New Technology To Change Old Habits With James Norris

Founder and CEO of Self Spark – James Norris

What is lifehacking and can it really be your answer to better, faster results? The best way to fight your procrastination when your own brain is practically against you. The only way to know “for sure” when a certain lifehack is helping you or not. What are “commitment contracts”, how do they work, and how to use them to your advantage. Plus everything you always wanted to know about nootropics, which one is the best to try if you’ve never done it before. Does Pavlok and aversion therapy really work? What direction are all these life hacking and bio hacking technologies going?

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• SelfSpark.com

Check out JamesNorris.orgfor more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Jaime Tardy:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire.  I'm Jamie Tardy and today on the show we have James Norris.  Now he's a serial entrepreneur.  He also has a bunch of different really amazing life hack stuff.  One is called Self Spark.  I'm gonna have him get into it all because he's also working at Stanford and a whole bunch of other amazing things that I can't even get into.  Thanks so much for coming on the show today, James.

James Norris:	Thank you for having me.

Jaime Tardy:	And you still live in Austin.  You actually went to school out here so we were connecting on that a bit before.  How did you make the transition from Austin school to entrepreneurship?

James Norris:	I was an entrepreneur well before UT but [inaudible] [00:09:10], yeah - 

Jaime Tardy:	I didn't know what that was.  I was doing this because I thought it was like devil horns.  And apparently that's - I didn't realize I was doing the Austin thing.

James Norris:	I do it around the world and no one gets it.  Sometimes occasionally like, yeah, you're from Texas, the football school, party school.  So I spent eight years in Austin to go to UT and then do a startup with my mentor.  But I've been an entrepreneur since I started selling candy during recess in first grade in Houston, Texas in a little suburban ghetto.

	So my start was [inaudible] family was broke and filed bankruptcy and a lot of bad things.  And I didn't wanna stick with that so candy was a solution.

Jaime Tardy:	As it always is.  No.  Okay.  So how do you make - okay, so I have kids, right.  One of them is in first grade and actually does sorta that stuff too.  So how did you make the transition from actually being a kid entrepreneur to a quote unquote "real" entrepreneur?

James Norris:	Okay.  Many, many micro businesses, about seven [inaudible] clubs.  I've built like ten clubs or so in my life and that started getting the startups properly around 19 or so.  But, yeah, I've got now eight startups that I've built and then a total of 22 organizations if you count the clubs and you go back to high school and college.  Because I just couldn't help but build because I had this energy and I had this desire to create things in the world, which is not always fantastic for entrepreneurship, as sometimes it doesn't make money.  But it is still valuable and interesting and a good challenge.

Jaime Tardy:	Oh, that's interesting because with the club thing I was like, okay, what's the revenue model on - or was there one or was it just clubs?

James Norris:	Yeah, the revenue model for clubs primarily is dues but you really build it off of hours [inaudible] [00:10:58] energy.  So you've got like a volunteering club - I did a lot of Red Cross so it's the energy that they would put in and you have some output in terms of social impact.  They have some output in terms of what they're getting on their CV and the resume plus their learning practical skills.  So it's like a win-win.  There's a business model there but nonprofit side I've done a lot of - we could talk about it if you want - I'm primarily a social entrepreneur.

Jaime Tardy:	Okay.  Explain a social - because I know we're gonna get into this anyway and I wanna hear about Self Spark too but get into exactly what a social entrepreneur is just in case people don't know.

James Norris:	Exactly, that's hard.  Sure, building businesses that have mission first.  The project builds the purpose.  So this is fundamentally - there are companies like Whole Foods just based in Austin which doesn't call itself a social enterprise but it's a conscious capitalist company.  They're trying to do good with every transaction so it does cost a lot but - because you're building better supply chains and you're helping people eat better.

	So there's a lot of value built into every part of the business model there.  And there are tons and tons like this.  I'm more and more interested in the social enterprises that can scale to really rapid growth and do a lot of impact at the same time.

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, you sent me an article right before this that I had a chance to read and it was like, instead of going after a million dollars, going after helping a million people very, very different mindset in general.  And you get to help a million people.  So tell me about sort of that shift and why rapid growth?  Why does it matter if we get to a million people as fast as humanly possible?

James Norris:	All right.  Everyone has their own values and what they're trying to optimize in their lives.  That's fine.  I'm trying to support that typically.  I've chosen to optimize for doing as much good as humanly possible.  I want to be an altruist and be a superstar altruist and create a lot of social impact.  And that's because I grew up in a troubled situation.  I saw suffering firsthand and I didn't think it was right that I got - I survived and thrived in a lot of ways.  And that comes with a lot of responsibility.  It feels like I should give back.  It's my obligation and my commitment, my choice.

