Tim Ferriss: Feeling Stuck Right Now? (Use THIS 10-Minute Exercise to Stop Overthinking and Take Action)

If you just get off of social media for two weeks, it will do the same amount of good

“for a lot of folks as ten years of therapy.”

What advice has made you the most money? Don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only one. What's something that the top 1% obsess over

that most people never even think about?

The absolute secretness of... Hey everyone, welcome back to our purpose. Today's guest is someone that I've been waiting to re-interview for nine years. I'm speaking about the one and only Tim Ferris.

One of the most influential thinkers in personal development and performance of all time. Tim's the best selling author of the 4-hour work week, host of the Tim Ferris Show with over a billion downloads. If you're someone who wants to learn how to make better decisions,

overcome fear and design a life that actually works for you. You won't want to miss this. Please welcome to on purpose, Tim Ferris. Let's dive in, Mr. Ferris. There's so much to extrapolate today with you.

I wanted to start off by asking you, like, what's a thought that reappears in your mind often today or what are you fascinated by today

that kind of steals your attention and gets you excited

because you've done so many things. You've accomplished so many things. You're so active in so many ways. I wonder what fascinates you now. I can tell you.

Literally was getting some texts on the way here from a few people I've been interacting with a lot. One is Tommy Wood. Dr. Tommy Wood is a neuroscientist. Also a phenomenal athlete.

Interesting combination. Looking at and we'll probably get into this more deeply, but different fuel sources for the brain and extending your cognitive runway. So in life, if you as I, for instance,

have a lot of neurodegenerative disease in your family, whether that's Alzheimer's Parkinson's or otherwise, what can you do now? Assuming a lot of these conditions take decades to fully develop how can you intervene early?

So that's a question that's occupying my mind

“and have found I think some very, very compelling options”

that are not new to me, but if you go through the scientific literature and you talk to people on the front lines, you do find some interesting options. So we can talk about those.

I would say bioelectric medicine, which ties into this. In other words, microchips and electricity over pills. A lot of medications have off-target effects. So you have a problem or you want to prevent a problem. You take a drug.

Very often it is not as specific as we would like. They're a side effects. There's a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine.

They can be applied a million different ways.

We probably should talk about it, but I'll give you an example. Here's a crazy example. There's a technology called TMS Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. That is existed for decades.

And it's basically using a magnetic field to affect brain activity. So they put a paddle close to your head. There are different ways to do it. It might be a cap with a few other things.

And you can either excite or inhibit different parts of the brain. It's slightly more complicated, but let's just assume that's the case. And the side-to-stame known ones that are Stanford, along with others,

developed something called the Saint Protocol, which is an accelerated version. So instead of taking, let's just say, TMS treatments that you would do once we twice just three times a week over five months,

they compress it all into one week, five days. And you're getting zapped ten times a day on the hour every hour, each of those five days. And what they end up seeing in many instances, and there's good, published, peer-reviewed studies,

people can look at 70% remission of treatments and depression, that is a durable. You start to see impacts on things like OCD, generalized anxiety disorder,

but one thing that I experiment with recently, this is maybe four months ago, because I have diagnosed pretty severe OCD, which I think can be a superb, but can also be a super handy cap.

Also, just look at my family, who knows how much of it is nature versus nurture, but generalized anxiety disorder pretty high. And that can be a helpful monkey on the back for getting a lot done,

“but there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage, right?”

So I wanted to see if I could dial back both of those. What I lose my edge, or what I actually improve my edge, I just wouldn't be holding onto the blade of the knife, right? And I went through this experimental protocol,

which is one day. So instead of taking a week off of work, one day, where you preload, and there's science behind this, with something called deseclissary,

and it's an antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis, among other things. Put it a law's engine in your mouth, and then an hour later you start these simulations. You do one day,

and I have gone from basically like an eight or nine

“out of 10 severity with generalized anxiety,”

to like a zero or a one. For four or five months now, you cannot do that one day. From that one day. It is incredible.

Does it help? Does it hurt? The dose does matter, right? You can overdo it. But this is a combination of pharmaceuticals

to help with neuroplasticity, and then brain stimulation. So I've been looking very closely at bioelectric medicine. I think this is,

and if I try not to too much, but pat myself on the back a little bit, and if they look at the four-hour body, and then the subsequent 10, 15 years,

a lot of that played out, and ended up being very, very highly reinforced by science. I, I'm placing a lot of my bets intentionally,

and then on the more philosophical side, but intensely practical. I don't think, philosophy can be inert,

and kind of flaccid if you choose the wrong approach,

but ultimately, if you try to decide on values,

“you're not going to do randomized control trial on that.”

