Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  AMANDA: “No, really. Just take on the pain, and wear it as a shirt.”

  TF: This is precisely why I regularly refer to myself a “professional dilettante” when I’m being interviewed by someone who views me as a dabbling generalist (which I probably am). By preemptively using the language of a critic, I remove some of their potential weapons.

  Two Words for Conflict Resolution

  “[My mentor’s] life advice to me, when I’m going into a conflict or a difficult situation with my parents or an argument with Neil [Gaiman, her husband] is, ‘Say less.’ That’s it. Just say less.”

  EXPLAINING HER EARLY SUCCESS AS A STREET PERFORMER:

  “I treated every single patron like a ten-second love affair.”

  Amanda’s Meditation Practice

  “Basic vipassana meditation, nothing fancy, no crazy mantras, no gods or deities, just basically sitting on the earth as a human being and paying attention to your breath and your body and letting thoughts come and go, but really trying not to be attached to the drama that comes visiting.”

  Dropping Ashes on the Buddha

  “One of my absolute favorite books of all time, because it changed my life, is a book called Dropping Ashes on the Buddha. It’s by Zen Master Seung Sahn, who was a Korean Zen monk. I read it when I was maybe 24, and it’s a short book: just a series of letters that this really funny, very direct, very no-bullshit Korean monk wrote back and forth with his students in the 1970s. It was one of those, ‘Oh, my God, I think I get it’ books. . . . I have given that book to probably 30 or 40 people, especially people who have told me that they are feeling kind of lost and/or depressed or directionless, or younger people who are at crazy crossroads in their life and need something to hang onto. If you like it, there is a companion book that was his second collection of letters, which was called Only Don’t Know.”

  Aim Narrow, Own Your Own Category

  The following is one of my favorite excerpts from The Art of Asking, which I highlighted because it beautifully showcases the “1,000 True Fans” philosophy I’m so fond of (page 292):

  Dita Von Teese, a star in the contemporary burlesque scene, once recounted something she’d learned in her early days stripping in L.A. Her colleagues—bleach-blonde dancers with fake tans, Brazilian wax jobs, and neon bikinis—would strip bare naked for an audience of 50 guys in the club and be tipped a dollar by each guy. Dita would take the stage wearing satin gloves, a corset, and a tutu, and do a sultry striptease down to her underwear, confounding the crowd. And then, though 49 guys would ignore her, one would tip her fifty dollars.

  That man, Dita said, was her audience.

  ✸ Any quotes you live by, or think of often?

  “‘Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who’ve found it’ [adapted from Voltaire]. A reminder that the path never ends and that absolutely nobody has this shit figured out.”

  Spirit animal: Mirror orchid

  * * *

  Eric Weinstein

  Eric Weinstein (TW: @ericrweinstein) is managing director of Thiel Capital, a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard, and a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  This is the text from Eric that catalyzed our podcast: “Do you want to try a podcast on [the topics in our text thread] . . . psychedelics, theories of everything, and the need to destroy education in order to save it?”

  The most viral thing Eric has ever written is about Kung Fu Panda, his all-time favorite film [“In Kung Fu Panda, how does Po end up developing the capability to be an awesome Kung Fu fighter?” on Quora]. Eric has also written about professional wrestling as a metaphor for living in a constructed and false reality [see “Kayfabe” on Edge.org].

  2,000–3,000 PEOPLE, NOT GENERAL FAME

  This is one of the messages Eric burned into my brain last year, and it’s guided many decisions since. We were sitting in a large soaking tub talking about the world (as mathematicians and human guinea pigs do in San Francisco), and he said: “General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities than benefits. However, if you’re known and respected by 2–3K high-caliber people (e.g., the live TED audience), you can do anything and everything you want in life. It provides maximal upside and minimal downside.

  GOOD QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN TACKLING INCUMBENT COMPANIES (OR IDEAS)

  “How is their bread buttered?”

  “What is it that they can’t afford to say or think?”

  “CONSENSUS” SHOULD SET OFF YOUR SPIDEY SENSE

  “Somehow, people have to learn that consensus is a huge problem. There’s no ‘arithmetic consensus’ because it doesn’t require a consensus. But there is a Washington consensus. There is a climate consensus. In general, consensus is how we bully people into pretending that there’s nothing to see. ‘Move along, everyone.’ I think that, in part, you should learn that people don’t naturally come to high levels of agreement unless something is either absolutely clear, in which case consensus isn’t present, or there’s an implied threat of violence to livelihood or self.”

  TF: I start nearly every public presentation I give with a slide that contains one quote: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” —Mark Twain. This isn’t just for my audience. It’s also a reminder for me.

  CHANGE YOUR WORDS, CHANGE YOUR WORLD

  Eric has an amazing vocabulary that regularly stumps me, and we speak a lot about the culture-shaping power of language.