	So I have - from the early days trying to build - like, make money, everything I could possibly do as a kid like washing cars and then mowing lawns and that sort of thing, selling pirated software, things like that.  I was also a bad kid.  I did have my run-ins with the law and stealing and things like that.  But deciding that it was more important to give back to others so they wouldn't have to get the same thing, and then just philosophically it seemed like the right thing to do.

	So I think you should go for your first million dollars is important but the first million people impacted is even more important.  So can you make an impact with everything that you sell or you create?  And that's what I think kids should be focusing on.  It's like, all right, I got my first million or your first thousand or first hundred, whatever the scale is for them.

Jaime Tardy:	So why do you think that you thrived in such a sort of not great upbringing when so many other people don't?

James Norris:	I had an amazing mother, that's one thing.  So she was the light of our family, just a fantastic woman, an inspiration to me still.  My work is in her honor.  But I happen to be resilient.  Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's early childhood experiences, maybe there's just those chance factors that happens.

	I have a twin sister and I have an older brother so they're both doing pretty well now but it's like we started from where we were and had to build up in our own ways.  And I have greater risk tolerance then most people.  I'm willing to bet it all and I've gone - I've basically gone down to my reserve, my [inaudible] [00:14:56] reserves three times, completely wiped myself out basically to build startups, to do a sabbatical, to - at UT I did a crazy thing.

	I was a triple major quadruple minor which I ended without any debts but that was because the government supported me.  I had jobs.  My dad actually ended up supporting me some but it's - I keep on making these bets and trying to go big just because that's who I am.

Jaime Tardy:	Okay.  So you're like, oh, by the way, I'm not gonna double major - or double minor, I'm gonna triple and quadruple because I have never heard of that before so I might as well go that big.  Why go that big?

James Norris:	Because engineering and - I was doing astronomy at first but it was too hard so I did something easier.  It's one of the things.  I have so much respect for those who are doing hard sciences and engineering and so on because it's more challenging than my - the three [inaudible] [00:15:45] arts degrees which I loved and was helpful for thinking and [inaudible] but seriously, it wasn't as hard as it might sound.  So if this is part of life - 

Jaime Tardy:	That's good to know.  All right.  I switched from art which was too hard to computers which I thought was way easier, by the way, just so you know, so very, very difference of opinion.  Mine was a different scenario of course, but tell me about how you started Self Spark because I really wanna get into this life hacking thing.

	We hear about the terms life hack constantly and, don't get me wrong, I am impatient.  I want to achieve everything faster, better, soon, more efficiently as much as humanly possible.  So tell us a little bit about Self Spark and then also what life hacking to you is.

James Norris:	Yeah, and that's a good point.  I'm uncertain about the term.  It's only ten years old.  Danny O'Brien coined it.  He was a journalist studying how alpha geeks got stuff done, the tools they were using.  And now it's sort of morphed into top ten uses of vinegar [inaudible] [00:16:43] it's rubbish.

	I think the essence behind it or behind the serious life hacking is using the most efficient and effective tools and techniques for improving your life.  It's basically getting to where you wanna go as fast as possible and being mindful that this is not - there aren't shortcuts for a lot of things.  I'll be the first one to tell you, I try to meditate faster is my joke.  I've meditated on top of a train.  It doesn't help to go faster, although there are some techniques with [inaudible] and some tools that do seem to give you a little boost.

	That said, we still have to work for it so I started life hacking when I was a teenager because I was trying to break free from my environment.  I mean, we were basically trying to get more done without enough time and I think everyone listening to this understands that.

	And so just over the last more than a decade I've been looking at all the tools, techniques, the behavioral science behind it, behavioral economics, neuroscience, social psychology, positive psychology.  You have to know all these fields to get a good sense of what's inside that brain of yours which is not aligned to your highest values.  It doesn't actually help you get what you want most of the time.  It's optimized for mating and for survival and things like that.

	So if you wanna achieve you start hacking into what makes you get up in the morning.  How do you fight your own procrastination and so on?  I have it.  I mean, I need this.  That's why I built Self Spark so - and I wanted to share it with more and more people.

Jaime Tardy:	I think that's - I mean, entrepreneurs are - because it's only up to us, right.  So I am the type - I have essential oils of brain power and peppermint oil when I'm tired.  And I have - you know what I mean?  I have a thousand things here.  Anyway I wanna show you all the stuff.  I have a whole bunch of things.  I try, right.  So give us some tips - and me because now I really wanna know - what are some things to make me as an entrepreneur more efficient, better, smarter, faster - that's very different - better, smarter, faster, all that fun stuff.

