. They have a totally different system obviously.
Bill Gurley: The other entrepreneur outside of Lei Jun is the ByteDance CEO. And ByteDance is probably got the leading position for the consumer AI, like Open AI, but over there right now, in addition to just incredible revenue growth. This is the company that owned TikTok and whatnot, but they’re not going public and you don’t see him at all, which may get to this tallest tree thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, celebrities also disappear over there.
Bill Gurley: No doubt.
Tim Ferriss: Very mysteriously.
Bill Gurley: Yes. Well, and business people.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: So yes, that does happen.
Tim Ferriss: I will say, and for people who are wondering, because there are a lot of — how should we put this? There are people who are very angry, very hawkish. Some people are very, very supportive, and then their agendas or alliances get questioned. I, like you, I’m just interested in understanding what is happening to the extent that I can. What is the actual truth on the ground? What are the details? And frankly, the innovation over there is remarkable. And what they’ve done in terms of establishing access to rare metals and everything they need to manufacture is remarkable. You go to South America or Africa, and it is Chinese everywhere on infrastructure projects. They’ve been very, very smart about it. So I’m deeply interested in all of it, and please hold your thought because I want to hear everything you have to say.
What I would say is a piece of the three-dimensional chess that I’ve been impressed with is how well the Chinese government is able to — well, of course they’re able to integrate with the private sector so that they’re able to use, in a sense, products to widen their scope of access potentially. Like DJI, for instance, great example. People have a lot of questions around these cars, as spectacular as they might be. Are they an extension of surveillance? These are open questions that I think are worth asking. But you were about to say something, so I’ll let you —
Bill Gurley: No, no, no. I think let’s come to that. Let me make one point and then let’s come to that. So there’s two other things I wanted to mention. Obviously, infrastructure. So they are building new nuclear fission plants. So fission being old school, not new school, at one fourth the price that we do it here in the US. So is South Korea, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And the numbers are incredible.
Bill Gurley: But when we sit here and say, “Oh, we want to re-shore manufacturing, and they can build things at one fourth the price we can.” If you don’t solve that, you’re going to re-shore something and we’re going to not be price competitive globally. And then because you won’t import what they have, and you’re going to make our citizens buy from this new factory where we’re making things way more expensive, it doesn’t work.
Tim Ferriss: The math doesn’t math.
Bill Gurley: It doesn’t work. And by the way, I’m not sure it brings jobs. The Xiaomi factory was a third based on some numbers I was able to acquire, a third the number of employees per car output. And I got to believe in 10 years it’ll be a sixth. And so you could calculate the total number of jobs that you’d be bringing back if you brought back all this car production and it’d be hundreds of thousands. It’s not millions and millions of jobs. So anyway, that infrastructure thing’s for real. And I think Dan Wong does a good job of saying that America’s run by lawyers.
Tim Ferriss: And this is the author of Breakneck.
Bill Gurley: Our country’s run by lawyers and theirs is run by engineers. Engineers. And so when you try and build something here, the lawyers just get in the way and try and block it, which certainly when you hear Elon talks about why the Gigafactory is here in Austin and not in California, it all relates to those things. So anyway, that’s infrastructure. There’s another thing that’s I think quite interesting, which is the government may not care about whether or not their companies have really big market caps.
And when I first realized this, you saw what happened when they took down Alibaba when they went after Jack Ma, and Amp Financial could have been this big thing and it got a haircut, and you question, well, do they care? And if you are pushing your companies to be low cost providers, maybe that’s at odds with them being hyper profitable and really big. And then you can turn around and ask the question. Hearing that caused me to ask the question, does America really benefit by the fact that the Mag Seven have $3 trillion market caps? I know the employees of those companies do, but is that a sign of our competitive capitalistic society not being truly competitive?
Tim Ferriss: On a global scale.
Bill Gurley: No, even within. There’s a notion you learn about in economics classes called pure competition. And in pure competition, no one has an intellectual property advantage. Marginal profits are whittled down just to the cost of capital, and the consumer benefits because there’s no excessive profit capture. If we have all these companies that are able to have excessive profits, is that a form of market failure? And does the fact that they exist help America in any way? At first, of course I’m a venture capitalist. I want to think, yes, of course. But then as I think about it, I don’t know that our government, or our society, or our people are better off because these six companies have $3 trillion market caps. It’s not that many people that — the percentage of the country that’s employed by those companies is small on an overall basis.
And so anyway, I think they have a different perspective on whether big market caps matter, and I think that is somewhat intriguing.
Tim Ferriss: What do you think about the innovation in China leading in some cases to the development of superior technology at a lower cost, that is plausibly an extension of the intelligence gathering apparatus of the government? Is that a real thing?
Bill Gurley: I’m not in a good place to know.
Tim Ferriss: I would have to imagine it seems like they would have to be stupid not to use that given their ability to penetrate the private sector.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. I think it’s certainly well known that they do surveillance of their own people. I know that would be particularly upsetting to people like Greg Luciano that runs FIRE and is very interested in free speech. The flip side is there’s very little street crime. You walk around, you don’t worry about that when you’re there.
Tim Ferriss: It’s true also in Japan though, right?
Bill Gurley: It doesn’t make it right or wrong. It is what it is. And I don’t know that we have this ability to tell them how they have to do it. Now, to the extent that the Huawei stuff where their products are being shipped out, and then those are used to gather intelligence out of their country and the rest of the world, of course that’s a problem.
But I think the way to deal with it, I’m not a politician, but I think the way to deal with it — I’m more of a believer of the engage. Engage, talk about what you don’t like and what you do like, and try and negotiate that problem away like we’re trying to do with the fentanyl precursors.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, way back in the day when I was an East Asian studies major, this was lifetimes ago. And keeping in mind, I was at the Capitol University of Business Economics in 1996. That was the bicycle era, these old photographs of Beijing with millions of bicycles with people in their long green jackets. I had one of those jackets for the winters. It gets really cold. But things have changed a lot. At the time, I was looking forward and thinking I might be one of those people who could engage in Chinese. I think the way to do it is in English, frankly, for a whole host of reasons. But even if you speak the other language, Putin speaks English pretty well, but he does all of his negotiations when he’s speaking in Russian for a lot of good reasons, the same good reasons.
Bill Gurley: I get that. But look, so first of all, I do get accused of being like an agent of the CCP or something, even by some of the people that responded to your Twitter thing. I’m not. I’ve only visited a few times. I don’t know anybody in the government, but I worry greatly that we make bad policy decisions if we misunderstand what’s really going on.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I agree with that. Yeah, I fully agree with that. I’ve thought about — I frankly am worried about it. I would take a burner phone and a burner laptop. I’ve thought about it, because I want to get a better understanding of the culture of innovation that can be fostered, and exactly how things are to the extent that it would be visible to me, how things are developing in China. I’ve thought about going there. I thought about doing the same thing in India, too, to go and interview 10 of the top entrepreneurs. But the reason I haven’t done it is that I’m just like, I don’t know what radars that’s going to put me on, what surveillance, what fill in the blank, how difficult is it going to be? Whose rings am I going to have to kiss? Am I overthinking it or is it straightforward?
Bill Gurley: I think you’re overthinking it. I think the odds that Tim Ferriss would disappear in China is really [inaudible 00:44:26].
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I’m not worried about disappearing. That would be a terrible — the upside downside on that doesn’t make any sense. I’m not worried about disappearing.
Bill Gurley: There are companies that may not speak with you. When I was there, DeepSeek and Unitree, the word was out on the street that they’re not meeting with Westerners for reasons that are —
Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m sure that’s true conversely in the US too, right?
Bill Gurley: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m sure that’s — and by the way, I think that reflective lens, when you think about the country is helpful. When Alex Karp was just on stage at DealBook last week, he was talking about surveillance and he says, “Well, of course our tools are used to surveil the enemy.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, my God, the Chinese are surveilling us, but obviously we’re surveilling them too. Let’s be honest about these things.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a lot easier for a bunch of obvious reasons. It’s in some respects, a lot easier for them to surveil us than the other way around. Partially just due to the homogeneity of the society over there. You can’t send a bunch of blonde-haired, blue eyes, black, Latino, whatever, to China to end up at top universities, top companies, et cetera. It’s just a lot harder.
Bill Gurley: By the way, to put a bow on this part, I would say there’s two other things. One, you hinted at. One, the supply chains are so integrated in China down to the raw material level, that even if you brought a factory back here, it’d be more of an assembly shop and you’d still be sourcing from there, which isn’t necessarily cost competitive. And to replicate all of it would take a very, very, very long time.
Tim Ferriss: Well, including raw materials for staple pharmaceuticals, There’s a lot going on. So what at this point, is it a day late and a dollar short for the US? I know I almost promised we weren’t going to go into this, but I want to know your opinion. I’m so curious. What are the keys to the US remaining globally competitive and vibrant as an economy? You hinted to one, which is, it seems inevitable, nuclear power or more power. So how do you do that? I’m not sure how quickly you can right the ship, although it seems like a handful of people have done a pretty good job of changing the narrative. What are some of the key things in your opinion that the US needs to do?
Bill Gurley: One is make it easier to build.
Tim Ferriss: Build companies? Build?
Bill Gurley: I think build infrastructure. If you’re going to build semiconductor plants, if you’re going to build nuclear plants on time and on budget, that’s very hard to do in the US right now. And the glimmer of hope I would say is that a few states seem to have governors that want to get stuff out of the way. And I think it’s red tape and bureaucracy, and lawyers, and litigation that make this stuff so expensive. And so Texas and Arizona seem to be getting their unfair share of data centers and semiconductor plants. And I think because of that attitude, I’ve seen a similar attitude in Pennsylvania where they repaired I-95 in 12 days, but they literally had to take a bunch of statutes that are on the books and say that they don’t apply right now. So that mindset I think needs a lot more momentum.
That’d be one thing. There’s another thing that I think is important for people to understand on the China front. There are numerous people with a loud microphone that will say, “Oh, they know how to scale out plants, but they don’t know how to do any innovation.” And that’s just flat wrong. Whoever’s saying that just hasn’t been there. They don’t know the facts on the ground. These entrepreneurs are every bit as good as the entrepreneurs they are here. There are examples like in LIDAR, they built a MEMS LiDAR product that’s like $130 a car.
Tim Ferriss: What is MEMS LiDAR?
Bill Gurley: It’s solid state. It uses solid state semiconductor technology instead of that big spinning radar. And so the LiDAR on a Waymo is $5,000. And it’s $130 for MEMS LIDAR. They’re putting it on every car. You can go into ChatGPT and say, “Tell me about MEMS LiDAR innovation in China.” But it’s a great example. Le Jun’s another one, but anybody that thinks there’s no innovation is just —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they’re just wrong.
Bill Gurley: They got blinders on.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No, that’s not true. That’s definitely not true. I asked you two years ago if there are any countries that you’re long on. At the time, I’d be curious if this is still the case. You said you’re long on the UK, less regulatory capture.
Bill Gurley: Did I say that?
Tim Ferriss: Losing party pay is in the legal system.
Bill Gurley: I do love that.
Tim Ferriss: Which reduces frivolous litigation compared to the US. Any thoughts on where you’re bullish these days?
Bill Gurley: Well, ironically, Matt Ridley was in town a few weeks ago in Austin.
Tim Ferriss: The Rational Optimist, other books.
Bill Gurley: I love his stuff, but he would say that I would be dead wrong on that. Things aren’t going well there. And he lives there. So I’ll just take that as I got that one wrong.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it depends on the timeframe too. Is it two years, or is it five years or is it 10 years?
Bill Gurley: One of the things that’s been impressive about China is since Deng Xiaoping brought back capitalism, 500 million people have come out of poverty. And you look at countries that have a very strong work ethic, and a high education, and a currently low per populate income, and you would think more jobs would come their way. So two that would pop for me are Vietnam and Turkey, who check all those boxes.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Bill Gurley: Hopefully I do better then.
Tim Ferriss: Check in in another two years. All right. So let’s talk about, this is going to be a segue to talking about Runnin’ Down a Dream and all things involved with that. Maybe we could start with an anecdote from a fellow Austinite, likes to play the bongos, long hair, associated with smoking reefer every once in a while. Matthew, we were talking about a short anecdote about Matthew before we started recording. Would you mind sharing that?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. As I was preparing, as I was wrapping up the book, I started listening to Greenlights, and I was told you had to listen to it because of course he reads it. So you get all the great McConaughey affectations as you read it. But there’s a story in it that just popped in my brain and summarized exactly what I’m trying to accomplish with this book, Runnin’ Down a Dream. And he had spent the vast majority of his young adult life—so this anecdote is from when he was like 20, 21—telling his family he was going to be a lawyer. And so he’d gotten into the University of Texas. He was Pre-Law. Every time he went home, he talked about, “Yeah, I’m going to be a lawyer.” And he had met some people at Texas that had convinced him that he should switch to film school.
And he had immense anxiety about sharing this with his father. This is all in the book, but his father’s a very tough individual. And so reason to be fearful when you’re going to drop some news. “I’m no longer going to be a lawyer. I’m going to go to film school.” And he builds it up a lot in the book. I didn’t know when I was going to talk to him. You can imagine being in that situation, you’re delaying, delaying, delaying. But he finally tells his dad and his dad utters this very simple phrase, “Well, don’t half ass it.” And he says, “Of all the reactions he could have had, don’t half ass it were the last words I expected to hear and the best words he could have ever said to me.” And he said in that single moment, he gave him blessing, consent, approval, validation, privilege, honor, freedom, and responsibility, called it rocket fuel.
And I’d like to believe there are a number of people out there, young adults, maybe even some midlife career who have this notion that they should be doing something else, but society has put them on a path, or just the way they matriculated through college, put them into a career that they just don’t love and that they have this inkling that they could go do this thing. Or maybe you’re a young kid and you really want to do X, but everybody else is telling you to do A, B and C. I want to help them have the confidence and permission to go do X, to go chase this dream. And as you hinted at from our last call, I think the amount of your ability to make connections and to gather information and learn on your own pace, has never been better. You can literally just sit there and talk to ChatGPT six hours a day if you so choose, and learn so much about any particular field.
And so your ability to take things into your own hands, and to go try and be successful in this thing that you feel passionate about, I think has never been better.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you think when you initially gave and subsequently had to go online, Runnin’ Down a Dream as a presentation, why do you think that took? Why did it strike a chord in the way that it did? What do you think it was?
