The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

“What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine.” — Jake Becraft

Jake Becraft is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies. He has guided the company from its founding vision through platform development and into clinical translation, positioning Strand at the forefront of next generation RNA therapeutics.

Beyond his role at Strand, Dr. Becraft is an influential voice in the national biotechnology landscape. He engages and advises policymakers, defense leaders, and industry stakeholders on biosecurity, innovation strategy, and strengthening American competitiveness in advanced biotechnology. Trained as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he operates at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and policy, focused on building both the companies and the institutional frameworks required to secure the future of programmable medicine.

He received his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology from MIT. He serves on the board of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio).

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Twitter | Strand Therapeutics

“Our goal at Strand, and our challenge, is building drugs today that impact patients’ lives. We’re not a research institute. Our goal is not to do really cool research on mice and join the ranks of people who have cured mice of cancer. There’s millions of them. There could be a Nobel Prize every five minutes for someone who’s cured a mouse of cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being diseases, and do so in a safe, effective, scalable way that impacts a person’s life as little as possible. And that is what we’re building.”

— Jacob Becraft

“What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine.”

— Jacob Becraft

“Everyone wants to cure cancer. I don’t need a story behind curing cancer. I just need a story about how we’re going to get there and how curing cancer is actually going to be one step on the road to solving disease writ large.”

— Jacob Becraft

“What we are in the midst of right now is the United States massively losing to China. China has built an industrialized version of clinical trial infrastructure for first-in-human trials that is so efficient and massively quick that they’re just able to go faster and cheaper into the thing that matters most, which is first-in-human trials. So the United States is actually in the process of very rapidly, as a country, falling behind China because what started as a place for American companies to come run clinical trials to get data and then take it to the FDA and then do larger trials in the United States has now created a flywheel structure within China where now just Chinese companies run their clinical trials faster than the American companies and then bring their Chinese-discovered drugs to the United States.”

— Jacob Becraft

“No one will learn until they care.”

— Jacob Becraft

“The biotechnology industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or it will be built up in a new way from new players.”

— Jacob Becraft

“If some bullshit hype filters into this, it’s worth it in order to take the correct swings at the truly big ideas, because one out of 10 transformations is better than seven out of 10 logical steps forward.”

— Jacob Becraft

“In low odds games, games where there’s a very low odds of success statistically, if you don’t go 100 percent all in, the odds will be zero.”

— Jacob Becraft

“When I look at some of those great investors who have made these high-conviction bets, it seems like they’re able to identify this moment in time for companies that is post-conviction, pre-consensus. The ones who know we’re post-conviction, we’re no longer saying, ‘Can we do this?’ We’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to work.’ But it’s pre-consensus because not everyone has caught on yet or not everyone is convinced.”

— Jacob Becraft

Want to hear another episode with a physician-founder building a new class of medicine? Listen to my conversation with Dr. Kevin Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, in which we discussed the birth of bioelectronic medicine, stimulating the vagus nerve to tame inflammation, the inflammatory reflex, treating rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, SetPoint Medical’s FDA approval journey, alleviating depression and autoimmune disorders, building devices that replace drugs, and much more.

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The post Tim’s Founder Kitchen — From Brainstorm to the President’s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics) (#868) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Sami Inkinen (@samiinkinen), a Finnish-born, Stanford-trained entrepreneur and the founder and CEO/president of Trulia and Virta Health. Virta is on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people using technology, AI, and nutrition. He is the founder of Fat Chance Row, which he created to raise awareness of the dangers of sugar and its connection to diabetes, rowing 2,750 miles from California to Hawaii with his wife—completely unsupported—while breaking a world record in the process.

The content of this episode is for informational purposes only. Neither Sami Inkinen nor Tim Ferriss is a medical professional, and nothing discussed here should be taken as medical advice or a substitute for consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

Sami’s full bio

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

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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: I will start, I suppose, with something that I can potentially use immediately or some variant thereof. Do you still schedule your week, or at least workouts, each Sunday? And I’m reading here — this is from a blog post. Schedule everything, right? This is “Top Five Tips: Getting and Staying in Shape for People who are Busy.” “I spend 10 to 20 minutes every Sunday scheduling most of my workouts in detail similar to any other appointments in my calendar. Like with most unscheduled tasks and to-dos, they’ll fall between the cracks. On the other hand, with proper scheduling, you’ve managed to get in your workouts with 150+ annual travel days, changing cities, super early wake-ups and delayed flights,” et cetera.

So this is kind of a micro question that edges into the macro just around planning and scheduling, but do you still take time out each Sunday to go through these things?

Sami Inkinen: 100 percent. 100 percent. It’s every Sunday. I just find that structure allows flexibility and spontaneity. If you don’t have structure, nothing gets done, at least in my life. And not that my life is super special, but two pretty young kids, happily married, running a company, growing, that’s thousand employees, and then trying to be a kind of semi-athlete in the process, if I don’t schedule, it’s not going to happen. So I spend about 15 minutes at the end of each week, that Sunday, professionally list the three things that absolutely have to get done, and then I schedule a few things, including workouts, and it works very well.

Tim Ferriss: When do you do that on Sunday?

Sami Inkinen: Well, this could be a long conversation, but it’s either early morning before the kids wake up and Sunday gets going, or if I don’t have it done by Sunday afternoon, then it’s after 7:00 p.m. when everybody else quiets down and I take my own time.

Tim Ferriss: Virta, how many employees do you have right now?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, Virta Health. So we have about 1,000 employees. And the caveat these days, of course, is don’t brag about employees because the more employees you have, less you’ve leveraged AI. But I guess mentioning 1,000 employees, it’s a real company and obviously growing fast, so it takes fair amount of effort. So about 1,000 people.

Tim Ferriss: Well, the good news is, like so many companies in the news these days, if you did end up over-hiring during COVID or something, you cannot say, “We made a mistake.” You can just say, “We’re using AI to improve efficiency,” when you have layoffs. But we won’t dwell on that. The question I had is, what type of training in your life right now are you currently scheduling each week?

Sami Inkinen: Well, we’re talking about training, so this is sort of physical training.

Tim Ferriss: Physical training. Mm-hmm.

Sami Inkinen: It’s really in two buckets. The primary focus is really endurance sports around cycling. So I do a lot of mountain bike racing as well as road bike racing, so that’s essentially endurance training. So I’d say 90 percent is cycling related, and that’s my core workout that essentially happens in the morning every day. 99 percent of the time, it’s one of the first things. It’s not the very, very first thing in the morning. So that’s one. We can go into morning routines and stuff like that in a second if that’s interesting. But I do a little bit of just core work pretty much first thing after waking up. So I don’t even have to schedule that. That’s sort of a non-negotiable. Before the brain even boots up, I’ve done my core work. But cardiovascular work is the main — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s not tease. Let’s just hop right into it. So what does the morning look like upon waking up, and what time are you getting up?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. So, again, let’s separate into traveling and not traveling, traveling for work — 

Tim Ferriss: Let’s do non-travel.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, non-traveling. I wake up 5:00 a.m. latest. This morning, alarm was 4:45, so I wake up pretty early. And I have the amazing privilege and luxury that the second I roll off the bed, I jump into a lake or pond. And it’s not a long time, maybe like a minute, just cold water, a couple of strokes. But essentially it’s a freezing cold shower. And this is a mountain lake, so we are talking like 40-degree weather, pretty much straight off the bed. And after that, maybe just a minute or two of some air squats and jumps and core, literally core work. Nothing too special, so that’s some Supermans and leg raises and stuff like that. And I do it because, again, I race bicycles quite a bit, and I have some lower back issues, and core work, it just never gets done unless it’s the very, very first thing in the morning. And then I’ll throw in a couple of pushups there. So that’s 5 to 10 minutes. Straight off the bed, jump into the lake, dripping wet, little bit core, little bit jumps, a little bit this and that.

And I’m just a huge, not just a believer, but the practical experience I’ve had is mood follows movement and motion. So before I even ruminate or think anything, I’ve already been in a lake and done five or 10 minutes of core work and some jumping and get the heart rate up for a little bit, and that’s pretty much the first five, 10 minutes.

And then the other thing I try to do always right after is do something useful for other people. Do something useful for other people. And what is that in practice when I’m not traveling? It’s preparing coffee for my wife and emptying the dishwasher. And it may sound very simple, but that’s like 15 minutes after I’ve woken up, I haven’t had a second to think about or ruminate, “Oh, my back’s hurting,” or “Oh, my God, so much work,” or whatever that is. It’s like a 15-minute boot-up sequence, and it’s like life’s rocking. And then I’m ready to go and do the other things.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t worry, I won’t have you give the minute by minute for your entire day, but after you have done that, so you’ve made coffee for your wife, you’ve emptied the dishwasher, then what? Are you having your first intake of coffee? What does the next 30 to 60 minutes look like for you?

Sami Inkinen: Man, sounds like you’re mind reader. So I do drink coffee. That’s time for an espresso or a cup of coffee at that point. Everybody else is still sleeping in the house. I sit down, and basically I write down my sleep, how many hours I slept. And I have a little diary. It’s a spreadsheet online, 16 years of data now. And I also write three things I’m grateful for. So this is kind of little gratitude journal, super, super simple things. And I try to focus on the mundane, such as leaves in the aspen trees or warm temperature, just simple things, very, very simple things. So I do that and write down a few things.

And then I usually work for about an hour, so clean email and Slacks, or maybe I have like a 20-minute writing thing, so this is kind of my CEO job. So I try to do about hour of that. And then whenever my wife wakes up, then we have sort of a 15, 20-minute couples moment, drink coffee, and talk about life. It’s a really wonderful moment there. So that’s kind of the very morning.

And then my real workout usually happens between 6:30 and 8:30, the exercise. And then after that, get to office. Exception would be if I have any meetings that are across time zones, then it could be a 6:00 a.m. Zoom or something like that. But before that, I’ve always done my swimming in the lake and a little bit core and maybe a cup of espresso. That’s the routine. And pretty much repeated that for more than a decade. It’s nothing too special. People ask like, “What’s the science behind?” I say, “Listen, if it doesn’t feel good, it’s not right for you. If it feels good, repeat it.”

Tim Ferriss: So I suppose there are different types of fun, right? There’s type one, type 2, maybe type three fun, which is just embracing the suck. God, I can’t remember who sent this to me. It was a friend of mine — maybe you recall who this is because I’m sure I pinged you about it. But they were driving up some windy, incredibly steep road in the mountains, and they were taking a video from their car of some lunatic, who I think they called a lunatic, “Look at this fucking guy. He’s crazy,” on what you could envision, listeners or watchers, as incredibly long rollerblades. They’re basically skis with a single track of wheels on them and poles doing uphill, I suppose, Nordic skating, let’s just call it, going up this unending incline, and they’re like, “God, who is that lunatic?” And of course, who did it end up being? Ended up being Sami. So fun means different things, or feeling good means different things in different contexts.

But the reason, for people who are wondering, why am I digging into all these details? Number one, I like the details, and the details matter, but you have always impressed me with the number of important pillars that you’re able to methodically schedule into your life, and furthermore, within those pillars, how you’re able to operate at a very high level in multiple domains. So that’s why I’m asking about the specifics, because these things, much like workouts, tend not to happen accidentally. If you don’t schedule them, particularly with the number of moving pieces that you have, and frankly the number of moving pieces that any person probably has, things will not manifest magically.

And I’m curious, we talked about the single day, do you have any type of — I know for training you almost certainly do have weekly and monthly architectures, particularly with competitions. But from a work, could be work, could be physical perspective, do you have a consistent weekly architecture of any type where, say, you might batch certain types of tasks or meetings or otherwise on certain days or anything like that? Or is it pretty much Monday to Friday more or less the same daily routine?

Sami Inkinen: I do have a system. Well, a couple of things. First, I think it’s good to remind when myself or anyone’s like, “Oh, here’s the system,” and — the reality is life happens all the time, so let’s just remember that. You’re running a company, you have kids, crap hits the fan all the time, or at least frequently, so obviously you have to be flexible. So what I’m going to share next is the kind of beautiful, clean scenario where you can kind of live with your structure. But the reality is you’re running a company — 

Tim Ferriss: The platonic ideal gets smashed a lot.

Sami Inkinen: Exactly. It’s 24/7, and the Sunday afternoon walk with your kids or with your spouse may not happen because you need to address a crisis. But let me start with — you mentioned like, “Oh, I’m kind of impressed how many things you can do.” Honestly, the biggest secret is saying no to 99 percent of the things that many people consider quote, unquote, normal. So what you care gets done. And sometimes people ask me like, “Wow, so many sacrifices. You’re trying to be an athlete and a CEO and a founder and trying to be a parent as well, and you even travel with your kids. You must have so many sacrifices.” I actually find that saying no is incredibly liberating in life. I’m way happier that I’m married to one person versus five. It’s awesome. There’s no way I could be a CEO of many companies. I love the kind of focus.

And so I actually find it personally in life, when you find something that kind of fills your cup and is satisfying and gratifying, just having the one or two things that I focus on and then go all in, rather than a sacrifice, it’s a happy place for me. So anyway, I would say that’s my biggest secret.

Tim Ferriss: I think a lot of people will hear what you’re saying and theoretically agree with it, and yet most people are unable to embrace that in practice, for whatever reason. And it doesn’t mean they’re not capable of doing it, but they don’t do it. Why do you think people have trouble saying no or the default is people are inclined to over-commit or that they do the 99 percent of things that are quote, unquote, normal that you say no to? Why do you think not more people do what you’re describing?

Sami Inkinen: Honestly, if I had a perfect answer, I’d probably write a book about it, but — 

Tim Ferriss: With all your spare time. Yeah.

Sami Inkinen: Here’s my guess. I think one might just be a narrative. And I can’t tell you how many times someone has said, “Oh, my, you must be sacrificing so much to be able to do what you do.” And I’m sure you could say the same for an Olympic athlete, like, “Oh, my God, so many sacrifices.” But if you’re an Olympic athlete focused on your sport and your craft, sure, you can’t do 99 percent of things quote, unquote, normal people do, but it’s probably incredibly satisfying to be able to do that one thing for the five or 10 or 15 years of your life. So that’s why I meant maybe it’s a narrative that, oh, if I say no to all these, whatever that is, a movie night every night or some distraction, whatever, staying on social media and watching Netflix four hours a day, then, oh, it’s a sacrifice not to do that. So that’s my guess, one thing, that it’s a narrative in our minds, like, oh, you want to do all these consumption things that maybe take time away from the thing that could move your life or profession forward. So that could be one.

And then the other thing is I think this sort of life structure that if you don’t have a basic — we can go back to your original question, what’s your architecture, what’s your structure? If you’ve never taken the time to take a step back and say, “Hey, how am I allocating my time,” it’s very easy to let the universe or the entropy to take control of your time, whether that’s your inbox or text messages from others or phone calls. It’s actually very, very easy let the world run your life as opposed to you running your life.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about the weekly architecture, and then I am going to come back to this particular question that I asked. But let’s take a breather on that, and would love to hear more about the weekly architecture or other architectures outside of the daily.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. So, again, this is sort of in an optimal world, but I would say professionally I do try to group similar type of tasks into specific days. So just to give you an example, Monday is filled with a lot of group and leadership meetings and stuff like that, so there’s one kind of context switching, that it’s meetings in front of the whole company and in front of leadership team and so forth. So that’s Monday. Tuesday I try to have all my one-on-ones, again, one type of context switching. And as an introvert, that takes a lot of energy, by the way, as important as it is and sometimes very enjoyable, but the kind of one person after another, it’s pretty draining for me personally.

Tim Ferriss: How many direct reports do you have?

Sami Inkinen: Well, I should say this has changed all the time. There’s been 15, there’s been 10, and I had eight for a long time. But for the last couple of months, I’ve had two, only two, which is a very small number. And again, that could be another one-hour conversation. But when you’re building a grow company, you always have to ask yourself, “What’s most important for this year?” And there’s not really kind of a school book-perfect kind of approach. But anyways, it is two right now. So Tuesday is that. Wednesday I actually try to reserve for thinking and writing, thinking and writing. So the default is no meetings. And one example of writing that I do, I write a team letter for the whole company from the CEO. So I’ve now written 553 of them.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. So you do that every week.

Sami Inkinen: Every week, and there’s a one topic, and again, another topic we could dive into. But what I find is that it’s as the company has scaled, there are a few things that are very scalable, like whether my email hits five inboxes or thousand obviously doesn’t take any time away from me, but I can give context, explain what’s happening, what’s important, what’s happening in outside world, what’s happening inside the company, and then every employee feels hopefully some level of connection. So that’s one example.

There’s a couple of things that I’ve kind of repeated ever since day one, and now at thousand-employee scale is still very scalable. But that’s just one example. I could be preparing for board meeting or thinking about strategy, which sounds very high-flying, but I would say one thing that’s very, very easy as a CEO of a grow company is to fool yourself that you’re productive and useful by being busy. But if you miss a decision, something around a corner, no amount of knocking tasks off the to-do list is going to compensate that. It’s almost like managing your own brain and feelings. It’s hard not to have a tightly scheduled calendar, but in fact, having that time open for like, you can go for a walk and think about the problem.

So anyway, so that’s kind of my Wednesday. And then Thursday and Friday is a lot of internal client work and those kinds of things, but I usually — that’s not too structured. But that’s a little bit of a typical week.

Tim Ferriss: On Wednesday, when you’re doing the writing and thinking, what are some of the ways that you structure your thinking? There’s unstructured thinking, right? You go for a walk and kind of ponder and allow the void to invite hopefully some type of insight. But then there’s structured thinking. And I guess to the extent that I know you at all, I would say I’m inclined to think you probably have some prompts or structure or an approach to doing thinking. What does that look like, or how would you speak to that?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, actually typically the way my brain works is the actual thinking and problem-solving happens 24/7, and I’ll give you a specific example. My workouts every morning, which is about an hour, hour and a half, unless it’s a very, very, very high intensity, that’s one of the best times where my thinking happens, and problem-solving and new ideas and creativity happens there. And then for the Wednesday, I actually just block an hour and say — it’s almost like the time to get the words and the thoughts and whatever that might be off my brain to a paper, or obviously in a cloud. So unless I have to do a very kind of left-brain, mathematical, deterministic problem-solving thing, literally like, “Okay, let’s look at how do we improve cross margin,” or something like that, the creative work does not happen at the desk for me.

And one thing that I noticed, this was especially during COVID, when COVID hit, I was listening a lot of podcasts and music and audiobooks on 100 percent of my workouts. It was maybe like a year. And I realized that the problem-solving and the creativity almost stopped. So now I have a rule that maximum of half of my workout I can listen to Tim Ferriss. Sorry. So if your download numbers are going down or listening numbers — 

Tim Ferriss: Damn it, Sami. I need all the help I can get.

Sami Inkinen: So if the brain is in a consumption mode, you’re kind of just filling in the cup, and I’ve noticed the creative thoughts and the problem-solving that’s happening or background processing, it’s not happening. So anyways, this is tactical thing that I’ve noticed that too much audiobook or podcasts filling the brain, and it stops creating stuff. It’s very interesting. That’s at least my personal experience. So I’m very conscious of, on those moments when I’m exercising or walking or driving somewhere, that there’s kind of a cutoff point. No more listening. Just let your brain do its thing.

And then the Wednesday comes in, it’s more like, okay, now I kind of have the framework in my head, take an hour and a half to, I don’t know, write about next year’s priorities or the new product we’re going to launch. Or even these team letters that I write, I actually write them in my brain when I’m away from the desk, and then when I sit down, it just — it comes out.

Tim Ferriss: So that actually leads into my follow-up question — I can’t imagine I’m the only person wondering this — which is, when you’re doing these workouts, let’s just say it’s an hour and a half to two hours, the real workouts, in the morning, I would imagine quite a lot percolates and comes up, and if you’re doing that Monday, Tuesday, maybe also Saturday, Sunday, et cetera, by the time you get to Wednesday, if I have not taken some step to maybe verbally record some of that or make short notes in a notebook for cues for later, I would be doubtful that I would be able to recall the good ideas that I had earlier in the week. Do you just have a preternatural sort of inclination to be able to remember all that stuff, or do you take some type of shorthand after the workouts so that you can use those then on Wednesday as prompts? How does that work?

Sami Inkinen: Essentially I write emails to myself or store notes. It’s the same thing. So there’s tidbits along the week, and then I have it for Wednesday. And then half may be in the brain, and half is written somewhere so I don’t forget it all, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And you just send yourself an email after the workout with some type of note?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. What is an example of what you might cover in a team/company email on a Wednesday, and how long is that? Because that is, like you mentioned earlier, one of the things you’ve repeated since day one. What would be an example that you can share? I mean, it could be hypothetical, but just what might you put into that, and how long is it?

Sami Inkinen: Half is standard structure. So there’s a quote from — again, we can go into details, but we’re in a business of reversing metabolic disease and helping people get healthy with nutrition. So we treat patients like real humans, hundreds of thousands. So half of it is this existing structure. There’s a quote from a patient, so we always kind of lead with, this is why we’re here, and here’s a positive feedback from a patient. Then there’s some business metrics, like how much we’ve grown, and what are the priorities, and just a reminder of this year’s key objectives. So half is like that.

And then the most important other half is topic of the week. So topic of the week is essentially my, as a CEO/founder, essay, and I think that’s what you were asking. I would say they’re roughly in two or three categories. One is what has happened in our external world, what’s the context there, and how does that affect us? One example, this is a real-world example that I’ve written quite a bit about, since we use nutrition as the core tool, but obviously our providers use all the tools in the toolkit, one of the things that has really changed in addressing obesity and metabolic disease over the last couple of years is the GLP-1 drugs, so these are the Ozempics of the world. And so I’ve had a number of letters discussing, how do these drugs potentially affect how we take care of our patients, and what’s the impact on our business? So that would be ity, and how is that affecting our strategy? So that’s one example.