James Norris:	Oh, can we do - let's all get brain transplants from somebody who's done this and taken 30 years to figure it out.  But I found that most people - 

Jaime Tardy:	[Inaudible] [00:19:00] - 

James Norris:	 -- most people haven't figured it out and they go through most of their lives at a basic plateau.  So it depends on each individual person.  So I can give blanketed advice.  I've worked with over 1500 people now across 90 events in nine cities result spark.  We run life-acting boot camps around the world where we teach you the stuff in one or two days.

	As a generic, there's so many things you could do.  Let's just say morning rituals is a really big one for people to take on.  So if you don't have the step-by-step process that you're trying to tackle, to set up your day, get your most important thing done, to get your healthy vats in your brain, to get enough water in your system.  If you don't have that morning rituals down, I would urge you to take a few minutes to write down the ideal morning right now as you're listening to this or afterwards.  See if you can make it happen tomorrow morning.  And if not, see if you can make it happen the morning after.  If not, the morning after because if you get that basis then you have a good start for the rest of the day.

Jaime Tardy:	Okay.  What does that - okay, let's talk about my - critique me, okay, so that way I get something and everybody listening.  And so there are specific things I do in the morning.  I wake up, I meditate, right ? 

James Norris:	Great.

Jaime Tardy:	 -- and do some visualization.  Like today I have a moitai coach come to my house so I do moitai in the morning which is - and he kills me on purpose.  It's great.  And I don't eat before that - well, sometimes a little bit of green juice.  And then eggs and avocado, healthy fats, right, and any like oils or supplements or anything that I have.  But that's pretty much it.  I pretty much take a shower and then get into my day.  So critique me, is there anything else I should be doing, shouldn't be doing, anything like that?

James Norris:	That is definitely a good basis for - a role model for many people around.  I'd have to dive into who you are and what you actually need to accomplish.  I didn't hear a focus on the most important thing, your MIT or your frog, the thing that's the hardest thing to do, maybe do that right after you're done with moitai.  It depends on your framing.

	It depends on your framing so you might actually try meditating after you're done exercising.  I found that it's actually really helpful for - I've now beaten up my body and I can really dive into a deep recession faster.  But a lot of people also find it's really good to do it first thing before they do anything else, otherwise they'll get distracted by the day.

	So I would ask you like, what percentage of success have you had with this particular program and would you rate it on a scale of one to ten, like on a whatever scale?  And if it's doing well then you don't need to change it.

Jaime Tardy:	So I feel like it's doing well and I'm wondering if it could be better.  So, I mean, this is the thing, right.  So I love it so far, especially the visualization exercises I do.  I do future feeling and all that stuff.  And then I'm like, is there any way I could do it better or faster, you know what I mean?  And maybe I don't need to tweak it.  Maybe after a while it's just like, Jaime, take a break and you're doing enough.

James Norris:	If it's habitual where you're not having to use a lot of energy to do it, that's fantastic.  That's usually a good sign.  And if you don't miss - if you miss it and you feel bad about it, that's also a good sign.  If you get your exercise habit in place and you don't get to the gym or whatever it is and you feel bad then you figured out you built that habit.

Jaime Tardy:	Well, that's what happened to me.  So before I was going to the gym to do the moitai lessons and then I would make excuses or something.  You know what I mean?  And that's why I have him come to my house three times a week because I'm like, he's gonna show up either way.  I have to get ready, crap.

James Norris:	When you pay someone there's a different responsibility.  So I do a lot of things with commitment contracts where you put money on the line for achieving your goals.  And you pay this person to come so he or she is going to be there and you've just gotta show up.  You've gotta open the door and that's great.

	So you're - like Ulysses when he was tying himself to the mast of his ship so he could hear the siren song, but he had everyone else plug their ears so they wouldn't hear the song because the theory, you know, in the story is if they heard the siren song they'd go and crash into the rocks and try to get closer to the sirens.

	So he wanted to hear it but he tied himself up to the mast so he couldn't move.  He couldn't crash the ship beforehand because he knew ahead of time that he was going to make that big mistake of failure of will, let's call it cresha.  So he basically knew ahead of time, just like you did.  And sometimes you can do this with partners where they do a phone call to you or you put money on the line with a program called Stickk S-T-I-C-K-K or Be Minder.  These are both apps that basically will take your money if you fail to achieve your goals.

James Norris:	What a great business model.  I'll take your money.  I should set that up.  What the heck.  So a commitment contract, how do we - give me a step by step, somebody has something in their life that they want to change.  It's the beginning of 2016, we really wanna start getting into it, right.  So what's something - give me a step by step how we can create a commitment contract.

James Norris:	Okay.  So if you wanna do a one op commitment the best tool for that is Stickk, so it's done by Yale economists.  And basically you put a deadline for a goal, like I'm going to exercise ten times this month.  And if you hit it and your partner tells you you hit it, fantastic, you get to keep your money.  If you don't and your partner says you don't, then - it could be a gym partner or it could be a friend, your spouse, then they basically can donate your money to a charity of your choice, sometimes an anti charity.