  As mentioned in Reid Hoffman’s profile (page 228), one of my favorite quotes is from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Partly as a result of my late-night jam sessions with Eric, I started experimenting with inventing new words and spreading them in pop culture This can be for shits and giggles, but sometimes it’s because a serious national conversation is in need of new words. In the former category, my first was “teledultery” from a tweet on April 6, 2016:

  “Proposed new word—TELEDULTERY (n.)—When a significant other secretly watches a TV series solo that you’ve agreed to watch together.”

  My second experiment, in the “serious” category, was made public in my conversation with Eric: “bigoteer.”

  There currently isn’t much of a penalty for frivolously labeling people an “ist” (e.g., sexist, racist, misogynist, classist), despite the fact that people who are unfairly accused of such things can have their careers, marriages, etc., destroyed. This often happens with no evidence, very questionable evidence, or even strong countering evidence. The damage is hard to undo, even if there’s a retraction or correction. Google and Wikipedia will, at the least, continue to have “has been accused of . . . ,” which is damning ambiguity.

  So, what to do? I think we can fight fire with fire. This is where “bigoteer” comes in.

  Bigoteer (n)—a person who implies other people are bigots, for personal gain.

  Let’s say a writer takes the lazy route for cheap applause (i.e., sensationalizing for clicks) and haphazardly accuses others of being an “ist” like sexist or racist. That mudslinger could now become labeled as a “well-known bigoteer” in their own Wikipedia entry, for instance. This would create a consequence and disincentive, which I don’t see currently, to acting in such a cavalier and damaging way.

  Out-of-control political correctness and online lynch mobs are the end of free speech. Fight it. The world we live in is becoming a horrible “consensus reality.” Don’t run over the cliff.

  DEFINING A “HIGH-AGENCY” PERSON

  Eric said “high-agency person” in passing, and I asked him to elaborate:

  “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second di
alogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something? So, how am I going to get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience?”

  TF: Eric describes The Martian as “The ultimate high-agency film.”

  WHAT IS “CANONICAL DESIGN”?

  “Well, let’s look at nature. There’s a great virus called T4 bacteriophage. If you look it up, it’s like a lunar lander. It’s really cool. The genetic material is held in a capsule called a ‘capsid’ that has the form of an icosahedron [20-faced polyhedron]. . . . It’s a little crazy to think that before Plato ever existed, nature had figured out this complicated 20-sided object. But because it was so natural at a mathematical level, even if it was complex, nature found the canonical design even though there was no canonical designer. . . . Because it was a God-given form, it didn’t need to be ‘thunk up,’ if you will, by any individual. Or the recent discovery of grasshoppers that use gear mechanisms for jumping. You would think we had invented gears. But, in fact, gears are such a natural idea that natural selection found it long before we did. . . . These forms really don’t have an inventor so much as a discoverer.”

  ✸ Most-gifted or recommended books?

  “For my science friends, I tell them to read The Emperor of Scent, by Chandler Burr, about my friend Luca Turin. It talks about a renegade scientist being stymied by the journal Nature, by various conferences, by the established research centers, and it’s just a wonderful introduction to how the dissident voice is marginalized. Because Luca is such a genius of olfaction and chemistry, he’s able to take a perspective, which may or may not be true, but keep pushing forward and battling. So, that’s one of my favorites.

  “I have another weird recommendation, which is this book Heraclitean Fire by Erwin Chargaff, who effectively shorted Watson and Crick. He told Watson and Crick that he didn’t think that they were very good or very smart, and that they didn’t know their chemistry. They weren’t qualified to work on DNA, etc. It turned out that they got it right, and he got it wrong. When I heard that there was somebody who bet against Watson and Crick, I thought, ‘Well, this is just going to be the laugh of the century,’ but it turned out that just to short those guys required another genius. He writes about trying to suppress these guys and failing because they were right and he was wrong. He has enough presence of mind to struggle with it.

  “These are books that I think are incredibly powerful because they talk about what it’s like to be one against the many.”

  THE POWER OF THINKING SIDEWAYS

  “Nobody really knew how to do wheeled luggage before 1989. It’s hard to imagine that the whole world had their heads wedged so far up there that they couldn’t think to put in these recessed wheels with a telescoping handle. And this was the invention of a guy named Robert Plath, who was a pilot for Northwest, I think. In one fell swoop, he convinced everyone that their old luggage was terrible. So even though there wasn’t a lot of growth, he created the growth because nobody wanted their old luggage. You could compare these discrete brainwave innovations across fields. For example, in table tennis in the early ’50s, the worst player on the Japanese team at the Bombay Table Tennis Championships was this guy Hiroji Satoh. He glued two foam expanses to both sides of a sandpaper table tennis bat, and nobody could cue off of the sounds because it changed the sound of the ball.”

  TIM: “Like a silencer on a gun.”

  ERIC: “Exactly. So if you put a suppressor on your paddle . . .”

  TIM: “Suppressor. Just the fact that you used that word makes me think that you have a bunch of firearms hiding in your basement.”

  ERIC: “I can neither confirm nor deny. But the idea that the worst player on one of the lower-rated teams would be the undisputed champion simply through an innovation that was that profound shows you what the power of one of these ideas is. [TF: “These ideas” = having a “secret” as described in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: knowing or believing something that the rest of the world thinks is nonsense.] The power laws are just so unbelievably in your favor if you win that it makes [venturing outside the norm] worthwhile.”