Bill Gurley: Well, I think we’ve built a society, like nobody’s fault. We just have built a society where we love to celebrate people that are successful in a lot of different fields, but when it comes to our own children, we tend to think way more pragmatically about what they should be doing. Lawyers, consultants, doctors, computer scientists, it’s all these jobs that have certainty to the financial component. And I think that’s so well intended. I don’t think there’s mal intent of anyone in the system. And I’m a parent of three, I’ve been through this. You just feel this obligation to try and push them towards prosperity, but it’s not intellectual prosperity, it’s not happiness, it’s financial.
Tim Ferriss: Stability.
Bill Gurley: Yes, that most people are guiding children towards. And this isn’t that complicated math, but most people end up working 80,000 hours in their life. It’s a third of your life. Why do something you don’t like? There’s Gallup poll data on career engagement and 59% of people say they’re not engaged at work. And this is that whole quiet quitting thing that we hear so much about. And some of these numbers are at an all-time low. It just seems horrific that people are sauntering through life.
Tim Ferriss: So what are some of the keys to taking the path less traveled then in this case? And there are a few I highlighted for myself, but where should we start? I highlighted one for myself. We don’t have to start here, but go where the action is. I just think this is so underrated, and people further undervalue it maybe in a digital world, but we can start anywhere you want. That’s just one that really jumped out to me because I think it’s really underrated. But where would you like to start?
Bill Gurley: I think in the book, one of the things that we tie together very early on is the interplay between passion, or fascination, or curiosity and learning. And the way to be most successful in any endeavor, but certainly if you’re going to go tilt it something that’s less pragmatic, is to be the smartest, most knowledgeable person you can possibly be. And knowledge is free now, as we’ve talked about. And I have this test for whether or not you’re actually truly passionate about what you’re trying to do, which is do you self-learn on your own time? Would you not watch Breaking Bad and read about this field and be energized by that activity? If you are, and we have 20, 30 different stories in the book of people that have been successful, almost all of them check that box. You just have this amazing ability to gain knowledge so much faster than everyone else you would be competing with. And that’s going to be useful. That’s unquestionably going to be useful.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, it makes me think of an interview I saw a long time ago, actually. It was quite a few years ago, but it was an interview with Joe Rogan and he said something that surprised me, it might surprise a lot of people, which was along the lines of he’s not good at, it was either willpower or discipline, which he’s in great shape. Obviously he’s black belt in jujitsu. He’s done what he’s done with the podcast. He’s the undisputed king of podcasting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, “I’m not actually good at whether it was discipline or willpower, but I am good at obsession. It’s all on or all off.” And I’ve seen that, I’m sure you’ve seen this in a lot of the entrepreneurs who actually make it to the other side and create these mega successes, they are just obsessed.
Bill Gurley: No doubt.
Tim Ferriss: And that gives them a huge, not just knowledge advantage, but endurance advantage. You just go down the checkboxes. It’s all advantages, and —
Bill Gurley: I had the opportunity to talk to Angela Duckworth when I was working on this and her book, Grit, talks about two components, passion and perseverance. And I heard a podcast she had done recently where she said if she could go back, she would put far more weight on the passion and the perseverance because she says, “We’ve taught our children to grind.” And so once again, starting in sixth grade, they’re told to learn the flute and take lacrosse and do all this stuff and crush the SATs and take the extra credit classes and all this. And they all do it and they all do it. And then they go to college and, “Oh, how are you doing?” They take six hours of class instead of four and they’re just going. But eventually she says, “If you don’t have that passion, you just burn out.” And so you’re right about the energy part. I think it’s both knowledge and you’ve put in more cycles.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It makes me think of, maybe this is cliched in Silicon Valley because it gets so oft repeated, but a lot of folks listening will not have heard it, which is if you’re looking for the next technological breakthrough or something on the edge, look for what the nerds are doing on the weekends. But it’s not just a great way to find what might be coming around the corner in a few years. It’s a great way to find the people to bet on who are already using their excess, their free time to work on these things.
Bill Gurley: No doubt.
Tim Ferriss: I think of [inaudible 01:01:43] and 3D printing. I mean, I can just go down the list. How do you —
Bill Gurley: And by the way, that’s another advantage of going to the epicenter is there’s more people doing that all the time.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe you could, let’s talk about, people might be surprised by this, but Bob Dylan. I think this is just the quintessential example. Why is he relevant to what we’re talking about?
Bill Gurley: When this idea popped in my head, I had finished a third biography and contrasted it with these other two and I just saw all these patterns. VC is a game of pattern recognition I guess my brain has just developed. I was like, “Oh, my God, it’s all this lock thing where these three people had all done the same thing.” And one was a basketball coach, one was a restaurateur and the other was Bob Dylan, not people you would, not industry, “Oh, this is where you should get career development advice.” There’s a part of the Dylan story that most people wouldn’t know unless they had read all the biographies or maybe seen the Scorsese documentary. But the new movie misses the whole thing, which is the pre-New York Bob Dylan was hanging out in Minnesota studying folk music at such a deep level that I feel confident in saying when he left, he knew more about folk music than any other human in Minnesota.
And he was borrowing, and maybe that’s even a euphemism. He was stealing his friends albums, he was going into the record store, into these listening booths. He knew all there was to know and had studied every bit of it. And he’s referred to by Scorsese as a music expeditionary. And the people that knew him in New York said he could mimic any one song. It’s not what you would think of when you hear a Dylan song that he had mastered the bedrock underneath and then started innovating. Picasso, by the way, the same thing, perfect realist painter at age 14. If you go to the Barcelona Picasso Museum, it’s in geographic order and you’re shocked at how good a realist this kid was before he went and did this other thing. That bedrock knowledge I think is so differentiating for someone to have all the history and then to start doing the innovation.
Tim Ferriss: What was the before and after on Dylan, Minnesota, New York City? And why is that such an important piece of the puzzle?
Bill Gurley: By the way, and just to even pile on more on this studious part of Bob Dylan, he did a podcast series for a while where he just walks through all these different genres of music and he’s —
Tim Ferriss: You’re talking about Bob Dylan himself?
Bill Gurley: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I didn’t realize this.
Bill Gurley: Yes, yes. You can go find it. He stopped, but he’s — and then that book he put out of the 50 best songs, the coffee table book that came out two years ago, it’s incredible the amount of knowledge he has about songs outside of his genre, everything. He’s a clear student of what he’s doing. I think this is well known and is covered at the beginning of the movie. He went to New York to find Woody Guthrie, probably the single most deterministic and ambitious mentor pursuit story that I’ve ever heard of. He hitchhiked there with no money and found him and became friends with him.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, this echoes back to go where the action is also, right?
Bill Gurley: Oh, no doubt. And by the way, he landed in Manhattan at the center of the folk music scene and all those people he was studying when he was listening in Minnesota, they were all there and he got to know them all. If that doesn’t happen, I don’t think Dylan happens.
Tim Ferriss: How relevant do you think the go where the action is now considering the access to information using ChatGPT or other tools, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Maybe less so access to mentors, although you can have virtual relationships, but how relevant do you think that is? I’ve got my own opinion, but —
Bill Gurley: You could certainly have the type of peer and mentor experiences that are remote. I have a great anecdote about MrBeast in the book that we could talk about that was a remote one, but the benefits of being in and around a whole bunch of people that are chasing the same thing is so high. And I think the intuition is, “Oh, well, it’s going to be even more competitive, so why would I go? Wouldn’t it be better to try and do this in a town where it’s less of a big deal?” But the problem is your learning is impacted, your access to peers and mentors is drastically reduced, and then probably most importantly, your optionality gets cut so dramatically. People think that a lot of success stories, they attribute it to luck, but there’s that famous saying, luck is when preparation meets opportunity. And when you’re in the epicenter, both your preparation and your opportunity go up 10 X. And so your ability to just have that lucky moment where you get brought into something is so much higher.
Tim Ferriss: The lucky moment is, I think, really important to underscore in terms of going where the action is because there’s a lot you can do virtually, but let’s just say you’re using ChatGPT, you’re going to get what you prompt. In other words, you’re asking for something and that can take you down a rabbit hole, but there, at least in my lived experience, and certainly I still see this happening, when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, and then I look back at my angel investing career, I look back at all these collaborations, the vast majority of them did not come from me going out with an agenda and seeking something. They came from serendipitous bumping into somebody at a coffee shop.
I literally met Naval Ravikant because I was hitting on his girlfriend at the time when she was getting her coffee, didn’t realize they were together. And then you look at Garrett Camp, Kevin Rose. These are, at a barbecue I met Kevin Rose. And you go down the list and you look at all of these formative, massively impactful, personally and professionally relationships. They almost all came from serendipity and you just don’t seem to get that density unless you’re in the center of the action. And perhaps it’s easier to relocate yourself, I’m sure it is, when you have fewer responsibilities, but God, I can’t even imagine what my life would have looked like had I not left Long Island and then ultimately moved to Silicon Valley.
Bill Gurley: Yeah, and same for me. I had thought about the notion of venture capital and practicing it and probably would have jumped at any job I could have got. Like when I was at McCombs here in Austin, I tried to get an interview at Austin Ventures. I didn’t get one, but had they said yes, maybe I practiced there. And I’m glad that didn’t happen. Going and practicing it where I did was the exact right place to do it. I do think if you can, if you can, because there are financial constraints, and if you want to be great at a field and that field has an epicenter, I think you should go.
Tim Ferriss: And there are different types of epicenters too. You think about, let’s just say AI, not to repeatedly bang that drum, but you could just say, okay, AI, first thing that comes to mind, Silicon Valley, but this is going to be a bit of a digression, but I remember asking Derek Sivers, a friend of mine, amazing entrepreneur, philosopher programmer, people can look him up, but I asked him, “Who’s the first person who comes to mind when you think of the word successful?” And he said, “Well, actually the most interesting or more interesting question might be who’s the third person who comes to mind?” Because I might say something really obvious like Richard Branson, but is he successful? I don’t really know what his goals were. I’d have to compare his goals to his outcomes.
And then you get to the third. Similarly, with an epicenter, you could say Silicon Valley first, but there might be something that is dense in learning, but has other advantages like, I think it’s the University of Waterloo, but one of these universities where industry is trying to raid the academic program because it’s so strong in terms of teaching the technical side. There’s so many different ways to approach it, but let’s talk about a virtual example. You mentioned MrBeast. Could you describe that story?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. I actually heard it on a podcast, but I also got a chance to talk to Jimmy Donaldson, so we got it firsthand. When he was infatuated with YouTube, he was one of the first people that was infatuated with YouTube, his parents were rightfully trying to get him to go to school and college, which he wasn’t doing because he was playing around on YouTube all day. He met three other people who were equally fascinated with YouTube. And this is a virtual epicenter story, but it’s really a peer story. One of my six principles is embrace your peers. And I think far too many people have sharp elbows to peers because they think they’re climbing the ladder and they’ve got to beat these people. And the world’s just way too prosperous to have that mindset. You can learn so much and get so much value from co-climbing that you should definitely do that. And I think it’s not taught enough and people don’t do it enough, but Jimmy happened on these three people and they got on a Skype call, he said 20 hours a day and for years —
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like Jimmy.
Bill Gurley: For years, they shared best practices on this call, which apparently in that world, the color of the icon on the post you do on Instagram to send them to YouTube, like all these little bitty esoteric things can impact conversion. And he said when he was talking about this, that they all became millionaires. And he said, “If you or any random individual had been a fifth person on those calls, you would have too, because of that.” And it’s just a wonderful example of how peers — he on this podcast said something that was very clever. He took the 10,000 hours thing from Gladwell and said, “Well, there were four of us spending 10,000 hours and then sharing ideas so you get 40,000 hours of expertise.”
Tim Ferriss: How would you suggest people who are not on YouTube where you can identify outliers perhaps, I shouldn’t say easily. In this day and age, I mean, it’s a sea of participants, but how should people go about seeking peers? And do you rank order your principles in a way, for instance, do you want to first check the box if you can of go where the action is and then embrace your peers because the level will be higher? I think about, for instance, my experience in Silicon Valley, it could have just as easily for something else been Nashville or New York City or who knows, Shanghai. I mean, it just depends on what you’re doing.
The mentors, let’s just say like Mike Maples Jr., who taught me the very basic ropes of angel investing, he definitely, without him, I don’t go zero to one in terms of having any basic literacy or access. That was the first rung on the ladder. But then once I was in, you look at people who were, in a sense, just getting started at the time. I mean, holy shit, some of them have really exploded. I mean, they’ve all done really well. Kevin Rose, Naval, Chris Sacca. The remaining — I mean, the latter goes on forever, but 49 rungs after that initial step up, zero to one, it was all peer driven. And those guys, we were comparing notes the whole way.
Bill Gurley: See, that’s the thing. I would say, first of all, I would practice it wherever you are. I would practice it virtually. I’d practice it locally. And if you can move to the epicenter, I’d practice it there. I don’t know that it’s an either or thing. You can have multiple groups of peers. You can have multiple circles of peers. But I think there’s only two tests, and one is trust. There are people in this world who view everything as a zero-sum game and they will elbow you out the first chance they can get. And so those shouldn’t be your peers. Those people you should quickly push to the side. Trust and then this shared interest in learning. And if they are equally learning on their own dime in their free time, which is my test for whether you actually truly are passionate about something, if they are doing that also, that’s perfect. And those experiences you’ve talked about, I’ve had so many of them myself, they get excited to tell you what they just learned, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. And then you reciprocate. And by the way, Mike’s a great example. I really have both a passion and a lot of respect for people that are writers in their industry, and Buffett did it and Howard Marks did it, who I benefited greatly from. I tried my entire career to write quite a bit, but Mike does this. Mike’s very — he’s a huge sharer when it comes to his knowledge about the subject matter and it’s so great —
Tim Ferriss: He is. Yeah. Pattern Breakers is an excellent book also.
Bill Gurley: So great.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah, Mike, I’m hoping to see him again soon. It’s been a minute. We’ve talked about MrBeast, Bob Dylan. In both cases, like poor kids with nothing to lose, in a sense. Not in any destitute sense, but they’re starting at —
Bill Gurley: It’s funny —
Tim Ferriss: — futons and ramen, right?
Bill Gurley: He was just interviewed at DealBook also, and his mother was in the front row who apparently works for him now. He was telling the story about when he went to tell her he was dropping out of college, similar to the McConaughey story, not quite as abrupt, or Jimmy’s being more abrupt, but of course she’s happy now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it all worked out. I mean, there’s always a little survivorship bias, but —
Bill Gurley: No doubt, no doubt.
