Tag Archives: Tim Ferriss

Dinner with the dead

Leave a reply

A question Tim Ferris used to regularly ask his podcast guests was, “If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be and why?” 

Well now it might be a bit easier to have one of those dinner conversations… even if the person is dead.

Here’s a conversation on AI and education between Bill Gates and Socrates, but first the description of the video:

AI Brings Bill Gates & Socrates Together: A Must-Watch Dialogue on AI. An exclusive video of Bill Gates and ancient philosopher Socrates discussing the potential of artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this groundbreaking fusion of past wisdom and present innovation, reshaping our understanding of AI.

In this video, you will witness a fascinating discussion between Socrates, the Greek philosopher considered one of the greatest thinkers in history, and Bill Gates, the American entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft, one of the most important companies in the world of technology.

Despite belonging to different eras, Socrates and Gates have a lot in common. Both are considered pioneers in their respective fields and have had a significant impact on society.

The AI-generated conversation will allow these two great figures to discuss topics such as technology, ethics, education, and much more. Will Socrates and Bill Gates be able to find common ground in their ideas and thoughts? Find out in this video!

It didn’t need the laugh track, and there is a slight cartoonish feel to the two characters, but this technology is just getting better and better!

Fear can paralyze

Imagine being legally blind, able only to see shadows in your peripheral vision. Now imagine needing to endure 10 rounds of fighting a new fresh black belt fighter, for consecutive 3 minutes rounds, to earn your black belt… Richard Turner did this. However I didn’t learn about Richard through his martial arts skills, but rather from his skills as a card mechanic… a close up card magician.

Here is where I first saw him, on Penn & Teller’s show ‘Fool Us’, where top notch magicians try to earn a performance spot in Penn & Teller’s live Vegas show. How do they earn this spot? They must do a trick that confounds Penn & Teller, and they are hard to fool!

Richard fooled them faster than anyone, and Teller was motioning to give him the trophy before he finished his trick.

I recently listened to Richard Turner — The Magical Phenom Who Will Blow Your Mind (#411) on the Tim Ferriss Podcast

Here is what Richard said at about the 1hr, 13min mark of the podcast (including opening commercials). I’m not adding anything beyond this quote, it’s brilliant and stands on its own!

“Fear can paralyze. We can be so worried about doing the wrong thing, that we do nothing.
There’s actually an English proverb that says, ‘A man who is afraid to make a mistake is unlikely to make anything… Fear of failure, when left unchecked, can actually lead to the failure we fear.” ~ Richard Turner

Adapt, Adjust, and Amplify

“Lose 25 pounds in a month.”

“Earn $1,000 a day.”

“Look 10 years younger.”

“Discover your potential.”

“Live the life of your dreams.”

“Anything is possible…”

…But none of it is attainable for the vast majority of people. The plans are made to look simple, but the goals are lofty, and the path to success is anything but easy. How many of us are excessively rich, looking and feeling healthier and younger than we are, and living our ideal dream life? We aren’t going to get all these things from some motivational speaker or some club membership or program. As Derek Sivers says,

“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

It’s amazing how easy it can sound, but real, incremental, and meaningful change often takes two things:

  • Consistent effort.
  • More time than you think.

I’ve written about my healthy living goals, and the shoulder injury that I’m recovering from. In the past, an ice-pick-like stabbing pain in my shoulder would have been enough to derail my entire workout schedule. I would have stopped everything and gone into lazy mode.

Instead, my treadmill run, which bounced my shoulder too much, became a stationary bike ride; my weights set became a core strength set. My other routines remained as well. I think this happened because I am not on some crazy, unrealistic path to health goals I’ll never achieve. I’m on a slow, attainable path, that I want to maintain.

Here is the path that worked for me:

Adapt, Adjust, and Amplify.

It wasn’t easy at first, and it was not going to happen overnight. There wasn’t a romantic appeal, it wasn’t sexy or overly inspiring. It took patience. And unlike the fads and crazes, it lead to significant change over time.

1. Adapt – The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If at first you don’t succeed, try something different. I made changes that were realistic and sustainable. Twenty minutes of cardio – totally doable to fit into my schedule. Before, I’d incrementally move that up to close to an hour. Now, I can put in over an hour on the basketball court, running hard, even though I haven’t done more than a 25 min. hard cardio workout in over a year. I won’t win any marathons, but I’m not dumb enough to ask my body to try. I adapted a workout schedule that optimizes my fitness in a minimal amount of time.