The other category is career and personal advice to our team members, like how to make most out of your experience working at Virta and around that kind of stuff that we discussed now, like personal productivity and how do we make most out of — so that, I would say, is the second category. And then third is just internal, this is what happened, this is what it means for us. So honestly, I kind of like it. It’s my personal outlet, and sometimes I’ve said, “Hey, 530 plus essays, there’s a book in a making. All we need to do is upload it to ChatGPT and we have a book ready to be published.”

Tim Ferriss: I promised I would come back to a thread, which I realize is probably a misworded question. The question I asked was why people have trouble doing what you do, which is saying no to 99 percent of the things that normals do, or feel compelled to do, to your point about the narrative. And I realize that’s perhaps not the right question. The right question might be, what advice would you give to someone who is having trouble saying no, or focusing on just a few things? But I can make it much more specific, because I think the more we can imagine it, perhaps the easier it is to dig into this.

So, let’s say that you had a relatively new hire, who is on the younger side but a 10X engineer, or some equivalent of that. Someone who is clearly a superstar, but who has not established the type of architecture and routine that you have in your life. Let’s just say you sense that they are on the path to burnout, which is going to be bad for them, it’s going to be bad for the company, it’s going to be bad for the patients you serve, and you want to stage an intervention to help them correct course. I imagine you may have even had these conversations. What might that conversation or coaching look like?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Well, funny enough, this has been one of the topics of my team letters, one of the 530. So, I would separate it into two things, my advice. One would be this sort of planning. Literally, it would be very simple. Sit down for five minutes on a Sunday evening before the week starts, and write down what absolutely completely needs to get done next week, super-duper simple, professionally and personally, and schedule it into your calendar, literally. And if you have the flexibility, then block two hours in the mornings to get those two or three things done. And then when life happens, or work happens, everything else kind of comes after that. So, that to me would be the number one thing.

And then I would couple that, when Monday comes or Tuesday comes, it’s whether you work in an office or in a remote setting, do not let the universe control your time. So this means absolutely no notifications. Maybe if you have to get text messages for, I don’t know, family emergency or something, but take everything else out and you kind of create that sacred space where you can do that work, whether that’s writing, or coding, or cold calling 15 prospects or whatever that is. It’s super-duper simple, but it’s so easy to then sort of, again, Monday comes, Tuesday comes, and then the world takes over, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, it’s 4:00 p.m. I haven’t done the thing.” So I’d say that would be the one category.

And then the second part — 

Tim Ferriss: Can I pause for one second?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, sure.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So before we get to the second, for some people listening, if they sit down for 10 minutes on Sunday to write down the things that must get done professionally and personally, they might have a list of 20 things in each category. So, are we talking about one thing, three things in each category? I know this seems like very persnickety, but this seems like a possible failure point for people, right?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So, what is your suggestion there?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. So, it’s probably one or two things, but this, again, we could launch into another part, which is obviously you need an architecture of annual thinking, planning, like what does business need, for example. In fact, I just have a text file, ASCII file on my computer. I was like, “Here’s the four things to remember as a CEO now and 20 years from now. Here’s the three things for this year. And here’s the three things for this week.” I literally have a text file and I just update it every Sunday.

And a whole another topic, which I’m sure some people think I’m crazy, is I have a 15-year plan for myself, which I accidentally stumbled that it actually could be useful and I update it every year. And again, we can take that offline or take a bookmark how that came about. It’s been incredibly helpful. And again, I want to highlight, structure allows spontaneity and flexibility, but if you don’t have that architecture, then obviously on a Sunday evening it’s like, “Oh, should I write a book, or get a new job, or just do this project that my boss was asking?” So, if you don’t have that North Star, you could be kind of spinning like a compass.

Tim Ferriss: I did take you off track, because you were saying block these things out in the calendar like Sunday, five to 10 minutes, block those things out in your calendar if you can, two hours first thing in the morning. Do not let the universe dictate how you use your time, block out notifications. And then you said the second thing, and then that’s when I interrupted you.

Sami Inkinen: Yes. Second bucket, this is probably the most important as this relates to a burnout and you’re falling apart. And I’m going to knock here on my wood, my table, not too hard to create any noise, but I founded my first software company in April 2000. So now we’re here in 2026, so that’s 26 years, running, building, fast-growth companies. And I haven’t cracked yet. And again, caveat is it could happen tonight. But there’s a few things I’ve learned, and I think these are applicable to, especially any knowledge worker, where everything’s just coming to your brain, and it’s very easy to get stressed, and anxious, and crack. And I’ve written about this as well. Here’s my formula that has worked for me very well.

One, you have to take care of your sort of foundational metabolic health. What is it? It’s sleep, nutrition, exercises. That’s kind of one. If you are metabolically very, very unhealthy, it’s very, very likely that you’re going to crack under pressure. So that’s one. Second one is, it’s very helpful to have, especially for founder CEO types, but for anyone, have at least two or three identities, or outlets. For me, it’s parent/husband, one, CEO, two, and then want to be athlete. And so if one’s failing, hopefully at least two are the areas, outlets in my life where it’s like, “Oh, it’s going okay.” And by the way, it’s never that I’m rocking and winning and ringing the bell in all three at the same time. And it’s very helpful. It’s almost like a mental trick, like, “Oh, my God, work sucks, but at least my kids love me today.”

So having that outlet, and particularly founder types, younger ones, it’s often the opposite. They’re sort of proud of the fact that I only have one thing and I’m ready and willing to die for my company. Well, that’s all well and good when everything’s going well, but you have the first speed bump and then everything falls apart. So that’s the second thing, I would say.

Third one is have peers outside of your company that you can let your hair down and relax. For me, it’s a group of CEOs. Other CEOs was, “Oh, my God, can you believe? Can you believe these employees are bitching again?” But obviously you can’t say that in front of the company. Personally for me, it’s been YPO, the Young President’s Organization since, I guess, 2008. So now for me it’s not anymore the why the young, it’s just PO, because I’m old enough. So, I have that.

And then I think the fourth one I would say is everyone has their own tools, but just understanding how your mind work. It could be meditation, could be some other tools, but that’s been a process for myself, to just realize that if you are just attached to your thoughts, eventually they’re going to get you, and you can’t really think yourself out of the hole that you’ve thought yourself into. So unless you can take a step back and observe like, “Oh, my God, my brain’s having a life of its own.”

So that’s kind of the tool that I would not to crack. So foundational health, have different outlets, identities, have peers you can talk to, could be friends as well, and then some sort of understanding and way of taming your mind, if you will, or being able to see that the mind has the life of its own. That’s been helpful for me. And I will say, again, could happen tonight, but I haven’t touched any prescription drug for anything sort of mind related, and that toolkit has kept me head above the water so far for 25, 26 years.

Tim Ferriss: I have a very left turn question for you. Hopefully, it won’t be incredibly offensive. But I was just thinking, when you were like, “I would knock on wood, but I don’t want to make any noise,” and then you’re like, “I can let my hair down, no offense, sorry.” And you’re very polite, and I’ve only been to Finland once. And I was walking around. And of course, went to the obligatory saunas and so on, which I actually can tie into my story, but I was walking around and in the maybe two days that I was in Helsinki, I thought to myself, because I lived in Japan, I speak Japanese, I’m still close to my host family who I stayed with when I was 15 and I thought, “Finish people feel like white Japanese people.” That was my feeling there.

And the reason it ties into the sauna, different context, but if you go to Japan, it’s everything is very restrained, very polite. People don’t stare you in the eye when you’re walking down the street. And in Japan though, if the boss says, “We need to go out and drink, when you drink, okay. And if the boss says you have to drink, you have to drink. But you go out and you can get really loud, and you can get really boisterous. And you’re allowed to say things when you’ve had some alcohol that basically everyone agrees they’re going to forget the next day like it never happened.

Now, I can’t take it that far with Finland, but when I went to the saunas, one thing that I was very surprised by is that they sell huge stein glasses of beer that people bring into the saunas. And I was like, “Oh, this is where they let their hair down. Okay.” Am I totally off base? I don’t know if you’ve spent time in Japan, but culturally I felt like in my 48 or 72 hours of exposure, I was like, “Wow, this is actually, even Finish itself has some of the phonemes, some of the sounds of Japanese. I mean, it sounds like I’m really overreaching now, but — am I just an insane person, or do you feel like there’s something possibly there?

Sami Inkinen: I think there’s similarities. And you’re definitely the connoisseur of a Japanese culture versus me, having just been to Tokyo and a few other places a couple of times. But that kind of space and distance, and politeness that people — well, actually, there’s no distance in Tokyo obviously, but sort of emotionally there is a kind of distance in Finland and in Japan versus when I came to America 2003, moved to California, it’s like everyone’s on your face and everything’s freaking awesome. And it took a couple of years to, I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, come on, give me space,” and everything’s not awesome.

And so yeah, maybe there are similarities. And then, yeah, alcohol I’m sure has been a mental health tool, not very effective at that in Finland for many, many decades. But sauna, I have to — well, first of all, there’s five and a half million people in Finland, and there are more than three million saunas. More than three million saunas. 

Tim Ferriss: It’s a crazy number.

Sami Inkinen: So on average, you have one to two people per sauna in Finland. Babies used to be delivered in sauna in Finland, because it’s the clean, bacteria die in the heat.

Tim Ferriss: Sterilized.

Sami Inkinen: There’s warm water. I think my mom was delivered in sauna. I was in the hospital, just to be clear. So, sauna is beyond being part of the culture. It’s part of the DNA. And it’s culturally, it’s an amazing place, actually, not just kind of let loosen your head down, but you don’t have your uniform, you don’t have your titles, you don’t have your whatever, socioeconomics, singles, symbols, fancy watches, and kind of everyone comes together, whether that’s family, or your friends, or your community. And yes, sauna is definitely a place where a lot of things happen in Finland. And yeah, we could talk about saunas and it’s its role in a culture, but it’s — 

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about it.

Sami Inkinen: — way beyond cold ponds and sauna.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Why is that? Why is it so prevalent in Finland? Because it seems like, and I’m sure you’ve seen this, but there’s certain studies in the world of psychedelics where it’s like they did brain imaging and one study that they’ve been slicing over and over again and torturing the data again and again to just produce more and more papers on this one study that was done so long ago. It seems like the same group of 140 fins has been dissected five million times in various announcements around saunas, but why is it so prevalent there versus other places? I don’t know the origin story.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. And hopefully, there’s a historian who will check me on this, but it definitely goes back hundreds, let’s say, many hundreds of years, where it was sort of necessary. Finland, four seasons incredibly cold winters. So sauna was a place to basically heat and warm up in the winter. It was also a place where you could dehydrate food. So that’s kind of how it goes way back when. And obviously now, it’s not necessary to stay warm and it’s not necessary to dry your food, but I think that’s where it started.

And then in saunas where you duck into a side of a mountain, and then you burn wood on top of rocks, and then you extinguish the fire, and then you make sure that the smokes goes away, and the rocks stay hot for a long time and you go in. That was the original, it’s called, people still have that kind of saunas today, it’s called smoke sauna. So essentially you don’t have a way to get the smoke out other than open the door. So there’s no fireplace where the smoke just goes through a chimney. So that’s called smoke sauna.

It’s a special sauna experience. And obviously, it takes much more time to heat it and make it safe, because you don’t want to go there, where there’s smoke. But I think that’s kind of the history. And then somehow I’m missing the link how it became sort of like a culture, but now, nobody will build a house without a sauna. Literally, first is where it’s a sauna, and then let’s figure out if there’s space for a bathroom. That’s kind of the order in Finland.

Tim Ferriss: I went to this public sauna, it’s pretty fancy, and there’s a word, you could probably tell me what it is, it’s like löyly or something like that.

Sami Inkinen: Oh, löyly.

Tim Ferriss: There we go. So this is, what? The act of throwing water on the stones? Is that what that refers to? Or the sound that it makes? I don’t know what the name of the actual location means, but you can tell me in a second, but the reason I bring it up is I have never experienced so many varieties of sauna, and they had a smoke sauna room. And in my mind, looking at the menu of options before going in, I’m like, “Okay, I get it. It’s a hot room. How different could it be?” But the experiences, and the feeling in the body, and the way it penetrates your being is very different. I was shocked, because I’ve spent so much time in dry saunas in the US, and I’ve also done steam rooms and so on, but I did not expect there to be such a broad palette of experience in saunas.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So that place was amazing.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. So, I guess Eskimos have a dozen or so words for snow, because they know every nuance and detail. And Finns have dozens of words for different things around sauna that you can’t even translate. Löyly is probably the most important. You judge the sauna and it’s quality based on löyly. And löyly is essentially it’s after you throw water into the rocks, the fireplace, the rocks, and then the steam comes up. It’s not the steam, it’s not the heat, it’s the, I guess you could say the spirit of the steam, but how it feels, how it lands. And let me tell you, there’s a million different variations how it happened. Is it too hot? Is it too sharp? Is it soft? Does it sort of linger around and how does it feel on your body? That is löyly. And you judge the quality of the sauna based on the löyly.

And there’s a whole science to it, kind of like how big is the space. To get the löyly right in a barrel sauna, which by the way I have at my house, is very, very hard, because it’s too small, the fireplace, you can’t get high enough, and you should be sitting kind of above the fireplace. So yeah, löyly is — if you know one word, löyly, and you want to impress Finns, you go to a salon and I say, “What a fantastic löyly.”

Tim Ferriss: I feel like I need to reach out to the Finnish Tourism Board to sponsor this episode, get people headed over to Finland. I really enjoyed it. It was a very short trip, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to get back.

Let’s talk about metabolic health, because certainly Virta, we can talk about Virta. And part of the impetus for this conversation was tons and tons of text messages back and forth, and some of them I’m sure we can’t talk about publicly necessarily because it’s internal data or whatever, but I would have say a conversation with Dominic D’Agostino, who some long-term listeners will know synthesizes novel exogenous, meaning supplemental ketones and so on.

I was, for instance, I give one example, facing a bit of an enigma in my own experience, which was, I’ve gone into ketosis, and I know that’s a very sloppy way of putting it, but let’s just say getting into ketosis, so eating a predominantly fat-based diet, or even doing it through fasting, getting to a point where I feel like my brain has switched over to ketones. And I was lamenting to Dominic that my devices were telling me I was not in ketosis. And I found this implausible, because after so many years of experimenting with it, I feel like I have a very good bead on when my cognition clicks over, and is actually operating at a much faster CPU capacity.

But my finger pricks with, say, a Precision Xtra device, or the Keto-Mojo, were telling me I was basically not ketosis. And very confusingly, even with a breath-based, I think it’s KetoAir or something like that, pretty primitive device, but even with that I was being given a negative. And you sent me a text showing your bar graph over the last 10 years or something of measurable ketone levels going down over time, even though presumably you’re increasingly and increasingly fat adapted. And I was like, “Of course Sami has this data.”

And then you have some fascinating, fascinating data I have certainly never seen anywhere else looking at different cohorts with various combinations of things, with or without, say, dietary ketosis. So that is part of the reason I wanted to have you on. You’re such a meticulous thinker around these things and data cruncher. But let’s maybe just define some terms before we get into things. What is metabolic health? And maybe you could tell your personal story, because my understanding is at some point you were sub 10 percent body fat, but your report card in terms of biomarkers and so on came back and you were pre-diabetic, is my recollection, but perhaps you could take that TED Talk I just gave and use it as a leaping off point for discussing, defining metabolic health and then talking about your own personal journey maybe as a starting point.

Sami Inkinen: And first the caveat, which is that I do have two master’s degrees, but I’m not a medical doctor and I don’t play one on the internet. And I’m sure in this conversation we’ll go into that area, so I just want to be clear: I’m not giving medical advice to anyone, and I’m not a medical doctor. But obviously, I have a lot of experience with the topic that you just asked.

But in terms of, I guess the personal story, so just rewind, not quite all the way back to Finland, but again, my background is not in medical field. I’m a physicist by training, and in fact, started my career in a nuclear power plant way back when in Finland when it was still fashionable. And I guess nuclear power plants coming back to fashion now, again. Which is just to show that like my background is in science and technology, not in healthcare. However, I’ve been essentially an athlete all my life, cross country skier, bi athlete, came to America, started doing triathlons.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you had to ski to school at one point, right?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, sounds very idyllic. Maybe that was a punishment by my parents. So Nordic skiing to school in the first grade through sixth, so — 

Tim Ferriss: Sounds terrible, actually.

Sami Inkinen: And biathlon came handy, so carrying a rifle so I could shoot the bears when they were attacking along the way, which may or may not be true. But yeah, I was an athlete and have been athlete all those years. And then after coming to America, started doing triathlons, and pretty high level athlete. Again, we’re not talking about the Olympic gold medals, but as an amateur, and did many, many Hawaii IRONMANs, I think seven of those world championship races. And even won the world championships in my age group as a triathlete 2012, I believe. 

And I give that all as a background context, because my view on metabolic health and sort of chronic disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity, was, this is very embarrassing to admit, was the following, which is, it’s ridiculous, it’s very simple: people know exactly what to do, most people, most Americans, they just don’t do it.

And as a result, we have just obese people everywhere. Everyone has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. And by the way, it’s more than 50 percent of American adults. Now the data is, I think, 93 percent, this is the published period of number, 93 percent of Americans are metabolically unhealthy in one way or another American adults. And it’s either you have a high blood pressure, or your lipids off, or you’re obese, or you have type 2 diabetes, or prediabetes. And my view, as judgmental as I was, was always, “Listen, ridiculous. You know what to do, but you’re not doing it. You’re eating too much, you’re just eating too much and you’re not exercising. You loser.” And that’s why I pay too many taxes, because healthcare is five trillion a year, of which almost all of it is metabolic health related. So that was my view.

And I’m very, very embarrassed to say that’s how I was thinking. Sort of judging people like, “You’re unhealthy for reasons that are 100 percent in your control.” And then I got the moment where I had to eat a lot of humble pie, and I discovered that despite being, I don’t know, 10 percent body fat or whatever, and exercising 15 hours a week, and performing well as a triathlete, I was pre-diabetic. All the numbers are often essentially on my way to type 2 diabetes, and I was like, “Shit, wait, I’m not one of those people with no willpower, I’m not one of those lazy people, I’m not one of those ‘middle of America,’ 300 pounds seatbelt extender. That’s not me. Seriously, what’s going on here?” And this was 2012, around the time my previous company Trulia went public, and I was like, well, first I have to figure this out for myself, because if I can’t avoid being metabolically unhealthy, nobody can. Well, guess what? Nobody can. That is the status quo in America today with so many people metabolically unhealthy.

And that got me very interested in this whole topic of, what is actually driving poor metabolic health? fortunately met with amazing scientists who helped me understand that, fundamentally, obesity, type 2 diabetes and the other conditions that result from poor metabolic health, it’s not a personal choice. People don’t wake up on a Monday morning and say, “I want to gain 200 pounds and develop type 2 diabetes. That sounds awesome. And sticking an insulin needle to my body for the next 10 years every day, awesome. Sign me up.” No, it is not lack of willpower. However, nutrition and food is the number one driver of poor metabolic health.

And if you know how to use nutrition, if you know how to use nutrition to actually improve and reverse your metabolic health, you can take an average, let’s just call it 300-pound middle of America truck driver or average person that we, people on the coast often look at like, “Oh, it’s your fault.” And systematically, reverse the condition nutritionally. And essentially, that’s what we’ve done at Virta Health now, with more than quarter million patients and scaling fast. But let me just pause there.

That’s kind of the how did the Nordic skier physicist from Sigma get interesting in metabolic health, and then we can take this down to different paths.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s hop in. I want to start with, well, as you might expect, question about diet. I want to know what, looking back, what the problem was with your diet, and also, this is of course a leading question, so feel free to discard it if it’s not a good question, but how large a role does high fructose corn syrup play broadly in the US in metabolic dysfunction, right? If that just were removed from the market, what impact would that have? But let’s begin with just your personal retrospective. Hindsight 2020, what was wrong with your diet? When you were actually 15 hours a week, roughly 10 percent body fat, performing well in competition. What was wrong with your diet?

Sami Inkinen: Number one question I get like, “Oh, was it your genetics? Because you were exercising so much.” Obviously genes play a part in everything, but I just want to remind that, given about 60 percent of American adults, six-zero, either have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes today. Clearly it’s not like our gene pool has changed. So it can’t really be genes. Or if 93 percent are American also metabolically unhealthy, it’s not like our genes have changed. So no, it’s not that same was the N equals one thing with very, very bad genes. This is happening to a lot of people. I would say one thing. The first one is there.

The second thing is that it is possible to be skinny and lean and metabolically unhealthy. Some kind of people of certain background, especially in Asia, it’s more common that you don’t gain 100 pounds, but you’re very metabolically unhealthy. Also, you can out exercise the calories and burn and not gain massive amount of fat, but you can still be elevated blood sugar, elevated insulin and be insulin resistant. And that’s basically what I was doing. It’s very, very hard. I can tell you that I was hungry for 15 years as an athlete. It’s like, “I’m always more hungry than I could. And if I eat to my appetite, I’m going to gain fat. I can’t do that as an athlete.”

So now I’m going to answer your question. So my N equals one, I’m absolutely convinced because I was able to fix and improve it is I was eating six meals a day of essentially incredibly high carbohydrate and incredibly high glycemic index foods and practically no fat for 10 plus years.

Tim Ferriss: So you weren’t eating Twinkies.

Sami Inkinen: No.

Tim Ferriss: We’re talking about things like white rice or what are we talking about?