Tim Ferriss: But let’s talk about Danny Meyer because I want to give an example of someone who gave something up to then pursue X instead of A, B, or C. Could you say a little bit about Danny? I’ve interviewed him on the podcast. I might have met him through you. I don’t even remember how I initially connected with him, but who is Danny Meyer and what is this Genesis story of Danny Meyer, the restaurateur?
Bill Gurley: It’s funny, when someone asks me who is Danny Meyer, I feel compelled the first thing to say he’s one of the most genuine humans on the planet.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Bill Gurley: Just a wonderful human.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Bill Gurley: But he is also one of the most celebrated restaurateurs of our time. He was working for a company that sold these devices to clip onto clothes so you can’t steal them from a retail store, and he was making good money. He was making about $200,000 a year, and this is —
Tim Ferriss: At the time.
Bill Gurley: — 40 years ago.
Tim Ferriss: Real money.
Bill Gurley: Real, real money. And he had convinced himself he was going to be a lawyer. I guess a lot of people convinced themselves of that. And he was about to take the LSAT and he was out to dinner with his uncle and his uncle was probing him and probing him and, “Oh, yeah, he’s going to take the LSAT.” And I think his uncle sensed a lack of real conviction about this thing, this person, this human was going to do. And he literally said to him, “Why are you doing this? You know you want to be a restaurateur.” And when you read Danny’s book, he did spend a ton of time in his youth being fascinated with restaurants and to the point where he would take copious notes prior to even doing this.
His family had a reason to know that he had this deep passion, but it’s interesting it’s an uncle. I don’t know that a parent is going to jump in and say that, and maybe that’s an advantage I have not knowing the readers of my book and giving him this permission to do things that aren’t necessarily pragmatic. But anyway, his uncle said, “You should start a restaurant.” And he took the test. He never submitted the scores to a university and very soon thereafter enrolled in some vocational restaurant courses and took a job. He took the first job you could get, which was a front office job at a restaurant that was making about a 10th the salary that he was making in the sales job.
Tim Ferriss: And went on to Gramercy Tav — I mean, all these iconic restaurants, then Shake Shack, then I mean, just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Bill Gurley: Yeah, and we walked through in detail his path once he made this intention, and one of the variables that my co-writer and I were looking for as we added stories to the book was this moment of intentionality. We didn’t want people that fell into a job and were successful. We wanted people that had made a decision, usually a pivot to say, “I’m going to go do this now.” And once he had made that decision, not only did he take that job, but he took advantage of being in that restaurant to learn about the multiple functions, but then he set up a tour through Europe as a stage in multiple places where he’s working for free, basically.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up because I wouldn’t have brought it up myself, but I’ve run — this is going to relate in a second. I’ve run a bunch of competitions for, let’s just say, creating artwork for PDFs/free books I’m going to put out or whatever, and there’s always a big hubbub where folks get, some folks get very upset and they say, “Oh, you want people to work for free?” And I’m like, “Well, there’s going to be a winner.” It’s like, if you don’t want to participate, don’t participate. But there’s always this shaking of the fist like, “Ah, it’s so unfair. You want people to work, do work for free.”
When I look at almost every example of someone who became the equivalent of Danny Meyer in their world, they did a lot that was unpaid, almost always. I’m sure there are exceptions, but staging is a great example in the restaurant world where it’s like, okay, you want to work at a restaurant where you’re going to have the highest density of learning and you don’t know shit? Guess what? They probably don’t want to pay you a whole lot because it’s actually going to be a bit of a drain on their resources to show you around and teach you how to work your station and do all this stuff. I would just encourage people to not be allergic to that. And the way I got, in a sense, my foot in the door in Silicon Valley was I volunteered at TiE, The Indus Entrepreneur.
Bill Gurley: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [inaudible 01:22:33].
Tim Ferriss: I volunteered with all of these nonprofit groups and quickly realized that most volunteers are doing the absolute minimum to be volunteers. And if you just do 10% more, it doesn’t take much. I would just refill people’s water glasses and stuff after I finished taking their tickets for an event. And suddenly the producers of this event who were also doing it, but had real jobs. I mean, I had a job at a college [inaudible 01:23:00] and I was working a lot. They were like, “Wow, this kid’s a go getter because he’s refilling these water glasses. Let’s give him more responsibility.” And that’s how I ended up connecting with all these speakers and everything, just did some stuff for free on the weekends. It didn’t take a lot.
Bill Gurley: There’s a story in the book that’s actually hard to believe. We profiled this woman, Jen Atkins, who’s a hairstylist. It’s an incredible story, but the one anecdote, she’s rising in her career and things are starting to work and she has jobs and she’s getting paid. She would go to Fashion Week in Paris and sneak in the back door and volunteer to do the hair of the models on stage. Snuck in. Not supposed to be there, just to get reps with these top models in this environment.
Tim Ferriss: Incredible.
Bill Gurley: It sounds unfathomable that someone would do that. She did it multiple times.
Tim Ferriss: And she did it.
Bill Gurley: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: What ended up happening after that? I don’t know her story.
Bill Gurley: Oh, she’s become probably the most successful hairstylist of our time. It’s an incredible story.
Tim Ferriss: How do you suggest people who are, maybe they’re doing A, B, and C right now, they’re listening to this and they just say, “All right, I want to take the leap. I want to do Z. I want to do whatever the off menu option is.”
Bill Gurley: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: They might have to have a conversation with a parent. They might have to have a conversation with a spouse. They may have to have a conversation with who knows, whoever the most important people are in their lives. How might they approach that? And we’re going to talk about choosing paths in a second, because I do have a question about maybe how to sanity check yourself in the world of AI, but how do you suggest having those conversations? Do you moonlight for a while so it’s not either or? Do you time box it or make it time bound in a sense where you’re like, “Hey, just give me permission to try this for six months, a year, two years.”
Bill Gurley: It’s interesting that I think any of those approaches is realistic. We profile Sal Khan in the book of Khan Academy and he told his wife he wanted to go try it for a year. He had also, he worked at a hedge fund just like Danny Meyer. He was making real money.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. I didn’t realize that about Sal Khan. Wild.
Bill Gurley: And started working with his cousins across the globe online doing these tutorial exercises and ended up posting a few on YouTube. They started working and he told his wife, “I really want to go tilt at this.” He didn’t even know what the business model was and he went and changed it. Look, I think the real test comes back to this passion element, or we use a lot of different words because passion’s been considered trite, but fascination, curiosity. If you have this deep desire to know so much about this one thing that that curiosity is so high, I think the odds that that’s not apparent to whoever these people are you’re trying to convince is pretty low. And if you can show that you’re — because if you’re going to tilt at something that hard and if you’re going to really differentiate yourself by being that learned in that field, I think it’d be hard for someone to tell you not to go do it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: It’s not going to be easy. I don’t want anyone to think that, “Oh, just read this book and magic happens.” It requires effort. And that’s why this test matters so much, this test of whether you would learn about this thing on your free time.
Tim Ferriss: And maybe are you already learning about this?
Bill Gurley: Are you already learning about it on your free time?
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Bill Gurley: Yes. No doubt.
Tim Ferriss: At least have one —
Bill Gurley: You should be. You should be. I doubt you’re going to turn it on.
Tim Ferriss: — data point based on history.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. Well, actually, I have an example of someone who just turned it on. We have a chapter called Never Too Late, which is where the [inaudible 01:27:32] thing is because that happened when he was close to 40. Another local Austinite, Bert Tito Beveridge started his endeavor in the spirit business.
Tim Ferriss: So wild, I was just thinking about him while I was driving here for no good reason.
Bill Gurley: At the age of 40.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Bill Gurley: He’s watching a PBS special. This is also hard to believe. He’s watching a PBS special. And back probably when there were only four channels or whatever, but they said on the screen, they said, “Take a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down it, put what you love to do on the left and what you’re really good at on the right. Just a list of those things and then contemplate what might be in the middle.” And he had studied chemistry and a lot of stuff and he liked going out to bars and socializing. And he was making flavored vodka as Christmas presents in his spare time.
Tim Ferriss: What was his day job?
Bill Gurley: His first career was in seismetology and the oil field and that dragged him to South America. And then when that became dangerous, both in Midland and in South America, he became a mortgage broker.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Bill Gurley: But he didn’t love either. He didn’t love either of them. But the reason I brought it up when you said, “already.” I don’t know that he was already studying the spirit business, but once he made that intentionality to go do this, then he studied it writ large.
Tim Ferriss: How did he start, just out of curiosity? Because I was just thinking about him. He just acquired — well, Tito Beveridge just acquired Lala Tequila, which I was involved with.
Bill Gurley: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s probably why he popped to mind. But how did he start?
Bill Gurley: He first started by just studying the distilling process writ large, like read everything he possibly could. And then it turns out there were no distilleries in the state of Texas and there were laws on the books that made it nearly impossible. So then he had to study that and literally rewrite regulation to make it possible. Interestingly, he did the whole thing on credit cards, so he owns 100% of the business, which is a huge business. It’s the single largest spirit sold in America today.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t realize that.
Bill Gurley: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t realize it was that big.
Bill Gurley: It’s huge.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Good for him.
Bill Gurley: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so wild. So wild. So I promised to get to this and I do want to get to it. Are there any sanity checks that you would put in place to compliment the fascination/obsession/what I’m doing in my spare time or would pay to do or do for free? Because I’m wondering if there are any things you would take off the table or how you would hone that given the rapidly developing technology of AI. So if someone said, “What I love to do in my spare time is copy editing.” I might not suggest that they throw caution to the wind and burn the ships and go into copy editing. Any thoughts? Because this is something that is —
Bill Gurley: Well, the first thing I would note is that many of those pragmatic jobs that the well-intentioned parents have been pushing their children towards are at risk.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Bill Gurley: So comp-sci.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Yeah, risky, but as compared to what?
Bill Gurley: Comp-sci went from being the most least risky major you could possibly get to one that’s somewhat risky overnight. And so that’d be my first notion. And the second thing I would add to that, which I already said is, no matter what your endeavor is, you need to be playing with this tool. It’s a modern tool. It’s the equivalent of a laptop and Microsoft Word was, it’s equivalent of what a calculator was. You don’t want to go out in the world and play without the modern tool set. It’s a part of what you need. If you’re playing with those things and you’re curious, you know where the edge is of whatever you’re passionate about and what the technology’s capable of.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So in order to find that edge and follow that edge, which will move, you have to be playing with the tools.
Bill Gurley: And look, I think in any field, one thing I love to suggest on the learning side is, know the history and know the new innovative edge. If you bring both of those things to the table, you are highly compelling. That could be true even if you’re not chasing your dream job. Even if you’re just a marketing major, if you walk into an interview at Clorox and you can simultaneously show that you’ve studied all the historical best marketers and you also understand how TikTok works, that’s heavily differentiating in that interview. Like you’re going to get the job, I would argue, versus someone else, if you can portray those things.
Tim Ferriss: How would you apply that here? Is that just, I guess, field dependent or are you referring to AI?
Bill Gurley: No. Yeah. Well, I think AI is the leading edge of almost any industry. So yeah, I’m saying you should just study what it’s capable of. Look, the thing that LLMs are most capable of, it’s a large language model. The language type stuff, like your copy editing example, things that were just rote moving words around, yeah, it’s really good at that stuff. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t be the person that really understands what it’s capable of and then superpower yourself to go attack a particular interest.
The other thing, you had started a question by saying warnings. I think there are a lot of fields where talent really does matter. I don’t know that I can make you a singer or I certainly can’t make you an NBA basketball player, but in all those fields, whether it be Hollywood or sports or even Danny Meyer at one time thought he was going to be a chef and he just became a restaurateur. He wasn’t a chef. I would say that for any artistic field, there are way more jobs that support those artists than there are the jobs of the artist.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that?
Bill Gurley: I mean, we have an example in the book of a Hollywood agent and that individual had not thought about a job in Hollywood when they were growing up because they felt they couldn’t act. So they’re like, “Oh, I can’t go do that.” But there’s tons of jobs —
Tim Ferriss: I see what you’re saying.
Bill Gurley: — in Hollywood that aren’t —
Tim Ferriss: Within the sector of entertainment.
Bill Gurley: — that aren’t the talent itself. So if you’re passionate about basketball or you’re passionate about the chef example of a restaurant, like there’s tons of jobs you can go do, music industry, without being that particular person.
Tim Ferriss: This makes me think of an interview I was watching recently, Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Invest With The Best. He was interviewing Ari Emanuel, so famous super agent, force of nature. His whole family is just like, they’re drinking different water. I don’t know what’s going on there. But he has raised a ton of money to invest in live events, sports and so on as an anti-AI or maybe AI anti-fragile bet, right? And there are lots of ways to make money when you raise a lot of money. So putting that aside, any other AI resilient or anti-AI bets that you think are interesting outside of live events, live sports?
Bill Gurley: I think a lot of the service industries, I think humans enjoy experiences and I don’t think that changes personally that much. And so restaurateurs or hoteliers, I think all those things are going to thrive and people that know how to really differentiate experiences in that way, I think are — I personally doubt that — I don’t share this thought that we’re all going to go watch movies that we’ve imagined that are made just for ourselves. I find that hard to believe.
I think people enjoy great art in many different forms. They enjoy talking about it and they enjoy the community element of having seen the same thing. And so it may be that if you’re a movie maker, you’re using AI instead of this expensive CGI tool set, but I think the storytelling and the imagination and the writing, I think all those things will still be real. I really do.
And obviously just general business, entrepreneurship. I took my dad, who’s 93, fly-fishing in Montana this summer and we were at a lodge and one of the other guests that was staying there is a 28-year-old entrepreneur from the tip of Texas down near Corpus Christi area. And he had started three or four businesses and was well off, like I’m not saying — but he was so enamored with AI. He said, “And then I needed this, and then it did this, and then I needed this, and then I did this. And then I wanted to know where to put the next one of these. And I just ask it, where would you put it in the city? And it immediately gave me answers.”
This guy was already successful, but he was running triple speed because he had tipped into this stuff and he was learning what was possible because he had an open mind towards it solving problems. And I thought, “Holy shit, if other people just leaned at it the way he’s leaning at it, they would become super powered themselves.” I was really blown away by that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. This makes me think of Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose is spending the vast majority of his free time playing with all these tools, vibe coding, using them endlessly. And I feel like that is probably over the next few weeks where I need to put some more time and just take a layup with wherever it happens to intersect with someplace that makes it easy to apply.
Who’s Sam Hinkie?