	So if you don't like the Republican Party the money might go to a Republican candidate.  If you don't like Democrats, it might go to a Democrat candidate.  These are the essence of trying to get that behavioral economics inside your brain, those incentives that you have and use them to your advantage.  It's not for everyone.

Jaime Tardy:	I was gonna say, does that really - I mean, I know scientifically it works and people will commit to that.  They won't just be like, okay, partner, say that I did it.  I want my money back.

James Norris:	So you can cheat yourself.  Be Minder is with no partner typically.  It's just an app that every day you check in if you did it.  And they voluntarily - I think it was 11 percent of people voluntarily paid the company their cash if they failed because they realize that they're hurting themselves.  And Be Minder is providing a good service for them so that should compensate.

	Money is one thing to do.  You can do this with embarrassing pictures.  I don't think that's as effective.  Every person's different in how they respond to these kind of incentives and you have to figure out for you.  That's what life hacking is, figuring out what's working for you, trying it out, testing, getting the data and keep on iterating until it works.

Jaime Tardy:	But that's what's so annoying, right, because I wanna go tell me what works.  This is like in business, the industry's different, everything seems to be different.  So somebody can tell you, oh, this is what worked for me and I still have to figure it out for myself.  And what we have a tendency to do is to be overall busy, whatever and don't really pay as much attention as we possibly can to that.  So these triggers will come up where you don't have a life that's - like it took me forever to even start doing the morning routine thing.  I kept having [Inaudible] [00:26:14] miracle morning guy come on the show.  I'm like, yeah, crap, I need to get better at that.  Yeah, crap, I need to get better at that, right.

	And then finally I was like, okay, and then I started tweaking small things at a time but it's taken way longer than I've ever wanted it to.  So why do we do that as humans and how can we make that way easier because, I mean, it's a huge commitment to try and figure some of this stuff out.

James Norris:	So it is but it's also probably the most important commitment you could make or one of them because it's helping you get meta growth.  As you get better at growing you can get better at growing.  You have more money, you have more energy, you have more time and you can use those to build more money, more energy, more time and become your best self.

	So if you care about self actualization, becoming your highest self and being in line with your values then this is what you do.  Now I want to make this ten times easier.  That's the premise of Self Spark, learning the technologies and the behavioral science.  It helps it be a lot easier.

	I'll give one example.  I'm wearing it.  It's called the Pavlov.

Jaime Tardy:	Oh, Maneesh, my good friend Maneesh.

James Norris:	Yeah, so if I do this it will basically shock me.  It's an aversion therapy technique.  I'm still testing it to see if it works.  I think it does for some people and it probably doesn't for other people.  But it's a tool that if you notice yourself procrastinating you can press a button [inaudible] yourself on a Facebook you can press the button.  Or it can automatically read your Facebook habits from another tool that's called [inaudible] - 

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	[Inaudible] - 

James Norris:	 -- Rescue Time tracks what you do on your computer every minute and it's like Big Brother but in a really good way.  It's like your supportive one and it's just for you.  But that'll tell you every minute how productive you're being.  And you could have it tied to this and zap you or vibrate or whatnot.

	But this is the cutting edge of where we're at about giving lifestyle change technologies [inaudible] [00:28:07] technologies.  We haven't found that much.  I've looked at over a thousand tools now and I have studied a lot of them.  There aren't as many as you might think or actually panaceas are fantastic.  We'll see about Pavlok.  Modafinil is a tool for - 

Jaime Tardy:	I take Modafinil.

James Norris:	 -- especially if you have sleep issues.  Those are pretty powerful and they really help you diet.  It's really good so Whole Foods.  I do a [inaudible] I do a type of diet called bullet proof, so I do my bullet proof coffee in the morning.  I joke that I have coffee with my butter in the morning that's grass-fed butter and then a bunch of things added in.  So all these things give you accumulative edge if you start to know what actually responds to you and what doesn't.

	And the thing is you also change.  It's like your least dynamic system if it were simple then everyone would do it.  And if it were simple to be a millionaire, everyone would be a millionaire by now.  So it's one of those things where if you can master it then you have that massive edge over most people.  And it's definitely humbling.

	How many years have I been doing this and I still have massive problems?  And you [inaudible] have to be humble about it and just smile about it and then look into the neuroscience for example.  Look into whatever you're doing and just take another experiment and keep moving forward.