Sami Inkinen: Rice, bread, apples, granola bars. I don’t know, ketchup, pasta. But anything that has a glucose molecule turns into blood sugar. Sure. If it’s an apple or if it’s lots of fiber, it comes very, very slowly. But if you’re eating 4,000 calories a day, of which 3,000 is carbs, do the math, 750 grams of carbs a day or more. And so you’re basically drip-feeding sugar into your veins constantly. Jamba Juice in the afternoon, once I get tired. I just remember it was my diet all the time. When you’re in your 20s and you can overdose. People say, “Dose makes the poison.” That’s true. You can tolerate for a long time, but once you get to your 30s, it gets very hard. So very convinced that that was it.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the more surprising things that you have seen within Virta Health now that you have more than N equals one? And what do the interventions look like?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Well, let’s start from the front end of your question.

What’s the most surprising? The most surprising is that we’ve been able to be successful with literally anyone, anyone. I’ll give you one example. And why is that surprising?

Even overcoming my own concept of, “It’s all about willpower.” I had this like, but it’s like people aren’t maybe not as educated as I am. Maybe they’re kind of busy lives. Maybe they don’t have my willpower or the willpower of willpower Olympians.” So that’s been one of the most surprising.

We work with Native American tribes, 800 or so large employers. There’s truck drivers. We’ve analyzed outcomes based on what’s called ADI, Area Deprivation Index. So you take all zip codes in America, and you rank them by average income, exactly the same outcomes. Exactly the same outcomes. We looked at race, ethnicities, exactly the same outcomes. And these are large scale, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients.

So that’s one that’s been very surprising, which is to say, “If you fix the biology, you fix the outcomes.” This isn’t, “Oh, you didn’t even go to high school and you have a very busy life, so we need some sort of extra willpower training.”

No, you fix the biology, you fix the body and the outcome. So that’s number one.

Number two is the magnitude of improvements. So to give you a couple of examples, someone may have had type 2 diabetes for 15 years. They are on 100 units of insulin a day, sticking the insulin needle three times a day for 10 years. And we can reverse that state of type 2 diabetes in six to nine months, and then sustain it for long term.

13 percent average body weight loss, and this is like on an intent-to-treat basis, not thousands start and then you calculate results based on five successful ones. No, you calculate the average drugs from all the thousand. So 13 percent.

In our clinical trial that was about 30 pounds or so, average weight loss at one year and sustained, and mostly fat because we did DEXA scans as well.

I would say the third one is the broad-spectrum effects, and some of these are peer-reviewed. So we’ve been able to show not just blood sugar down and reversing type 2 diabetes, not just weight loss, but up to 75 percent reduction in liver disease. It used to be called fatty liver disease, but scientists changed it to liver disease. So it’s called MASH and MASLD. By the way, it costs $100 billion a year in America today.

There’s one FDA-approved drug today, one FDA approved drug today for MASH. It’s one type of liver disease. It costs 45,000 a year. No kidding. And it came out to market last year, first time, 2025, billion dollars in sales. We deliver similar results nutritionally.

Tim Ferriss: I think this is public. This is in our texts, but the paper just accepted through peer review treating Stage 4. There is no Stage 5, if I’m remembering correctly.

Metastatic pancreatic cancer. This is bad news. This is super, super bad news. I mean, if my memory serves, this is kind of like a Steve Jobs-type situation with — okay, but this is treating Stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer with three chemo drugs, that’s one arm, versus same drugs and on Virta, trying to get patients into ketosis remotely. Well, do you want to describe the results of that?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. So this was a very well-controlled, it’s a randomized control trial for Stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer. We ran the trial with a number of academic oncology centers. So this wasn’t just us, a very well-controlled randomized controlled trial.

And before I talk about the results, just a reminder: pancreatic cancer is number two or number three killer, depending on the year of cancers in America. So it’s very deadly. It’s usually diagnosed too late, at Stage 4 metastatic stage. And the life expectancy is usually 12 to 18 months or 12 months. It’s very, very deadly cancer.

And so we had a trial where we had one arm where we randomized people. It was chemo, three drugs, and then another arm, as you mentioned. Same drugs, exactly the same therapy, plus the Virta nutrition therapy. And we were able to show just about 35 percent life extension on average in that arm, chemo plus Virta.

Again, it’s a very deadly disease. 35 percent is stunning, but of course we’re still counting months. It’s not that you go from 12 months to 12 years on average.

But I guess going back to your earlier question, that shows the power of metabolic health and poor metabolic health and what might be possible. What is absolutely possible is reversing type 2 diabetes, losing weight, preventing liver disease.

We didn’t even talk about kidney disease and other things. But the fact that we can drive outcomes even with some cancers, and I will say, “some cancers.” I can’t say, “Oh, nutrition can cure cancer.” Not quite.

But poor metabolic health and in our case, we didn’t really define the poor metabolic health in the beginning, but essentially it’s high glucose levels, high fasting insulin levels and what you then might call insulin resistance. Your body’s primarily burning sugar and you’re constantly hungry, you’re constantly craving. So even if you’re 100 pounds overweight, you’re hungry and you want to eat more of that stuff. That’s the typical state of poor metabolic health.

And then it manifests itself with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease often, eventually chronic kidney disease and many other things.

And seems like many cancers thrive in that kind of environment, in that kind of poor metabolic health.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I don’t think that’s controversial. I mean, maybe look, says the non-doctor to the non-doctor, but I mean, certain cancers, not all, are very glycolytic, right?

Sami Inkinen: Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, they’re really dependent on a steady fuel of sugar to simplify it. Dom, I think for people who want to hear more on that, also Dominic D’Agostino has spoken about it quite a bit in a couple of my conversations with him.

So what I want to ask you about, because we’ve teased it a little bit, the Virta nutrition therapy. I’m looking at the Virta quick guide right now. If you don’t mind, I’ll just kind of lay out some of it, right?

Sami Inkinen: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Because for me, this is where probably the magic is embedded. And I want to learn more about how you guys get the compliance, the adherence that you do. Because that to me has always been this very elusive, I don’t want to say missing link, but challenging link with anything approaching what we might consider a ketogenic diet.

And I want you to also dispel if I’m making a false equivalence with the ketogenic diet, but you have curb your carbohydrates, aim to begin with around 30 grams per day just as needed.

And you have some very important stuff in here, right? Measure total carbs, not net carbs. This is where people try sometimes outsmart themselves, and then you give examples of what that can look like. And then building your plate, what does an actual meal plate look like? Non-starchy vegetables, moderate protein, added fat, salt and extras, et cetera.

So I’d love for you to describe what you have found to work when you are getting people started, and just what you’ve picked up over time in terms of the most helpful components. I was going to say ingredients, but not food ingredients. Ingredients for getting people to adhere to these diets, right?

Because my assumption, which may be incorrect is, “Okay, I, Tim Ferriss, I can go to Whole Foods and buy salmon and vegetables and this and that.” But a lot of people in economically depressed circumstances or areas or fill in the blank buy a lot of their what some people would consider unhealthy food because it’s very inexpensive and it’s readily available.

And having spent time around a number of Native American reservations, it’s like, “Man, there are food deserts in the United States.”

What have you found, what have you learned over the course? Because your data set is so incredible. I mean, it’s just like such a rich and amazing data set. What have you learned about helping with adherence and compliance, or modifying the diet itself?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Well, I will bracket, you said we have big dataset. We absolutely have the largest dataset of metabolic disease reversal in the world, millions of patient years of data and data points from each patient every single day. Not just qualitative information, but blood biomarkers.

Yeah, let me try to peel the onion to answer your question, because a lot goes into it. I guess just to take a step back, yes, we use nutrition, individualized nutrition as the core therapy to treat our patients. It is our own protocol.

I say “our own protocol” because any kind of generic label that you put into it, people go to Google and they Google and they can go wrong in 1,000 different ways. So anyway, so we use our own protocol.

But yes, to address and reverse insulin resistance, you do have to reduce your total carbohydrate intake. And we have dose response curves to know that the more and the better you do it, the better outcomes you typically see.

But that’s sort of number one thing I will say that yes, we use nutrition as a therapy to reverse metabolic disease. And I will say that as a physicist, using nutrition as a drug or as a therapy is harder than nuclear physics.

Why? For all the reasons you mentioned. Because every person makes a medical decision three to four times a day, that’s when you eat. It’s different today versus tomorrow, and then it’s different between individuals. So it is a very, very hard puzzle to solve. Fortunately, computers and software is very helpful about that. So that’s one, individualized nutrition.

Number two, what does it take, and how do we approach? Key piece, even if you know exactly what somebody should eat, is you need the support system. And I guess that’s my tech background with Trulia and other things that comes to play that everything we do, we do virtually.

So what we can do is we can monitor your biomarkers remotely. We give you tools to do that. We can track blood ketones, blood glucose, your weight, and other things. And then we have actual real medical doctors, not me, who are full-time employees who monitor you, and coaches who can then make adjustments.

Tim Ferriss: Is that collected through continuous — 

Sami Inkinen: Collected devices — 

Tim Ferriss: — monitors? Is it also blood draws, or is it mostly some type of continuous monitoring?

Sami Inkinen: It’s all of the above. Some patients get a CGM and some it’s a finger prick. But not everybody gets a CGM, depends on the situation. We do lab draws one to two times a year, so that obviously can’t happen daily.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I got it.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: With the finger prick, that’s some type of Bluetooth-enabled thing that — 

Sami Inkinen: Automatically.

Tim Ferriss: — automatically syncs the data.

Sami Inkinen: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: So they’re not manually having to enter any values.

Sami Inkinen: No, exactly. It goes to the cloud and gets to us.

And I say that because if you say, “Oh, here’s how to eat. Here’s a brochure or a book or something,” it’s kind of like telling a car driver, “Just hold onto the steering wheel straight. It’s going to be awesome. Here’s brake and gas pedal.”

And you know what’s going to happen. The car is going to beautifully stay on the road until the first corner. It’s like, “Ooh, forgot to mention that we may need to adjust, turn left, turn right.”

And so it’s the same thing with nutrition, that unless you have this kind of a platform, there’s constant adjustments and constant adjustment. It’s kind of like a self-driving car. But then if you have the cameras, white line and yellow line align, and you kind of try to keep it in between.

So with the remote monitoring, we can try to keep you between the yellow and the white line. So that’s the second thing.

The third piece for adherence, we start talking about nutrition. The most important thing early is to understand the constraints that a person has. I’ll give you silly examples.

If we tell a vegan to have bacon and eggs for breakfast, you know what happens? They’re going to say, “F-U-C-K, I’m out.” Right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Sami Inkinen: There’s no way to convince a vegan to have bacon and eggs for breakfast, and vice versa. There’s other things, obviously if you are, we work with US Foods, large kind of actual food delivery, food service, is truck drivers. Their concept of a lunch is McDonald’s.

We can’t tell them, “Oh, here’s the list, go shop Whole Foods or Erewhon, and then go home and cook at home.” It’s like, “Okay, McDonald’s it is. We’re going to reverse your diabetes on McDonald’s diet.” And by the way, we do that. 

Tim Ferriss: I don’t want that to get buried.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But what are some sample meals that people might get at a McDonald’s or something like that?

Sami Inkinen: Perfect. Yeah. So that’s the next step with food, and maybe I’ll give an example. It’s like, “Okay, now that we know you are a truck driver and you will never become a vegan, you can never become a vegan.” Obviously I’m tongue in cheek here, but most of them don’t.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m not a vegan either.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I’m not sure if you’re probably not either, right?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. And by the way, we have many, many successful vegan patients.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sami Inkinen: So I know, sorry if I started a diet war here, but — okay, example, you truck drive. Okay, so McDonald’s it is, it may not be the pinnacle of health. But we can reverse your metabolic disease with that. And let’s forget the organics, we’ll do that later if you can. Here’s what you do.

You go there, say, “All right, well, you want your burger, maybe you even add extra cheese. But please ask them to drop the bun and just have a lettuce wrap, get that.

“Then you go to the condiments. Yeah, mayo might be fine, but don’t take the ketchup because we can educate you and tell you that ketchup is colored sugar. You can’t have that.

“Yeah, you want your soda. You really want your soda, water is not enough? Okay, so go for the Diet Coke. Don’t take the soda with the sugar.”

Again, somebody’s listening like, “Oh, Diet Coke’s bad for you.” I totally agree. I’d rather drink water. But again, let’s not let perfection be the enemy of progress.

So that would be a McDonald’s kind of a session, and off you go.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Sami Inkinen: So that’s the second step with food. And then the third one is really empowering the patients with — we talk about AI, like AI-based tools.

You go to a restaurant, or you’re trying to cook something. You can take a picture and we instantaneously say like, “Hey, what kind of adjustments should you make?” and tie that to your actual situation. So how do you change that?

And this happens every day, two, three, four times a day. And that’s the self-driving car analogy, that the car that goes straight is fantastic until you have a corner. And that’s 100 percent of the diets in America today. You can’t do one size fits all.

And then before you ask a follow-up question, this is mind-blowing for people, and ties to your earlier question as well.

The adherence of Virta patients, again, which are real Americans, not Samis, real Americans, is twice as high at one year as taking a GLP-1 drug.

We have 83 percent adherence retention of patients at one year, and look at any of the publicly available data. People stick to GLP-1s like 40 percent, maybe 50 percent, 30 to 50 percent. Why is that?

Number one reason is the user-perceived benefits. It’s like, “I can’t believe I feel this good. I can’t believe I’ve lost 35 pounds. I can’t believe I don’t need to stick the insulin needle to my body.”

And the stories that we hear from people is like, “I’m 65, I thought I don’t see my grandkids grow. Now I see, and I have so much energy that I’m gardening the first time in 20 years,” or whatever that is.

And you know this. When you’re feeling really, really bad, you’re sick and everything’s hurting, and then that suddenly goes away, that’s like life is freaking awesome.

Tim Ferriss: It is.

Sami Inkinen: And so I think the number one reason is the benefits are so strong versus a calorie-restricted diet where you’re like, “This sucks, but I’m going to look good on a beach at least for a week.”

Tim Ferriss: How do the experience of benefits l differ from GLP-1s? Just because we’re segueing directly from that, and certainly a lot of people listening will either directly themselves have experienced or know someone who has lost 35 pounds and feels more energy because the GLP-1s do make you slightly more ketotic.

For the people who are wondering why they might feel sharper, that’s actually one very plausible piece of the puzzle.

But how do the perceived benefits differ in a way? And maybe there’s more to explain it, I’m sure there is, the two times GLP-1 adherence at one year. I guess that’s what you said, right?

Sami Inkinen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m just trying to identify where those two interventions diverge.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, absolutely. First, I will say our Virta providers prescribe both oral and injectable GLP-1s when appropriate and/or necessary. And when our client, the plan sponsors like an employer, health plan have them in a plan design.

So I just wanted to mention that so that nobody thinks, “Oh, this is some sort of nutrition dogma.” No, there’s effective pharmaceuticals and especially GLP-1s in obesity and metabolic disease context are way better than the 1980s and ’90s diet pills. So it’s a real, real innovation.

Tim Ferriss: You guys don’t prescribe Fen-Phen to your patients?

Sami Inkinen: We don’t. We don’t. By the way, there are companies that do that to lower cost of GLP-1s, but absolutely we don’t do that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Sami Inkinen: I’ll start from very basics. The GLP-1s 100 percent affect your appetite. They change how much you eat, so you eat less, but they alone don’t change what you eat. So that’s a starting point.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Sami Inkinen: And if you don’t change what you eat, you’re not going to be perfectly or even optimally metabolically healthy. And so one example is you lower appetite, you eat less.

But the second you come off these drugs, all the data shows that your weight skyrockets. And more likely than not, you gain fat and you’ve lost pounds of muscle.

By the way, we’ve shown the patients who come to us on GLP-1s, and once they discontinue the drug for whatever reason, by personal choice or side effects, we’ve been able to sustain that weight loss. This is published in peer-reviewed data, 18 months out. And soon we will have even longer-term data. But 18 months, no weight regain. Why? Because we start changing what you eat while you’re on the drug, and if you do that.

But to sharpen the point to your question, obviously we know the side effects of healthy nutrition: none. Every drug has side effects. So that’s one thing. And these GLP-1s are tolerated much better than many, many other drugs. But there’s a lot of things, nausea and stomach issues.

And it’s interesting, we’ve surveyed the patients who are on GLP-1s in our care. 80 percent of them say, “I either want to severely reduce the dependence on these drugs, or get completely off of them.”

So this idea which is prevalent, at least in the press, “Americans just want to take a pill, and keep taking the pill for the rest of their lives.” Most people, if given the choice, if given the choice to be healthy without, they don’t want to be taking drugs.

So I guess hopefully that answers the question of what are the user-perceived benefits? Well, there’s no user side effects when you’re eating healthy food. But with the drug, you usually have that.

I’m not the expert to talk to how energy levels or excitement or mood and things like that change. I think lots of data will come out when millions of people on these GLP-1s for years, but yeah, eager to see what happens.

But there’s definitely a lot of things to be fully aware, like lean body mass in elderly populations, 65 and plus people who lose a lot of weight on GLP-1s, very alarming reports coming out.

Tim Ferriss: I want to get granular again with just a hypothetical example of a vegan, because you mentioned this. This word has come up a couple of times.

And in a way, in my mind, I’ve always envisioned that as a tougher nut to crack than McDonald’s, just because so many — how should I put this?

This is true across the board if you just walk through any grocery store, including Whole Foods. There are a lot of junk foods masquerading as health foods, which are full of ingredients that are terrible for you. Incredibly high glycemic, meaning they’re going to spike your blood sugar.

Maybe we could talk about glycemic index versus glycemic load. But suffice to say if you eat it and you check your blood sugar within 90 minutes, it’s going to be a lot higher. And this seems to be true of a lot of vegetarian or vegan food also.

So what would be an example of how a diet plan, or let’s just say a meal or a day of meals for a vegan, let’s just say, on the Virta program?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Yeah. Again, I will say everything has to be individualized. But to use average figures, we rarely have to massively change protein intake for our patients.

Maybe surprisingly to some people, the standard of American diet has a, give or take, maybe it’s a little bit on a low side, but more or less the right amount of protein. And by the way, that’s the most expensive macronutrient.

So sometimes people are like, “Oh, when you start treating your patients, it must be so much more expensive.” Well, actually protein is the most expensive. We rarely changed that a lot.

In vegan context, that’s probably the hardest thing to get right, to get sufficient amount of protein. And you really have to get at least 1.2 grams per kilo, kilo. One kilo is 2.2 pounds of protein proline or normal body weight mass. So if you’re 80-kilo person, which is 176 pounds, that would be a kind of lean person, 100 grams of protein a day is minimum you have to.

So that’s probably the hardest, and vegans know this very well. You have to look at nuts and tofu and may need to rely on soy, and are you willing to eat eggs? But that would be one.

So we figure out again with the patient like, “Okay, what are you willing to eat? Are you able to have dairy?” Some people are okay, some not. But that’s probably the hardest usually to make sure that people get adequate protein.

And protein is really essentially it’s the only macronutrient that doesn’t really store itself. So you have to get it couple of times, two to three times a day to maintain your body mass.

Then after that, it’s actually interesting. To get the sufficient calories if there’s a lot of crap vegan food, meaning sugar or cornflakes or whatever, then we start replacing those with healthy fats.

And this is also misconstrued like, “Oh, it must be so expensive because corn is subsidized, or corn syrup is subsidized. Hence, you can have unlimited amount of corn calories, cost nothing.”

Well, guess what? You can buy 9,000 calories, so one liter of high-quality olive oil from Costco for, what does it cost, two bucks? So it’s a misconception. The cheap subsidized sugar calories can actually be replaced at the same cost.

Now if you’re very, very overweight, you don’t want to be replacing those calories because guess what? You want your body to give the fat calories. And then around the kind of healthy vegan food, then we guide the patient towards leafier, less starchy, vegetable options. So you can eat very sumptuous vegan food. I think we even have, because this was a misconception in our very early days, so we’ve been pretty vocal.

We have bunch of patients who are vegan. If somebody Googles “Virta Health on vegan diet” or something, there’s a couple of our patients have openly shared what they eat, but it’s totally manageable. In fact, you just end up throwing out the window the crap vegan food, so I don’t know — sugar-frosted cornflakes would be a perfect example of that. Orange juice or something like that, which I love oranges, but orange juice is essentially soda.

Tim Ferriss: Tell me if I’m hearing this correctly. It sounds like, if you reduce the high glycemic junk that someone is consuming, you’re going to over time improve metabolic health, right? But is it fair to say that, for instance, the truck driver who’s eating the lettuce wrapped cheeseburgers and drinking Diet Coke, man, you do that for, depending on the size of the person and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, obviously, if it’s a male, I don’t know, maybe in three to five days, that person’s probably clocking in at, who knows, 0.7 plus millimolars. I’m not sure how you say it.

Ketones, right? Beta-hydroxybutyrate, I would imagine, but in the vegan example, maybe you’re simply reducing the glycemic load, but maybe not getting deeply into ketosis, just because the question in my mind was related to the protein, right? How do you consume tofu, tempeh, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera while keeping your total carb count low? It doesn’t immediately seem possible to me, unless they’re willing to eat eggs, but if we take eggs off the table, then it seems like you can significantly improve metabolic health, but it may not be through the vehicle of what would technically be considered ketogenic. Is that fair to say?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. That’s why We don’t really use the ketogenic — 

Tim Ferriss: The K words?

Sami Inkinen: Again, for two main reasons. One, you Google it, and you get your version that you get the love or hate, and likely it’s wrong, and then two is it’s all on a spectrum or kind of a dose response curve, and we never want to let perfection be the enemy of progress. The less you have hunger and cravings and the better you feel, more sustainable and easier everything is, including just life. That’s what we teach to our patients, and you can kind of be anywhere in the dose response curve and be successful.