Bill Gurley: Sam Hinkie is a gentleman that about, I don’t know, six years ago became maybe the youngest GM in the history of the NBA. He became the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Tim Ferriss: Why is his story relevant?
Bill Gurley: He was a amazing student. He grew up in Oklahoma. His father worked for Halliburton. He made good grades, good students, kind of classic, did everything right, became a consultant. I think he was working for McKinsey, and they moved him to Australia. And he’s sitting there and he’s reading other things in his spare time. He’s not reading about how to be a better consultant. And he reads a book called Moneyball, which we all know of, the Michael Lewis book about the Oakland A’s.
And in almost what seems like an instant decided, “I really need to be in sports analytics.” And I mentioned that a lot of the stories we found have this intentionality. So that book, just like The Last Laugh did for Seinfeld, that book told him, “I’m going to go do this.” And from the day he read that book to getting the job as the head of GM of the 76ers was about 10 years. So no experience whatsoever in the field to youngest GM of all time in 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: Was he obsessed with sports already at that point?
Bill Gurley: I think so. He played — this gets back to what I said about maybe your original obsession came from participating or being the talent, but then he’s not particularly big. And so yeah, he was successful in high school, but there was no path to keep going down that field. So yeah, he had immense passion for the category, but had never imagined himself in the field in one of these other roles until that book disinhibited him and gave him permission to think, “Well, you know what? I could be differentiated on this dimension, on this dimension of understanding analytics.”
He immediately was applying to business school, and he used that as a pivot point. For those that have the needs and the resources, I think in MBA programs can be a great place to switch careers and go chase a different dream. And there’s a great interesting anecdote in the book where he’s trying to decide between Harvard and Stanford, which is a choice for most humans [inaudible 01:41:42].
Tim Ferriss: Quality problem.
Bill Gurley: Yeah, exactly. But he went and told them both what he wanted to do and Harvard basically said, “Well, we don’t really have any programs like that.” And Stanford, to give Stanford a lot of credit, said, “You know what? That’s super interesting. We have this person associated with the school that does this. We’ll introduce you to these four people.” And were a lot like McConaughey’s dad when Sam brought them that challenge.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds about right. That checks out for me.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. Based on what you know of the two institutions.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. And then he just started, he ended up meeting Michael Lewis because he was in the Bay Area and some of the Stanford people knew Michael. And so he talked to the guy that wrote the book that inspired him. He hustled his ass off. I don’t want to make it sound like — he kind of built his own curriculum, but it worked.
Tim Ferriss: For people who are not going to get an MBA, would you still suggest everyone read the first three chapters of Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors?
Bill Gurley: Unquestionably.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Just wanted to —
Bill Gurley: Anyone that’s going to do anything in business should read that book.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I wanted to give the throwback to our first conversation.
Bill Gurley: By the way, at the back of the book, it lists about 50 books. At the very end.
Tim Ferriss: Just to whet the appetite?
Bill Gurley: Well, I think you did the same thing. I’ve gone through your —
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. Oh, no.
Bill Gurley: In fact, I looked at yours for the structure when I wanted to see how to lay it out.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, amazing. Amazing. I want to get your expansion on avoiding false failures. Let me explain what I mean by that. So there’s this expression, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
Bill Gurley: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Bill Gurley: It’s in my note.
Tim Ferriss: But my experience has been, it’s not always fun, even if you’re doing what you love. Sometimes there’s burnout. Sometimes you go through chapters where things do feel like a grind. I mean, maybe I’m an outlier, but that’s been my experience. When I realized, for instance, in the case of the podcast, it’s like, “Wow, I have much more sponsor demand than I could ever fill. If I just doubled the number of episodes, I’d double the number of revenue. So why don’t I do that?”
And it started to feel like a bad job. Not a bad job.
Bill Gurley: I get it.
Tim Ferriss: It’s still a great job, but the volume was too high. And I can imagine if people take the expression I just mentioned, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. They pursue X, whatever that is, the songwriting and the performing in the case of Bob Dylan, Danny Meyer, whatever it might be. And then they hit a really hard stretch. Maybe it’s early on, maybe it’s later, maybe they’re [inaudible 01:44:46] and some French guy yelling at them.
Bill Gurley: Yeah certainly.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the case with a friend of mine. And they’re like, “Wow, God, this really feels painful. Maybe this isn’t my path.” How do you distinguish between growing pains that are temporary and an indication that you’re not doing the right thing?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. It’s funny. I’ll take a short diversion in answering the question.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Long diversions.
Bill Gurley: Because people often ask me, “How do you use AI?” When I was wrapping up the book, my publisher and editor said, “I want you to write the concluding chapter.” And I wrote what I think most people would do, which is I just summarized the whole book and I submitted it to him and he said, “No, this is no good.” And so then I went to ChatGPT deep research mode and I said, “Tell me about the 10 best nonfiction concluding chapters that you know of.” And it went and did like a 20-page report and sent it to me. And what I noticed in reading that was that most of these great concluding chapters were orthogonal. They weren’t a summary. They were a different take on the whole thing. Well, my concluding chapter is now titled It Ain’t Easy, to your point.
And I went through all of the stories that we have in the book and I pulled out the darkest hour moments for each one of those people and included it at the end, because I didn’t want to leave people with the impression that it’s just all smiles and babies and hugs. I don’t think that’s true in any field.
And I guess my answer would be, do you still feel this natural curiosity to learn the entire time? Is the impediment something that truly means you should stop like, “I can’t get around it. I can’t…” Or is it something that maybe can be avoided, something I can get around? I push heavily on the peer thing because one of the things a peer group can do is help you in those moments, both just from emotional support, but also to put perspective on whatever this speed bump is and whether it’s insurmountable or not. Mentors can help with that too, but I think peers are better for that because you worry about being judged in disclosing this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 100%.
Bill Gurley: And so peers don’t judge. That’s why that trust thing really matters also, another reason why it matters. And they can help you. I think they can help you determine whether that is as big a blocker as it may seem like. But there’s going to be some of that in any field. I don’t think there’s any run that’s just without paying.
Tim Ferriss: I’m also imagining that one of the challenges that I had and some of my friends had at different points in pursuing, fill in the blank, starting our first companies, just beginning to invest, having a career in X, right? When I got out of college, it was mass data storage and hitting these really rough patches and feeling like you’re the first person in the world to experience this and it’s because of your unique flaws or uniquely bad decisions. And I’m just realizing now, I haven’t tried this, I’m sure it would work, that you could just describe the dark chapter you’re going through into ChatGPT or one of these tools and say, “Can you give me any comparable examples from other people who have succeeded in other fields?”
Bill Gurley: I’m sure that’ll work. It’ll also give you five answers on how to deal with it, how to get around it.
Tim Ferriss: How to deal with it.
Bill Gurley: But by the way, one thing that’s important when we’re talking about this is, Daniel Pink has this great book on regret, and he talks about it as a valid motivator to get you to make good decisions. And there is a reality that that anxiety you may feel may mean you’re not in the right lane. And so when you were at that sales job, you got to the point where you’re like, “Holy shit, I don’t want to be doing this anymore.”
And I had two careers before I became a VC, one as an engineer and one as a sell-side analyst. I enjoyed both. I think I was good at both, but I reached a point about three years in with each where I was like, “I don’t want to do this the rest of my life.” And so I would say, equally with like, don’t give up too early, but if the signal is really telling you, I don’t want to do this the rest of my life, jump out. That’s the precise moment to move on and try something new.
And I spend a ton of time in the early chapters trying to get people to understand that’s okay. Most people don’t end up in a career that their major was. I think one of the reasons people grind too long is because they think they’re supposed to. They just think they’re supposed to stay in this lane they’re in.
Tim Ferriss: How did you conclude it was time to hop in those cases? We don’t have to go into tons of the background because we talked about so much of your history and decisions and so on, including, I don’t want to say stealing palm pilots, but it’s a pretty good story about getting a palm pilot with contact information. But was it just a gut feeling? Was it a disquiet that you felt in your system or was it more than that?
Bill Gurley: I’m sure I’ve overplayed it in my brain, but they feel like very concrete moments where I had almost near certainty. The first one was, I started my third project at Compact Computer Corporation where I was an engineer and the projects were these computers we were releasing and the third one was another computer with a little faster clock speed and a better Intel chip, but the rest of it was all the same and we were going to do it again. I’m like, “That doesn’t seem that interesting to me.” And I’d become curious about other things. So when I was doing external learning, which is what I refer to as this kind of spare time learning, it wasn’t that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Right.
Bill Gurley: It was something else. I was reading Peter Lynch’s book on stocks and stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Segue to the sell-side analyst.
Bill Gurley: Yes. The thing that happened as a sell-side analyst, and and I may parlay this into something from the Daniel Pink book, but this notion of, do you want to do this the rest of your life? The sell-side job is wonderful. You get access so early in your life to so many amazing people, but you have to work really hard. And this classic thing where you’re in your 20s and you’re working on Wall Street, they serve dinner at the office. The cafeteria is open, that’ll tell you something.
And it was like 10:30 or 11:00 PM and the entire research department was on the 36th floor of Park Avenue Plaza and I did a loop. The four corner offices were the most senior analysts. And for whatever reason, I popped my head in each of their office and they were career sell-side analysts. I said, “Do I want to be this person when I’m 60?” It just stuck in my head. I went to the next one, went to the next one. Hopefully — I don’t know who those people were, but I was like, “No, I don’t.” Like that night, I made the decision that I got to go do something else.
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s one of —
Bill Gurley: If you don’t mind.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, fire away.
Bill Gurley: In Daniel Pink’s book, he talks a lot about boldness regrets. And this is where I say, “Do you want to do this for the rest of your life?” He says, “One of the most robust findings in the academic research and my own is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn’t take than the chances we did.” What haunts us is the inaction itself. Foregone opportunities all linger in the same way.”
And he says that they’ve studied this across China, Russia, Japan, it’s common across all of them. And you may have heard of this YouTube video where Bezos talks about his regret minimization framework. And so he had the same thing. He’s walking around Central Park, “Should I stay in this incredible job at D.E. Shaw,” where he’s making tons of money, “or should I take this flyer on this online bookstore I want to do?” And he put it in his mind that test, which is when I’m 80 and looking back, am I going to regret not doing this?
Tim Ferriss: Well, it makes me think of, and this is also a dicey proposition quoting Niccolo Machiavelli, but, “Make mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth.”
Bill Gurley: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Right?
Bill Gurley: It’s the same thing.
Tim Ferriss: And I do think about that a lot myself. I mean, I’m at a point where I’m trying to figure out what my next chapter is too, because this podcasting game’s getting pretty crowded.
Bill Gurley: It is.
Tim Ferriss: And I still enjoy doing it, but that’s only because I refuse to play by the incentives that the platforms and algorithms provide, which is economically punishing, but intellectually rewarding.
Bill Gurley: Because you’ve had two successful careers as, not just a podcaster and influencer, but as an angel investor, I would encourage you to read Arthur Brooks’ book, Strength to Strength.
Tim Ferriss: I did. I did. It was great.
Bill Gurley: Okay. You already read it?
Tim Ferriss: It was great. It was great.
Bill Gurley: I think it gives great perspective for a later career shift.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I should go back and look at my notes from that book again. So let’s chat for a second. People should all check this out. I mean, you’re such an operator. Track record’s incredible. Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love, we’ll talk about that again. We’ll mention it again at the end. What do you want to do after this book? I mean, you can’t sit on your hands very long.
Bill Gurley: No. And as I mentioned, when I made the decision to stop the venture career, which I think we talked about on the last podcast —
Tim Ferriss: A little bit, yeah.
Bill Gurley: — where I read the Steve Martin book. But I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to do something else. And I went on a listening tour and I talked to all these people that had —
Tim Ferriss: Can you just reiterate what a listening tour is?
Bill Gurley: Oh, I identified several people who had successfully—retired is a strong word—but made a decision to stop doing a job they were very successful at. And then what do you do now? It’s similar to the Arthur Brooks book, but it was just a personal life. A lot of people angel invest, a lot of people go on boards, a lot of people manage their own money. I had this list that people teach and I slowly was checking them off.
Tim Ferriss: Just crossing out, yeah.
Bill Gurley: Scratch them out, yeah. I don’t really want to manage my own money. I don’t really want to angel invest. I don’t want to start my own venture firm. I’ve done that. I found myself crossing them all off and I couldn’t discover something that got me excited and tied into this what are you doing with your external learning thing. Slowly, I’ve come around to an idea that I made up.
It’s not a career that other people have, but I think I’d like to start a policy institute. I’ve come up with a name P3, which stands for Purpose, Progress, and Prosperity. When I was doing the BG2 podcast, which I recently stepped away from, we did a episode at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Facility. Before I did that episode, I spent three or four weeks calling everyone I knew to make sure that I was prepared for that.
That was one of our more successful episodes and I just really enjoyed that. I look at the shifting mindset around the globe on nuclear energy in the past five years as an example of what’s possible with really great policy work. It wasn’t one person. I think the fact that Steve Pinker was banging the drum was super important, but Andreessen and Elon and all these people started pounding that same drum. Joe Gebbia’s wife made this a big life passion project of hers. But it’s shocking how quick we went from, “This stuff’s bad,” to, “Oh, no, we made a mistake. It’s actually good.”
That could have a powerful impact on the planet. I don’t know how many of those type things there are to find. I don’t want to go grind on state by state legislation. I don’t have any interest in that. But looking at big problems, looking at US-China relations, US healthcare system has some massive problems. Can you come up with ideas that help shift these things? I’ve already got to know some really innovative professors who are thinking in very innovative ways and I look to use my financial capabilities to do grant writing through people like that and see what we can go do, see what we can go change. Regulatory capture is another one that I’ve spent time tilting at.
Tim Ferriss: If you’re not doing this state by state legislative change, what does the work of P3 potentially look like? What is policy work? I know that seems like a silly question but —
Bill Gurley: We’re at day one, but I’ll give you —
Tim Ferriss: What might it look like?
Bill Gurley: Yeah, here’s an example. A professor approached me on the regulatory capture front. “What if we put —
Tim Ferriss: Could you define that just for people who didn’t hear episode one?
Bill Gurley: Yeah. There’s a Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago named George Stigler. He’s passed away but who made the very strong argument that regulation is the friend of the incumbent, that large businesses learn how to lobby Washington. No matter how well intention the policy is that’s passed, it ends up benefiting the incumbent more than restricting the incumbent. He won a Nobel Prize for that work. I gave a speech at the All-In Summit that you can go watch on YouTube. It has five million views on this topic, but I think this happens in the majority of the time rather than — anyway, this —
Tim Ferriss: That’s why ACH takes three days to clear, right?