Jaime Tardy:	Thank you for saying that.  So is there a list of all of these things?  So I read Bulletproof - I've tried bullet proof coffee.  It did not work for me.  It made me wanna puke every single morning, which is not good.  But I did it for a month going like, it's gonna work eventually.  No, it'll be good.  I'll be good.  No, definitely not.  Not gonna do that again though I have so many friends that it - like Pat Flynn was the one that turned me onto it like four years ago, right.  And he's still doing it.

	And so when you start going and trying these things - because my friend Able James Bascom, I don't know if you know him or not, but he has a book called The Wild Diet.  He was actually in People Magazine this month.  So he's the type of guy where he has this thing attached to his - when I went to his house he'd like, okay, I sleep here and I'm testing this.  And it's a thing that goes behind your head when you're sleeping and blah, blah, blah.  And then you have these things.

	I'm like, wow, okay.  I would love to try these things and that's nuts, right.  Even if I had a list of all of them I don't feel like I could put the system together to test everything well enough to see if it would work well for me.  Do you know what I mean?

James Norris:	I've tried to solve this very problem.  I'm still working on it.  But of the thousand I've looked at I've tried to [inaudible] [00:30:40] the ones I find that are most efficacious for the most people.

Jaime Tardy:	Good, yes.

James Norris:	Unfortunately there's not much evidence behind most of these tools because they don't understand what randomized control trials are.  I'd just love to see the personal growth industry start publishing all their outcome data.  This is something we're doing at Self Spark.  You can see our results.  Just ask for them because I believe in being really transparent about how we're doing.

	So [inaudible] adopt me is a site which lists some of mine, still in the works but I am trying to get it up to speed where I'm comfortable with.  Because it's so hard to know for you and for the other millions of people that could do these things what's the best thing to choose first.

Jaime Tardy:	Because let's say like, I know Maneesh Sethi that created Pavlok and I remember way back when he was telling me about it and we were joking like, ha, ha, this is - because I used to have - well, I have [inaudible] now but I created a band that vibrated to remind you of things.  Like this was seven, eight years ago before that was cool.  I could've gotten a patent for wearable - it would've cost me 20 grand and I was like, I don't have time for that right now.  Now I'm killing myself but whatever, it was fine.

	But Maneesh, I remember when I first met - when he first had sort of his Pavlok thing he had a business card that shocked you.  So he's like, here's your business card.  I'm like, you suck.  And I'm like, why would I voluntarily shock myself, number one?

	So I wanted to try it but I'm like, I don't know that I'd actually use it.  So even if it's available and all these studies say that it could be really, really good, I'm still like, I feel like that way with a lot of different things just because I've bought so much stuff that I haven't actually used after a long time.  Do you know what I mean?

James Norris:	You're - everyone else suffers the same problem.  This is individual differences.  It's a term in psychology and it is something that there's no easy solution to yet.  I'm still looking for the highest impact tools.  I can tell you things like soy lancer meal squares for food seem like they're pretty good.

Jaime Tardy:	Have you tried those yet?

James Norris:	I've wanted soy lancer for 15 years and when I finally got it I was already eating better than soy lance so it was less useful.  But [inaudible] [00:32:57] meal squares is the equivalent like a little square meal bar basically which is a whole foods approach so you don't have to actually mix the drink.

Jaime Tardy:	I know, all I do is these for most of the day, right?

James Norris:	There you go.

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah.

James Norris:	It's good?

Jaime Tardy:	I guess so, yeah.  But you never know.  As long as you're feeling - I guess - let me ask you this, because there are a thousand things right.  And I do wanna - in a second I'm gonna ask what are your top three that we need to try, right, because maybe there's some things that I need to try.  What I'm wondering is how do we really evaluate whether these are effective or not because there's so many variables in that like, I'll try this brain power thing.  And I don't know if it's a placebo or not.  I've been using it for a long time.

	But the quantifiable difference of me going, I feel better, smarter, whatever right now, like I'm not sure that I'm really noticing that much but it makes me feel better smelling it, putting it on or something like that.  So I'm continually using it.  Who knows if it's really working?

	I feel like there's just such wide variables.  There's never a, hell yes, this is it, totally working, totally keeping it forever besides eating better food and exercising.  And those are the ones I'm meditating.  Those are the three, right.

James Norris:	I'd say online dating for some people so that can be very, very effective.  Okay, [inaudible] [00:34:18] tender.

Jaime Tardy:	I do that too, okay, good.

James Norris:	Across the whole category of everything you wanna do this is what the kit is trying to solve to get the highest impact ones.  You know, it's hard.  So the take-home message here is, if you don't know - see a difference then okay, it probably isn't as important except for things maybe like supplements and vitamins.  But if you're eating really well that's primary.

	The key is you don't have sensory apparatus that will tell you if these things are really that great.  And these are [inaudible] studies so you don't have controls.  And you're doing this all through introspection.  You can ask other people to evaluate you objectively.  You can have them observe.  You can take some data like with [inaudible] as a cognitive brain-training tool.  You can see baseline overtime.