The further you are, we can pretty much predict not just your health outcomes here out, but even the healthcare cost savings, which is sort of insane, because drug companies do these trials. You take one pill, this is what happens. You take two pills, this, and then you kind of want to optimize where you want to be on a curve. Our therapy is no different, and we show this to people. We actually say, “It’s your choice, and you get here,” but the beauty is that we empower people so they can make their choice. Then, the beauty also is that you don’t have to be perfect, and you can still be very, very successful. Average diet is so bad, honestly, that it’s relatively easy to make your own progress.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The Standard American Diet, SAD.

Sami Inkinen: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: I just love that the acronym is SAD. It’s so good. Whoever came up with that, God bless you. What a great acronym. I want to get back to your training, so we’re going to get off of Virta in a moment, but I want to say, just for people who maybe have heard the last few conversations I’ve had with Dominic, I am deeply interested in ketosis, the ketogenic diet, and exogenous ketones, but I have seen, I think Virta is approaching this the right way with a greater degree of flexibility. I would also just point to, for instance, the slow carb diet and The 4-Hour Body. It is not a ketogenic diet, right? You’re consuming legumes, you’re consuming a lot of fiber in the form of beans or lentils, et cetera.

It is not ketogenic in any way, but it does reduce or eliminate processed food. It eliminates most starchy carbohydrates, except for one day a week, and the types of transformations that you can see metabolically are just remarkable. Granted, that is a book, so by nature of its format it is a kind of on size, hopefully, fits most, whereas Virta is much more adaptable and customized for the left right turns that you described, but I wanted to just underscore the fact that I am not a keto purist by any stretch of the imagination, and most of the time I am not in ketosis, although I do spend time in that range. 

I want to hop from Virta to a question around training. So, just in brief, and I’m not sure this number even exists, but what is it an average non-athlete VO2 max, and what is your VO2 max?

Sami Inkinen: I’m freaking old by the way, I just turned — Do you know how old I am?

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know how old you are. You’ve got those impeccable Finnish genetics. I have no idea.

Sami Inkinen: Oh, my God. I turned 50 in December.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, nice. Congratulations.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, so I’m very, very old. This is at least what my — 

Tim Ferriss: You’re not that old.

Sami Inkinen: — two kids tell me, who are like 10 or something, but I think at this age in particular, or even like a 30-year-old fit male, VO2 max is measured relative to your body weight, so it’s how much oxygen you can consume, your body can utilize, so it’s milliliters per kilo per minute. I think it’s maybe 40.

Tim Ferriss: Would be on the average side?

Sami Inkinen: 40 maybe or 35 or 40 or 45. Yeah, my measure is more than 80 milliliters. It’s pretty high, very high. The caveat is it was measured a couple of years ago, so it’s probably a little bit lower today, because the VO2 max tends to go a little bit down as you age. You can still kind of increase the percentage of that, that you can produce for five or 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, but it’s kind of very, very high. I think the highest ever method recently, it’s more than 100, but if you’re 90, you’re kind of Olympic. 85 to 90 gets you to kind of Olympic podium in endurance sports, can catch, and again, that’s not the one and only measure. There’s a lot of other things, but if you’re above 90, you should not be doing podcasts. You should be in the Olympics.

Tim Ferriss: Well, good news, bad news. I’m going to stick with the podcasting. I’m definitely not above 90. The reason I’m bringing this up is that, in conversations with my doctors and people I really trust, as well as a number of podcast guests, like Dr. Tommy Wood, who is a neuroscientist and phenomenal athlete also, the topic of endurance training, as it factors in, I hesitate to use some of these labels, but endurance/aerobic training, as it factors in, you’ll see very quickly why I’m struggling with terms, factors into health span and longevity. It’s become a topic du jour in the last handful of years in particular.

The way it’s been presented to me is, and I’m particularly interested in this for its implications for cognitive health and potential volumetric changes in the hippocampus and so on with certain types of training, given that I have Alzheimer’s in my family, but the way I’m taught to think about it is that, let’s just say zone two is the base of the pyramid and then VO2 max is the height of the pyramid, and you’re trying to maximize the total surface area/size of that two-dimensional pyramid, and I will confess, I’m very ashamed to confess, I hate sitting on a stationary bike. I absolutely loathe it. I find it so boring.

I also just see these long term changes in the sort of kyphosis, like the hunchback postures of some long-term cyclists, and I want nothing to do with that. I have enough back issues as it is. So, my question for you is, when you’re trying to get a normy to do more endurance-like training, and I am on the path. I have some spinal issues with the lumbar and sacral kind of segments of the spine, which I won’t bore everybody with right now, but I’m hoping to get to a point where I can actually do sports I enjoy, like jiu-jitsu or other things which, at least for high intensity interval training, mimic something like the Norwegian four by four really well, right?

I could do a round of four minutes, take three minutes off, do another round of four minutes, and maybe it’s four minutes on, four minutes off or three minutes on, three minutes off, but close enough, right? If I’m doing it consistently, but as it stands right now, I can’t really do incline treadmill with, say, a ruck sack or something for zone two because of the hip extension and the issues that causes in the lower back, so despite my best efforts to avoid the stationary bike, I keep on ending up on this damn stationary bike. And road biking just scares me too much with the traffic, say, in a place like Austin. Everyone I know here who has done street, road biking for more than a handful of years has had some type of accident.

What would be your advice for someone who’s trying to get, literally, back in the saddle to do some training? How do you think about this type of training, as it fits into health span and so on? Because I’m not intrinsically someone who enjoys this particular type of training. I remember for The 4-Hour Body, I was in South Africa at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, and they did a muscle biopsy of my thigh, my quadricep, my vastus lateralis, and they looked at all the enzymes. I can’t imitate a good quality, strong South African accent. It’s pretty good. It’s a great accent, but “years.” I can’t even say “years.” That’s how you ferret out the South Africans, or the North English.

But the point is he came back and he showed me these charts of enzymes like citrate synthase, which seem to be correlated to endurance capacity. Tertius, I think that was his name. He said, “Basically, this flat line is Homer Simpson, and here is your line, which is like infinitely below Homer Simpson,” so I don’t think I’m very well-built for this stuff. This was a long litany of complaints, but how would you suggest I think about this kind of training, right? Because it seems important. I’m not sure how to make it more interesting. I do find the interval stuff a little more compelling, and it keeps my attention more than the zone two, but it seems like you kind of want to do both. What are your thoughts? I’m just turning this into a therapy session.

Sami Inkinen: Sure. Asking the non-coach a coaching question. My favorite topic, pretending to be an expert.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but you’ve dealt with coaches.

Sami Inkinen: I will take it. I will take it. Yeah, so my approach, I’ve had a coach, and then, essentially, 95 percent of my life I’ve self coached myself, because I take it as an interesting puzzle to try to learn, and then surprise, surprise, as an entrepreneur I don’t really want to be told what to do, so I ended up self coaching. Based on that experience and with that caveat, first of all, on a high level, my approach, basically, in everything in business, metabolic health training is kind of nailed the basics, less marginal gains and crazy. I know it’s boring and doesn’t sell a lot of supplements and stuff, but it’s like nail the basics, less marginal gains and crazy.

When you do that, that’s when you actually get the 99 percent of the results. For training, specifically, also whatever you want to accomplish, and you’ve done a lot of sports and lifting, the very basics are very simple. It’s progressive overload and specificity. If you don’t have progressive overload, even if it’s just the walking or hiking or running, you aren’t going to get better. Initially, when you’ve done nothing, come off the couch, it’s like very easy progressive overload. It’s like do anything, and you get better, and then the other one is just the sort of specificity. If you want to be a sprinter, you can’t train like a marathon runner and vice versa.

If you want to squat a lot, bench press isn’t going to help a lot, so it’s literally those principles that I use, but to give specific advice to you, what you just said, to get the cardiovascular stimuli, you obviously have to get your muscles burning oxygen, using oxygen and then burning either fat or carbs and your heart rate up, so you need to do something for that. The reason cycling or any kind of a bike thing is so widely used, it doesn’t take space, and if it’s indoors, it’s very safe, and it’s low impact. It’s low impact. One thing I would say for the bike is, and Austin has a lot of good bike stores, shout out to Mellow Johnny’s and others. 

Tim Ferriss: I have two indoor bikes upstairs.

Sami Inkinen: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: One was set up by tech from Mellow Johnny’s, so I’ve got the bike.

Sami Inkinen: There you go. So, one is bike fit, so if there’s someone who’s like a PT and a bike fitter, and say, “Hey, I have these XYZ issues. Fit this bike to specifically work for me as much as I hate it,” so that’s one thing where you could get the handlebar crazy high or something like that, maybe even do a lot of standing. By the way, those are fun workouts to kind of, I don’t know, do a three-minute standing, three-minute seated, three-minute standing, whatever. So, that would be one thing to consider for the bike, that you get a fit that’s specifically for your back issues. It may not be the world’s most aerodynamic, but if it’s stationary bike, who cares? So, that’s one. The other thing, you don’t have a lot of snow around, but I know you occasionally go to places with snow. Nordic skiing and sort of skinning, obviously fantastic. Fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: Yes.

Sami Inkinen: Fantastic.

Tim Ferriss: Skinning, I love. I love skinning. If I’m outside, I’m not going to get hit by a car. If I could do skinning every day, I would, and my back actually loves it. So yes, I’m 100 percent behind skinning.

Sami Inkinen: Then, of course, often people who’ve kind of totally destroyed their knees and hips, it’s swimming, which I hate swimming personally, as a traveler. Well, elements of it are beautiful. You go underwater, and it’s kind of like meditation, but more than 20 minutes, and it’s like, “Please give me a break.”

Tim Ferriss: See, I will take the swimming. I’ll take the swimming over the cycling. I went and did some swimming yesterday, so I’m up for the swimming.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Then, if you live in a mountains, it’s very, very easy to get sort of zone one, zone two by just walking, even without actual weight, because you go up, up, and sort of speed walk. Then, maybe the last one I say, if you have the self-confidence to not feel too embarrassed, is Nordic walking. So, Nordic skiers do summertime. You either walk or run with them, but you basically have poles and you go uphill. You’ll probably get an extra 10 heartbeat and kind of higher level exercise.

Tim Ferriss: So, it’s kind of like jogging uphill with poles?

Sami Inkinen: Poles, poles. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Sami Inkinen: Obviously, you could just walk and then use them.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I could get into that. I use poles. Yeah, I could get into that.

Sami Inkinen: Then, to the sort of VO2 max, so building a better aerobic engine in like zone two does help your VO2 max two, and then of course, if you lower your body fat, body weight, the kind of denominator in the calculation improves, but specifically VO2 max training, you actually get the adaptation pretty quickly. I don’t do it all the time, crazy amount, because it can also burn you out. The two most common ways to really hit VO2 max is either you do sort of 30 seconds on and offs, like you go very hard, and then 30 second easy, but then essentially you kind of keep hitting the VO2 max oxygen consumption or sort of two to four minutes all out. They’re very, very hard, or two to three minutes all out, and then you take three minutes off and you do that whatever, four or five minutes, four or five times. Those are the most effective, I would say, and typical ways to specifically get your VO2 max up, but they can burn you out if you do too many of those.

And so, for me, personally, what I do typically closer to like a specific event or race, it may be like three weeks, where I do two of them a week, so just like six workouts. Then, I drop it to, I don’t know, one every two weeks or something. You can burn out and you can’t keep growing, and the VO2 max isn’t just going to infinitely keep going up. Bad news. And so, maybe that’s how I think about it. Find a sport where you can comfortably and enjoyably do an hour or so of cardio, whatever that is, and then this would be my advice. Think strategically when you do your VO2 block, and that could be just, I don’t know, three weeks or maybe it’s two weeks every quarter or something like that, and then the maintenance dose, again, I’m using dangerous terms here, because who knows what the optimal dose is? But constantly pushing the VO2 max, I think it’s just the injury risk, it burns you out, and it’s not going to do anything, because once you reach your VO2 max ceiling, you kind of are there, so there you go.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so a broader question I want to ask you about is what exercise dogma or sacred cows you have stress tested? Because I was looking at, this is a blog post that you wrote, this is a while ago, and I actually don’t have written down here the title, but it’s about hacking your running speed in four weeks. I’m tempted to read this whole thing, but I’ll just read some of it, right? So, my total running time averaged one hour, 50 minutes per week. It’s a four-step protocol for four weeks. So first, and I won’t read all of this, but develop muscle endurance by running 10 to 15 minutes every day, right? That might surprise people, because it’s like, “That’s more achievable than I would have expected.” You contrast that with the conventional approach of doing a long run once a week and increasing the distance each week, so I’m not going to steal the thunder.

We could comment on this as an example, but then broadly speaking, just kind of like unfounded sacred cows, because man, there are so many everywhere, not just an exercise, but everywhere. Number two, build your cardiovascular engine with all out, I think this is 10 by one-minute set, once a week, on a treadmill for regulating effort, right? And so, the total workout is less than 35 minutes, and you give links to scientific evidence. Number three, plyometrics for quick improvements in running efficiency. Even highly trained endurance runners seem to improve their running times in a few weeks of plyometrics, which is not that much, right? Roughly five-minute routine, three times a week, three times 12 explosive box jumps, three times 12 jumps for max height, right? Which is sometimes replaced with skipping into a hill. I don’t know what skipping into a hill is. Maybe you can explain that. This approach took 40 seconds or roughly 10 percent per mile off my best running speed in four weeks, leading up to a competition. Typically, a five percent improvement per year is a huge jump.

I mean, that’s kind of bananas. Then, you also added the note on, simultaneously gained about a pound or two of body weight, so my speed gain wasn’t due to change in body weight. This seems to, and I just confessed that I hate endurance stuff, so I’m really wading into the deep end of my ignorance pool here, but this seems to fly in the face of a lot of conventional recommendations, so I was hoping you can speak to anything that I mentioned, but also just broadly speaking, dogma in exercise because there’s so much crap, and there’s so many things that never really get stress tested in daily living, health, wellness, right? It’s like you hear all this crap all the time, where it’s like, “You only use 10 percent of your brain.” That’s not true. Evolution wouldn’t allow that to be the case, right? Drink to eight glasses of water a day. It’s like, “Well, yeah. It really kind of depends, right?” I mean, there’s so many recommendations you hear over and over again, so what have you uncovered in terms of dogmas?

Sami Inkinen: Well, first of all, that particular like, “Oh, my God. I need to get fast and running,” I wanted to do a triathlon, this is already a couple of years ago, actually, just about 10 years ago, wanted to do a triathlon, and I was training to row across the Pacific Ocean with my wife in a row boat, which is a whole other conversation we can have. I had stopped kind of running, and I was lifting weights, doing a lot of front squats. I was weighing 200 pounds, and like right now, I’m kind of in a cycling team, so my weight’s like 177 pounds. I was 23 pounds heavier.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a lot heavier.

Sami Inkinen: And I was like, “Whoa, how do I go from zero to hero? I want to be the Tim Ferriss of running. How do I hack this?”

Tim Ferriss: You don’t want to be the Tim Ferriss of running, I can tell you. That is my weak, Achilles heel.

Sami Inkinen: So how do I hack this? In that approach, basically, I wanted to slice and dice the running performance or at least the minimum, fancy, Silicon Valley term, first principles, but into contributing parts, like what are the one or two, three things you need to have? One, muscular endurance. You can be cardiovascularly fit, but go and run a downhill for 30 minutes or even 10 minutes. Your legs are noodles. You can’t continue running, so you need minimum dose for muscular endurance so that your legs don’t fall apart, and I think I was running for a triathlon that had a half a marathon, so 13 miles, 13 by one miles to run, so muscular endurance was one. 

Then there was the efficiency you mentioned and so forth, but anyways, to go back to the actual, broader question, a couple of things for me. Especially for endurance sports, triathlon and for a marathon running and other things, one is like massive load and volume, and you kind of get more and more tired over like six weeks, eight weeks, maybe twelve weeks.

Then, you taper for two or three weeks, and you hope that after your last crazy week, in two or three weeks, you dig yourself out of the hole, and then you are super-fast on a race day. It’s like, literally, you’re on a knife’s edge all the time, and I completely changed that in the last four or five years I was really competing in triathlon, which is I want to be ready to race almost at the end of every week, meaning progressive overload but stay vibrant, and no matter how hard of a workout I do, say, on a Saturday or Sunday, by Wednesday I have to be ready to hit hard and feel like I can do almost like my best numbers. Personally, I found that more effective, avoided any kind of over-training, and I think when you’re lifting weights at the gym, this concept is much easier to crash.

It’s like, let’s say do your bench press, and for three weeks your reps or weight just keeps going down, everybody would be like, “What the F? Clearly I’m not either eating enough or I’m lifting too often,” but endurance athletes do exactly that. They kind of keep grinding, grinding, grinding. They get more tired. Then, they hope they get out of the hole, so that would be one thing that, basically, training in a way where you progressive overload, you hit your body, but then in sort of three to four days, you are back better, faster, stronger than ever, and then you keep repeating that. Personally, I found that, at least for myself, way safer, way more objective, and I always knew, “Oh. I’m getting stronger,” “oh. I’m getting more tired,” “All right. I’m going to take two days off, or maybe I have a full rest week,” so I would say that’s one thing.

The second thing, again, I’m not a running coach, a running expert per se, but especially if you have a multi-sport approach, it’s way better to train the cardiovascular engine on a low impact machine, so cycling. If you’re doing triathlon, I’ve done more than 10 full distance iron mans, and fastest was eight hours, 24 minutes, which is pretty fast for an amateur, especially before all the aerodynamic gains that people now have on bikes, so maybe I could take 10, 15 minutes off of that, but 824 is pretty fast. I run a 256 marathon off the bike. I think it was 256, two hours, 56 minutes after the swim and the bike. So, reasonably fast, but my longest run, to be able to run a marathon in a triathlon, was usually one hour, 20 minutes, which is like, I don’t know, nine or 10 miles, so just as an example, that would be the second thing.I don’t think you need specificity in that sense.

If you need to build a cardiovascular engine, do it in a way that doesn’t beat your body down, so like cycling versus running. I think that would be one thing, and then let’s leave the nutrition aside, but that’s like a war, like how much should you eat carbs versus this, and should you do carb loading and all that? Needless to say, I’m personally a huge believer that, as long as you sort of fuel the work while you do it, you don’t have to gain, because glycogen stores three grams of water, so if you have 600 grams, let’s just say 600 grams of carbs glycogen in your body, so that’s 2,400 calories, you have another 1,800 grams of water, so it’s 2.4 kilos, so that’s five or six pounds if you’re like fully loaded. I haven’t found, even for very long distance, you don’t need to gain five or six pounds. If you drip feed and fuel the actual work, you get to the same results. Controversial statement, but that’s my experience.

Tim Ferriss: I recommend people read the blog post also, and since you mentioned it and we’re probably not going to go for a six-hour conversation, I can’t not mention the rowing 2,400 plus miles with your wife. I think that was 43 days plus? 43 days, three hours, something like that, which sounds like, I mean, it really sounds like a divorce camp to me, and we could spend another three hours just talking about this insane decision to row for that. It was way more. Yeah, 2,750 miles roughly from California to Hawaii. I mean, the flight itself is pretty long from Hawaii, but my question is around, you Domestic peace or — 

Sami Inkinen: Violence, violence.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, minimizing violence. I was looking at this piece in USA Today, and it says that you had a written and signed formal document that not only described how you would treat each other in the journey, but even how you would respond to specific complaints and gripes. It’s like the only thing more Sami than rowing almost 3,000 miles is having this document. I wanted to hear about this document, and if it was as helpful as you hoped it would be and also anything else that you guys figured out in terms of not killing each other over that period of time being stuck on a boat.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Well, for listeners, just the context is, indeed, it’s 2,400 nautical miles from Monterey, California to Hawaii, Waikiki Beach, the shortest distance, but weather wasn’t really our friend. So we ended up doing 2,750 nautical miles. And I think it was 45 days and three hours, but who’s counting? But essentially a month and a half, almost seven weeks of rowing with my wife and completely unsupported.

I just want to be clear, no helicopters, no follow boats. There weren’t submarines around us and helicopters dropping bonbons. So it was just two of us. First of all, there’s so many life lessons and if you, Tim, are fortunate to find a woman of your life, that’s definitely a way to test the relationship’s longevity. And if you survive it both and come out together, and I will say this, we had been married for four years. We had known each other for six years. Having gone through that experience and hopping off the boat on a platform on Waikiki Beach and hugging my wife, that still is the sweetest moment in my life.

Hugging her and knowing there’s only one person on this planet who knows exactly what we went through and it’s my freaking wife. And the fact that we got it through together, no amount of hardship is going to break this, including having kids. But anyways, so it certainly was life transforming experience many ways.

The document, it served two purposes. One, in a kind of preparation phase I maybe mistakenly wanted to make sure that my wife is 100 percent in. So I was like, “This is what it’s going to take. This isn’t show up in two weeks and start rowing. It’s going to be a halftime job for six months to even get physically ready and kind of train and know how to jump into survival suit. It’s a halftime job.” So part of the document was like, “I’m signing into this. I’m not going to give up.” Which sounds like husband is asking wife to do that, but yes, that’s me.

And then the other half was about behaviors on the boat and the most important piece of the document that served us very, very well is the following. Any and every decision once it’s made is water under the bridge because we had to make a lot of decisions around safety and navigation and do we go this and all of that. Lots of decisions every day, like what do we do today? And you would never know if that was the right decision because the weather changes. And it’s one thing to do that at home and then you go to work and you forget it, but you’re basically stuck in a small stinky box for 45 days. There’s unlimited opportunities to get back to it and kind of bicker about it. That was incredibly helpful and served us very well.