Right? Yeah. You have to find your way. Fortunately, people have been attempting to do this from millennia,

and I would say that in the last few years, especially, there's a great book called "Already Free," I think it is, by Bruce Tift,

that discusses kind of two complementary approaches, which are the, let's just say, developmental achievement approaches that Western psychotherapy might take, or self-help broadly.

How do I improve myself? How do I change my circumstances? But then, on the opposite side, a perhaps,

let's call it more Buddhist approach, although it's not unique to Buddhist, or Buddhism alone, the acceptance page. Right?

Recognizing what is allowing what is, and it's a balancing act to do both, but I've been so, I would say, for decades,

most of my life focused on the achievement piece. And there's a lot to be said for it, a lot of upside, but paying, also attention to the approaches,

the practices that cultivate the other side, because guess what? None of us have as much control as we might like to think. So, especially once you add in other humans, Sorry, guys.

That's an illusion. So, I would say those are, after you of the things that are very, very present for me. I love it. You've just given us the contents page of our conversation.

It's brilliant. This is what I enjoyed the most. Yeah. Do you mind if we dive into some of those a bit? Yeah, for sure.

And I, my hope all, and I also said this before we hit record. I don't want to have anything to picture cell. I, I really am excited about some of these things that I'm exploring now.

So, if I can give people very specific concrete recommendations, then I'll be that in some way, expand their thinking or help them, then I'm thrilled.

Yeah. Now, I'm really grateful for you coming on. Let's dive into cognitive fuel, then to go first. What do we currently do?

“Or what do we currently know that we use for cognitive fuel?”

And then the newer approaches that you're looking at, how are they so different? As you said, they have less side effects we're talking about. Potentially.

In terms of fuel, first caveat, not a doctor don't play one on the internet. So, talk to your physicians. However,

what I will say is, it's helpful to think of the brand, like huge think of musculature. And the mind-body separation duality is,

is a complete falsehood. So, everything is really, really tightly interrelated. What I, what I will say is that if we look at the extremes to inform the mean,

this is something I like to use as a shearistic. You can learn a lot by studying the extremes in athletics, in business, the best in the worst outcomes. And that tells you a lot about the middle,

but not the other way around. Like if you study the average, this, the ideal customer, the ABC in the middle,

it doesn't actually help you solve the edge cases. Alright, so, if we look at, let's just say Alzheimer's. Alright,

some people, some scientists, doctors refer to Alzheimer's's type 3 diabetes. Why? Because the brand,

and there are many factors going to this, can end up in a state where it's very bad at utilizing glucose, insulin, insulin sensitivity,

you're basically diabetic in your brain,

and I'm simplifying here. But, for instance, and I've done this with relatives of mine, with Alzheimer's,

you give them an exogenous ketone supplement of the right kind, give them a little shot, and I'll do it with them, so they're not freaked out.

Within 20 minutes, their sentences are longer, their rate of speech is faster. In some instances, there's something called the clock test,

where you can look at the severity of Alzheimer's, or other conditions, by having someone attempt to draw clock, and they just can't do it. And boom,

30 minutes later, they can draw clock. So what's going on? ketones are an alternate fuel source. And if you ever fast,

if you ever experiment with intermittent fasting, which we can also come back to, another thing that has my attention, if you cultivate your ability to use ketones, suddenly,

you have this very compelling alternate fuel source.

I'll give you a third one though,

that is new to me. Even though if I look back at my experience and life through sports, I'm like, "Ah, okay, that helps connect some dots."

Lactate. If you ever have done a bunch of cycling, or you go in the gym, and you get that burden, all right?

Well, big part of that is lactic acid-alactate. Turns out the brain can really use that. Not only is fuel, but it's also a signaling.

It's also, it's a signal or messenger that can produce all of these changes in the brain. And there is, for instance, Tommy Wood introduced me to this. The Norwegian 4x4,

people can look this up. Norwegian 4x4 is a fact, in effect, doing its VO2 max training. We can explain what that is.

“But it's not really important right now.”

Basically four minutes of incredibly hard,

let's say stationary biking. You're getting up to 85, 90% of your max heart rate. In the last minute of those four, you don't think you're going to make it.