	Lots of things like that give you a little bit of insight but if it's not worth your time then you don't need to do it.  It's worth doing it in short experiments.  That's almost always going to be valuable to try new things.  But if you don't see good value, if you don't have good reason, good evidence to believe it then maybe you don't work on it.  Then you just keep on going through your day.

	But if you notice that you are low energy or if you aren't as happy or if you're not making as much money as you want, just look at the evidence for that and then take the highest likely probability tool for helping solve that and then make a prediction.  This is what I would say, like try to make predictions about what you think will happen before you do it.

	So the Pavlok, I wrote down my predictions.  I'm still testing to see if they work.  And then that gives you a lot of in honesty about what these things are, useful or not.

Jaime Tardy:	So how long of a testing - because I want you to give me the three things about like how long of a testing process - give us what we should be doing so that way we can make a valid assessment.  Because I just feel like we're otherwise just winging it.

James Norris:	Well, you were definitely winging it [inaudible] [00:36:12] you're not gonna get scientific accuracy here with these [inaudible] kind of like, I mean, sample size of one.  Sometimes it's like immediate.  You see it within ten minutes, sometimes an hour, sometimes a day.  Usually these experiments are less than a week of doing something and [inaudible] what happened.

	But you don't really have - you're asking for how do I know for sure.  I don't know for sure for any of these things.  The more I learn the more I have what I call Socratic inversions.  Socrates was famous for not knowing anything so the more I've learned I'm, well no, I'm not so sure.  So I pride myself on trying to be humble there, which doesn't make sense of that oxymoron statement.

Jaime Tardy:	[Inaudible] well, tell us what are those three things-  So, okay, tell me what those three possible things are.  If we could only pick three, besides meditation which hopefully everybody's trying it or attempting to do, eating better and exercising.

James Norris:	Okay.  So for all people all the time - 

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	I know, right, great, but go ahead.

James Norris:	-- [inaudible] with Wealthfront.

Jaime Tardy:	What is it?

James Norris:	Wealthfront is a [inaudible] advisor, financial service that will take your money and invest it into index funds and so on for a year.  So you don't have to do any work and it basically just helps you make money overtime.  And most people I know don't have the discipline or the energy to really focus on their finances.  So if you're one of those people, use something automated like that.  That or Betterment.  Those are the top two right now in the field.

Jaime Tardy:	Oh, I know Betterment.  Okay.

James Norris:	If you're gonna do I would say meditation so using an app like Calm or Headspace, that they're probably the top two in terms of getting to a more reliable habit.

Jaime Tardy:	It's been awesome.  It's really, really cool.

James Norris:	Yeah, these are definitely good tools for a lot of people.  And it's hard to go deeper.  I wanna say something like Modafinil or [inaudible] [00:38:13] so these are just interesting because they can give you more focus.  But you need a prescription for Modafinil.

Jaime Tardy:	So, okay.  Let's dive into [inaudible] and stuff like that because I am a huge fan, right.  So I've got a lot.  I've tried a lot.  I have friends that create me different stacks of things and they're like when I was writing my book a couple of years ago, my friend was sending me pills.  I was like, okay, I'm assuming these are - no.  It was all legal, don't get me wrong.

	And I tried Modafinil, actually have a prescription for Adderall because I have ADD.  But I've been trying so many.  If you go down into my cabinet, it doesn't look as bad as Abel's when I went to his house, like that was pretty bad.  But I have tried every single supplement.  Alpha Brain seemed to work better for me but sometimes Ciltep has worked for other people better, right.  So I feel like I go through some of this and peppermint oil, rubbing it on your hands and smelling it when I'm kind of losing - so I've got pieces.

	Tell me what you think I should do now because I feel like I've sort of dabbled.  Modafinil is not my thing because it depletes a little bit too much.  I don't feel - A. I feel like a zombie, like a complete zombie and it lasts too long for me.  It's great if you need 12 hours of book writing and that's it.

	One of my friends described it as - he goes, I sat in a coffee shop and I went to start and then I looked up and it was closing time.

James Norris:	That can happen [inaudible] [00:39:48] so - 

Jaime Tardy:	He was like, I got a bunch of stuff done which was awesome but it was very like tunnel vision stuff like that.  And I tried it and it worked really well for when I was doing my book.  It's not my top choice at the moment.  I feel like there's a few things that are a little less drastic because I feel like I can't go out socially on it.  You're sort of just like in a funk brain.

	But give me what I should be doing now knowing that I've tested a few things.  I do Alpha Brain, Adderall maybe once a week because I don't wanna be crazy on that.  But that's where I'm ad right now.  Do you have any - I know usually you're teaching people about nootropics to begin with and everybody listening probably is not as crazy as I am but I just wanted your opinion.