Bill Gurley: Yes, yes, yes, yes, but stablecoin may solve that. But this professor approached me about making maybe a global database that scores countries on how captured they are and that identifies the best practices from the countries that have the best scores. That kind of thing, like investing in that type of data and transparency, is pretty compelling to me. That’s an example of what I might go do.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me chew on that for a second. Let’s say you create this data set that presents these scores on a country by country basis. What are the hoped for outcomes of that? That countries that have worse scores start to model the countries with better scores? Certainly, there might be talent flight from one place to another. I mean, we already see that in some respects. I mean, that’s not purely regulatory capture determined, but when you share that data, what would the hope be?
Bill Gurley: The hope would be that you can shine a light on the best practices and try to get those implemented —
Tim Ferriss: In other places.
Bill Gurley: — here in the US.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: That would be the hope. Also, I think just shining a light on them is — I’ll give you an example that relates to regulatory capture. After you’ve been a senator or congressman for a while, you get invited onto committees. The minute you’re on a committee, you are in charge of regulation that affects different industries. I don’t even know if most humans know this.
What happens is your local senator or your local congressman who you think is representing your district now starts raising money nationally. They go around and meet with businesses because they’re on that committee and have influence and they’re raising money nationally. I think that’s ridiculous personally. You could imagine restrictions against that, transparency towards it. If your congressman represents this zip code in Austin, wouldn’t you want to know if they’re raising money in Minnesota? Isn’t that a little unusual?
Tim Ferriss: Well, you shared a story last time we spoke about being asked to raise a hundred grand in donations just to get a meeting with a Congress.
Bill Gurley: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Our mutual friend, Rich Barton, talks about shining flashlights in dark places. This technology that we have access to should — I think donations should be on the blockchain, quite frankly. There’s no reason why this information needs to be in the dark. I think there’s a lot of opportunity around data aggregation.
Tim Ferriss: Any other ideas that are percolating?
Bill Gurley: I’m enamored by state versus state competition. Part of it pops into my brain from the China experience and the provincial competition, but you see Newsom and Abbott fighting back and forth, and maybe there can be a positive outcome from this. I think some of the Federalist Papers envisioned that different states could try different experiments and we could see what happens as a result of that.
Tim Ferriss: We’re seeing some of it with Texas and Arizona.
Bill Gurley: We are seeing something. I think it could be pretty interesting and provocative and could lead to positive change. I have this dream that some state, and maybe this state that we’re sitting in that has a surplus, would do something crazy with teacher salaries. What if a state just all of a sudden said, “We’re going to pay 50% more for teachers”?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: Think about the dynamic that would create. It’d be pretty wild.
Tim Ferriss: It would be.
Bill Gurley: Maybe I’ll go tilt it that one, too.
Tim Ferriss: So other problems on your mind — well, I’ll just present a list here from some prep notes. We have US healthcare, regulatory capture, intellectual property, US-China, fairness and financial markets, US K-12. Could you speak to intellectual property and fairness in financial markets, how you might be thinking about those?
Bill Gurley: I’ve got to be a top 10,000% supporter of open source. This gets back to Ridley’s book, The Rational Optimist, but he talks about prosperity comes when ideas have sex. Just the sharing of information, in my mind, should be free, that it shouldn’t cost anything. It’s very unclear to me that the patent system actually adds value. I’m quite doubtful that the human mind wouldn’t innovate if it didn’t come with a 17-year financial protection. I’m doubtful of that. I think there’s great scientists at every university working on problems that aren’t necessarily being patented. Your ability for hyper competition and innovation is so much higher when there aren’t restrictions in place. Anyway, I think the world’s a better place when ideas are shared and not protected.
Tim Ferriss: Since the system we’re working with is the system we’re currently working with, how might something like drug development work without patent protection?
Bill Gurley: Well, here’s an interesting thing. The NIH gives out $40 billion a year and a lot of that money goes to companies that end up getting venture capital backing.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve had some very open fights with people about this.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. Why doesn’t an NIH grant come with an open source rider?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. If the VCs want to fund —
Tim Ferriss: With federal funding, yeah.
Bill Gurley: Yeah, it’s federal funding.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I agree with that.
Bill Gurley: Right now, there’s a big fight over whether just their research papers have to go on non-private networks instead of the private ones they’re on today. I mean, they just want the information out there. That’s a minor step I would consider a major step. You don’t have to take the money, but why is the US government giving people money that ends up becoming proprietary inventions? That makes no sense to me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Whether it’s the US government or individual philanthropists or foundations. I mean, on some level, if that, then at some point — right. I agree with that, but are there industries that — I mean, the only one that first came to mind was drug development where the R&D costs are so high.
Bill Gurley: They all cry. The VCs will tell you, “It’ll never work. No one will have any incentive if we don’t have a 17-year protection.” The entire Silicon Valley —
Tim Ferriss: I’m not saying I believe that.
Bill Gurley: I know. I’ve lived in a world where if someone comes into our office and talks about patents, we roll our eyes because none of the types of businesses that we’ve backed at Benchmark in Silicon Valley are ever about patents. Elon has famously open sourced all his Tesla patents. It’s such a bold thing to do and so gracious, I think, really to society, but his point is — oddly, I was talking to Ted Cruz about this and he said, “Yeah, Elon thinks the same thing.” He views the edge of competition is how fast are you moving, how great are your products, the consumers love them, not, “Can I defend them in a court of law?” The protection that the drug guys get is so much — no one can really use software patents to get protection, an algorithm, or something. No one even tries.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: But with drugs, if I have this particular genome sequence, all of a sudden I get this huge proprietary window in the market. It’s just nutty.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. This is not exactly the same thing, but, I mean, what a service to humanity. I was just watching — I think the documentary name, people can watch it for free on YouTube and other places, The Thinking Game, about DeepMind and Demis and his team really seeing AlphaFold. I mean, all the structures of these proteins, I mean, it’s just like, oh, my God, what an incredible resource for humanity.
Bill Gurley: Well, there’s an interesting example right there. The original paper they wrote was open source and OpenAI doesn’t exist without that discovery, which happened at Google in an open source. They just exploited it the fastest.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wild.
Bill Gurley: And by the way, I mean, not to divert too much back, but right now China has 10 open source AI models that are all in hyper competition with each other. That is a dangerously effective primordial soup for innovation compared to what we have here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, I should probably know this, but I don’t, how does China handle — what are the policies around and laws around intellectual property, patents, things like that?
Bill Gurley: Well, interestingly, I found a document online that someone had put together a PowerPoint about the history of open source at China and it’s 20 years old. It’s not like they just stumbled into it. Go back 20 years ago, one of the primary criticisms of China was that they stole IP. If you’re the Chinese government and there’s this new thing called open source, you’re going to embrace it because there’s no fault there because everyone’s sharing and everyone —
If you look at the big open source projects, Linux, MySQL, and you go on the webpages, you’ll see Alibaba, Tencent — these companies have been supporting these technologies for a while. Every five years, they write this five year plan, the Chinese government puts it out. Five years ago, they had a huge section on open source. They’re clearly suggesting to the entrepreneurs that the government favors that approach. Going back to Ridley’s book and the notion of pure competition, I think the society —
Tim Ferriss: This is The Rational Optimist?
Bill Gurley: Yeah, I think the society benefits from that. I use this example. Imagine there’s two feudal societies that are all agricultural based. There’s two of them, though. And in one, once a week the farmers come to market and just trade goods and then they leave. And the other one, the farmers come to market and they’re required to share their best practices with everybody else and then they leave. Going back to this peer example in the book, that one’s going to be much more performant than the other one. This gets to Ridley’s point about ideas having sex.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, open source also, we talked about this a decent amount in our last conversation, but it can be used as an incredible strategy or counterpunch from for-profit companies like Android. I mean, my God, I mean, it’s like you can do a lot. It’s an incredibly powerful tool.
Bill Gurley: I think that using open source as a defensive tool instead of an offensive tool is one of the most sophisticated corporate strategies a company can possibly do. It’s very hard to do because it goes against all of your instincts. But I would suggest that Amazon and Apple and maybe Meta who has toyed with it should run at the idea of jointly supporting an open source model. I don’t think they’re doing it, but I think they should, because their incumbency is at risk if someone else has a massive proprietary advantage.
Tim Ferriss: Fairness in financial markets, what does that mean?
Bill Gurley: I’ve been tilting against this insider’s game of the IPO market for some time and I’m very passionate that when you bring a company public —
Tim Ferriss: Does that come with the luxury of retirement or —
Bill Gurley: Maybe. I mean, yeah, if you tilt against the investment banks, you got to be comfortable not going to conferences, that’s for sure. They owe some really nice funds. You fall off the invite real quick. But the way that an IPO’s price is so God awful stupid, they pick who gets the stock and they pick the price. I’ve said it over and over again, but a freshman comp size student and a freshman finance student, if you told them to design the IPO, they would just match supply and demand anonymously. It’s how every bond is priced. It’s interestingly how every initial coin offering works. I’ve become a late to the game crypto enthusiast because I’m so sick of this damn IPO process being broken.
Tim Ferriss: Could you say a bit more about how it’s broken? Just walk us through a hypothetical example of why it’s broken.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. When a company’s coming public, the bankers — literally, they ask everyone for orders, but then they pick who gets the stock and they pick the price. They don’t let supply and demand pick. Supply and demand can automagically pick the allocation and the price. Automagically is the wrong word, can algorithmically. This is super easy. It’s not hard.
Tim Ferriss: Why don’t they do it that way?
Bill Gurley: Because they’re handing free money to their clients.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there we go. That’s what I was looking for.
Bill Gurley: Yeah. No, it’s been known for a long time. I uncovered an email from 1999 at Goldman Sachs, which I’ve posted on Twitter several times where they’re like saying, “Oh, we can use this hot stock to reward our top clients.” They know what’s going on. The fact that the SEC doesn’t get involved really bothers me, but this tokenization thing is a real way to get around it because the crypto community’s already decided to use algoriththms to allocate and determine price. The price and the allocation should just be determined. It’s how direct listing work. Everyone knows how to do it. They just don’t do it. It’s horrible. But there’s other things too in this category.
The long prevalence of Visa and MasterCard is just ridiculous, 2.5%, and stablecoins have so much momentum right now. I think those two companies are going to be in real trouble within a five-year window. Most of the financial problems are pure regulatory capture, like the reason that there’s a problem.
Tim Ferriss: Tell me if I’m explaining this well, because I’m not sure we said this directly, but basically the incumbents help to write laws and regulations that favor them and prevent newcomers from competing effectively.
Bill Gurley: After ’09, we wrote this thing Dodd-Frank and we thought, “Oh, we’re going to make things better,” and all you’ve had is consolidation and banking since then.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Bill Gurley: If you look at the offering, especially at the low end for the poorest citizens of the US, free checking went away. The poor people have a hard time paying their bills, so they don’t even have the tools to do it because free checking went away. Free checking went away after Dodd-Frank.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Just to please push back if I’m oversimplifying this, but the regulatory capture is not just bad for startups in Silicon Valley who hope to grow and disrupt and fill in the blank, it’s also bad for everybody.
Bill Gurley: Oh, it’s horrible for consumers. I mean, the US healthcare situation, which seems to be getting worse on a daily basis, is a huge example of regulatory cap. Somewhere in the past 10 years, they just told physicians they can’t run hospitals. They just eliminated probably — I mean, who other than a doctor is going to go start a new hospital? The amount of competition you eliminated in this one swoop is enormous, just enormous. That’s just a single example, but there’s hundreds of them in that area.
Tim Ferriss: What would success be for this book? Six months after it comes out, what will lead you to have been happy with putting the time in? It’s taken a while. It’s taken a lot of work. What do you hope the outcome will be?
Bill Gurley: It really started as a passion project and I have no financial goals for whatsoever. In fact, as we get to book launch, I’m going to launch a foundation that gives grants to people who want to chase their dream job but don’t have the financial wherewithal to do it. I’m going to start working on that in addition to P3.
For me, it’s all about how many people do I affect in the way that McConaughey’s dad did or that this book did for Seinfeld. Some of them saw the talk on YouTube from the UT presentation that I gave and I’ve already reached out and said thank you and they’ve shared how it changed their life. But the more people I can do that for, I will just be tickled pink. I’d just be so excited, because I think when people get out of this pragmatic lane and go do these types of things, they tend to be unusually successful, which I think then has a bigger impact than just on them themselves.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.
Bill Gurley: The number of humans positively impacted by Danny Meyer’s success is in the thousands, I’m certain.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure.
Bill Gurley: And I’m not counting customers of Shake Shack.
Tim Ferriss: People, check it out. I mean, I love your writing, Bill. You’re not just a commentator. You’ve been an operator. You’ve observed a lot of operators, studied outliers, and people who’ve chosen X instead of A, B, or C. The book is Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. Check it out, folks. People can find you on X @BGurley, of course. If they want to see just a landing page, they can go to benchmark.com. Anywhere else you’d like to point people or anything else you’d like to mention before we start to land the plane?
Bill Gurley: No, I’m good. Thank you so much for your time.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, Bill. And for everybody watching and listening, we will have a link to everything we mentioned. We mentioned a lot of things and a lot of references and resources. Just go to tim.blog/podcast. You can check all that out.
Until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. But look for X when people give you A, B, or C, or when you think you’re limited to A, B, and C. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
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WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Bill Gurley (#840) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-18 01:14:25
Bill Gurley (X: @bgurley) is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Over his venture career, he has invested in and served on the boards of such companies as Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Florida and then his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. For more than two decades, Bill has written about technology and other subjects on his popular blog Above the Crowd and on his social media accounts.
His new book is Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love.
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“I don’t care what field you’re in, you should be playing with this stuff. It has the potential to impact your role in your career, and the best way to protect against any risk of your career being obfuscated or eliminated from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can possibly be.”
— Bill Gurley
“Most people end up working 80,000 hours in their life. It’s a third of your life. Why do something you don’t like? There’s Gallup poll data on career engagement, and 59% of people say they’re not engaged at work.”
— Bill Gurley
“And I have this test for whether or not you’re actually truly passionate about what you’re trying to do, which is do you self-learn on your own time? Would you not watch Breaking Bad and read about this field and be energized by that activity?”
