Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with worldclass performers of all different types to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own life. This time, we have a slightly different episode. I will not be the one doing the deconstructing. Instead, we have a takeover by my very good friend, Peter Attia.

As longtime listeners of the podcast know, Dr. Peter Attia (@PeterAttiaMD) is a former ultraendurance athlete, a compulsive selfexperimenter, and one of the most fascinating human beings I know. He is also one of my goto doctors for anything related to performance or longevity. Peter also hosts The Drive, a weekly, ultradeepdive podcast focusing on maximizing health, longevity, critical thinking, and a few other things. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this episode, we have Peter interviewing Sam Zell, a legendary dealmaker and investor. Sam is the Chairman of Equity Group Investments, and he was recognized by Forbes as one of the “100 Greatest Living Business Minds” in 2017. He holds a place on New York Stock Exchange’s “Wall of Innovators” for his role in building the $1 trillion REIT industry. Sam is also the author of Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel.

This is one not to miss. Please enjoy!

Intro [00:00]
How Sam's parents escaped Poland just before the German invasion [10:04]
Sam's father and the evaluation of risk [22:32]
Doing what you think is right, regardless of how unpopular it is [25:44]
Abandoning a law career and setting up a business [31:08]
How Sam diverged from his father’s real estate investment strategy [39:46]
Sam recalls the first real estate deals he made with his father and the level of thought that went into them. [42:50]
Deploying versus developing assets [47:10]
The operational side of risk and how to manage it [49:33]
The variables that can delay a project [50:24]
What Jay Pritzker, “the smartest risk guy” Sam ever met, taught Sam about risk [52:04]
Is there an asset class for which these lessons about risk don’t translate? [56:40]
Bob Lurie and the discovery of “complementary skill sets but shared values” [57:55]
What is the trilliondollar asset class called a real estate investment trust (REIT)? [1:07:35]
What disaster did Sam foresee as early as 1988? [1:14:05]
What made the recession in 2008 different from other financial crises tied to real estate? [1:20:05]
Is the current state of commercial real estate a “canary in the coal mine” for the US economy? [1:24:22]
What is a leveraged buyout (LBO)? [1:25:12]
Sam's prescience about WeWork, “the Enron of real estate” [1:25:54]
Why Sam would never buy a business he couldn’t run [1:29:31]
The secret to Sam’s collection of loyal business collaborators [1:31:06]
The employee who wanted to go to divinity school [1:33:47]
How Sam stays abreast of what’s going on in that world? [1:37:48]
Sam travels 1,000 hours a year. Where does he go, and what motivates him to go there? [1:41:26]
“We suffer from knowing the numbers.” Huh? [1:44:14]
Now in his 70s, what are Sam’s plans for retirement? [1:45:48]
Is the US economy overly interwoven with the fate of China’s economy? [1:46:46]
How does Sam inspire his children? [1:53:04]
What problem is Sam most interested in solving? [1:55:05]

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About Tim Ferriss:
Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an earlystage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4Hour Workweek, The 4Hour Body, The 4Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 400 million downloads and been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running.

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