  TIM: “Or Dick Fosbury, who went backwards over the high jump bar for the first time in the Olympics, winning gold —”

  ERIC: “1968, you got it.”

  TIM: “Ridiculed, then mimicked, and eventually made standard.”

  ERIC: “[In the case of the poorly designed standard umbrella] I would, for example, immediately think about, let’s say, the Japanese and their love of origami, and the mathematics of paper folding. That would be a place that I might see whether I could mine that silo of expertise for any application to the umbrella. Very often, it’s a question of being the first person to connect things that have never been connected before, and something that is a commonplace solution in one area is not thought of in another.”

  FOR DEEP FUCKING CREATIVE WORK

  TIM: “If you are trying to do deep creative work that requires a lot of synthesis, or as Naval Ravikant might say, ‘orthogonal thinking,’ what would your work cycle look like?”

  ERIC: “I use a weird technique. I use ‘coprolalia’—it sounds pornographic.”

  TIM: “A little bit.”

  ERIC: “You know the strings of obscenities that Tourette’s patients involuntarily utter? [That’s coprolalia.] So, I find that when we use words that are prohibited to us, it tells our brain that we are inhabiting unsafe space. It’s a bit of a sign that you’re going into a different mode. . . . When I’m going to do deep work, very often, it has a very powerful, aggressive energy to it. It’s not easy to be around. It’s very exacting, and I think I would probably look very autistic to people who know me to be social, were they ever to see me in work mode.”

  TIM: “How do you incite that? Do you just start trying to string together as many obscenities as possible? Like an incantation?”

  ERIC: “I have my same sequence. It’s like an invariant mantra that I have to say.”

  TIM: “Can you share it, or is that top secret?”

  ERIC: “No, no. You can’t share your meditation word.”

  TIM: “Well, just some hints, then. How long is it?”

  ERIC: “It probably takes me seven seconds to say it. You [also] have to decamp from normal reality where you start thinking about [things like], ‘Well, how am I negatively going to impact my neighbor?’ No, this is your time. You’re stealing the time. And the act of creation is itself a violent action.”

  TF: This odd technique does seem to quickly produce a slightly altered state. Try it—write down a precise sequence of curse words that takes 7 to 10 seconds to read. Then, before a creative work session of some type, read it quickly and loudly like you’re casting a spell or about to go postal. Eric also finds late nights, around 3 a.m., to be ideal for deep creative work.

  ERIC: “When the phone stops ringing, when you have no FOMO [fear of missing out] because everybody’s asleep. It’s a Monday night, and it’s just you and an expanse of whiteboard. That’s when the magic happens.”

  OLD HABITS DIE HARD—THE WATCH SMILE

  “In almost every advertisement for wristwatches, the watches are set to 10:10. [Until you see] that, you can’t really believe that it’s true. But afterwards, you realize that the world has just pulled one over on you, because 10:10 looks like a smile to watch advertisers.”

  TIM: “Oh, I guess it’s very symmetrical, isn’t it?”

  ERIC: “Yeah. But what’s funny is that the wisdom has crept in to the point that sometimes you’ll see digital watch ads, and they’ll still be set to 10:10, even though it doesn’t look like a smile.”

  ON STARTING to USE PSYCHEDELICS AFTER AGE 40

  For his entire life, Eric believed that using psychedelics was “like pouring acid on your brain and leaving it as Swiss cheese.” That has changed in the last several years:

  “It wasn’t until
I started meeting some of the most intellectually gifted people in the sciences and beyond . . . I realized that this was sort of the open secret of what I call the hallucinogenic elite, whether it’s billionaires, or Nobel laureates, or inventors and coders. . . . A lot of these people were using these agents either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means.”

  “LEARNING DISABILITY” OR “TEACHING DISABILITY”?

  “. . . This is where we run into the trouble, which is we don’t talk about teaching disabilities. We [only] talk about learning disabilities, and a lot of the kids that I want are kids who have been labeled ‘learning disabled,’ but they’re actually super learners. They’re like learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower, and teachers can’t deal with this.

  “We label those kids ‘learning disabled’ to cover up from the fact that the economics of teaching require that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep. Well, that’s not a good model. I want to get as many of my dangerous [in a good way] kids out of that idiom, whether it requires dropping out of high school, dropping out of college. But not for no purpose. Drop into something. Start creating, building. Join a lab. Skip college.”

  ERIC’S “MORNING ROUTINE”

  “Each morning is basically a struggle against a new day, which I view as a series of opponents who must be defeated. I’m not a morning person. So every morning I get out of bed, I’m just astounded that I’ve done it. . . . It was Julian Schwinger, the great Harvard physicist, I think, who was asked if he would teach the 9:00 a.m. quantum mechanics course, and he stopped for a second. The person asking said, ‘Well, what’s the problem, Professor Schwinger?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know if I can stay up that late.’”