— Bill Gurley
“People think that a lot of success stories, they attribute it to luck, but there’s that famous saying: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” And when you’re in the epicenter, both your preparation and your opportunity go up 10X. And so your ability to just have that lucky moment where you get brought into something is so much higher.”
— Bill Gurley
“I think there’s only two tests, and one is trust. There are people in this world who view everything as a zero-sum game and they will elbow you out the first chance they can get. And so those shouldn’t be your peers. Those people you should quickly push to the side. Trust and then this shared interest in learning.”
— Bill Gurley
“I think that using open source as a defensive tool instead of an offensive tool is one of the most sophisticated corporate strategies a company can possibly do. It’s very hard to do because it goes against all of your instincts.”
— Bill Gurley
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Want to hear more from the legendary investor (Uber, Zillow, OpenTable, and more)? Listen to my first conversation with Bill Gurley, in which we discussed investing rules and finding outliers, insights from Jeff Bezos and Howard Marks, must-read books for understanding business, open-source strategies as competitive weapons, why the minute you set a very hard rule you might be setting yourself up for a mistake, regulatory capture, and much more.
The post Bill Gurley — Investing in the AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More (#840) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2025-12-11 01:26:05
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei), the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.
Dr. Li has served as a board member or advisor in various public and private companies and at the White House and United Nations. She earned her BA in physics from Princeton in 1999 and her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She is the author of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, her memoir and one of Barack Obama’s recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS: Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity. WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above. WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
Tim Ferriss: Dr. Li, it is nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Hi, Tim. Very nice to be here. Very excited.
Tim Ferriss: And we were chatting a little bit before we started recording about how miraculous, and I suppose unfortunate it is, that somehow we managed to spend three years on the same campus and didn’t bump into each other.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I know. And now I’m wondering which college you were at and which clubs.
Tim Ferriss: Oh yeah. I was Forbes. I was in Forbes College.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Forbes College. No, I was Forbes too.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. This is for people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. There are these residential colleges where students are split up when they come into the school. And Forbes was way out there in the sticks, right next to a fast food spot like 7-Eleven called Wawa.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Wawa.
Tim Ferriss: And next to the commuter train. And then there’s something called eating clubs at Princeton. People can look them up. But they’re effectively co-ed fraternity/sororities where you also eat unless you want to make your own meals. And I was in Terrace.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I was not any of that. But for those of you wondering why we didn’t meet, we should say we were very studious students who were only in the libraries.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We were very studious. I actually made my, whatever it was, $6 an hour at Gest library working up in the attic.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Tim, I worked in the same library. I don’t understand why we did not meet.
Tim Ferriss: That’s really hilarious. Okay. Yeah. So, well, now we’re meeting.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Did you change name or something? Maybe we did meet.
Tim Ferriss: I didn’t change my name, but here we are. So we’ve reunited. That’s wild that we didn’t bump into each other. I was also gone for a period of time because I went to Princeton and Beijing and went to the — what was it? Capital University of Business and Economics after that. And so I was gone for a good period of time and then took a year off before graduating with the class of 2000. So still, we had a lot of overlap.
But let’s hop into the conversation. And this is a very perhaps typical way to start, but in your case, I think it’s a good place to start, which is just with the basics chronologically. Where did you grow up? And could you describe your upbringing? Because based on my reading, your parents were pretty atypical for Chinese parents in my experience, certainly.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You know a lot.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Could you speak to that please?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. I would say my childhood and leading up to the formative years is a tale of two cities. I grew up in a town in China called Chengdu. I was born in Beijing, but most of my childhood was spent in Chengdu where it’s very famous for panda bears. And at the age of 15, my mom and I joined my dad in a town called Parsippany, New Jersey. So I went from a relatively typical middle class Chinese family Chinese kid to become a new immigrant in a completely different world, of all places, New Jersey. And to learn a new language, to learn a new culture, to embrace a new country. And then from there on, I went to Princeton as a physics major, but I did take some of the classes you took and then went to Caltech as a PhD student to study AI, and the rest is history.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s dig into — I want to hear about both your parents, but I want to hear a little bit about your dad because he seems like, based on my reading, a very whimsical, creative soul, which is a sharp contrast in some ways to, for instance — I had Bo Shao on the podcast, amazing entrepreneur. And his father was, I suppose, what some folks might think of when they imagine, not a tiger mom, but like a tiger dad. So in the case of Bo’s upbringing, his father was very strict, but if he meaning Bo won a math competition, then he would get extra love and he would be allowed to have certain treats and things like that. Could you just describe your parents a little bit?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So first of all, clearly you read my book. Thank you for that. It is true. As a child, you don’t realize that. As I was just going through my own science memory, I was writing it. The more I wrote about it, the more I realized, oh my God, I really did not have a typical dad. My dad loved and still loves nature. He’s just a curious mind. He finds humor and fun in unserious things. He loves bugs, insects. He loves taking me as a kid. Growing up in the 1980s in China, there isn’t much abundance in terms of material resources. But my city Chengdu was expanding so we lived in apartment complexes at the edge of the city, even though my dad and my mom worked in the middle of the city. So on the weekends, my dad and I would just play in the fields where there’s still rice fields, there’s water buffaloes. I had a puppy and my dad would just — really, all my memory is just like finding bugs really.
And then sometimes my dad and I will follow some — I don’t know. We took an art class. I took a kid’s art class. I will go to the neighboring mountains to draw. My entire childhood memory of my dad is just a very unserious parent who had no interest in my grades or what I’m doing in class. Did I achieve anything? Did I bring back any competition awards? Nothing to do with that. Even when I came to New Jersey with my parents, life became extremely tough. It was immigrant life. We were in a lot of poverty. And even that, my memory is that he has so much fun in yard sales. I would just go to yard sales. Every weekend it was just, “Yay, let’s go to yard sales and just use that as a treasure hunt almost.” He’s a very curious and childlike mind in that way.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m asking about your parents in part because I know you’re a parent and ultimately I’m going to want to ask how you think about parenting and that will come up at some point. But since listeners will certainly be asking themselves this question, and we’re not going to get into any geopolitics because there are plenty of people who want to get into that and fight over that, which we’re not going to do, but why did your parents leave China? What was the catalyst or what were the reasons behind leaving what you knew or leaving what they knew and coming to a very different foreign country? You’re going from Chengdu, which is a city to suburban New Jersey, which is, as I think you’ve described it felt very empty, right? And then you have the language barriers and the financial barriers. There’s so many things. Why the move?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So I’ll give you two answers. The early teenage Fei-Fei would say, “I have no idea.” Because my dad left when I was 12 and my mom and I joined him when I was 15. And those years, you’re a teenager, right? There’s so many strange things in your head. And all I knew is that they said, “Let’s go to America.” I had no idea. I really did not know what happened. There was this vague sense of there’s opportunities of freedom. Education is very different. And I had a hunch that I was not a typical kid in the sense that I was a girl and I loved physics. I loved fighter jets of all things. I can tell you all the fighter jets I love from F=117 to F-16 to all the different things that I loved. So that’s all I knew.
In hindsight, as a grown up Fei-Fei, I appreciated my parents. They’re very brave people because I don’t know this age myself would just pick up and leave a country I’m familiar with and go to — I don’t know. A completely different country that I speak zero language and I have zero connectivity to. And mind you, that’s pre-internet, pre AI age. So when you are going to a different country, you might as well go to a different planet.
Tim Ferriss: You’re cut off. Yeah.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So I think they’re very brave. The grownup Fei-Fei realized that they wanted me to have an opportunity that they think will be unprecedented for my education, and it turned out that’s true.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, certainly looking at your bio, it’s mind-boggling to imagine all the different sliding door events and different paths you could have taken. So we’re going to hop pretty closely along chronologically, but we’re going to ultimately get to a lot of the meat and potatoes of the conversation. But I want to touch on maybe some other formative figures. And I would like to hear about your mother as well, because just with the context of your dad, it’s like, okay, that seems fascinating and very unusual, particularly if you’ve spent any time in China, especially during that period of time.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: He is very unusual that way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Very unusual. So then people might wonder, well, where does the drive come from? Where does the technical focus come from? And I’d love to hear your answer to that and also hear you explain who Bob Sabella was, if I’m pronouncing that correctly.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There are two questions. Mostly, is my mom the one who putting the drive and the technical passion and what role did Bob play in my life? So first one, first of all, my mom has zero technical genes. She really has no — I sometimes still laugh at her. She cannot do math, let’s put it this way. So I think the technical passion is just, I was born with it.
Tim Ferriss: Innate.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: My dad is more technical, but he loves insects more than equations for sure. So I think as an educator for so many decades now myself and also as a parent, you have to respect the wonders of nature. There is this inner love and fire and passion and curiosity that comes with the package. But my mom is much more disciplined person. She’s still not a tiger mom in a sense. I don’t remember my mom ever going after me on grades she really did not. Both my parents never ever cared about me bringing any awards home.
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but I can tell you in our house, there’s zero wall hangings of anything. Which actually carry to today. Even for myself, my own house, my own office have zero of those decorations of achievements or awards. It’s just my mom did not care about that. But she did care about me being a focused person if I want to do something. She doesn’t want me to play while doing homework. That kind of thing would bother her. She would say, “Just finish your homework.” Say by 6:00 P.M. if you don’t finish your homework, you’re not allowed to do more homework. You have to deal with the consequences. So she instilled some discipline, but that’s about it. She’s tougher than my dad. She is very rebellious. She had a unfinished dream herself. She was very academic when she was a kid herself and Cultural Revolution really crushed all her dreams. So she became a more rebellious person in that sense that I think I did observe and experience as a daughter. So maybe part of immigration is even part of that.
Many years later, she would say, “I had no plan coming to New Jersey, but I think I’m going to survive. I just believe I’m going to survive and I’m going to make sure Fei-Fei survives.” I think that is her strength, her stubbornness, and her rebelliousness.
Tim Ferriss: When does Bob enter the picture and who is Bob?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Bob Sabella was a high school math teacher in Parsippany High School. He was my own math teacher as well as many, many students. He entered my life in my second year, so it was bordering sophomore to junior year in Parsippany high school when I started taking AP calculus. But he quickly became the most influential person in my formative years as a new American kid, immigrant, as a teenager, because he became my mentor, my friend, and eventually his entire family became my American family. And he became my friend when I was a very lonely ESL English as second language student. I was excelling in math, but I think it’s more because I was lonely and he was very friendly. He treated me more like a friend who talks about books we love, talk about the culture, talks about science fiction, and also listened to me as a very — I wouldn’t say confused, but a teenager undergoing a lot of life’s turmoil in my unique circumstance. And that unconditional support made me very close to him and his family.
One thing he did to me that I did not appreciate till later is that when Parsippany High School couldn’t offer a full calculus BC class because it just didn’t have that, he just sacrificed his lunch hour, his only lunch hour to teach me Calculus BC. So it was a one-to-one class. And I’m sure that contributed me, a immigrant kid getting to Princeton eventually. But later as I became teacher myself, it’s exhausting to teach all day long. And the fact that on top of that, he would use his lunch hours to do that extra class for me is just such a gift that I now appreciate more than I was as a teenager.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thank God for the teachers who go the extra mile. It’s just incredible, especially when you get a bit older and you have more context and you can look back and realize.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I really think these public teachers in America are the unsung heroes of our society because they’re dealing with kids of all backgrounds. They’re dealing with the changing times. The kind of stories Bob would share with me in terms of how he went extra miles, not just with me, but with many students, because Parsippany is a heavily immigrant town. So his students are from all over the world and how he helped them and their family. Those are the stories that people don’t write about. That’s part of the reason I wrote the book was to celebrate a teacher like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I have so much I want to cover and I know we’re going to run out of time before we run out of topics. I want to spend more time on Bob and at the same time, I want to keep the conversation moving. So we’re going to do that and I’ll just perhaps hit on a few things and then dig into a number of questions. But certainly at Princeton, you, but also your entire family had to survive. So you were involved with operating a dry cleaning shop in New Jersey as one option, right? You ran that for seven years. So through that it feels like you’ve gained perspective on many different levels that have then helped inform what you’ve done professionally. So you learn to think about not just people who are protected in an ivory tower, but people all the way down across in society, so from every swath of society.
Your mother also, although she was not technical, she imbued in you this discipline and also seems to have had a very broad appreciation and knowledge of literature and international literature. So now you have this global perspective, presumably at the time in Chinese. And then you end up at Princeton.
And I know we’re going to be hopping around quite a bit, but I’m curious to know how ImageNet came about. You can introduce this any way you like. You can tell people what it is and what it became and why it’s important, and then talk about how it started, or you can just talk about how it started, but it’s such an important chapter.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So let me just explain what ImageNet is. ImageNet on the surface was built between 2007 and 2009 when I was assistant professor at Princeton and then I moved to Stanford. So during this transitional time, my student and I built this, at that time, the field of AI’s largest training and benchmarking dataset for computer vision or visual intelligence. The significance today after almost 20 years of ImageNet, it was the inflection point of big data. Before ImageNet AI as a field was not working on big data. And because of that and a couple of other reasons, which I’ll get into, AI was stagnating. The public thinks that was the AI winter, even though as a researcher, young researcher at that time, it was the most exciting field for me, but I get it. It wasn’t showing breakthroughs that the public needs. But ImageNet together with two other modern computing ingredients — one is called neural network algorithm. The other one is modern chips called GPU, graphic processing unit. These three things converged in a seminal work, milestone work in 2012 called “ImageNet Classification, Deep Convolutional Neural Network Approach.” That was a paper that a group of scientists did to show that the combination of large data by ImageNet, fast parallel computing by GPUs and a neural network algorithm could achieve AI performances in the field of image recognition in a way that’s historically unprecedented.
And that particular milestone is — many people call it the birth of modern AI. And my work ImageNet that was one third of that, if you count the elements. I think that was the significance. I feel very, really, very lucky and privileged that my own work was pivotal in bringing modern AI to life.
But the journey to ImageNet was longer than that. The journey to me — ImageNet started in Princeton when I was an undergrad. You were in the East Asian Study Department. I was hiding in Jadwin Hall, which is our physics department.
I loved physics since I was a young kid. I don’t know how. Somehow my dad’s love of bugs, insects and nature translated in my head into just the curiosity for the universe. So I loved looking to the stars. I loved the speed of fighter jets and then the intricate engineering of that eventually translated into the love of the discipline that asks the most audacious question of our civilization, such as what is the smallest matter? What is the definition of space-time? How big is the universe? What is the beginning of the universe? And in that early teenage hood love, I loved Einstein. I loved his work. And then I wanted to go to Princeton for that.