Basically you're running away from wolves. And then you take three to four minutes off, and you repeat that again when you do four cycles. So you're doing four minutes on, let's just call it four minutes off,

four minutes on, for four rounds. If you do that, there's a study conducted three times a week. And I think it was for six months,

the effects on your brain, which includes some plausible volumetric changes, like certain structures in your brain, like the hippocampus actually grow. One of the primary areas effected by Alzheimer's.

Those effects extend out for five years, from six months of training three times a week. What is going on? Yeah, what is going on? The VO2 max is just an indicator

of the work that you're putting in. Okay, well, why does that kind of work matter? Because steady-state aerobics, walking for long distances doesn't do it. And there are people,

credible people who focus on this, who think that lactate is the main driver. So for instance, this morning, before I came here, I was like, "Well, I'd like to have a little bit of extra energy."

So I did a weight training workout, where each of my sets, with leg press or leg extension or whatever, large muscle groups, I just turned on a music track that lasts four to five minutes,

and I'm like, "All right, I can't stop for four to five minutes, and it's going to be really painful." And that's it. Because I think that the cycling itself

doesn't necessarily have any magic to it. Like, you could use growing. You can see intensity. It's the lactic acid. It's the actual concentration in the blood.

Those, I would say, are three interesting fuels to consider, and I'm sure we'll come back to this. But like, sometimes you don't have a problem-solving issue.

Sometimes you don't have a quandary in your life that you can think your way out of. You have a fuel issue. So before you try to riddle yourself with journaling out of all of your issues,

maybe you're just starving. Yeah. And back at men, you need food.

“Good men, you need to improve your insulin sensitivity.”

Maybe look at intermittent fasting, which completely blew my mind with how it changed my insulin sensitivity and biomarkers over the course of four weeks. It really shocked me.

And OR, these are actually compatible, looking at building up your ketogenic machinery, which you can do in a whole bunch of ways. I love the point you're making about fuel,

and I was definitely someone I always felt like

when I came to this work, I had a really strong mind because of my previous work, but I hadn't really worked on my body. And it was when I married my wife, who's a nutritionist and a dietitian.

You're jealous. Yeah, yeah, very useful. Extremely useful. But the body became a part of the conversation because she was so much about physical health,

as well as mental and emotional health. And I think I was so in the mental emotional sphere that I kind of disregard the body to some degree. Yeah. Only to realize how much I was limiting myself,

based on this fuel point, and even to speak to a very recent occurrence, probably a few years back, I was experiencing fatigue and low energy, although I was positive and living my purpose and felt,

meaning in my life and had beautiful relationships, but I was just tired.

“And I remember getting my biomarkers done,”

and everything, and it turned out to be something really basic, but they were just like, your vitamin D is out 10. It should be at a 60 to 100, like, you know, for the optimal, but you're at 10.

Like, how did I not understand that something as small as this could be affecting my energy?

I think you're so right, people are journaling really hard. They're trying to find their purpose. They're trying to do this thing mentally, and half the time. It's like, you're not giving yourself enough fuel

to even be able to have that breakthrough.

Yeah, it doesn't matter how good you are driving. The race car is no one's done oil change. No one's checked the tires. Yeah, no one's put proper fuel in the tank, etc. So I think that those levels are important

to check, like you mentioned, the vitamin D, in a lot of my friends who have complained about things. I had your depression or fatigue. They might do a micronutrient test and realize that they're deficient in trace minerals.

Very common. Rather, it's copper, selenium or other. And it's like, okay, here. Try, like, you'd have had full Brazil nuts. Once a day for a weekend, let me know.

It goes and they're like, I have energy. I'm like, well, yeah, okay, great. Well, then you can check off the selenium.

“So, which I think can be very reassuring for folks, right?”

Because if they've been banging their head against the wall, trying to quote unquote "figure out X" and they're just not making progress. It's not necessarily because your brain isn't working. You're not smart enough.

Well, maybe it is because your brain is boring. But you can fix it holistically through looking at your mind and body as one thing. Yeah, certainly through same meditation. You can have, you can exert all sorts of interesting effects

on your body, right? Through the breath as this sort of interface with the autonomous autonomic nervous system. So, it stands to reason you can do the other. Right?

It's bi-directional. If you want it, you can improve the mind by working on the body and you can improve the body by working on the mind. They go together. Absolutely.