2. Adjust – My schedule had to adjust when I started writing this daily blog before my morning workouts. I kept running out of time. Now I’m writing this at 10pm, in bed on Sunday, rather than early tomorrow morning. I write longer posts on weekends, when inspired, and keep them short, with limited writing time on weekdays. I’ve adjusted a few things along the way, each time I do so, it’s to reduce friction and to make maintaining my wellness regimen easier. A great example of an adaptation is that when I felt I was stagnating a bit on my runs, I started doing some interval training. I increased my speed for minute or minute-and-a-half intervals, and I watched my top speed increase. When I got to a good speed, one that I used to run when I was in my 30’s, I made that my new maximum for my hard days… I adjusted again, rather than pushing myself to some unreasonable goals.

3. Amplify – When things are working, I highlight them. I’m public with them on my blog, and with family and friends. This isn’t bragging, it’s holding myself accountable. When I see results from interval training, I push myself to do this more often. When I got injured, I focussed on my daily calendar, and the things I could do, rather than the things I couldn’t. By amplifying the small successes, and the commitment I made to myself, I’ve created a positive feedback loop that inspires me to keep going.

As catchy as Adapt, Adjust, and Amplify may sound, it’s the other two tips that really make this work:

  • Consistent effort.
  • More time than you think.

Keep going, knowing that long term goals are more sustainable than flashy weight loss or instant muscles. Low motivation or injuries will happen, they don’t need to break the pattern of consistency, they will just slow down the intensity, and the timelines to the goals that were created.

There are times to aspire to be great, and to put everything you have into success and achievement. And, there are times to focus on self care… Times to realize that mentally and physically, we need to be consistent, show up, and maintain as well as tweak, the patterns and behaviours that make us incrementally better over time. It’s not fast, it’s not glamorous, it is achievable and rewarding, as long as you are dedicated and show patience.

My new approach to learning from books

I’ve always been a slow reader, and so the transition to audio has been a refreshing way to consume more books than if I stuck to reading text. Even so the amount of books I can read is very limited, especially when you consider that a typical audio book runs somewhere between 7 and 12 hours of listening. So I was very interested when a colleague told me about Blinkist, a book summarizing service. He shared a link with alternative summarizing services and I ended up getting a competing service called 12 Minutes. The app chose me when a lifetime membership went on sale for less than 2 years on Blinkist.

I tried this out and I didn’t like it much. Although the summaries are short, I found my attention waned. Informational books devoid of the compelling stories and examples couldn’t hold my attention even for 12 minutes. I was disappointed.

But recently my desire to get through more books increased after reading a Tim Ferris blog post that said,

“We don’t have that much time left to read books. Tim Urban’s The Tail End makes this clear. Based on his calculus, he might only read another 300 books before he dies. He and I are roughly the same age, and Tim is a very fast reader.”

I’m older, and a slower reader than both of them. So I thought, let my try again with a different approach. I opened up my iPad to a sketching app, called Paper, and then opened 12 Minutes and saw the feature book was The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is the perfect book because I wanted to read it, it was gifted to me by a parent at my school over 3 years ago, and it sits on my shelf unread, not even on my list of books I have have time for in the near future.

Here are the notes I created while listening to The Lean Startup:

It took longer than 12 minutes. I didn’t time it but I’d guess 20-25 minutes with pausing and reminding. However this book is relatively small at only 8 hours and 38 minutes on Audible… and I likely would never have gotten to it.

With this new two-pronged strategy, I was able to stay focused and take a couple useful ideas from the book. I also have some notes I can come back to later. So unlike my audiobooks that I listen to working out and commuting, I will probably use the 12 Minute App in conjunction with a sketching app, and I’ll see if this new approach to learning from books is something I will stick to?

The Kindness of Strangers

Imagine you are walking with your kid in a foreign country. You’ve just flown in and arrived downtown by public transportation, suitcases in tow, and you are a 5 block walk away from your hotel. Your kid steps of a curb incorrectly, you hear a pop, and a scream, and there is your kid, buckled just off the edge of the curb, ankle in hand, crying. Any movement of the ankle results in a scream of agony.

You move off the road and a few people have gathered to help. They tell you there is a hospital just 3 blocks away, and point in the opposite direction of the hotel. You realize that you need to carry your kid and there is no way you can also carry all of your suitcases.

You look up at one of the strangers around you and say, “Can you please do me a favour? Here is my business card, can you please take my bags to our hotel and ask them to store them until we get there?” The person agrees. They head to the hotel, suitcases in tow, you head the other way to the hospital holding your kid.

What are the chances that your bags will be at the hotel when you return from the hospital?

– – –

I was listening to The Tim Ferriss Podcast with his guest, magician Penn Jillette, and Penn had some interesting insights into the kindness of strangers.

He said he doesn’t believe in evil, and that if you look at the vast majority of people in the world they are good and kind.

If someone seeks you out to ‘help you’, their motives might need more scrutiny… but if you get to randomly choose someone, anyone, to help you, then the odds are unbelievably high that this stranger will be good.