The one thing I will say, and then you can ask other questions, we had a lot of time, obviously 45 days, three hours. We slept about six, seven hours a day. So there’s 18 hours a day to talk, listen, be together, can’t escape, can’t go to the bathroom, can’t lock the door, go to the bedroom, you cannot. And so some of it was silent, some of it was we had to fill the airwaves and we had all kinds of questions to each other. And one of the questions my wife had to me was, I think we were running out of questions. She said, “Listen, of all our friends, if it wasn’t me, who would you marry?” And as a diligent engineer, I stepped into that trap and answered it going through friend by friend, landing on the very specific one. But anyways, that is a question no married or unmarried person should ever answer, but I answered.

Tim Ferriss: When you were done with your very thoughtful engineer’s response to that question, how did she respond? And later was she like, “Yeah, I just for whatever reason wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail into the boat and see what would happen.” I mean, what happened afterwards?

Sami Inkinen: I remember it vividly sadly. It was, “I can’t believe that’s the last one I don’t think.” And, yeah, I have to explain myself out of it. But, yeah, it was a life transforming trip during which I made several big life decisions, one of which we made together, which was to start a family, which also is a complicated, obviously big decision to have kids. And entering the boat, we were both convinced that life’s too good to be mess, to be destroyed with children. And we literally changed our minds within the hour at the same time independently, which is quite something.

Tim Ferriss: So you decided to start a family, meaning you made the decision to start a family on the boat, or you actually started trying to have a family on the boat?

Sami Inkinen: Both, actually. So I think we were about seven or 10 days into the trip. It was very, very stormy early. And I had had enough white space ruminate about life and it was like a lightning strike. I still cannot explain this feeling of like, I was in my 30s, what is there to do? I could start five more companies and I don’t know, put my name on the side of a hospital, which I don’t want. What’s the meaning? Essentially it’s an existential crisis. What can a human do? So what’s worthy of the life? And obviously there’s a number of things, but the lightning that hit me was, wow, can you imagine raising a child? That’s incredible. And I turned to my wife and said, “Listen, this is kind of weird because we’ve talked about this and we don’t want, but I just feel we should start a family.” And her immediate response was, “Well, I’ve been thinking about exactly the same for the last 24 hours, exactly the same last 24 hours.” And then and there it was, “This is it. It’s going to happen.”

And my wife happens to be even more decisive than I am. So we had an Iridium satellite phone. This is time way before Starlink, which works, but you can send like a text message barely, and she texted to her girlfriend who obviously wasn’t rowing and said, “Hey, I’m going to give you some data. Can you start tracking my ovulation cycle so you can tell us, text us back when is the exact timing?” And we should have tried on the boat, and I will say that was the least romantic moment for both of us. And the fun part of this story is there’s a little bit of a mystery, but we got off the boat just about 10 years and nine months ago now and my oldest daughter is 10 years old. So there’s a little bit of a mystery what happened and where it happened, but it’s very close.

Tim Ferriss: When you had that lightning strike, and you both very coincidentally or not had that lightning strike at roughly the same time, if you tried to explain it, do you think it was just the incredible isolation of the two of you? Was it your wife saying, “Oh, my God, I love Sami, but I need at least one other person to talk to?” If you had to try to explain it, even if it’s grasping for straws, what do you think led to that lightning strike?

Sami Inkinen: My guess is it was the clarity of thought when there were no distractions, like the clarity of thought. And I think there’s even a theory of the brain or the mind is kind of Bayesian, like you have priors, you have so many priors and you’re always stuck in your rigid thinking and obviously there’s science that you can kind of loosen those priors with psychedelics and other things and then you kind of see things clearly.

I honestly think that there was the ability to think cleanly and clearly and that’s kind of what contributed to it. And what I found in life is ultimately the human experience is 100 percent subjective and if you’re not in touch outside of that, it’s just computers and algorithms, but it’s 100 percent subjective. And when you really tune into the subjective experience, oftentimes the biggest decisions in life are based on that, like who do you marry?

By the way, I had a spreadsheet for that too, but then I realized, met my wife, I threw the spreadsheet out the window and that was it. Same thing about having children, like the truly meaningful decisions, they are ultimately subjective in nature. And when you’re truly in kind of touch, how does it land? How does it feel? The answer kind of comes there. And I feel in the middle of the rowboat, no email, no nothing, no job, no task, no to dos, all to space. It was much easier to be in touch with that kind of experience and feeling. So that’s the story I tell, but may or may not be true.

Tim Ferriss: Makes sense to me, especially after a period of time of being on the boat, right? Once you have the routine aspects more or less on autopilot. Of course you have the decisions about angle and direction and so on. But I want to come back to something you said, which was, sure, I could start five more companies or have your name on side of a hospital. I know as you mentioned, that’s not of interest.

It seems like you did not, this is from Forbes, so who knows, but did not own a car until you were 36, talks about basically how minimalist or some might even say, “Austere you have been for certainly a period of time.” And you’re talking about renting cars from Thrifty. It had the cheapest cars, had not bought a watch in 15 years, exercise clothes are all swag from various endurance competitions, which is funny because I sometimes get shit for wearing all the free swag that I have. Most of what I wear is free stuff that I’ve gotten.

I’ve never been accused of having a great fashion sense. And the rest of his casual wardrobe is 10 copies of the same t-shirts and jeans. Literally this shirt that I have, I basically have crew and v-neck. It’s the same brand. It’s the same shirt. It’s just different colors. So my question is, is that a Sami thing? Is it a Finnish thing? And where have you found the most value in — let me rephrase that. What are some examples of where you have found great value in overcoming that type of frugality, where spending money has actually produced a real improvement in your quality of life?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, interesting. Feels like a two-part question. Maybe the start is, I think I mentioned earlier that I find people say, “Sacrifice,” or you have to say, “No,” to so many things. I actually find saying, “No,” and focusing on the essential incredibly liberating and it’s kind of my happy place.

And so for some of these crap around and too much choice, what color t-shirt or what kind of clothes do I put on? I just find it very liberal. I love the fact that things are as simple as they are and sure life is way more complicated now than say 15 years ago, but I actually like not to clutter my life with money or anything else. Let’s put it that way and keep things very simple. And I’ll briefly give the example of the car story. So yes, I’ve had my driver license ever since it was possible in Finland.

It was 18, so 18. But actually I didn’t buy my first car. My wife bought it. Maybe I was 36 first because I had been renting Thrifty car from San Francisco Airport for eight years. Why that? It’s a funny story, but it illustrates my point. Well, first of all, I didn’t have any credit in America, and I needed a car after I came out to Stanford. For work reasons I could go to Thrifty and rent it. This was like 19 bucks a day, no credit, I could rent it. And then I realized this is amazing because I travel so much for work. I don’t need to wash the car. I don’t need to change the oils. It got broken into twice in San Francisco. I could just drive the 19 bucks a day car to airport and drive out with a new car.

I was like, “This is so convenient. No worries.” Ford Escape, that was my car of choice. And then one weekend I came home years, years later, and my wife’s like, “This is it. You need to own a car. You’re an adult. You can’t be renting all the time.” And she bought me the same Ford Escape that I had been renting for seven years. So that was it. So that’s kind of where it’s I think mainly coming from that the simplicity and convenience, focus on the things that matter. Sure, I have fancy bicycles to ride fast.

Tim Ferriss: What was the color? I want to know if you threw some flourish in there. Was it white or black or was it like electric blue with a racing stripe?

Sami Inkinen: Unfortunately didn’t have flames on the side, but it was blue, the one that she bought.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I get that. I got it.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, yeah, it was — 

Tim Ferriss: No spoiler on the back? Yeah.

Sami Inkinen: No spoiler on the back. So there’s that. Yeah, so my approach to money is very, very simple. The less I have to think about the happier I am, and the fact that earlier success have enough for house and food and leftovers is wonderful. But if I have to be thinking about the leftovers at all, something’s wrong. So simplicity is very, very — but yeah, buying time is very helpful. There’s some things that just it’s good to have service and helpers around. I would say that’s a good investment.

And then the one and only thing where I would say, “Yeah, I do like sort of living environment to have a house that you can enjoy, not for the sake of it, but to have the kind of little things and conveniences you have, whether that’s to be able to exercise or roll into a lake…”

Tim Ferriss: Have a [inaudible].

Sami Inkinen: “…roll into a lake from your house.” So I would say that, but yeah, the less I have to think about money, happier I am. It’s just focus on life and the life’s happening, forget the money, life’s happening, go and make it happen.

Tim Ferriss: Do you have any books that you recommend or gift to people more than others?

Sami Inkinen: That is a good question. I’m not a big book gifter other than recommend for my like Virta team and sadly they are professionally, and they are all too kind of well known and common that they would add a lot of value. There’s the — 

Tim Ferriss: Well, what are they?

Sami Inkinen: Score [Takes] Care of Itself, High Output Management — 

Tim Ferriss: What was the first one?

Sami Inkinen: The Score [Takes] Care of Itself The 49ers coaches, Walsh’s book and High Output Management. Actually the High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil is much, much, much new. And I know you’ve interviewed Elad. So it’s in a professional setting. I do read a lot. If you want to plug for a book that I’ve really, really enjoyed over the last year, very inspiring, shows what’s possible in life and a little bit of leaves this kind of universe, leaves you wondering like what’s really true in a universe and whatnot is Trejo by Danny Trejo. Absolutely mind-blowing book.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Machete, he’s appeared in a bunch of Robert Rodriguez films, Robert’s right here — 

Sami Inkinen: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: — in Austin.

Sami Inkinen: That story.

Tim Ferriss: How on Earth did you end up picking up that book?

Sami Inkinen: Well, in our family, I read a lot, but there’s one person who reads more, that’s my wife. So I’d say half of my book recommendations come from her because she screens 10 books for everyone that I read so is a good filter. And I cried several times. I laughed several times, and I was incredibly inspired and came out reading that book, belief in humanity and just it was amazing.

Tim Ferriss: If you had given me a million guesses for what you were going to say, I never would have guessed Trejo by Danny Trejo, so T-R-E-J-O, right? If I’m getting that.

Sami Inkinen: Yes, yes.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Okay. You’re full of surprises, Sami. I like it.

Sami Inkinen: Also, if you are ever contemplating having a family, that book also gives humility as you think about how much can you affect your kids’ life, and I’m not going to give a spoiler alert, but it’s highly recommend.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll get it. I’ll get it on Kindle today. I mean, we have covered a lot. I have a few questions I’d love to ask as we start to wind down, but is there anything else that you would like to cover, make sure that we discuss or anywhere you’d like to point my audience? I mean, I’m going to link to everything in the show notes. Of course, they can find Virta Health, V-I-R-T-A, Virtahealth.com on the website and we’ll include everything where people can find it easily. But is there anything else that you would like us to cover?

Sami Inkinen: I think you covered things very, very well. I would say, “My professional duty is to be an evangelizer,” and say, this very sad metabolic health mess that we find ourselves in America and globally and this savvy, the common sense thing that, oh, the diseases that we talked about, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular, is they’re chronic and progressive, and the best we can do is to manage them with an every increasing load of medications is fundamentally not true.

And whether that’s Virta or something else, I just want to be very clear that there’s hope in the horizon and the hope is largely in the form of nutrition, but not in a traditional way that you need to restrict and suffer. So that’s sort of my professional duty to bring hope and say, if you’re living with type 2 diabetes, and by the way, people who are living with type 2 diabetes, usually they’re family members, their relatives, and you’ve seen people lose eyes and limbs and lives because of type 2 diabetes. To me, mostly completely unnecessary for the last three, four decades, that that disease, among with other metabolic health conditions, is fundamentally reversible and you don’t hear that from your doctor today, sadly.

And it’s not doctors’ fault, they’re well-meaning, but you go to medical school, you get literally zero, 0.5 hours of a nutrition training and nobody tells that conditions like type 2 diabetes can be reversed systematically, not miraculously. And so hopefully I can be a messenger of hope that these conditions are reversible, especially after I already disclosed that I used to live thinking it’s your fault, it’s your fault, you are just lazy, you don’t have the willpower, but that’s not true. Nobody gets these things because they’re lazy or they decide. It’s because of our food environment and the food environment kind of slowly but surely poisons us. But if you know a few little tricks and changes, you can actually turn back the clock. So that’s my PSA.

Tim Ferriss: And I want to say to folks, if you’re a large employer, who are the actual customers of Virta Health? Who should actually go check out the website?

Sami Inkinen: Yeah, thank you. That’s so nice. Anyone who pays healthcare costs in America could be and should be a customer. If you pay healthcare costs, you are paying for the party or people staying sick and others profiting from the sickness. So this includes self-insured employers and we work with like 800 of them. So essentially all Fortune 1000 employers, self-insurer and thousands of others. So all self-insured employers, obviously health insurance companies when they take risk on their patients. And this includes the private Medicare Advantage, private Medicaid, managed Medicaid organizations, state employee groups. I think we work with 13 out of 50 states today already. So state employee groups and then some government entities, there’s VA, there’s DOD and others. Any payer who pays healthcare costs could be our customer. And our pitch to them is, guess what? We’ll help you make money. Yes, indeed, we’ll help you make money.

And the side benefit is we also save lives. And I say that because the love language of American capitalism is dollars. And so when you can help someone else to make money, you’re going to be very, very successful, and I love it.

Tim Ferriss: Virta has done something that I wasn’t sure could be done. I mean, you have, as you already mentioned, I mean the world’s largest data set of this type of metabolic health and disease reversal and the way that you’ve been able to refine and engineer and iterate and further polish a program for individualized care and sort of mass scale adherence really makes, it’s mind-boggling to me. It’s really, really incredibly impressive.

And I don’t want to say, “I know how much work goes into it,” but I think I have an idea of just how challenging that is because I think of myself as someone who kind of specializes in behavioral change. And to your point, you can do a lot of really innovative things once you free yourself from the tyranny of the perfect, right? Not letting perfection be the enemy of progress. That is the mistake of a one size fits all approach like you need to be on the ketogenic diet and you need to hit this minimal concentration of blood, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s just not going to work on a mass scale. It just doesn’t work.

But when you have different ways to help people improve five, 10, 20 percent, 50 percent. The way that moves the needle over time, this is not the right way to put it, but it defies conventional explanation in the way that as you already put it, a lot of doctors have been taught in their minimal exposure to say, “Nutrition.” So the science that you’re doing, and I’ll say it as it’s on me, but really what you’re doing with the controls and with the trials, but also with the cohort analysis and everything else you’re doing internally, like the science you’re doing is incredibly, incredibly valuable. And I don’t just mean that in dollar science, it’s valuable to humanity.

So I really applaud you for building Virta and I just felt like we needed to have this conversation because A, you’re just such a freak of nature, and I wanted to talk to you about all the things we’ve talked about, but also because what you’ve built is something that I wasn’t sure it could be built. And with the many text messages and seeing a lot of stuff that just blew my mind, I wanted to have you on, so I’m glad and grateful that you took the time.

Sami Inkinen: Yeah. Thank you so much. And honestly, I appreciate those kind words. It’s 11 years in the making and never take it for granted, bigger company, bigger problems, but trying hard every day.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m going to pick up Trejo, which is not what I expected to be my immediate next step after having this conversation, but for everybody listening, we will link to everything in the show notes. You can find Sami, certainly you can find Virta first and foremost at Virtahealth.com, V-I-R-T-A. You can find Sami Inkiken. Good luck with the spelling, S-A-M-I I-N-K-I-N-E-N on all of the places, samiinkinen.com, on Instagram, X, et cetera. I’m not sure how active you are on those, but check out the blog posts for sure. And we’ll link to everything as I mentioned in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Just search for Sami S-A-M-I. I can promise you he’s the only one who’s going to pop up.

And until next time, just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself and take those 20 minutes on Sunday, plan it out, get those things in the calendar. Otherwise, it’s going to get crowded out by the universe and then woe is you, woe is us. So take care of that. And, Sami, again, thank you so much for the time.

Sami Inkinen: Thank you very much.

Tim Ferriss: All right, folks, until next time. Thanks for tuning in.

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Sami Inkinen of Virta Health — Reversing Type 2 Diabetes, Rowing 2,750 Miles, and Lessons from Fixing Metabolic Health in 100,000+ People (#866) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Sami Inkinen (@samiinkinen) is a Finnish-born, Stanford-trained entrepreneur and the founder and CEO/president of Trulia and Virta Health. Virta is on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people using technology, AI, and nutrition. Previously, Sami held roles at Microsoft, Nokia, and McKinsey & Company, after starting his career at a nuclear power plant in Finland. Sami holds an MS in engineering physics from the Helsinki University of Technology and an MBA from Stanford University.

A world-class endurance athlete, Sami is a triathlon age-group world champion and an 8-hour, 24-minute Ironman finisher, having completed the Hawaii Ironman World Championship seven times.

Sami also founded Fat Chance Row to raise awareness of the dangers of sugar and its connection to diabetes, rowing 2,750 miles from California to Hawaii with his wife—completely unsupported—while breaking a world record in the process.

Please enjoy!

The content of this episode is for informational purposes only. Neither Sami Inkinen nor Tim Ferriss is a medical professional, and nothing discussed here should be taken as medical advice or a substitute for consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

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“Structure allows flexibility and spontaneity.”

— Sami Inkinen

“Mood follows movement and motion.”

— Sami Inkinen

“The biggest secret is saying no to 99 percent of the things that many people consider ‘normal’ so what you care [about] gets done.”

— Sami Inkinen

“Truck drivers, their concept of a lunch is McDonald’s. We can’t tell them, ‘Oh, here’s the list. Go shop Whole Foods or Erewhon, and then go home and cook at home.’ It’s like, ‘Okay, McDonald’s it is. We’re going to reverse your diabetes on McDonald’s diet.’ And by the way, we do that.“

— Sami Inkinen

“The adherence of Virta patients, again, which are real Americans, not Samis, real Americans, is twice as high at one year as taking a GLP-1 drug. We have 83 percent adherence retention of patients at one year. And look at any of the publicly available data: people stick to GLP-1s like 40 percent, maybe 50 percent, 30 to 50 percent.”

— Sami Inkinen

“GLP-1s 100 percent affect your appetite. They change how much you eat, so you eat less, but they alone don’t change what you eat. … And if you don’t change what you eat, you’re not going to be perfectly or even optimally metabolically healthy.”

— Sami Inkinen

“Type 2 diabetes can be reversed systematically, not miraculously. And so hopefully I can be a messenger of hope that these conditions are reversible, especially after I already disclosed that I used to live thinking it’s your fault, it’s your fault, you are just lazy, you don’t have the willpower. But that’s not true. Nobody gets these things because they’re lazy or they decide. It’s because of our food environment. And the food environment kind of slowly but surely poisons us. But if you know a few little tricks and changes, you can actually turn back the clock.”

— Sami Inkinen

“The love language of American capitalism is dollars. And so when you can help someone else to make money, you’re going to be very, very successful.”

— Sami Inkinen

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 5 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, Pod 5 Ultra ensures you and your partner stay cool in the heat and cozy warm in the cold. And now, listeners of The Tim Ferriss Show can get $400 off of the Pod 5 Ultra for a limited time! Click here to claim this deal and unlock your full potential through optimal sleep.

This episode is brought to you by AG1. I’ve taken AG1 for more than a decade. Longtime listeners have heard me call it my nutritional insurance. Here’s the news: they’ve just launched AG1 Pro, designed for people focused on performance and longevity. I’ll be traveling soon, and I’m throwing this in my bag to cover my bases while I travel. Past a certain age, maintaining lean muscle becomes priority number one, and AG1 Pro is formulated to support exactly that. It includes HMB, a clinically studied compound that supports protein synthesis and helps reduce protein breakdown, plus zinc carnosine to support the gut lining. Remember: training is only half the equation. Recovery is where the work compounds, and AG1 Pro is built to support it. It’s NSF Certified for Sport, so what’s on the label is what’s in the pouch. Get your free AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in the Welcome Kit at Drinkag1.com/Tim.

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Want to hear another conversation about ketones, metabolic health, and what your devices might be missing? Listen to my conversation with ketogenic-diet researcher Dr. Dominic D’Agostino, in which we discussed the ketone measurement paradox of feeling sharp at low readings, the carburetor analogy for ketone production versus utilization, metabolic memory and becoming more fat-adapted over time, my 18-day keto experiment, intermittent fasting as a keto on-ramp, the glucose-ketone index sweet spot, post-meal walking and GLUT4 activation, one-week-per-month protocols, low-carb Mediterranean as the 80/20 minimum effective dose, and much more.

The post Sami Inkinen of Virta Health — Reversing Type 2 Diabetes, Rowing 2,750 Miles, and Lessons from Fixing Metabolic Health in 100,000+ People (#866) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Jerzy Gregorek (@TheHappyBody) is a 4x World Weightlifting Champion, co-founder of UCLA’s weightlifting team, and co-creator, with his wife Aniela, of the Happy Body program. 

To fill out the form on Cerebral Palsy Research Project, visit tim.blog/cp.

To watch Prisoner No More for free, click here.

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

Legal conditions/copyright information

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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: Jerzy, nice to see you, as always.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, pleasure.

Tim Ferriss: I’m going to talk —

Jerzy Gregorek: Good to be here.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I always love spending time with you and I have wanted to have this conversation for — doing the math — more than 10 years because you told me of this transformation that we’re going to be discussing in detail a long time ago. And it blew my mind to the extent that you may not remember this. I wanted to try to figure out a way to hire a long-form journalist to write —

Jerzy Gregorek: I remember.

Tim Ferriss: — an entire long-form magazine piece on this. And it turned out that a much better format is film. And certainly in this conversation we’ll talk about it, but not to bury the lede.

For people who don’t have any context, Jerzy and I have known each other quite a long time. And Jerzy’s appeared on the podcast before alongside Naval Ravikant, who also has worked with Jerzy. And Jerzy’s a four-time world weightlifting champion, co-founder of UCLA’s weightlifting team, co-creator with his wife, Aniela, the lovely Aniela of the Happy Body program. There’s a lot more to his story. We get into it in depth in the first conversation.