But it turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious question. So by the end of my undergrad years, I wanted my own audacious question. I wasn’t satisfied with just pursuing some of the else’s audacious question. And through reading books and all that, I realized my passion was not the physical matters, it was more about intelligence. I was really, really enamored by the question of what is intelligence and how do we make intelligent machines? So at that time, I swear I did not know it was called AI. I just knew that I wanted to pursue the study of intelligence and intelligent machines. And then I applied to grad school and I went to Caltech. Caltech was my PhD. I started in the turn of the century, 2000. And I think I considered that moment I became a budding AI scientist. That was my formal training as a computer scientist in AI. Then my physics training continued in the sense that physics taught me to ask audacious questions and turn them into a north star. And in scientific terms, that north star became a hypothesis. And it was very important for me to define my north star.
And my first north star for the following years to come was solving the problem of visual intelligence. How we can make machines see the world. And it’s not just by seeing the RGB colors or the shades of light, it’s about making sense of what’s seen, which is, I’m looking at you, Tim, I see you, I see a beautiful painting behind you. I don’t know. Yeah. It was real. I see you’re sitting on a chair. Like that is seeing. Seeing is making sense of what this world is. So that became my north star question. And that hypothesis that I had is I have to solve object recognition. And then that was in my entire PhD was the battle with object recognition. There were many, many mathematical models we have done and there were many questions, but me and my field was struggling. We could write papers, no problem, but we did not have a breakthrough. And then luckily for me, Princeton called me back as a faculty in 2007. It was one of my happiest moment of my life. I feel so validated my alma mater would consider giving me a faculty job. So I happily moved back to Princeton as a faculty this time and I continue to be a Forbes member actually.
So at Princeton, there was an epiphany is that I realized there was a hypothesis that everybody missed, and that hypothesis was big data.
Tim Ferriss: This is the point that I’m so, so curious about. I just want to pause for a second. Also, for people who are interested in some of the history of Princeton, it’s pretty crazy. They should look up the history of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. I remember taking some of those East Asian studies classes that you referred to in classrooms where Einstein taught. And it’s just the aura, the veneer. You want to believe that you can feel it just permeating the entire campus. And it’s fun. In that respect, it’s very fun.
But I’m going to read something from a Wired piece that discussed you at length. And as you mentioned, big data before and after in terms of its integration into the type of research that you’re describing. And as it was written — and please feel free to fact check this or push back on it, but in Wired, they said the problem was a researcher might write one algorithm to identify dogs and another to identify cats. And then you, it says, Li, began to wonder if the problem wasn’t the model, but the data. She thought that if a child learns to see by experiencing the visual world, by observing countless objects and scenes in her early years, maybe a computer can learn in a similar way. And I want you to expand on that for sure.
The question for me is like, why did you see it? Why didn’t it happen sooner?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: We’re all students of history. One thing I actually don’t like about the telling of scientific history is there’s too much focus on single genius. Yes. Agreed. We know Newton discovered the modern laws of physics, but yes, he is a genius, not to take away any of that from Newton, but science is a lineage and science is actually a non-linear lineage. For example, why was I inspired by this hypothesis of big data? Because many other scientists inspire me. In my book, I talked about this particular lineage of work by Professor Irv Biederman, who was a psychologist. He was not interested in AI, but he was interested in understanding minds. And I was reading his paper and he particularly was talking about the massive number of visual objects that young children was able to learn in early ages. So that piece of work itself is not ImageNet, but without reading that piece of work, I would not have formulated my hypothesis. So while I’m proud of what I have done, my book especially wanted to tell the history of AI in a way that so many unsung heroes, so many generations of scientists, so many cross-disciplinary ideas pollinate each other.
So I was lucky at that time as someone who is passionate about the problem, but also someone who benefited from all these research. So yes, something happened in my brain, but I would really attribute to many things happen across so many people’s work throughout their lifetime devotion to science that we got to the point of ImageNet.
Tim Ferriss: I’m so glad that you’re underscoring this because if you really dig as a — I don’t consider myself a scientist, but I love reading about the history of science. There’s so many inputs, so many influences, so many interdependencies.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And the simplicity of the single hero’s journey is appealing in it’s simplicity, but it’s almost never true.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: It probably is never true. Even my biggest hero, Einstein, right? Anybody who knows me, anybody who read my book knows how much I revere him and I love everything he’s done. The special relativity equation is a continuation of Lorentz’s transform. So even Einstein, he builds upon so many other people’s work. So I think it’s really important, especially, I’m sure we’ll talk about it. I’m here calling you in the middle of Silicon Valley and we’re in the middle of an AI hype. And obviously I’m very proud of my field, but I think that when the media or whatever tells the story of AI, it almost always just talk about a few geniuses and it’s just not true. It’s generations of computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers who made this field happen.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. For sure. Everyone knows Watson and Crick, for instance, but without Rosalind Franklin and her x-ray crystallography, it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t happen point-blank.
We’re going to hop to modern day in a second, but with ImageNet, I would love for you to speak to some of the decisions or, let’s say decisions or moments, that were just formative in making that successful. Because for instance, if you’re going to try to allow a machine to — and I’m using very simple terms because I’m not technical enough to do otherwise. To learn to identify objects closer to the path that a child would take, you have to label a lot of images. And so I was reading about how Mechanical Turk came into play and then there’s a competitive aspect that seems to have driven some of the watershed moments. Could you just speak to some of the elements or decisions that made it successful?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: A lot of people ask me this question because after you mentioned that many, many people have attempted to make data sets, but still only very few are successful. So what made the ImageNet successful? I think one of the success was timing, is that we truly were the first people who see the impact of big data. So that very categorical or qualitative change itself is a part of the success. But it’s also, as you were asking — the hypothesis of big data is not just size. A lot of people actually misunderstand ImageNet’s significance as well as other dataset significance. Coming with the dataset is a scientific hypothesis of what is the question to ask. For example, in visual recognition, you can make a dataset of discerning RGB, and that would not be as impactful of a dataset that is organized around objects. We can go down a rabbit hole of why. Not because RGB is easier per se, it’s because you have to ask the scientific question in the right way.
So another example is, instead of making a data set of objects, why don’t you make a data set of cities? That’s even more complicated than objects. But then that’s dialing too complicated. So, every scientific quest, you have to have the right hypothesis and asking the right question. So that’s one part of the success is we defined visual object categorization as the right hypothesis. That was one rightness, I guess. Another rightness is that people just think, “Oh, it’s easy. You just collect a lot of data.” Well, first of all, it’s laborious, but even aside from being laborious, how do you define the quality? You could say, “Well, if quality is big enough, we don’t care about quality.” But how do you dial between what is big, what is great, what is good, and how do you trade off? That is a deeply scientific question that we have to do a lot of research on.
And then another decision that is a set of decision that is really hard is what defines quality in terms of image? Is it every image has higher resolution? Is it it’s photorealistic? Is it because it’s everyday ImageNet look very cluttered? Is it all product shots that look clean? These are questions that if you’re too far away, you wouldn’t even think about asking, but as a scientist, as we were formulating the deep question of object recognition. We have to ask this in so many dimensions.
And then you mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk. That is actually a consequence of desperation. Because when we formulated this hypothesis, our conclusion is we need at least 10s of millions of high quality images across every possible diverse dimension, whether it’s user photos or is it product shots or is it stock photography? And then we need also high quality labels. Once we make that decision, we realize this has to be human filtered from billions of images. So with that, we became very desperate. We’re like, “How are we going to do that?” I did try to hire Princeton undergrads and as you know, Princeton undergrads are very smart, but —
Tim Ferriss: They have very high opinion of the value of their tongue.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. And they’re expensive. But even if I had all the money in the world, which we didn’t, it would have taken so long. So we were very, very stuck for very, very long. We thought we had other shortcuts, but the truth is human labeling is a gold standard and we want to train machines that are measured against human capabilities so we cannot shortcut that at that time. So we had to go to what we eventually found out is called crowd engineering, crowdsourcing. And that was a very new technology. Was barely a year old or so by Amazon. They created a online marketplace for people to do small tasks to earn money when these tasks can be uploaded on the internet.
I remembered when I heard about Amazon Mechanical Turk, I logged into my Amazon account, I checked the first task I checked out to do just to try was labeling wine bottles or transcribing wine bottle labels. The task will give you a picture of a wine bottle and you have to say, this is 1999 Bordeaux and all that. So people upload these micro tasks and then online workers, like someone in their leisure time, like me, if I had leisure time, I would just go sign up and get paid to do that. And we realized that was, again, out of desperation, that was a massive parallel processing with online global population to do this for us. And that’s how we labeled billions of images and distilled it down to 15 million high quality images.
Tim Ferriss: So, all right. It’s just so wild when you look at these stories. I just finished a book on Genentech and there were all these little technical inflection points that also allowed things to happen. So if it had been five years earlier, or maybe three years earlier, without Mechanical Turk, oh boy, it presents a challenge. But also as you pointed out, in science, it’s one thing to get answers, but you need the input on the front end with a proper hypothesis or a good question. And even with Mechanical Turk, if you’re only focused on the mechanics of employing that, you can get yourself into trouble because if humans are incentivized to, let’s just say — I think this was the example I read about, identify pandas in photographs and they’re paid for identifying pandas well, what’s to stop them from identifying a panda in every photo, whether they exist in the photos or not?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So you have to follow the incentives as well. How did you solve for that?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. I know. This is where my student and I had — I cannot tell you how many hours and hours of conversation we have about controlling the quality. We have to solve for that in multiple steps. We need to first filter out online workers who are serious about doing the work. So for example, we have to have some upfront quizzes so that they understand what a panda is. They read the question. And then once they qualify for that, we ask them to label pandas, but there are some pandas. There are some images we have free. We know the correct answer. Some are true pandas, some of them are not true pandas. But the labelers don’t know so in a way, we implicitly monitor the quality of the work by knowing where the gold standard answers are. So these are the kind of computational tactics we have to use to ensure the quality of labeling.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Yeah. Just incredible. All right. So I’ll actually just put a recommendation out there for a book, Pattern Breakers, by a friend of mine, Mike Maples Jr. He taught me the ropes initially of angel investing. But in terms of identifying inflection points and in some cases, converging technological trends that for the first time makes something possible, which then opens an opportunity for something with the right prepared mind, in your case and those of your collaborators and the people you built upon for something like ImageNet, Pattern Breakers is a really good read for folks.
So let’s hop to modern day then for a moment. And I would love to ask you — because you’ve been called the godmother of AI in our alumni magazine, in fact, and elsewhere, but you’ve had such a — not just technical but historical viewpoint, meaning you’ve over a broad timeline, broad by AI standards, been able to watch the development and forking and perils and promise of this technology. What are people missing? What do you think is eating up all the oxygen in the room? What are people missing, whether it’s things they should know or things they should be skeptical of or otherwise?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Especially I’m here calling you from the heart of Silicon Valley. I think people are missing the importance of people in AI and there’s multiple facades or dimensions to this statement is that AI is absolutely a civilizational technology.
I define civilizational technology in the sense that because of the power of this technology, it’ll have or already having a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society. This is unverified, but I just heard that 50% of the US GDP growth last year is attributed to AI growth. So apparently this number is 4% for US GDP have grown 4%. If you take away AI, it’s only 2%. That’s what it means. So that’s civilizational from an economic point of view. It’s obviously redefining our culture. Think about, you’re talking about the word sucking oxygen out of the room, everywhere from Hollywood, to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, to political campaign, to TikTok to YouTube to ESA.
Tim Ferriss: Taxis in Japan. I was just there and the videos playing on the back of the headset and the taxi were all talking about AI. It’s everywhere.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: It’s culturally impactful, not only impactful, it’s shifting our culture and it’s going to shift education. Every parent today is wondering what should their kids study to have a better future? Every grandparent say, “I’m so glad I’m born earlier. I don’t have to deal with AI,” but still worry about their grandchildren’s future. So AI is a civilization of technology, but what I think it’s missing right now is that Silicon Valley is very eager to talk about tech and the growth that comes with the tech. Politicians are just eager to talk about whatever gets the vote, I guess. But really at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI, people will be using AI, people will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI. And no matter how AI advances, people’s self-dignity as individuals, as community, as society should not be taken away. And that’s what I worry about because I think there’s so much more anxiety that because the sense of dignity and sense of agency, sense of being part of the future is slipping in some people. And I think we need to change that.
Tim Ferriss: Now, I’ve heard you say that you’re an optimist because you’re a mother. And both optimism and pessimism to an extreme can bias us in ways that are unhelpful or create blind spots. And I’m curious, if you try to put your most objective hat on, which is difficult for any human, but if you try to do that, do you think people are too worried, not worried enough, or worrying about the wrong things? For people who are not the CEOs and builders and engineers behind AI. Because you’re right, of course. everybody will agree with this, that a lot of people are very worried. And I’m just wondering if it’s ill-placed. If you talk to some of the VCs who are the biggest investors, of course, they have this sort of, in my view, beyond all possibilities, techno-optimist view of the future where AI solves everything. And it’s hard to believe there’s a free lunch there. And then you have the doomers, the doom and gloom where suddenly it’s Skynet next year and we’re all slaves to robots or eliminated, turned into paperclips. And reality’s probably in between those two. So do you think people are worrying about the right things or have they lost the plot in some way?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: First of all, I call myself a pragmatic optimist. I’m not a utopian, so I’m actually the boring kind. I don’t believe in the extreme on both sides. I travel around the world. Just last month I was in Middle East. I was in Europe, I was in UK and I was in Canada. I came back home in America. I think people in America and people in Western Europe are more worried about AI than say people in Middle East, in Asia. And I think we don’t have to litigate on why they’re more worried, but just to come closer to home, just talk about US I wish I have a megaphone to tell people in the US that you’re known to be one of the most innovative people. Our country have innovated so many great things for humanity, for civilization. We have a society that is free and vibrant, and we have a political system that we still have so much say in how we want to build our country. I do wish that our country has more an optimism and positivity towards the future of using AI than what is being heard now.
I think people like me, technologists living in Silicon Valley has a lot of responsibility in the right kind of public communication. So there’s a lot of things that was not communicated in the effective way. But I do hope that we can instill more sense of hope and self-agency into everybody in our country, because I think there’s so much upside of using AI in the right way. And I want not just people in Silicon Valley or in Manhattan, but I want people in rural communities, in traditional industries everywhere, 50 states to be able to embrace and benefit from AI.