So, that's a lot of what has my attention. There's a lot of nonsense floating around out there about vagus nerve stimulation, but if you talk to certain scientists, like Dr. Kevin Trace, you wrote a great book.

“I think it's from a great book called The Great Anders,”

all about the vagus nerve, which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side of the neck with roughly 90 to 100,000 fibers on either side. He's got a great story in the book

where he's discussing all of this research related to, in effect, activating something called the inflammatory reflex and preventing overwhelming cytokine storms for COVID for you name it.

And you can stimulate the vagus nerve a bunch of different ways. You can have an implant. There's actually something called Femododine over the counter.

Talk to Dr. Don't just start taking this, but it's an antacid, I believe,

and that actually has some incredible effects

related to that. But he was on stage talking about this at one point and the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama's contingent happened to be at the same event. And the Dalai Lama got up after

because Kevin was talking about the vagus nerve, right, just for simplicity, singular. And the Dalai Lama asked a question after the presentation, the translator translated and said,

"His holiness would like to know are there two of these that run down the neck?" And he said, "Yes, actually there are two." And the Dalai Lama kind of chuckled. And there's a practice that they have

that involves meditating on these two channels that run down the neck and then basically innovate the rest of the body, including the abdomen and the side. That's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I find that east-west connection like so fascinating. And how the science is being able to prove

“these ancient techniques, I remember when”

I was talking to someone else on the show, it was that idea of them talking about circadian rhythms and looking at the sun first thing in the morning, et cetera, which of course,

you've talked about as well. And I was talking about how in the monastery in India

it was always about sun salutations.

So I'm sure you're an homage car because the Sanskrit version of sun salutations. And that was the practice you woke up in the morning and you paid respects to the sun, which meant making, you know,

I contact with the sun and allowing the sun rays to enter. And I'm like, all of these techniques they didn't have the language that we have. But the technique existed far back then.

Talk to me about the, did you call it the bioelectric? Bioelectric medicine. Medicine, yeah, because you took my chips versus build.

Yeah, chips or electricity versus... So I explained to me what you mean by chips. I'll just microchips. So you actually using a device which could be in the case of,

I think it's set point medical, for instance, has an implant, which is the size of a Omega-3 capsule. I think it's called set point medical. They were on the cover of the New York Times for this.

And it just got approved. It goes in the neck. It's actually a very fast procedure. And it applies stimulation to the Omega-3 nerve, which runs right along the crater areas, basically.

It gives some people incredible relief

“where they might have been incapacitated,”

laying on a couch. Can't get up, have to elevate their legs. Can't walk more than a few steps. They get this implant. And then boom.

Two months later, they're running upstairs on a two or three-year-up with their husband. I mean, that's a real example. It doesn't solve it.

It doesn't reverse it. It just provides... This is, that's a very good question. I shouldn't speak to X. I don't know enough about rheumatoid arthritis

and what it looks like in terms of development over long periods of time. What I will say is that broadly speaking, this is controversial, but it's not that controversial, if you sign to Siren and interact with who look at this very closely.

I think a lot of our psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Some of them, you may be predisposed to those things genetically. But I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start with acute infection,

much like long COVID or long Lyme disease. There's some acute immune system insult, often in infection. That leads to then chronic neuroinflammation. And when you address that neuroinflammation,

a lot of the symptoms can abate, which is why there have been studies looking at just giving people or depressed anti-inflammatories. And I'm not saying, by the way, anyone listening or watching,

“that you should go gobble anti-inflammatories.”

Their side effects don't do that. But maybe there are other ways to address excessive inflammation. It turns out, vagus nerve stimulation could be one of those. There are other approaches.

I can't recommend any current device out there. I'm interacting with this Scandinavian researchers and amazing. I'm hoping that at least in the US maybe in the next six months, something will be available that people can grab.

I'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight, being corroborated by science because it is a really cool tie-in. Breathing, do breath work. There are different types of breath work that absolutely seem to have an effect on the inflammatory reflex.

And that's actually part of the reason why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice, especially if they do it twice a day like 10 to 20 minutes per session after about two weeks. It's so consistent.

It's like for the first week, they're like,

"I don't know if this is doing anything." And then after like seven to ten days, there seems to be something that happens and people are like, "I'm so much calmer." I'm so sure that's all right.

There are really different ways you could explain it but let's throw one out there that doesn't really, I haven't really heard discussed that the rhythmic breathing that you and train when you're doing that kind of sitting activates the biggest nerves.