This time around, we’re going to talk about a very, very specific transformation that people might not associate with weightlifting when they envision lifting weights in the gym. And that is just how far-reaching coaching transformation can be. And I’m going to read a definition, first, of cerebral palsy. CP. This is from the AI answer on Google, but you’ll see some version of this in most places, so: 

“Cerebral palsy is a group of permanent disorders affecting movement, posture, and muscle tone caused by abnormal brain development or damage to the developing brain, usually before birth, sometimes it’s during birth. It is the most common motor disability in children resulting in non-progressive limitations.”

I’m just highlighting a few words here. 

“Permanent non-progressive limitations, meaning the brain injury does not change over time on muscle coordination and balance.” 

All right. Now, I’m going to compare that with a lead into the doc, which I’m making available for free on YouTube, which is called Prisoner, No More. We’ll have more to say about that. It is quite short, easy to watch, about 30 minutes to my memory. And here’s the description.

“What happens when a doctor’s prognosis becomes a life sentence and one person refuses to serve it? Prisoner, No More follows Tae Jin Park, and I recognize that is not probably the perfect pronunciation for Korean, but Tae Jin Park, a young man diagnosed with cerebral palsy who dismantled every physical limitation medical science predicted for him through elite athletic training under Olympic strength coach Jerzy Gregorek and an uncompromising commitment to identity transformation Tae Jin’s story redefines what the human, body and mind are capable of.”

And that’s directed by Jeff Wolfe and we will come back to that as well. 

But let’s hop into an actual conversation here and begin with Jerzy, if you wouldn’t mind, just some before and afters, right? And then we’ll go into the entire chronology of it and everything else, but maybe we could just touch on a few, like, bench press, what he could do before — Tae Jin — and what he could do after. Math, language, where would you like to start?

Jerzy Gregorek: Let’s start from bench press, I guess.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Jerzy Gregorek: So the first day I loaded the bar 15 pounds and he couldn’t lift. He couldn’t take it off the rack.

Tim Ferriss: He couldn’t unrack it.

Jerzy Gregorek: Just only 15 pounds. So I have this wooden bar, Olympic wooden bar that I used to coach children, four-year-olds, five. I remember my daughter was doing snatches when she was three years old. It’s three pounds. But I put the three pounds on and he lifted three pounds.

And so I thought, “Okay, he could lift three, so let’s see if he can lift eight.” So I added five pounds and he did. It surprised me, the difference. And then I loaded another five on, it was 13 and he did, came back to 15 pounds, he barely lifted, but he did.

So that gave me the insight right away that he is going to progress fast. So I asked for his father to come to the gym. And I tell him, “You have to be here and you have to watch every session with him because something is going to happen here.” I already get the feelings that something good is going to happen.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t want to spoil the story. We’re going to get into micro-progressions and certainly the importance of the bench press, which you identified really early on. What did he get to as his maximum working weight in the bench press?

Jerzy Gregorek: He got to 170.

Tim Ferriss: What body weight?

Jerzy Gregorek: I think around 140. So he passed his body weight. He became stronger than his father, and his father couldn’t believe. But as the father was watching it for years, at one point, he said, “I’m really getting what the micro-progression is. It’s an amazing thing.” So that was really something.

Tim Ferriss: So another layer to this story that makes it all the more amazing and inspirational and mind-boggling is that Tae Jin also is autistic, if I’m correct, right?

Jerzy Gregorek: Right.

Tim Ferriss: So while you’re helping him to build confidence and competence physically, you are also working on a lot of other things, and I’m sure we’ll get into many of them. But could you just tell us a bit more about his conversational ability before and after?

Jerzy Gregorek: What the father told me that he was — the conversation only with Tae Jin was “Time to go to bed,” or “Time to eat.” And there were some, probably, more because he could count to one to 10, but he wouldn’t know what is three minus two. So the math, what I noticed that he needs to work on the math, because I asked him to do five squats and he did six or four, sometimes five.

So I said, “Tae Jin, I wanted five.” And he said, “That was five,” and it was six. So he was missing, and that gave me the idea that he needs to work on his math. So I started asking him simple questions, “What is three plus two?” “Three plus five?” And up to 10, he was okay. But after 10, didn’t know what is the five plus seven. The subtraction didn’t know at all.

So that was the beginning of the math. When it came to English and then a conversation, he couldn’t have any conversation. So the father, after about probably a year, he said, “We had a first conversation.”

Tim Ferriss: After a year of training?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yes. We actually talk about something. That’s what was amazing. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Then after how long did you train with Tae Jin?

Jerzy Gregorek: Almost five years.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So at the end of five years, with math, where was he? Okay. So at the end of five years, with math, where was he at the end of five years?

Jerzy Gregorek: Well, he’s in community college. He passed 57 units, so he’s waiting for another three units to finish 60 and go to San Jose State. So you can imagine what his math is and English. He writes essays and — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s just — let that sink in, people. It is so wild. And you’ll see this in the video. So to not just converse about concrete objects — the mug in front of us or something to the left of us, the dog on the floor — but you had him memorize poetry so you could discuss things like emotional tone, metaphor, right? Getting into much more complicated terrain.

And it’s, honestly, the more I learn about this and the more I revisit it, because this is not the first time we’ve talked about this, and I just rewatched the documentary earlier today, which I did the voiceover for. And I got really emotional watching it, to be honest. 

And so I want to talk about the how to, because there’s so many pieces to this, but maybe what we should talk about is why previous approaches hadn’t worked, right? How are people with cerebral palsy generally treated by society? Why do they have these deficiencies? The lazy explanation is, well, they had this brain damage or abnormal brain development. And that’s that, right?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a sentence. And then Tae Jin had worked with physical therapists before meeting you. So why didn’t he make progress? I mean, those are two different questions, but I’ll let you start with maybe how you view the environment and society as implicated in the development for people with cerebral palsy.

And this applies to many other places, by the way. It’s not limited to cerebral palsy, but for instance, we were talking about community college and Tae Jin when he decided to go back to school, which didn’t start with college, of course. And there were a lot of pressures to put him into a special program. And you were like, “No, no special program. He has to be around normal kids.” And so I’m leading into it a little bit, but would you like to say a bit more about that?

Jerzy Gregorek: Well, I come from Olympic weightlifting, as you know. So athletics focus always on progress and reaching records, breaking records, and that’s what the athletes are about. But when you think about physical therapists, chiropractors, doctors, we call them really, in weightlifting, recoverers.

So helping us to recover, acupuncture, massage, and all of this is when we do the training, we need recovery. So the recovery is that system that helps us to recover the body for the next day and do the next day something a little bit more than before and create the progress. When a physical therapist approach, let’s say somebody that is after surgery or has problems, the mission is to return the person to where the person was before. And the same with doctors, make them healthy again.

But with Tae Jin, that’s not the case, or cerebral palsy people, because they are already there and they cannot return anywhere. So they have to progress the same way as athletes, forward more, either stronger, faster, what is five plus seven, or right align, memorize the poem. So all of it and belief system that you talk before a little bit and triggers here too, because he hated the son, the son, and he hated police and he hated mother, he hated father. And that came out during our process of coaching.

So that I had to address too. So all the philosophy was also the part of it. It was poetry, philosophy, there was math, and it was English. But coming back to what you said about the whole community that works with cerebral palsy, I think that the focus is not athletic focus. The focus is to comfort them. So not really improve them, not to improve them so they are improving, just to comfort them so they have the safety life and they are okay, I guess. That’s probably the difference here.

Tim Ferriss: And just to reiterate something for people who are listening, we’re talking about, in some respects, two things that will get intermingled as we talk, which does not mean that we’re equating them. But you have, on one hand, the mood affect and some of the communication challenges and other components of autism spectrum disorder. And then you have the motor challenges and much more, of course, related to cerebral palsy.

So we’re talking about both. And let’s revisit the prior physical therapist, right? Because I believe, based on some of the notes that you sent to me, that his approach was to put Tae Jin on a treadmill. Is that right?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: In other words, it was — 

Jerzy Gregorek: And he hated that.

Tim Ferriss: — he threw him into a plan, but it wasn’t a progression. I don’t know if that’s fair to say. I mean, maybe there was some — 

Jerzy Gregorek: Some, maybe.

Tim Ferriss: — minimal progression to it.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, maybe some progression of a treadmill, but treadmill after a while creates exhaustion, tiredness, and the brain actually becomes depleted instead of getting the power, getting the strength, getting more energy. 

We’re talking about resting energy. And when that resting energy can be improved, the resting energy can keep the person awake. He was very lethargic at the beginning.

Tim Ferriss: He would sleep in the car, he would sleep — 

Jerzy Gregorek: Sleeping in the car.

Tim Ferriss: — whenever he had the opportunities.

Jerzy Gregorek: And never was awakened in the car. When he was in the room, he would usually sleep because he was not engaged with people, so he was sleeping.

Tim Ferriss: And so the bench press seems like it was one of the kind of key components to increasing resting energy.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yes, bench press, squats.

Tim Ferriss: What type of squats?

Jerzy Gregorek: Back squat.

Tim Ferriss: Back squat.

Jerzy Gregorek: Back squat. And then eventually the back squat was a big challenge because he couldn’t sit down. He was very stiff. Because he was stiff, he would fall on a daily basis. He was bruised all over the body, and he walked awkwardly. Usually, [the] father held his hands and when they were walking and he was just walking very to the left, to the back, awkwardly. So that created a challenge. So the challenge for the squatting was that he was not able to squat down. He was able to bend.

Tim Ferriss: Right. Which is why his parents also took him to the bathroom. They took care of everything.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. He was looking for the box or the chair. You remember the box?

Tim Ferriss: I do. Yeah.

Jerzy Gregorek: So he was not able to sit on a 20-inch box because he was bending forward and looking for the box. So that was about, I guess at the beginning, about 20 inch, 23 inches. When it came to 16 inches, I noticed that he’s nicely squatting down and also was able to turn. At the beginning, he was not able to turn. So when I noticed that, I told the dad, “He’s ready to go to the restroom on his own and ready for the other things in the restroom.” And that was the beginning of the first, really, independence for Tae Jin. He was able to dress himself.

The other thing was to tie the shoelaces. So at a certain point I saw that he has this shoes and his shoelaces were untied and the father ran to tie his shoes. I said, “No, no, no, he can do that.” And he said, “Okay.” So father sat. We were outside of near our lunges in our house. And so he bent and he tried to tie and the father was looking, piercing. I said, “Relax, he’s going to be okay. ” And I created this atmosphere facilitated for Tae Jin so he could relax and he could actually make it happen.

It was about 20 minutes before he actually made it, but it was a torture for the father. So I started really seeing how the parents are with him, that I had to teach the father, the mother to be patient, to wait until he does something, not to do for him. So that was also an element of that was needed to be fixed.

Tim Ferriss: It’s also, in looking at it through a very sympathetic lens, I can understand how all three of them have been struggling and working hard to do the best they can over — how old was Tae Jin when you met him?

Jerzy Gregorek: 25.

Tim Ferriss: 25.

Jerzy Gregorek: They were intense here.

Tim Ferriss: So 25 years of conditioning and habits.

Jerzy Gregorek: 25.

Tim Ferriss: So it takes time for everybody involved to change those habits.

Jerzy Gregorek: They were a ticking bomb.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jerzy Gregorek: They were so intense with him and he was, I would say, so fast to respond. And his, also, walk was that way. He tried to walk fast because he believed that walking fast, he will be normal. But I slowed down everything. I taught him how to walk and it was the torture for him, but said, “Heel and toe and heel.” After about two, three years, he started walking normally, heel and toe. And I know I have videos. I sent you videos of it. It just was just amazing to watch, Tae Jin, to walk with soft arms because his arms were really up and — 

Tim Ferriss: Contracted and controlled.

Jerzy Gregorek: And really contracted. Yeah. And control, extremely controlled. And then everything started being more soft and relaxed. And he started walking like a normal person, what the father wanted. Came to one of my birthdays and it was just amazing to see him out there about four years. People were just puzzled and [were] just like, “Is it the same person, really? What happened to Tae Jin?” It was just amazing.

Tim Ferriss: So I’d love to highlight a few of the ingredients that were critical for the recipe that led to that because a friend of mine, I’ll name him because it’s funny, he’ll get a good laugh out of it. I remember I introduced my friend, Mike, to you. And Mike has a multitude of issues with his hips. He has one titanium hip. And I remember I introduced the two of you. He came over and you guys trained, you laid out a program for him and he was unable to squat properly to a certain depth. So you meet people where they are, right? Everybody can improve, but it’s about knowing the starting point. You’re famous for saying this.

And so you gave him a certain depth. And I remember he did that for maybe a week and then he was feeling good. So we decided to do it five inches deeper or something like that. And he came back and met with you and your response was, “You are wasting both of our time.” Because the micro-progressions are a key component to progressing without injury. And also, I know that you feel like the “no pain, no gain” approach to training is a myth, right, or that belief undergirding training.

So I want to mention just a few other things and they are, of course, all in line with your most famous mantra of “Hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life.” Hard doesn’t necessarily mean painful, right? But it does mean hard or difficult, but I want to mention a few of them here because it’s so comprehensive.

We’ll come back to this, but car spotting, right? So Tae Jin was so lethargic, as we already noted, that he was typically sleeping, but after six months or so, you asked his father if he noticed anything new and he remarked that Tae Jin had noticed a car on the way over.

So you started to give him assignments to remember the cars that he spotted, the color, the make, whether the driver was male or female. And you got an inkling of his potential for math because he started memorizing the license place, which is just incredible. Then negativity, this negative affect, you already mentioned him hating the sun, hating the police, hating this, that, or the other thing. At certain points, hating the workout, which maybe we’ll come back to because I thought it was very clever how you responded to that with, “Well, once you’re an adult, you can decide if you want to quit the training.”

Jerzy Gregorek: And that was a trick.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it was a trick.

Jerzy Gregorek: It worked.

Tim Ferriss: And you had hurdles for hitting that. You also gave him assignments though to come back to the negativity, having dialogues and asking him questions to see the world more objectively. So assignments to have him write in English and explain why the sun and the police might be important for our existence.

The use of celebrations, so I might ask you about this, but having certain milestones for him where you would give him a certificate, and then I think it was later on going to restaurants with his family and giving it to him in front of him, but also because his life, I suppose, seemed so perhaps to him uneventful up to that point, like nothing was happening. Maybe you could speak a little bit to that and then I’ll jump into some of these others.

Jerzy Gregorek: Well, his brain was virgin, so nothing was there. So he didn’t have history, so he couldn’t really talk about whatever he was doing. He was not doing anything. So I — 

Tim Ferriss: Right. There was no content.

Jerzy Gregorek: I wanted to create history in his mind, create something, memory, about something. So one of the things was to give him certificates for the breaking records. So whenever he broke the record, then we printed a diploma. And I asked father to set up a dinner celebration and every time the record was broken in the squat or bench press, we went for a dinner. During this dinner, we gave him a diploma and some other people came and it was this celebration.

And Tae Jin started liking this, was like a star. And after about a year, I saw him, he started talking about this celebration. He talked about math, he talked about poems. And so all of it started becoming his memory, his history, and it was very important. And he also started liking breaking records. He got crazy on jumping up the box, but that came because he wanted to be an adult.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. So we’re going to get to the adulthood that might come up immediately. I also just want to give credit where credit is due to the parents. And I don’t know to what extent it was both parents or the father, but driving twice a week. How long was the commute each way?

Jerzy Gregorek: So they were coming twice a week, about one hour and a half driving one way. So they had to have at least four hours to come. Father was devoted, very kind, devoted, and stoic. He was there all the time and you couldn’t really see any irritation in him at all. Loved his son. That was very clear. So he was coming every time. When he couldn’t come, so his mother brought him in. But it was, for them, four hours drive.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a real commitment.

Jerzy Gregorek: So I discussed that with Tae Jin and I told Tae Jin how devoted was his father. Eventually when we started having conversation, a philosophical conversation, appreciative conversation. So I tried to pass on him the appreciation of his father and launch the imagination about his father. If the father was not committed to that for five years to bring his son twice a week and every time spend four hours and the money, then I told Tae Jin, “You wouldn’t be who you are today. He helped you to become what you are.”

Tae Jin, it was interesting. He was just, sometimes, “Look!” and you could see that he was thinking about something. Sometimes he like it, the most joy that I saw in him, he was breaking the records and some videos are there. It was just like — 

Tim Ferriss: It’s in the doc.

Jerzy Gregorek: — he was so joyous. That is like when you see children sometimes, very joyous that in that moment, that nothing else happens. And it was ecstatic. It was just so pleasurable to see.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. More like an athlete winning gold at the Olympics on the platform.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Let’s talk, as promised, about responsibility in adulthood, which was a crafty strategy on your part. Could you speak to that?

Jerzy Gregorek: He didn’t want to play piano at first.

Tim Ferriss: Because he had been required to take piano lessons.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. Yeah. So father told him to play piano. And said he didn’t like to come to the workout and training. He didn’t like the training.

Tim Ferriss: So he didn’t like the piano and he didn’t like the training.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. And then he said, “I want to stop the piano.” And I said, “Well, you’re not an adult. You cannot do it. Somebody needs to decide for you. But when you become an adult, you can stop the piano. You don’t have to come here for the training.” I said, “Well, then what is the adult?” So we started discussing it. I said, “What do you think?” And he started discussing what is really an adult.

So I said, “Well, adult is independent.” What does it mean, independent? So working, making money, living somewhere separately and so on and so on. But then I said, “But there’s other thing that we can consider you an adult. If you jump on an 18-inch box,” right? So he was jumping, at that time, around 11, 12 box.

Tim Ferriss: 11, 12 inches?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. He got so excited and he thought that he can conquer it very quickly. And he was on a mission with this box, I tell you. He was like the energy that was generated in him, well, it’s the same energy like in me when I wanted to go to Olympics, right?

Tim Ferriss: He was motivated.

Jerzy Gregorek: I would run to the forest at 2:00 a.m., whatever was needed to do, I would do. And I would do with lots of energy and with just commitment. And so he was committed. He wanted to jump. But I knew that six inches, it will take two years because micro-progression is there. He was not going to do it easily, but we were on and we were on and on. And then he came to, I think about like 17-something inches. He was so excited. And then we ended up with some problems and he had to heal his back because it’s not so simple to just jump on the 18. It was a huge challenge for him.

Tim Ferriss: When people watch the documentary, and I would have mentioned this in the introduction, but I made a short link, doesn’t sound short, but easy to remember link that’ll point you straight to it on YouTube. If you just go to tim.blog/hardchoices, if you go to tim.blog/hardchoices, it’ll take you straight to the doc. But when you watch the doc and you look at Tae Jin’s before, what his motion, motor control, walking looked like before and imagine him jumping onto a 17-inch box. It is unimaginable when you look at the starting point. Really just incredible.

Now I want to hear you explain another development that I think is just so compelling and that is related to math, right? So he starts memorizing license plate numbers. You’re also working with him on repetitions and building up some of that arithmetic muscle. How did he go from that to doing math five to six hours a day and having that fire lit with him?

Jerzy Gregorek: Well, it was progressive.

Tim Ferriss: It was progressive, but that’s why I’m asking. How did he get there?

Jerzy Gregorek: So first I started really working on the counting. So he had to count from until 20 or 30.

Tim Ferriss: I just want to pause to just let people have that sink in for a second. Math five to six hours a day, which again, we’re going to talk about the journey.

Jerzy Gregorek: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Most people on 20 cups of coffee a day could not do five to six hours of math a day.

Jerzy Gregorek: So I asked him about the counting. First was the counting, that he couldn’t count to 20. So I said, “Okay, let’s count to 15. Can you count to 15?” So we counted to 15. When he got to 15, I said, “You go home and you start learning to count to 20.” So he came back and I tested him. “Did you count to 20?” “Yeah.” “So, okay, count.” So he counted.

So then I add the addition, “How much is five plus seven?” He wouldn’t know. So homework, going homework, you learn how much is five by six, seven, eight, nine, all the calculation up to 24, the adding, then subtraction, division, multiplication, all of it until the number 10 or 20. Then counting to 30, 40, 50, 100. And when we got there, I told that he needs a tutor. We need a tutor, math tutor, and English tutor. He needs both.

And so they hired people to help. And then, so I was testing, of course, but he had these tutors. So I think that it was an amazing addition to work on his brain. And I noticed the same story with other cerebral palsy people that have difficulties with math. And some of them that I saw that they had good English, but math looks like difficulties.

So eventually when he progressed with energy, with bench press, he came to the certain point within a year that he could press about 100 pounds. And that gave him enough energy that he could go to his computer and spend hours on the computer to study his elementary school. He started, actually, elementary school. And because he was not in elementary school, so he was 25 years old when he’s sick. So he joined this program, elementary school program, and he started working through it on his own.

And after two years, he passed the whole elementary school. Then he started high school, another two years, and he passed. Normal high school, I know a normal, the same program as other people. And father said,” Tae Jin is on fire. It’s 2:00 a.m. and he’s still on his computer and he started 8:00 p.m. And at 2:00 a.m. he’s on his computer and he doesn’t want to stop.” For something in him awakened and [it was] powerful.

And at the same time, he started noticing that who he was as a person, that actually he was a person and he [had] cerebral palsy. And that generated a lot of negativity in him, a lot of resentment to his father and mother. And then he started really talking that he hates his mother and then he did everything at that time.

Tim Ferriss: That was before.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Before, yeah. And just to flash forward, right? I mean, his father’s reported that he’s living in independent existence, taking care of his own needs, planning his own days, orders Uber, rides to get to his classes, manages his own paperwork. So that’s the after.