James Norris:	You're already an advanced user so this goes into your individual response to each of these drugs.  And it's - I definitely don't wanna try to diagnose and do this over the air.  It's like, all right.  Let's go here, this root in this country is going to work for you.  And then we haven't talked about psychedelics [inaudible] - 

	Okay.  So my read for you is that you're doing pretty well.  And if you want to now optimize at the 1 percent level or at the 3 percent level, you might be able to - you might get a little bit more juice, more energy and more focus.  But you now have to look at the cost benefit.  So you're gonna spend dozens of hours, some money and you're possibly going to get that.

	I think that's usually extremely useful for people to do especially if you think that time will span over next year, the year after, the year after, the year after.  It depends on how far you are in the space.  I haven't found anything that's really that much better than Modafinil.  And Ciltep you can make it on your own .  It's just artichoke extract and forskolin which is a nice more of a natural simpler one.

	I like - basically caffeine is a nice - still for me it's a good focus.  I know if I'm going to do something like that, like a 5-Hour Energy is the cheap one I'll use sometimes because I know if I have to submit myself to that then I'll get some value from this.  It's a little visual aid if I put it next to my monitor.  So I don't know for you.  That's [inaudible] [00:42:06] answer.

Jaime Tardy:	Well, let's say for everybody else that has no idea what we're talking about at this very moment because they're like, wait Jaime, where did you - what tangent did you just go on?  So give us what people should start with.  A. tell people what a nootropic is so that way we're sort of rounding it back out.  So what a nootropic is and then maybe like one or two to start testing at the very beginning if they're a little scared of Mondafinil.

James Norris:	Yeah, so nootropics are just agents to help you better cognition, better focus, motivation.  And I think the best thing to do is actually to learn.  So Smart Drugs Smart is one of the podcasts on this.  There's [inaudible] sub channel on nootropics.  And the more you study the better before you start.  Definitely before you start because you don't wanna play with your brain and especially if you're - I think it's under 27 or so your brain is still forming so parts of it are in development.  And especially if you're young you wanna be very careful.  Obviously talk to your doctor before you do any of this [inaudible] - 

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	Yes, please, [inaudible] that of course, we don't wanna give any - thank you.

James Norris:	 -- nothing else because we're talking heads.  Listen to your physicians.  But some of this stuff, the research, the science, it's not being pursued as much as it should because of these weird [inaudible] about enhancement.

	But, yeah, study is the most important thing.  I would - typically Ciltep is the one I have people start on if they just wanna do something that's inexpensive and seems to have a small [inaudible] but reasonable and fairly - 

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	If you're in Austin too, you know that my friend runs the company.

James Norris:	Yeah, yeah.  I've met some of their folks and I just went to Dave Asprey's Bulletproof conference months back and ran into some of these people.  I didn't [inaudible] Avilard is the guy that pioneered this particular nootropic.  I haven't met him yet.

Jaime Tardy:	That's awesome.  Okay.  So say you're gonna start with Ciltep.  I think that's sorta the way to go.  Where do you see bio hacking and life hacking in general going?  Because I feel like our technology is getting better in general and yet, like you said, there's not a lot of options.  Like to me I'm a big sci-fi Marvel geek that's like, okay, in the future - I watched this show Dollhouse.  I don't know if you've ever seen it.  It's really good.  And they upload their brain and they do all these things.

	We know that that eventually way, way long time from now we'll probably exist at some point.  We're not even anywhere close and we have a bracelet that zaps us.  That's where we're at right now.  Like really can we come up with something better?  Where do you - no offense, Maneesh, no offense at all.  He's doing very well.  But tell me where you really see this going in like two years.  Not like ten, twenty years out because I feel like that's different, but like in two years that we can start looking forward to.

James Norris:	So I've been studying this space really deeply for about five years now.  And when I first started I was more optimistic about how fast we're going to progress because I hadn't studied the whole ecosystem.  Now I've looked at a lot so in two years we'll probably have a couple more breakthrough technologies like tender [inaudible] or whatnot.

	I don't expect to have anything that's that transformative.  In one or two domains, you know, maybe in - finances are doing much better.  I mean, Mint when it first came out was a breakthrough technology.  And so everyone hopefully has thought about using Mint to automate your finances.

	But I'm not sure if there's going to be anything that - if I were to bet money, which I sometimes would do, there isn't one thing that's obviously going to win.  So I'm hoping nootropics in the next few years will be taking off.  This seems like it's happening especially with marijuana becoming legalized and things like that.