Tim Ferriss: Why are you building what you’re building? What is World Labs? Why decide to do this?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I actually answer this question very often to every member of my team. I built World Labs. There are two levels of this answer from a technology point of view. World Labs is building the next generation AI focusing on spatial intelligence because spatial intelligence, just like language intelligence, is fundamental in unlocking incredible capabilities in machines so that it can help humans to create better, to manufacture better, to design better, to build better robots. So spatial intelligence is a linchpin technology. But one level up, why am I still a technologist is because I believe humanity is the owning species that builds civilizations. Animals builds colonies or herds, but we build civilizations and we build civilizations because we want to be better and better. We want to do good. Even though along the way, we do a lot of bad things, but there is a desire of having better lives, having better community, having better society, live more healthily, have more prosperity and that desire is where civilization is built upon. And because I believe that humanity can do that, I believe science and technology is the most powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools in building civilizations. And I want to contribute to that. That’s why I’m still a scientist and a technologist, and I’m building World Labs for that.
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain to people what spatial intelligence is and what the product is, so to speak, at least as it stands right now that you’re building?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So spatial intelligence is a capability that humans have, which goes beyond language. Is when you pack a sandwich in a bag, when you take a run or a hike in a mountain, when you paint your bedroom. Everything that has to do with seeing and turning that scene into understanding of the 3D world, understanding of the environment, and then in turn, you can interact with it, you can change it, you can enjoy it, you can make things out of it. That whole loop between seeing and doing is supported by the capability of spatial intelligence. The fact that you can pack a sandwich means you know what the bread looks like. You know how to put the knife in between. You know how to put the lettuce leaf on the bread. You know how to put the bread or sandwich into a Ziploc bag. Every part of this is spatial intelligence.
And does today’s AI have that? It’s getting better, but compared to language intelligence, AI is still very early in that ability to see, to reason, and also to do in world, in both virtual 3D world as well as real 3D world. So that’s what World Labs is doing. We are creating a frontier model that can have intelligent capability in the model to create world, to reason around the world, and to enable, for example, creators or designers or robots to interact with the world. So that’s spatial intelligence.
Tim Ferriss: Could you expand on the designers or creatives or robots interacting with the world? So does that mean that you could — and my team has been playing with some of the tools, so thank you for that. What does that mean? If you could paint a picture for let’s say a year from now, two years from now, how might someone use this or how might a robot use this?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I was just talking to someone a couple of weeks ago and it was really inspiring is that high school theaters are very low budget. Sometimes I go to San Francisco Opera or musicals and the sets that’s built for theater are just so beautiful, but it’s very hard for high school or middle school —
Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: To have that budget to do that. Imagine that you can take today’s World Labs model, we call it marble, and then you create a set in, I don’t know, in medieval French town. And then you put that in the background and use that digital form to help transport the actors and action into that world. And of course, depending on the auxiliary technology, whether you’re on a computer or eventually people can use a headset or whatever, you can have that immersive feeling of being in a medieval French town. That would be an amazing creative tool for a lot of creators. That was an example someone and I was talking about it a couple of weeks ago, but we already see creators all over the world. Some of them are VFX creators. Some of them are interior design creators. Some of them are gaming creators. Some of them are educators who want to build some worlds that transport their students into different experiences are already starting to use our model because they find it very powerful at their fingertip to be able to create 3D worlds that they can use to immerse either their characters or themselves into.
Tim Ferriss: And just process wise, if someone’s wondering how this works, let’s just say it’s a public school teacher, let’s just say, who’s hoping to inspire and teach their students going the extra mile.
What does it look like for someone to use it? Are they typing in text, describing the world they’d like to create, uploading assets or photos, almost like an image board? How does it work if someone’s non-technical?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. So they don’t need to be technical at all. They open our page on desktop or in their phone, but desktop is more fun because it has more features. And then they can type a French medieval town, or they can actually go anywhere. They can use Midjourney or Nano Banana to create a photo of a French medieval town, or they can get an actual photo about that. And then they upload it, we call it prompt. And then after a few minutes, our model gives you a 3D world that is say a part of the town. It does have a limit in its range. And then that 3D world is generally 3D because you can just use the mouse to drag and turn around and walk around and see that world. And then downstream, if you want to use it, you could have many ways to use it. You can actually create a movie out of it by using one of our tools on the website to just put cameras and you can make a particular movie out of it. If you’re a game developer —
Tim Ferriss: I was just going to say, it sounds a lot like a gaming engine.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. You can put a lot of characters in it. If you’re a VFX professional — we have a lot of VFX professionals. They can actually take this and put it in the workflow of their movie shooting and have real actors shooting movies. We also have psychology researchers using that immersive world in particular psychiatric studies. We could also use that as the simulation for robotic training because a lot of robotic training needs a lot of data and then use that for generating a lot of different data. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So is it almost like a flight simulator for robots before they go into the real world?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: That’s part of the goal. We are still early, so the flight simulator is not complete yet, but that’s part of the journey.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned psychiatric studies. I think that’s what you just mentioned. Yes. What might that look like?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So we actually got this researcher who called us and they’re studying people who have psychological disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder where they’re triggered by certain environments and they want to study the trigger and also just study how the treatment. But how do you trigger someone who, let’s say particularly have issue with, let’s say, a strawberry field. I’m just making it up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You can take them to a strawberry field, but what about you want to know if it’s strawberry field in the summer or strawberry field at night, or it’s strawberry, or it’s many strawberry? How do you do this? Suddenly this researcher realized we give them the cheapest possible way of varying all kinds of dimensions and they can test this out and do their studies.
Tim Ferriss: That’s really interesting. Yeah. I could see it being applied to — it might be called exposure therapy, but in terms of — now that you’re describing it, I could see how it could be added into pretty much everything. If you think about how humans operate in the real world.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Incredibly good.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: And the boundary between real world and digital world is less and less. Thinner and thinner because we live in many screens, we live in the real world. We do things in virtual world, we do things in real world. We’ll create machines that can do things in real world and virtual world. So there’s a lot we do in digital and physical spaces.
Tim Ferriss: Who are some scientists or researchers who you pay attention to, who are not necessarily the big brand names and marquee lights that are already very public in the world? Is there anybody who stands out where you’re like, there’s some really tremendous people doing good work who —
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Well, that’s part of the reason I wrote the book is, especially in the middle chapters where I wrote about the journey of doing ImageNet that combines cognitive science with computer science. I actually talk about psychologists and neuroscientists and developmental psychologists in — some of them are still with us, some of them are not. For example, the late Ann Treisman, Irv Biederman, they all passed away in the last few years, but they were giants in cognitive science whose work has informed computer science and eventually AI. There are still lots of scientists around the world. Many of them are in the US who are thinkers in developmental psychology. In AI, I follow their work. Yeah. I think that the world of science, just to name some names, Liz Spelke in Harvard, Alison Gopnik in Berkeley. I love Rodney Brooks, who was a former MIT professor in robotics. And there’s just a lot of them. I don’t mean to just single them out, but you’re asking me for names that are not in the news of AI.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s perfect. Thank you. I would also love to get your perspective on what might be — this is a very strong word. But seemingly inevitable in terms of developments in the near intermediate future. And I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In 2008, 2009, I became involved with Shopify, the company, back when they had like 10 employees. And there were a few things happening around that time. And you could ask questions in the next 10 years or 20 years, will there be more broadband access or less? More. Okay. Will there be more e-commerce or less? There’ll be more. Okay. And when you have four or five of those that seem over a long enough time horizon, absolute yeses, it begins to paint a picture of where things are going. Are there any things that in the next handful of years you think are perhaps underappreciated as near inevitabilities?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: You want me to talk about underappreciated? I don’t know if they’re over appreciated, but they’re definitely appreciated. The need for power is appreciated. The trend of more AI, not less AI is appreciated. The long-term trend of robots coming is appreciated. So these are appreciated. What’s underappreciated is — spatial intelligence is underappreciated in the sense that everybody’s still now talking about language, large language models, but really world modeling of pixels of 3D worlds is underappreciated because like you were saying, it powers so many things from storytelling to entertainment to experiences to robotic simulation. I think AI in education is underappreciated because what we are going to see is that AI can accelerate the learning for those who want to learn, which will have downstream implication in our school system, as well as in just human capital landscape, like how do we assess qualified workers? It used to be which school you graduate from, with which degree, but that will be changing with AI being at the fingertip of so many people. That’s underappreciated.
I think AI’s impact in our economic structure, including labor market is underappreciated. The nuance is underappreciated. I think this whole rhetoric of either total utopia post-scarcity is hyperbolic or like everybody’s job will be gone is hyperbolic, but the messy middle is how from knowledge worker to blue collar, to hospitality, to all these changes that’s happening, it’s underappreciated by our policy workers, by our scholars, by just overall society.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the nuances from the job perspective? Maybe this ties into what I promised earlier I was going to ask you, which is what you are telling or will tell — I don’t know their ages. Your children. Or recommending. Let’s just say, I don’t know how old they are, but if we assume that they, just for the sake of discussion, of the age where they’re trying to decide what they should study, where they should focus, things of that nature, how would you think about answering that even provisionally?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I think the ability to learn is even more important because when there was less tools, fewer tools to learn, it’s easier to just follow tracks. You go through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and then get some training vocationally, and that’s a path. And with that is a set of structured credentials from degrees and all that. But AI has really changed it. For example, my startup, when we interview a software engineer, honestly, how much I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now. It’s more about what have you learned? What tools do you use? How quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools? And a lot of these are AI tools. What’s your mindset towards using these tools matter more to me.
At this point in 2025, hiring at World Labs, I would not hire any software engineer who does not embrace AI collaborative software tools. It’s not because I believe AI software tools are perfect. It’s because I believe that shows, first of all, the ability of the person to grow with the fast-growing toolkits, the open-mindedness, and also the end result is if you’re able to use these tools, you’re able to learn, you can superpower yourself better. So that is definitely shifting. So coming back to your question, what do you tell young people, tell children? I think the timeless value of learning to learn, the ability to learn is even more important now.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. It strikes me as we’re talking that it’s only going to get increasingly easier for the ambitious to act as superpowered autodidacts, right? We’ve already seen this. Certainly YouTube has a nice track record now. You can either entertain yourself to death and avoid doing things that help with self-growth and development or you can supercharge it. And similar With AI, you flash forward. We don’t even need to flash forward, but it’s how does a teacher audit that their students are doing the work they’re supposed to be doing?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: On so many levels, it’s getting to the point, there are some exceptions, but of near impossibility. Students can either avoid all work or they can supercharge their own work, but the output might look very similar at least for a period of time. So schooling is going to change a lot. It’s very, very interesting.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I actually think, Tim, if the school evaluation is structured in a way that whatever AI gives and whatever the student gives is the same, there’s something wrong with the structure of the evaluation.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Can you say more about that? That’s interesting.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: So for example, English essay. This is not me. This is me hearing a story that I so agree with. I’ll retell the story. As a high school freshman English class teacher, I heard that someone told me the story of their kids’ school. On the first day of school, the teacher actually said to the class, “I want to show you how I would score AI.” So the teacher give an essay topic. Show the students this is what the best AI gave me and I’m going to show you how I think this is good, this is bad, how this is suboptimal, and I’ll give it a B minus. Now I will tell you, this is my bar. If you’re so lazy that you ask AI to write your essay, this is what you’re going to get. But you can use AI, that’s totally fine. But if you can do the work, learn, think, be the best human creator you can and work on top of that you can get to A, you can get to A pluses. And that would be, in my opinion, the right way to structure the evaluation. Is not to pit humans against the AI and then try to police the use or not use of AI. Is that to show where the bar of the tools are and where the bar of the human learner should be.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m going to sit with that example and try to think of more examples. It’s very interesting. And boy, oh boy, I’ve been shocked by how quickly the models improve. But yes, as a thought experiment. I’m going to chew on that. I know we only have a few minutes left. Fei-Fei, I wanted to ask you a question I ask a lot, which is if you could put a quote or a message, something on a billboard, something to get in front of millions, billions of people, just assume they all understand it. It could be an image, could be a question, could be a quote, anything at all, a saying, a mantra, doesn’t matter, could be almost anything. What would you or what might you put on that billboard?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: What is your north star?
Tim Ferriss: Okay. What is your north star? This is of course critically important. And coming back to how you define that or find that for yourself. You were talking about audacious questions and then that leading to a north star hypothesis. Is there another way that you would encourage people on top of that to think about finding their north star?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: I believe that’s how that makes us so human and makes us to be so fully alive is that we as a species can live beyond the chasing of just basic needs, but dreams and missions and goals and passion. And everybody’s north star is different and that’s fine. Not everybody have AI as their north star. But finding that goes to the heart of education again. And I don’t mean formal classroom education, it’s just the journey of education. A lot of that is the ability to learn who you are and to learn how to formulate your north star and how to chase after that.
Tim Ferriss: Last question. I was just going to ask, Did your parents ever explain to you why they named you Fei-Fei?
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yes. It’s because when my mom was going through labor, my dad was characteristically late to the hospital and along the way he caught a bird. He let it go, but he did catch a bird. I don’t know if he was just distracted. It was in Beijing, in the city of Beijing. My dad was bicycling to my mom’s hospital. And that inspired him to call me Fei-Fei.
Tim Ferriss: Fei-Fei.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Fei-Fei. Oh wait, sorry. For those who don’t speak Chinese, I forgot — you do speak Chinese, but for those who don’t speak Chinese, fei means flying.
Tim Ferriss: Means flying.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Yeah. So be inspired by a bird.
Tim Ferriss: Really quick, I’ll just say, because it’s funny. My first Chinese name that I had was [foreign language], which is because I was very blunt and honest, so [foreign language]. But [foreign language]. But when I was first starting, my tones in China were not polished and people thought I was saying that my name was [foreign language 01:21:02], which is airport.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Airport.
Tim Ferriss: So I petitioned my teachers and we changed my name to something less confusing.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: What’s your new name?
Tim Ferriss: [foreign language]. It’s [foreign language] but it’s without the [foreign language] at the bottom.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Oh, wow. Fancy name. That’s way more sophisticated than mine.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I get to script it with my Chinese teachers, so I have an unfair advantage.
Dr. Li, thank you so much for the time. We will link to the show notes for everybody at tim.blog/podcast. They’ll be able to find you easily. And everybody should check out worldlabs.ai and we’ll put every other link, your social and so on in the show links. But thank you for the time. I really appreciate it.Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Thank you Tim. I enjoyed our conversation.
The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