What did you notice in terms of, and how did you cultivate this if you did? I don’t know if you did this deliberately or if it was a byproduct of everything else, but emotional range or facial expressions. Did any of that change over the course of the training?

Jerzy Gregorek: Emotionally, he was blank, the same, so for a long time.

Tim Ferriss: You mean in whatever circumstances?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. But at a certain point, he started being negative and expressing his negativity. And then he made these moves and I couldn’t see where he was. I was looking for where he was, but I addressed negativity as something that needed to be fixed. So whenever he said that he hated something, I challenged it, challenged it in a way, “Why is it good?”

So he was negative, but then why police is good? Why the sun is good? Why the father is good? Why the mother is good? So expanding and expanding imagination for him so he could facilitate this, so he could find in his mind, actually, acceptance that actually is a good thing. It’s a huge shift in his psyche believing and liking people, right? He never liked me. It’s just like, “I don’t like you.” And he says, “I don’t like you.”

Tim Ferriss: How long did he say that for?

Jerzy Gregorek: All the time. He’s never liked me.

Tim Ferriss: So he’ll celebrate and give you a high-five for your training, but still.

Jerzy Gregorek: I don’t know even today if he likes me, probably not. I created a lot of hard choices for him. So he went out, eventually he will come to this point that he will maybe like what I had done maybe, but not really me.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. Well, you know what? As long as you don’t care about the credit, you’re doing good work in the world.

Jerzy Gregorek: Well, it’s not really, I was not there to shine.

Tim Ferriss: Of course, of course. Could you talk about helping him or asking him to identify heroes a bit? That also stuck out to me. Could you provide a little bit of context to people on that piece of the puzzle?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. So he was already in elementary school and he was writing an essay about a hero.

Tim Ferriss: That was an assignment?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yes. And he wrote it.

Tim Ferriss: From school, not from you?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, from school because he already had a tutor, English tutor. So he was always proud that when he did something, he was bringing something and reading me. So he read it. And so he wrote about Genghis Khan and I said, “Okay, so is Genghis Khan a hero?” “Yeah.” Okay. So I said, “Well, why he is a hero?” He talked a little bit. And I said, “So who is a hero?”

Well, that created a philosophical approach. So we ended up that the hero is really risking their own life for others to save others, but that’s not Genghis Khan. I said, “Genghis Khan was not that. He was a conqueror, but he was not a hero.” And then at the same time, I watched this movie about admiral, actually Korean admiral, about 300 Japanese ships were coming to Korea to conquer them. And he, with one ship and 12, and he stood up to them. And actually the 12 ships, the people didn’t want to fight, wanted to surrender.

He said, “No.” And he fought and he fought and these other 12 ships joined him eventually and the whole armada, Japanese armada turned back. And I said, “That is a hero.” And I said, “That is your hero from Korea and you are going to rewrite this essay.” “But it’s too late.” I said, “It’s not too late. You’re going to go to your teacher, you tell the teacher why Genghis Khan was not a hero and you want to write the essay.” “Okay.” I said, “Okay, you go and do it.” And he did and he wrote the essay, the teacher agreed.

Tim Ferriss: I can see why he might not like you.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s pretty fair.

Jerzy Gregorek: It was very quick. Think about it, I was coaching him — 

Tim Ferriss: I understand the purpose.

Jerzy Gregorek: He was jumping, he was lifting, and at the same time we did poetry, math, English, write all of it together. And it was quick, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Hard teachers in his life.

Jerzy Gregorek: Why he wouldn’t like me. I don’t know why? Just there are many reasons. But one day he wanted to step on the six-inch box, I remember, and he tries to step and he would not step.

Tim Ferriss: And this is the one foot up.

Jerzy Gregorek: Stepping one foot and like on a stair, right?

Tim Ferriss: And then stepping up.

Jerzy Gregorek: He was, “I couldn’t make it.”So I grabbed his shirt and pull him — 

Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen the video.

Jerzy Gregorek: — in a knot. And after about two times, I left him and he was jumping on this box like one of another stepping one, one, one, and so fast. It’s just amazing what the brain is. You get a little bit help and suddenly the door opens up and it’s the progression is huge and fast. It’s amazing. I tell you, what I was watching, what I learned during this process, wow.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Even to this day, I know that modern science has come to a greater appreciation of brain plasticity and the malleability and adaptability. And of course, just as the, let’s call it broadly speaking, this is simplification, but the control center for the entire body, right? The brain’s job is to keep the body alive. So they’re dance partners.

There is just so much room for improvement. And a lot of the science that I’ve supported has been related to this, but this was the first time I’d ever seen such an amazing transformation in someone with a cerebral palsy that was so clearly and well documented also, right? And I want to talk about next steps in a little bit to try to expand this into a study. But before we get there, can you speak to training logic? So I think that was after about two years of already training with him, but working on his thought process using poetry. Why did you do that?

Jerzy Gregorek: He couldn’t really read the lines of poetry and understand the feelings, emotions behind. So then I started really doing the math and seeing whether he can think logically, right? So I tested him if A is B and B is C. So he’s A, he’s also C and playing these games.

And slowly he started not only being logical in — I asked him about writing something about what is logic and give me the example. And so he would bring me, “Was there logic or not?” So we tested that and then added the math, but the most difficult for him was to read a line of poetry and know the metaphor, not really what really happened, but what was the meaning of the line?

Tim Ferriss: Behind the words, not just the words.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. And every line. So when I asked him to remember and recite the poem, he would recite the poem. And then we analyzed the poem every line of the line after line. And what is the meaning? What is the feeling of the line? And that was an amazing possibility for him to learn the language and the feelings behind the language, the emotions. At the beginning, he didn’t have any clue about the feelings, what the actually written words express when it comes to feelings.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. When I think about your entire coaching experience with Tae Jin, I’m struck by how many different levers you were able to help him pull, right? But one that meta lesson that pops out to me, and I’d love for you to correct this if I’m not thinking about it the right way, is that he didn’t respond to people in conversation, right? Didn’t have much of a response in part, and I’m projecting here, because he didn’t have the belief that he could. He had no history to support the belief that he could, right?

And then with physical movement, similar, right? And you gave the example, I mean, this is a very fast example, but of grabbing the shirt and forcing him to do it. And then within a few repetitions, you let go and he’s doing it on his own. And of course, there’s the progression over time, but even with the poetry and how you gave him assignments to practice public speaking, right, without that, he wouldn’t have had the confidence to then speak, say, within the more complicated context of school with classmates and things like that.

I have to imagine, right? But I sometimes have listeners or readers ask me, “What can I read to develop more confidence?” And I’m like, “Well, you can try to read to develop more confidence, but really, you’re not going to fool yourself. You need to do things to develop the history of doing things so that you have confidence.” But does that resonate or would you add or reframe that somehow?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, of course, what you say, it’s a certain perspective, but I would like to tell you about my perspective.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s what I’m asking.

Jerzy Gregorek: So I saw the mind, the brain as something that needs to find the way forward and find the way around those patches that were dead. And I saw it everywhere. I saw it in math when you cannot know what is two plus two that is four, and you struggle. For me, the child struggles to find out what is two plus two.

Eventually, the child knows, and so there are certain connections already. And then two plus three and so on. So development of math, I saw crucial here, very important, that when I am not there, he can practice actually the math. And by practicing the math, we overcome this many steps, steps of progression, the micro-progression. And also that challenge has this plasticity of the brain, that plasticity is not — I thought, okay, I make him strong doesn’t mean that something else is going to happen, or maybe I will not make him strong because the math is not developed.

So I saw the connection between the squat, the bench, the numbers, the words, and the beliefs, and philosophy. I saw connections everywhere, and I created the challenges, the hard choices every time, everywhere. For me, bench pressing, going from 100 pounds to 102 was not different than to know what is 15 plus 17.

It is if I know what is 15 plus 17 is another thing that when it happens, something happened in the brain that was not there before. And I started facilitating all this development of the brain that would be challenged, developed from different perspective. And I think that eventually the research needs to be done. I try to understand what I’ve done because I’ve never really worked with a person like that. So I try to understand too, what happened there, how did it happen. And whether there is possibility even to replicate this and help so many people. Tae Jin’s progress is amazing, crazy, amazing, magical. And if that could be replicable, wow, we could help a lot of people.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about it because before we started recording, I was trying to get an idea of the rough number of cerebral palsy diagnoses in the US. And you’re based in Northern California, so I wanted to get an idea in California. These are real back of the napkin, rough internet responses, but it seems like, let’s call it roughly one million diagnoses in the US potentially. And then that could be occurrence in that diagnoses, but somewhere between 100 and 120,000 in California alone. So this is a non-trivial condition. It’s very prevalent.

And if you could develop a method through doing research, develop a method that you mentioned could be replicated, could be taught to physical therapists, then this could have a tremendous impact on a wide scale. And maybe we could talk about what some of your thoughts are. And I’m going to create a web form for people who want to potentially indicate interest in certain facets of this, but what might the program look like?

How many patients would you have? What would it look like in practice to do a research project to determine if you can formulate a method that would be replicable or a template maybe with a little bit of tweaking here and there that physical therapists could use or others?

Jerzy Gregorek: Meantime, I had some experience with other cerebral palsy people. And my approach is one, that I believe that everybody can improve. So it really doesn’t matter for me is it cerebral palsy or not. If it’s chronic fatigue, it can happen. If it’s fibromyalgia, the progress can happen.

So with cerebral palsy, when we think about cerebral palsy people, they have different conditions, different beginnings. The most important is to find where is beginning, where to start is one of the major thing, because usually I think that we want too much, it’s not going to happen. So we need to find this very tiny thing.

You remember Jewel in Hawaii, you helped me to go and coach her. And she was 18 at that time, and she couldn’t control her head and arms and legs. So her mother would hold her, and I would try to find out where is the beginning with her. And she has, hands like this and it was moving. And I found out that I pointed to one place. I took a ball very close to her, about an inch from her arm and then fingers and asked her to touch it. And she struggle and struggle. And we found a way where actually she could touch it and she was so happy when she touched. Oh, I have to send you these videos.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please.

Jerzy Gregorek: It’s just you can cry when you can see things like this. And her joy when she was doing it. So also the math. I found out that her mind was very good with stories. She could talk about some things and she loved the stories to listen to stories, but her math was not really different than Tae Jin’s.

She could only count from one to 10. And then adding two plus five she would. And then we would start with that. So I see the math is major part of that method. The physical is of course the beginning. The beginning is how strong they are and how flexible they are. Flexibility is the main point here because the awkwardness comes from both. One thing that the brain, the mind cannot control those places, but those places also the parts of the body became that way. So that’s why awkwardness is coming in.

So the physical and the physical improvement of the physical becomes challenging because they can injure themselves. They can be in pain. And those two who will facilitate, they will need to know how to start, how to use the micro-progression, how to write everything down.

Tae Jin knew all his numbers. He knew how to measure the time of five or 10 jumps. And he would write all the jumps and brought me to the gym what he did. His homework was numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. Not only the numbers of counting, but also the numbers of measure.

Tim Ferriss: So just to hop in for a second, because I would love to help, of course, that’s part of the reason we’re doing this conversation is to help facilitate trying to create some type of template that can be applied to a lot of people with cerebral palsy. Not to bury the lead, the short link will just be tim.blog/CP and we’ll have a web form for people who may want to help from an academic perspective, ideally in Northern California, somewhere within near driving distance since you would want to be there. I think the thought is maybe twice a week with these different folks, something like that.

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah, I see that about maybe five cerebral palsy people and meeting them twice a week, let’s say Tuesday and Friday, and for one year and then add another five, so now it’s 10, another five. And do it for five years.

Tim Ferriss: Five years in total?

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. Record everything, see how it works, bring therapists or others that could actually watch, observe, and learn. And I believe that this replicability is possible. We need to test it, right? We need to explore how is it really possible? What can we actually do when we have this 25 people?

It could be that it was because I was there, but I don’t want to say that it was because of me everything happened. It could be that perfect storm happened because I was a math teacher, I’m a poet, I’m a weightlifter. So all of it happened that I was this one person facilitating that. But when we do research, we don’t have to have one person. We can have math people, English, and philosophers, and we can have trainers. We can create a center. And in that center, we can think about how we can progress, how we can improve and document everything in details the same way as I was doing. Micro-progression is an amazing power.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it strikes me also that with the right people involved and with the right consistency, right? And I mean, you might need a faculty member to agree to spearhead it. And then there would be fundraising, which is pretty straightforward to figure out. And then they would have postdocs or people underneath them would help with recruitment, although I don’t think that’ll be a problem after this podcast, patient recruitment, and then making the trains run on time.

But I could see a path, as I’m sure you’ve thought about this much more than I have, but where you could end up with something like a core curriculum of principles that you’re teaching. And maybe you’re recording video modules to explain these things to practitioners where it’s like micro-progressions, finding a place to start. What are different ways to find a place to start?

And then perhaps there are certain things that won’t apply to everyone. So for instance, we didn’t talk about, we don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but Tae Jin was kind of crumpled to the right side, right? So you had a ball hanging from the ceiling that you would have him reach up to touch to help correct that. 

Jerzy Gregorek: Yeah. With the posture.

Tim Ferriss: There might be core curriculum and principles and then ancillary principles and techniques that can be applied on a case by case basis, but then you end up with this core curriculum that people can learn remotely or something like that. I mean, it’s really exciting to think about.

Jerzy Gregorek: I think that at this point, I see that we can assess these people from five perspectives. I think the physical perspective, where they are physically, where is the flexibility, where is the strength, math perspective, language perspective, philosophy perspective, beliefs perspective, where they are. So easily we can take the psychology and then psychologists and develop certain ways of assessing them where our beliefs, right?

In math, it’s very clear, right? In the language, probably English teachers and they will create very quickly curriculum to find out where is the level of that. And then once we have assess, okay, we have a physical problem that is 80 percent, math is only three percent. The person is really good at math in English as well. But we can have also that math is not there at all and walking is good. So there are all possibilities how we can assess from this five perspective, these people, but we need to also explore and experience them, right? There’s not only one person, Tae Jin, because it’s just only one person. Now we need to see, can we actually do with five? Can we actually deliver what we delivered?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, this is the scientific method, right? And you have such a fantastic starting point, right? It’s an N of one, although you’ve worked with more than one person with cerebral palsy at this point, but let me just give the URL again. So for people who might be interested, this is, if you are at Stanford or UCSF or San Jose State or someplace that might be able to help with this type of research, if you are in a financial position and would like to support this type of research, go to tim.blog/cp or if you have other resources you want to bring to bear on this in some way. Tim.blog/cp, standing for cerebral palsy. So tim.blog/cp and just fill out the web form. I’m incredibly excited about this. 

We covered a lot in our first conversation. We’ve covered a lot in this conversation. Is there anything else that you’d like to mention or cover that we haven’t gotten to already today?

Jerzy Gregorek: What a question.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Jerzy Gregorek: Well, yeah, we covered a lot, but I think one of the most important thing is that people can get help and if we have the right approach, we can facilitate, create it. And of course, they change, right? We didn’t change them. So we have to remember that we are facilitators. We are not really cultures that created the powerful human being, that actually powerful human being created themselves. And we have to create a place where it’s athletically aligned with athleticism and not care only.

We know, I see that as soon as we care or we exercise without mission or purpose or goals, then we can exercise for 10 years and never change. So I saw these people, thousands of these people, right? So it doesn’t apply only to cerebral palsy people because it applies everywhere else. But with cerebral palsy, because it’s very interesting because they have this situation in the mind, in the brain that actually we could work with, that these are the patches in the brain that we can create the peripheral nervous system that actually goes around. We can create that mind, that plasticity of the mind we can create.

I think I have a strong feeling that this is possible. I always believe that it can be done. I just created challenges, constant challenges with Tae Jin that could deliver the results, the change, the why wanted. It has to be always the, where are you going with it? So for me, he had to walk straight, he had to walk soft. And for me, I would not sleep until I would get it.

So we need devoted people. We need people that are devoted to these people to help them, not just physical therapists that want us to make money and go home. This is a huge challenge.

These people are extremely challenging and we need to also challenge them. And by the creating this challenge, we can create amazing things actually. So it is not something that somebody has cancer and it will get worse. That’s not the situation here. It’s a unique situation with cerebral palsy people that we have the situation that somebody is and somebody doesn’t change for worse.

Somebody is like that. Can’t change for worse too because life happens, but because people are like that, we have very clear slate to begin with and we are not dealing with ill people, sick people. We’re just dealing with people who mechanically something happened to their brain. And that can create for us a really great beginning. And it could be that with almost any cerebral palsy, something like this return to, I wouldn’t say they cannot return because many of them, they are just that way. So they cannot return anywhere, but they can improve and become like Tae Jin become Tae Jin that is going to college from the person that was only waiting for food and sleep and couldn’t go to toilet and was lethargic all the time.

The life was like that for him and that life would be like that, right? If nothing happened, what actually we did. He would be that person. And the parent, here’s the parents. The parents, I saw happy parents, but after three, four years, they actually, they were like a ticking bomb, you said about intensity between these three people, right? But about three, four years, I saw them happy first time,

Happy. And that is enough to fight for, right? To give everything, whatever you have, to create the happiness in this three people who were worrying all the time what will happen if they die, what will happen if something happened to them. Now they don’t have to worry anymore.

Tae Jin is completely independent. He’s in college for Christ’s sake. Just imagine that. And a lot of that, I believe, 100 percent that can happen with everyone.

Tim Ferriss: The Happy Body micro-progressions, your philosophies and philosophy, might scare people off. Your principles can be applied to so many different things that you and Aniela have developed over the years. Really want to make this research project happen.

So folks, if you’re interested in any way helping with that, in whatever capacity, you go to tim.blog/CP and then also want to mention just like the way that you and Aniela coach can be applied almost certainly to many different conditions, many different circumstances, all circumstances in some sense. I want to give a shout-out to Jeff Wolfe, the director of Prisoner, No More.

I always ask everybody before I talk to them or do anything with them, what would make it truly a home run? And he just mentioned the bigger opportunity is to position Prisoner, No More, not just as a standalone short, but as a proof of concept for a larger series. The vision is a slate under the same umbrella. So you could have Prisoner, No More for alcoholism, Prisoner, No More for fill in the blank, right? Which I think is also very exciting.

So I really, really hope people, you’ve got to watch it. You’ve got to see what we’re talking about visually. It’ll just — a lot of you are going to cry. I’m going to tell you in advance, but it’s good cry. So check it out, tim.blog/hardchoices in honor of — 

Jerzy Gregorek: Choices.

Tim Ferriss: Hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life. So tim.blog/hardchoices, check it out. You can find The Happy Body and more on Jerzy and Aniela’s training at thehappybody.com. And I’ll link to everything in the show notes as usual at tim.blog/podcast. So if you’re like, that’s a lot to remember, don’t worry about it. Just go to tim.blog/podcast and search Jerzy, not spelled like New Jersey, but spelled J-E-R-Z-Y. And trust me, there’s only one Jerzy on my website. It’s Jerzy Gregorek. Jerzy, thank you so much for the time. It’s always great to see you.

Jerzy Gregorek: Thank you, Tim.

Tim Ferriss: And everybody, thanks for listening. We’ll grab a bite to eat tonight with the whole gang. And everybody who has tuned in as always, I appreciate you. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. But not just comfort. Don’t just make yourself feel better.

Don’t just eat that cheeseburger and watch reality TV on Netflix. Challenge yourself. Wherever you happen to be, you can make progress. You can make amazing progress. You just need to find the right starting point. And for that reason, check out the happybody.com. Listen to my first conversation with Jerzy on the podcast as well. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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.

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: The Most Incredible Transformation I’ve Ever Seen — Jerzy Gregorek on Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Coaching, and the Power of Micro-Progressions (#865) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Jerzy Gregorek (@TheHappyBody) is a 4x World Weightlifting Champion, co-founder of UCLA’s weightlifting team, and co-creator, with his wife Aniela, of the Happy Body program. 

To fill out the form on Cerebral Palsy Research Project, visit tim.blog/cp.

To watch Prisoner No More for free, click here.

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“I believe that everybody can improve. So it really doesn’t matter for me [if it’s] cerebral palsy or not. If it’s chronic fatigue, it can happen. If it’s fibromyalgia, the progress can happen.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

“[If] we exercise without mission or purpose or goals, we can exercise for 10 years and never change.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

“With cerebral palsy, I think that the focus is not athletic focus. The focus is to comfort them. So not really improve them … just to comfort them so they have the safe life and they are okay, I guess. That’s probably the difference here.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

“I saw the connection between the squat, the bench, the numbers, the words, the beliefs, and philosophy. I saw connections everywhere, and I created the challenges, the hard choices, every time, everywhere. For me, bench pressing, going from 100 pounds to 102 was not different than knowing what is 15 plus 17.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

“With cerebral palsy, they have different conditions, different beginnings. The most important [thing] is to find where is the beginning. Where to start is one of the major things because usually I think that we want too much. It’s not going to happen. So we need to find this very tiny thing.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

“We have to remember that we are facilitators. We are not really cultures that created the powerful human being. That powerful human being actually created themselves. And we have to create a place where it’s athletically aligned with athleticism and not care only.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

“[Tae Jin’s father and mother] were worrying all the time what will happen if they die, what will happen if something happened to them. Now they don’t have to worry anymore. Tae Jin is completely independent. He’s in college, for Christ’s sake! Just imagine that. And a lot of that, I believe, 100 percent, that can happen with everyone.”

— Jerzy Gregorek

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Want to hear the last time Jerzy was on the show? Listen to our conversation in which we discussed immigrating from Poland as a political refugee, the importance of flexibility, strength, speed, and posture at any age, winning in small increments, how an accidental introduction to weightlifting reclaimed Jerzy from three years of blackout alcoholism, The Happy Body program, the rusty hinge analogy, the three killers of happiness (sarcasm, complaining, and blaming), poetry as medicine for those who struggle with weight loss, Plato’s chariot allegory, and much more.