If you use a stimulator, guess what? You use it five minutes in the morning, say for the year, five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night because the effects last about 12 hours. Okay, and it takes about two weeks for most people

to notice everything settle. Well, that's a strange coincidence. And if you do box breathing or something like that, for people who are maybe tuning in or like a meditation or a God,

like if I have to sit and focus on my breath one more time or imagine a candle or whatever it might be. It's not necessarily for everybody. I get it. I mean, my monkey mind is on high octane fuel.

I get it. But you could use an app that just helps you breathe. Right? We're something. Box breathing, whatever it might be.

Try that 10 minutes twice a day for two weeks, see what happens.

“I think most folks will be very pleasantly surprised”

on the ancient wisdom side. Yeah.

I've always been interested but skeptical,

interested in but skeptical of acupuncture. And skeptical because, as with many modalities, practitioners sometimes oversell it, panacea for everything. It's true, psychedelics, it's true with massage, it's true for pt, it's true for surgery, it's like, I can fix all your problems.

All right, probably not. However, there are few aspects. And I went to two universities in China. I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin in this case. I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine,

acupuncture on animals. How does that work? Right? As far as we know, maybe there's not a whole lot of placebo effect with dogs, let's just say.

So being able to use acupuncture in place of say anesthesia with animals, that's pretty weird. That's interesting. The other one that seems pretty compelling. They're, they're several, but the other one is pregnancy.

Using acupuncture for fertility. So what on earth is going on? If that is actually a thing. Yeah. For the time being, let's say, maybe it is.

And I know a few traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and they have walls of photos of babies. And I'm like, that's interesting.

and the placebo effect, which by the way, people are like,

"Oh, it's just placebo effect." The placebo effect is craziest thing in the world. But let's leave that alone for the moment. One of the ways that you would stimulate, like, can stimulate some of the fibers in the vagus nerve, is with placement on the ear.

And you're applying electric current on something called this, the Symbic Conscha right here. The placement really matters. It's very, very specific. And then you need another probe to,

you know, ground or complete the circuit effectively. That would be the five minutes of stimulation. You can also do it the neck, but the neck is quite uncomfortable. The placement of those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners put the needles.

No way.

“And electricity is not the only way you can do it.”

That's not the only way. I mean, there was a physician in France, who experimented with taking ballpoint pens and pressing on different parts of the ear. Which, funny enough, that was in the 1900s,

ended up getting retrofitted and adopted by a lot of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China. But the overlaps interesting, right? Like that's very interesting. And it's also, you have to wonder, it's a man. How many thousands of years of trial and error

of that take to figure out? Yeah, you're not in place now. Yeah. And how did they figure it out, too? Yeah.

That's, it's wild. And I should say, as one voice of sanity, there's also a lot of stuff that is existed for a very long time that is probably nonsense. Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

“But it's face to say, the answer to your question,”

why electric medicine is using electricity or electronics in place of drugs to avoid this side effects? To avoid the side effects, to help establish homeostasis, perhaps as opposed to overall blocking something or overall stimulating something.

You know, smashing some receptor, but then, by the way, it also has an affinity, all these other receptors that we don't really want to mess with, but we can't avoid it. And there is a place for drugs. Like, I take prescription medication, right? It's like there is a place for it.

But it's in at least the US where it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through. You can advertise on television directly to patients, selling drugs, it's outrageous. The pharmaceutical and industrial complex is a very real thing. And the incentives are very perverse in a lot of cases.

So we are over-prescribed, over-medicated with our question. Yeah, I blew my mind when I moved to this country and saw those ads. I couldn't believe they were real. I was like, this has to be an SNL skit. So we're like, it has to be some kind of comedian.

I couldn't believe it.

Because you don't have that in the UK, you just do never see that.

Yeah. And so when I moved here, I was like, wow, it's literally telling me that this might kill me. Like, my kill you is a legitimate, you know? Very, very fast word-per-minute fine-print. Yeah, it's unbelievable. No, I appreciate that.

A lot of what you spoke about, you talked about, you know, doing the lactate and it was like six months to unlock. You talked about the, of the four, four, four, like four on, four on, three times a week, six months. And then you spoke about the idea of, you know, two weeks of meditation twice a day to feel the benefits.

What I find more and more fascinating even in myself and what to speak of our community and the audience that tunes into shows like this is we know that everyone struggles with that initial discomfort.