—

Going back to the scenario:

What are the chances that your bags will be at the hotel when you return from the hospital?

I’d guess pretty close to a hundred percent, what about you?

What does your answer tell you about the kind of world you believe we live in? What experiences have you had to prove or disprove the belief in an inherent kindness of strangers?

Ben-Horowitz-Leadership-Quote

Tough Leadership Decisions

Here is a great quote by Ben Horowitz on the Tim Ferris Podcast:

“One of the most important kind of leadership skills:

…If you make decisions that everybody likes all the time, then those are the decisions that they would make without you. So, you are not actually adding any value… Almost by definition a lot of the most important decisions end up being ones that people don’t agree with, don’t like, and are difficult, and cause people not to like you, at least for a while.”

I’ve shared before that “As a leader if we don’t have relationships where we can go to the hard places, then we aren’t being the best leaders we can be.” The Horowitz quote adds a whole other element to this. We really are not being leaders if we are only making decisions that would happen without us. If that’s not what we are doing, then we will obviously be making decisions that not everyone will approve of. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t try to create a common vision, and it doesn’t excuse us from treating everyone as team members who can contribute to that vision… but sometimes we need to make hard, unpopular decisions.

Something that I can critique myself on, and that others might be able to empathize with, is that sometimes I delay those hard, uncomfortable conversations or redirections for too long. I spend too much time trying to get everyone on board with a new idea, or I walk on eggshells leading up to the shift. One thing we do need to recognize is that sometimes our decisions can affect others far more than they affect us, and so the readiness for change is not always evenly distributed. Resistance can come from unexpected places, and ripple in unforeseen ways. This isn’t always because of poor leadership or communication, but rather something we need to respond to after making tough leadership decisions.

Change is hard to lead. These 3 images (and the accompanying blog post) examine the challenges of embracing change, resisting change, and also inspiring change.

But as Ben points out, even when we work hard to inspire change, sometimes we have to make unpopular decisions, ones that not everyone will agree with. At that point, you aren’t going to win a popularity contest, and you aren’t necessarily going to be inspiring. But it is in these moments that you’ve got to decide if it is more important to go to the hard places of making such decisions, or if you would rather do something that could be done without you there as a leader?

I think truly great leaders define themselves when they are making tough leadership decisions, rather than when they are making popular decisions. Although when it is you that has to make those decisions, it doesn’t feel always feel great. Ben continues in the podcast to describe this feeling as ‘running towards the darkness’. When you are making tough, unpopular decisions you can feel alone and uncertain, but that’s probably better for your organization than yielding to decisions that are easier to make, but less likely to have a favourable outcome.

Ben-Horowitz-Leadership-Quote

The long format podcasts experience

I don’t listen to the radio in my car anymore, and I only listen to music when I’m with other people. If I’m alone in the car, even on my very short commute to work, I’m either listening to an audio book or I’m listening to a long format podcast.

What’s the appeal of the long format?

I have gotten very tired of the typical news-style interview format. That format is designed to work in one of two ways:

1. Three to seven minute interviews that focuses on one key idea, one good, quotable sound byte (and glosses over many other interesting and big ideas).

2. A panel discussion where discourse is trumped by arguments from the extremes with blatant disregard for anyone with a centrist view.

On the other hand, a long format discussion can go deep. It can meander to different topics. It can invite you in as if you are in the room with the interviewer and interviewee.

No one does this better than Joe Rogan. He has become a master interviewer! He is skilled at interviewing people smarter than us, and asking the right clarifying question for us to take the journey along with him.

I don’t listen to all his interviews (too many, and I focus on the interviewees I can learn a lot from), but I’m currently listening to his interview with Edward Snowden. At the time of writing this, the YouTube version has 7.4 million views, and several million more people listen to an audio version like me. As an aside, Joe Rogan is changing the way people listen to media. His podcasts routinely get more views than television shows and newscasts. And his unbiased reporting, not having to pander to broadcast networks, and advertisers that are restrictive, are exactly why he could get 3-hours of Edward Snowden’s time that the networks would never get.

What I like about his podcasts is that he can get guests like Peter Attia or Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and while they both have podcasts, when I listen to their podcasts, they get too technical and go over my head. Whereas, Joe will ask clarifying questions and help me take the journey with them.

Here are a few more longer format interviews/podcasts that are worth listening to:

1. Derek Sivers or Jamie Foxx on The Tim Ferriss Show

2. Stephen Fry or Yuval Noah Harari on the Sam Harris podcast.

3. And I’ll be going back to podcasting again, here are two of my favourites so far, Remi Kalir and Roy Henry Vickers.

The long format podcast is an engaging way to learn, and to pass time normally consumed with talk radio and annoying commercial interruptions. Give them a try!