The post The Most Incredible Transformation I’ve Ever Seen — Jerzy Gregorek on Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Coaching, and the Power of Micro-Progressions (#865) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Please enjoy this transcript of a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, featuring four listener favorites—Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman—whom I invited to answer the question What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026?

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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!

David Yarrow: My name is David Yarrow. I’m a British photographer that works principally in America. We sell our art through the fine art market around the world, but principally in America. I think the number one thing that I did to simplify my life was not to get remarried after I got divorced at a very young age of maybe 40 years old. My wife had given me the two most important things in my life, my two children. And it would’ve been easy at that stage of enormous self-doubt to jump into a new life with someone else and that could only have made life more complicated. I’ve got massive respect for people to choose to take that path. But for me, I had my family and I didn’t want it to get more complicated. I just hoped that the reasons why we’d separated would, over time, heal as we matured as individuals.

And that, luckily, is exactly what happened. And we’re far better friends. We spend a lot of our lives together now, and we often think about how different it would’ve been if we’d both gone and remarried and started new families. As it is, the four of us now spend an awful lot of time together as a unit. It’s abnormal, probably, for outsiders. But I think because we’ve been through pain and seen from the outside the issues that perhaps others can have when stepchildren are introduced into things, we recognize that it was right for us, not right for everyone, but it’s certainly allowed us both to focus on our jobs and the other parts of our lives without the stress and complications of complicated families. I think complicated families can lead to complicated lives. And I think if you’re single, but you have the mother of your children as close to you as you possibly can, it does allow you to be not selfish, but self-indulgent and appreciative of your goals. And I think it’s led to a far stronger relationship with my children than otherwise would be the case. And if you have a strong relationship with your children, I think it makes it much easier to be productive in other parts of your life. 

That is not to preach to anyone else. I’ve made more mistakes than most people, but I do know that the simplification of my life born out of the decision not to seek comfort in a second marriage was key to the happiness in my life. 

I think another tenet of the simplification of my life, which has been very, very necessary, is to have a perpetual filter in my address book. And specifically in terms of the number of close friends that someone in the late summer of their life can have. And when I was young, I used to believe that it was an asset to have 60 or 70 people that you could call close friends.

I think that’s impossible. It’s almost an oxymoron to say you can have 60 close friends. I think that principle holds true at 30 close friends or 20. I think I probably have now outside my immediate family, seven or eight people that I’d consider very close to. I had a bereavement in the family recently and with my brother, and ultimately, I didn’t want to speak to too many people. It was too emotional. And I just spoke to the people that I was closest to. 

I’m a person that likes to give energy to any relationship, and I think energy is a luxury brand. And like any luxury brand, it’s got to be fairly elusive at times. You need to invest in yourself. And I’ve been very guilty of investing too much in people that perhaps don’t deserve it or won’t reciprocate it. That’s not to be mean, it’s just common sense.

I think in business as well, a corollary of this is I don’t have an agent. I’ve never had an agent. I know there’s very good agents in the world that earn every penny, but I found a lot of them to be slightly financially thirsty and slightly goal hungry when it comes to taking the acclaim. And the lack of an agent has meant that there’s been a lot of direct contact one-to-one with me. Will you do this? Will you do that? And the ability to say no comes with age. I think I was far too willing to say yes to things where every sinew of common sense suggested that was a suboptimal use of time. I think the idea of going out seven nights a week is totally exhausting and it impinges on the two nights where you do have to give good energy. I don’t think I’ll reverse this trend. I might end up with no friends, but I think having 10 friends is the right number for me and it has ultimately simplified my life.

***

Claire Hughes Johnson: Hello, Claire Hughes Johnson here. I’ve spent over 20 years scaling tech companies first at Google, and then as the Chief Operating Officer of Stripe for many years. And I guess I’m best known for writing a book called Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, and that is how I met Tim.

I’ll be honest, I’m surprised Tim asked me to talk about simplifying my life because that is not something that I think I’m particularly good at. In fact, I think in my interview with Tim, he ended up advising me, and I think the advice he shared was there’s a point in your career when you switch from default yes, which is a great position when you’re trying to meet people and learn new things and build your connections and your network and your career, to default no. And that was one of my big lessons from our conversation. But with that, maybe not confidence-inspiring introduction, I’ll share some thoughts on simplifying my life.

I think the first, actually, thought for me is I needed to understand why I said yes to too many things. And that involved doing some introspection and some work, and yes, getting some help in talk therapy, which is not something I’ve had a lot of success with. But for some reason, I feel like I need to be needed, and that I earn love and affection by saying yes and being of use to people as opposed to just being me. And I’m still working on that. So that’s number one to simplifying your life is why is your life complicated? And mine has always been complicated because I say yes to too many things.

All right. So second lesson is, I think I mostly borrowed this from Arthur Brooks’ book From Strength to Strength, but you’ll find it in a few different “prioritize your life” advice books. And that is, I think we sometimes get too oriented toward tasks, jobs, things we need to do with our time. And if you flip it and think about people, it’s easier to see your priorities. Who are the people that I most want to spend time with? The easiest one for me is my children.

But instead of thinking, well, I want to do this thing, like go see this soccer game or go to my friend’s book event, I think, well, who’s the person involved? And I start the year with who are the most important people in my life to spend time with. And if it’s one of the people on that list, I’m going to say yes, and it doesn’t matter what we’re doing. It’s helped me to make sure I’m spending time with the most important people. It’s really easy now when someone asks me to do something that compromises time with my children, I just say no, because they’re the most important. I left an event today early to come home to have dinner with my son. So that’s the people flip.

When I do say yes, I’ll also mention that I’ve learned to be better about understanding, okay, why did I say yes? What’s my goal? What’s my job at this thing that I said yes to? And sometimes you get into a situation, you think, well, I should be networking, I should be meeting people, but maybe I just went to give a talk and I’m going to give a talk and then I’m going to leave. Or I went to meet just one person who I wanted to catch up with and I go and spend time with them and then I can leave. But keeping your eyes on your mission for how you’re spending your time can help not feel so guilty about not doing the other things that might be in front of you with your yes.

The final way that I’ve simplified my life is I’ve built some things into my, again, my calendar and my time, that I think people think of as extracurricular that I’ve realized are just too important to skip. The most notable of those is time to exercise. I am not a big athlete. I wasn’t a super successful athlete in high school. I worked out a little bit in college, but I came to understand that exercise is important to my mental health, and just feeling good in my body and being a confident person and a well-balanced leader, getting sleep is also very important to me and my success.

And once I realized that I wasn’t as effective, certainly when I started at Stripe, I was compromising on sleep, I was compromising on exercise. I didn’t compromise on having dinner with my kids most nights when I wasn’t traveling, but I was compromising myself. And I had this realization that to be the best leader, I needed more sleep and more exercise, and I made it part of my job. And I told Stripe CEO and founder Patrick that I was going to embark on a retention exercise, meaning retain myself at the company, and that meant I was going to come in a little late one or two mornings, leave early one day, and I booked time with a friend to work out. And I just, instead of just doing it on the weekends, I made time during the week to get enough exercise. And I also started to have rules for myself about when I would shut the laptop and get to bed, and that probably did retain me for a few more years. I guess I still work part-time at Stripe, so maybe it’s a long-term retention.

Nobody knows, you don’t know what that thing is for other people, but if you think about if your energy is these scales and on balance — am I getting energy from how I’m spending my life or is it being taken away? Try to measure what it is. It might be spending time with an elderly parent, it might be time with your kids, it might be exercise.

It might be having a deep conversation with someone once a week about a topic that’s not your work. But look for what those things are and track them and then make sure you’re booking time for those things into your calendar as if it’s a job. And don’t be apologetic. Don’t compromise that thing unless it’s an emergency. Really don’t compromise it and book around it. And I think the people who know me really well are surprised at how much I prioritize getting a workout done. And I no longer feel guilty about that. I feel really good that I’ve decided this thing is important to how I live my life and it’s not negotiable.

***

Diana Chapman: Hi, there. This is Diana Chapman, and I am passionate about Conscious Leadership. I’ve spent the last 20 years disrupting many influential leaders around the globe, teaching them that the thing standing between them and their next level of impact is usually themselves and most often their fears. 

So I’ve been asked to talk about decisions I’ve made that have helped simplify my life. And one of the key things I’ve learned is that simple happens when your inner and outer worlds are in agreement.

I call that “a whole body yes,” that every part of me is in alignment inside with what is happening outside. I am congruent. And when that happens, so much complexity drops away. 

I’m excited to share these three decisions I’ve made. And the first one is, I made a decision a decade ago that I would no longer live in any obligation. And what that means is I don’t live any more from a should — I should do this; I should do that — because that’s what a good daughter or a good partner or parent or friend does. Instead, I deeply listen. Is this what wants to happen? Would this serve me and them and my aliveness and the world as a whole? So now my choices come from a deep place of trust and no longer from the fear of disappointing people or breaking habits that you’re supposed to do.

I do want to clarify one thing here. Some people ask, “Does that mean you love all the activities you are a part of with the people you do them with?” And the answer is no. My husband might ask me to go to a concert of one of his favorite musicians, and I might not love that music, but what I would really enjoy is being with him, celebrating one of his favorite musicians, and being in all that joy with the crowd. That I have a whole body yes to, and so I go free of obligation. My inner and outer worlds are in agreement. 

The second decision I made, and this is a biggie, is that I decided that I wanted to create a relationship contract with every person I spend any meaningful amount of time with in my life. It’s very similar to if I asked someone to come play a game with me and I’d say, “Hey, here are the rules of the game, and I want to ask if, based on those rules, you’d be willing to play with me.” And the value of all of us agreeing to a set of rules is that we have so little drama playing the game.

And so I use that same concept with all of my close relationships and I ask all of them, “Would you join me in a way of doing relationship?” I use the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which is based on the book of the same name I co-authored. And these commitments I brought to the business world, but they originally were in my personal life and I started them in my relationship with my husband. And these commitments are ways we agree to do life and then we make clear agreements with each other around how to do those.

So for example, in all of my close relationships, I make an agreement with everyone that we don’t blame each other, that instead we each take a look at how we are co-creating whatever it is we would like to change. That way, we’re in a constant state of learning and growing and no blaming. Gosh, that ends so much drama, and low drama makes a very simple life.

When my family and I agreed that we would end blaming in our home, we literally put signs up around in different rooms with the word “blame” with a circle around it and an X through it. So when anybody blamed, any one of us could point to one of the signs and say, “Reminder, you’re in a no blame zone.” And then the agreement was, rather than blame, we would take responsibility for how we were co-creating the thing that we were complaining about and teach a class.

So an example might look like I blame my family for making a mess in the kitchen and instead I say, “I want to take responsibility. I don’t have clear agreements with you guys about how we keep the kitchen clean, and so I’m co-creating a messy kitchen, so I don’t want to blame anymore. I want to take responsibility for how I have a part to play in this, and rather than blame, I want to clean it up and in this case make some clear agreements so we can permanently end this pattern that recycles over and over again.”

 I had a client who called and was frustrated because his CEO, who he reported to as the COO, was not giving him the feedback he wanted for his professional development. He was blaming. So I said, “Hey, remember we’ve committed to no blame, so now teach me the class. I too want to have my CEO not give me the feedback I want for my professional development, so teach me how do you make sure you don’t get the feedback you want?”

So my client thought for a moment and said, “Okay, here’s some ideas. Here’s how I do it. Step one, when the CEO cancels one-on-one meetings on a regular basis, don’t complain about it, don’t ask them to get rescheduled, and assume other things are more important than you. Two, don’t ask for feedback. Just sit around waiting feeling entitled, but don’t clarify that it’s important to you. Three, when feedback occasionally does come, don’t appreciate it, don’t value it. Instead, in your own mind, dismiss that it’s not particularly valuable feedback, and therefore don’t encourage the person to give you more of it.” So, I said, “Great. If I did those three steps already, I would probably create the exact same issue that you have.” Then my client agreed to go back to the CEO and say to him, “Hey, I want to take responsibility for how I’m not getting the feedback I want.” And he taught the class to his colleague. That’s how it’s played.

Another thing we agree to is to stay deeply in curiosity and not get caught up in being righteous with one another. And if we do notice righteousness, we just gently invite each other to see that in the game we’re playing, that’s considered a, quote, foul and we recommit to coming back to curiosity. 

We also make agreements about letting it be okay to feel our feelings and let the other one have their feelings. A lot of drama comes because we’re trying to control each other’s feelings.

When my son was applying to colleges, he really wanted to go to Berkeley. And the letter came and he and my husband and I were sitting together in a room, and he was rejected. And in that moment he started to cry. And I jumped in and started to say, “It’s fine. It’s fine. You’re going to UCLA. That’s such a great school too.” And my husband interrupted and said, “Sweetheart, let him feel his feelings.” And so, my son let a few tears come through so he could let go of the vision he had of going to Berkeley. Once he did that, which only took about 30 seconds, he was then able to open up and be excited about the opportunity to go to UCLA. I’m so grateful that my husband called out the pattern of how I was trying to control my son’s feelings, really, so that I could control my own. So he asked both my son and me to feel our feelings.

We also make an agreement that we reveal to one another any thoughts we’ve had three or more times so we don’t withhold, because when you withhold, you withdraw, and when you withdraw, things get complex. And then of course, gossip can get started and then you really get complex.

We also agree that we do our best to keep our agreements. We only make agreements that we’re really willing to honor and we do our best to do what we say we’re going to do. 

Another one of my favorite agreements is to play with things when they start to get serious. That’s one of my favorite ones to do with the people around me who are willing to do that because, my goodness, can we move through a lot of complexity quickly if we can play. 40 percent faster, it says that kids learn when they’re playing and I think probably the same thing is true for adults.

I’m really lucky that I have so many people that will play with me when things get serious. My friend Grace is one of them. And one day I get a phone call, and I pick up the phone, and on the other end there’s this very playful voice in a Southern accent, and it said, “Hi, my name is Grace Anne. Is this Diana?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” “Well, Diana, I want to let you know Grace, I’ve learned, is real hurt by something you said the other day. Now, she’s not going to call you and tell you that, she’s kind of prideful, but I’m calling, because I thought maybe you’d like to know and give you a little hint about that.” And I said, “Well, Grace Anne, thank you so much. I’m really grateful.” And she said, “You are welcome.” And she hung up.

So, of course, I picked the phone back up and called Grace. And I said, “Hey, Grace, I want to let you know that I have a sense that you might have been hurt by something I said the other day.” And she said, “Yeah, you know, actually, I was.” And we got to have a conversation about it and move through it and come out on the other end close and connected. And I so appreciated that she didn’t know how to reach out, but through play, she was able to learn — and so was I — how to come back into connection.

A third decision that I made in my life occurred at a time where I was working really hard, more hours than I ought to, because it was compromising my health and wellbeing, which has its own kind of complexity. At that time, I believe that the overwhelm came because I really wanted to be right in a story I had that my work in the world really mattered. And because it really mattered, I had to push myself and drive myself, and that wasn’t working.

So I came to a decision in which I wanted to hold two truths equally, and the two truths for me are my work does really matter. The values I hold, the intentions I have, where I place my attention, all of these have impact on others, and that really matters. At the same time, I choose to hold the belief equally that my work does not matter, that the world would be just fine if I was no longer here. This is a wonderfully brilliant, intelligent world, and it can figure itself out without me.

And holding these two truths together offers me the opportunity to live in congruence, listening to what is mine to do, what is not mine to do. How do I do it in a way that is sustainable? Because living unsustainably creates a tremendous amount of complexity, and it’s the kind of complexity I don’t want to live with any longer.

It is my great hope that some of these ideas inspire some of you and that in trying them on for yourself, you discover there is real liberation and aliveness and joy in the experience of having your inner and outer worlds in agreement. I am wishing you all so very well. Cheers to being human. It is not for the faint of heart. And if we can make it a little simpler, amen.

***

Anne Lamott: Hi, my name is Anne Lamott. I’m the author of 21 books. The last one was called Good Writing, which I wrote with my husband, Neal Allen. At the age of 60, 12 years ago, I woke up feeling a heaviness on my chest, a cellular understanding of how much I had been carrying all these decades that were things my parents had told me about myself that were simply not true. 

My parents were very progressive, but they started seeing me for my achievements at five or six, instead of for the goofy, loving being that we are all underneath the surface. When I decided on the right to be who I truly was, instead of the person I had always agreed and striven to be, i.e., highly successful, endlessly charming, life got a lot more simple.

I had to do the deep dive into the belief that I needed people’s respect and affection to feel of value, to feel that I was a valuable human being. Once I realized that this feeling wasn’t out there, but that it was rather going to be an inside job, my life got much quieter, and I could slow down and actually live it, savor it, breathe it in. Reclaiming the goofball inside helped me reclaim curiosity, which they had stopped grading for by about first grade, and this made everything so much simpler. I no longer had to keep the same six plates spinning in the air so people would think I was fabulous. I discovered that I didn’t have to keep trying so hard all the time in every way.

My Diocesan priest friend, Terry Richey, once told me that the point is not to try harder but to resist less. Hearing this instantly simplified life for me, seeing the folly of the endless trying to achieve, to improve, to impress, whatever, helped me find my way back each day and in every way to one simple thing I wanted to bring my focus and best self to. I was no longer in the frantic, striving, complex world of needing people to validate my parking ticket, because I was affirming my own worth. I could breathe again, and there is no more simple, profound, enriching change we can make than learning to breathe again. To really breathe gives us an umbilical connection to life, to the universe, our own hearts, and our deepest selves.

Two meditation techniques helped me learn to breathe with consciousness. One was simply to put my hand on my belly and inhale slowly all the way down until I could see my hand rise. I ask you, is there anything more simple than breathing into your hand and watching your tummy go up and down, expand and contract?

The other technique was something I learned from Ram Dass, who taught that we could imagine our hearts as having nostrils and experience expanding our heart in this way. The heart is our spiritual core, and it feels just wonderful to make it bigger. 

60 was a significant birthday, because I realized I was starting the third third of my life. Many people I loved deeply had died, and I truly got on a cellular level that we’re all on borrowed time, and it’s good to remind oneself of that. It makes life so much more simple when we stop hitting the snooze button and start being more intentional about how we spend our days and our life force.

I felt like I had been flying around in the little plane of me with all the tense little boxes of no longer meaningful stuff that was so hard to let go of, but that it was keeping me flying too low, metaphorically. So, with the help of wise teachers, I started tossing it out of the airplane and I felt myself begin to rise. Simplicity in life is related to creating spaciousness and greater weightlessness, reclaiming curiosity and spaced outedness, which brings us back into the present moment, the momentous moment, which is home.

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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman (#864) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question: What are 1–3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? To explore that, I invited five long-time listener favorites: Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman.

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“Complicated families can lead to complicated lives.”
— David Yarrow

“Am I getting energy from how I’m spending my life, or is it being taken away? Try to measure what it is. … Look for what those things are and track them, and then make sure you’re booking time for those things into your calendar, as if it’s a job.”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

“Low drama makes a very simple life.”
— Diana Chapman

“Reclaiming the goofball inside helped me reclaim curiosity.”
— Anne Lamott

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

Want to also hear the previous instalment in this series? Listen to episode #857, featuring tips from Maria Popova, Morgan Housel, Cal Newport, Craig Mod, and Debbie Millman, in which they share removing what no longer fits to make room for what does, radically simple investing and money philosophy, cutting the noise of overcommitment, designing a life that matches who you are, the difference between freedom and control, and much more.

The post How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman (#864) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Great to see you, as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Definitely that.

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

Elad Gil: Very dramatic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: That’s crazy.

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’d say, “Go to Hollywood.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Yeah, good point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Right, practice smiling people.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Very specific.

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: That’s it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Elad Gil: Very Naval, right?

Tim Ferriss: Very Naval.

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Yeah.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Could you speak to that?

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

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

Tim Ferriss: What’s ASD?

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

Tim Ferriss: I see. I got it.

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

Tim Ferriss: Which model were you investigating that with?

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

Tim Ferriss: Why were you looking into that specifically?

Elad Gil: I thought it was interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Like what?

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

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

Elad Gil: Vitamin D and creatine.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Got it.

Elad Gil: If you want to a lift.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elad Gil: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Website | X | Substack | No Priors Podcast

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

— Elad Gil

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

— Elad Gil

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

— Elad Gil

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

— Elad Gil

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

— Elad Gil

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

— Elad Gil

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

— Elad Gil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: That is amazing.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: From Maryland to Washington, DC.

Cathy Lanier: From Maryland.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Cathy Lanier: Right on the border of DC.

Tim Ferriss: Can I pause you for one second?

Cathy Lanier: Sure.

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: That’s okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Right, cuts the child support bill.

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: That is remarkable. Yeah.

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

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

Cathy Lanier: Mm-hmm.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Oh my God. Talk about — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I won’t — okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: 1990.

Tim Ferriss: 1990.

Cathy Lanier: Yep. 1990.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: What was his name?

Cathy Lanier: Donny Exum.

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

Cathy Lanier: Critical. Those mentors are critical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: So what happened?

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Gross.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: Captain.

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: He’s the next big mentor.

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: This is lieutenant.

Cathy Lanier: That’s lieutenant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, you don’t need those anymore.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy Lanier: That’s Eisinger Kilbane.

Tim Ferriss: You handled tenant billing, right?

Cathy Lanier: Yeah.

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

Cathy Lanier: Sound familiar, Tim?

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

Cathy Lanier: OCD?

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Sure, I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So tons of free time.

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

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

Cathy Lanier: Military.

Tim Ferriss: Military — 

Cathy Lanier: Military.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Tough look. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: It’s so fun.

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

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

Cathy Lanier: Good for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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