	There's a recent medinalysis on Modafinil that was pretty big that showed some support.  So it might be the time for nootropics, that's my hope.  I've been looking at transcranial direct simulation and a lot of other technologies which are still pretty early to go to market but there are some that are being sold now.  So if you wanna be on the cutting edge you can try this zap your brain [inaudible] [00:46:16] - 

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	Talk to your doctor - no, do that out of your own risk, no.  That's [inaudible] - 

James Norris:	 -- a few years from now it'll be similar.  I'm hoping one or two more tender type breakthroughs but we're still going to be this meat sack walking around having to play with our brain which doesn't wanna work when we want it.  And we'll get tired when we overeat, lots of things like that which we're still gonna have to work through.

	So your Star Trek future is gonna take some more time.  

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	[Inaudible] forever, I get it, I get it.  It's fine.  I'm working on it right now.  I think that's what's so funny is like even paying attention to some of these technologies - I know we have to start wrapping up in a second - I wanna be a futurist when I grow up.  I have a mentor that's a futurist.  I'm like all in.  I wanna start companies and go into that space because I'm a huge geek into it.

James Norris:	I built Singapore Futurists and I'm in this trans-humanist space.  Singularity University is - 

[Crosstalk]

Jaime Tardy:	[Inaudible] oh really?  I haven't even gone there yet.  Okay.

James Norris:	 -- but a beautiful kind of ? this is a new vision for a new human, letting us actually achieve what we wanna achieve.  But it will take some time so Jaime, I'm sorry.

Jaime Tardy:	I know.  Crap, I'm really impatient.  Can you tell everyone what Singularity University is and stuff like that though too because I don't think most of my audience knows.  I usually shut up about this stuff but when somebody allows me to talk I probably go way into too much.  So tell everybody what Singularity University is.

James Norris:	It was offline.  Singularity University is this ten-week program that teaches you all the exponential technologies for changing the world.  It's based out of NASA Ames in California.  It's one of the most transformative programs I've seen.  A lot of my friends have gone through it so I'm definitely a fan because [inaudible] [00:48:09] output people that think really big in terms of exponential.  And we didn't really get into that but when you're life hacking you're looking for those ten X type things you can do.

	So like getting your investments automated right now for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years without you having to lift a finger, that's pretty good.  And that's a not bad ten X type of return.  There aren't too many like that so the more you can optimize like that, do it.  And then SU just teaches you how to do the world scale.  And Self Spark is trying to do that at the individual scale.

Jaime Tardy:	I think that's a killer.  All right.  I know we have to start wrapping up and we now have to be friends, just so you know, because now you're like one of the only people that I can talk about some of this stuff with.  Connect me with other really amazing people.  So I'm gonna ask the last question I always ask, what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

James Norris:	Okay.  So I think really underrated technique is prediction because we're all really bad at predicting the future.  But the better you can do this the more success you're going to have.  So today is Sunday.  I want you to make a prediction that's seven days long.  Not a goal but I want you to make trying to set a financial prediction or something of that nature, let's talk about money, how much more money do you think you're actually going to make in this seven days?  What's your evidence for that?  Write it all down.  You have to write it down otherwise you'll deceive yourself.

	And it's not a goal so I also want you to write down what your friends or your colleagues, what they would predict about your success as well this week.  Just objectively.  Don't try to interpret, just write what you think.  Actually go and ask them if you can.  That way you have your interpretation and theirs

	And then at the end of the week you also have the reality.  You have those three.  And then see who's getting it right.  See what you can do about changing your model of yourself, updating it?  So we have a phrase notice and update.  Just notice where you are and update your beliefs, update what you're thinking and doing.  Just be gentle with yourself but you're probably going to be wrong.  It's okay.  Try to get better every time.

Jaime Tardy:	I think that's killer.  I've never heard that.  So I've done, what 300 and something of these interviews and I've never actually heard that specific way of saying it.  So thank you so much for coming on the show today, James.

	I know we talked about before you were gonna have a link with a bunch of things that we mentioned so that way people could just click on some of these things so we didn't have to do a thousand different links in the show notes.  So what is that and where can we find more about you and your company and all that fun stuff?

James Norris:	Yeah, so I'll make a list of the things we talked about and fun tools to think about for financial success.  So SelfSpark.com/EM will be the landing page for just you guys.  And for me if you wanna dive into my madness it's JamesNorris.org.  I have a lot of free tools for social impact and [inaudible] [00:50:56] change and so on.

Jaime Tardy:	Awesome.  Thank you so much for coming on the show today.  I really appreciate it.

James Norris:	It's my pleasure.  Thanks for having me.

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Tags: Aversion Therapy, Bio Hacking, Bio Hacking Technology, Business Hack, Commitment Contracts, James Norris, Life Hack, millionaire interview, Nootropics, Pavlok

Categories: All, Best Life, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Productivity

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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