“But you said, you have to do for two weeks to start feeling the benefits and noticing that calm or letting things settle.”

Or you have to do something for six months. What have you found to be the best start-up strategy to a new habit to unlock its potential when it may take two weeks to unlock its benefit? This might sound like a simplistic answer, but it's telling people that. Yeah.

To know what I mean? Yeah. Because in many cases, you're so right. It's like, hey, study a language and you'll learn the language. But you're setting someone up for failure in that example.

And I use that just because most people are like, oh, god. So much PTSD about learning languages, right?

But if you tell them, like, hey, here's what the graph looks like.

As you, you're going to have this type of experience and then once you add this new grammatical construction, like you're going to have a bit of a trough of sorrow. Don't worry about it, right? You're going to plateau, but you're not actually plateauing. Your mind is adjusting to involve this additional complexity.

And then you kind of explain what like the stock chart of your brain is going to look like. Then people don't freak out and the abandonment rates can be less. And so I think with something like meditation, saying, you may see benefits sooner.

So commit to two and a half weeks and do less than you think is necessary.

Do less than you think you can do. The supplies to any new habits, as far as I'm concerned. If you think you can do 20 minutes, but that's pushing it into redline territory, do time. Do less than you think you can do. Because that is going to contribute to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm.

Don't bleed the stuff. There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic and Yadiyadiyada, rugged individual stuff that we find in many parts of the world. This is not a place to show how much you can do if you're trying to adopt a new behavior. So with the meditation, I think it is undervalued how setting expectations can be the missing ingredient. It's just like, hey, if I were trying to sell one of my friends, which I do often, I would just say, look much like katosis or ketogenic diet.

It's pass fail. It's binary. You can't do it 50%. The good news is you're going to know after two and a half weeks in the case of meditation, whether this works for you at all or not. And if it works, it could be pretty dramatic. But if you give up after a week, it's the whole thing's wasted.

“So just commit to an a half. And if you need to do a bat with a friend or something to set stakes and incentivize yourself,”

it's you'll be embarrassed if you stop. Like, guess what? That's useful too.

Yeah. And I talked a lot about that in the four-hour shelf. Like, how would you actually set up incentives so that it's harder to quit? These are very, you know, have your friend take some photos of you and your tidy white is an unsladering light. And that'll get released into the wild if you don't do it for two and a half weeks. Or it's like a hundred dollar bet and your buddy, your friend is going to donate that to your most hated political candidate in your name.

If you don't do it for two and a half weeks, okay, great. So you're more likely to do it. Everyone needs reasons. Yeah. So it's so good.

I think that's the biggest one on this is just setting expectations. And in the case of the Norwegian 4x4, this is a quirk of science and interpretation of science. So they did do this six months and the effects seem to extend out to five years. But that doesn't mean that you need six months. Right. Right.

That was just the study design. Yes. So who knows? I would imagine that it's not all or nothing. That is cumulative.

And that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood about today.

“I said, well, like, what do we know and what do we not know?”

Because that was the study design. And that's, I'm sure, since been replicated and people are modeling that. But is it possible that instead of, say, four by four? So, you know, 16 minutes of this beauty max training is a possible that less time would work as long as you hit certain peak levels of lactate.

Could a ten minute, could a five minute session of weight training work if you hit a certain minimum threshold? Question mark. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah.

Right. Has anyone done three months? No major protocol. Unlooked the effects. Yes or no?

Maybe. Maybe not. This is kind of stuff that I also fund through my foundation, right? I get so tired of kind of chewing on my fingernails, wondering about these things that I just fund a lot of science.

But there may be a smaller minimum effective dose. That's stuff. We'll see. Yeah. Fascinating.

Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Try not to fool yourself. Setting things up so it's very hard for you to fool yourself or to bias.

Yeah. So, I like the undersat expectations. And do less than you think. That's a great one. Do less than you think.

Absolutely. Do less than you think is a brilliant brilliant method.

“And I think we're so scared of saying that to our friends or people we love because”

we know everyone wants instant change. Yeah. And so because people want instant change we want to say do this today and it will calm you down. Yeah. And we know that isn't true because it's going to take a practice in a discipline.

It might. But yeah. I mean, there are some very fast returns. And then other things to seem to take more time. I interviewed years ago someone named John Crystal who I believe is the chair of psychiatry

at Yale where he was at the time. And he did a lot of along with his colleagues. A lot of the seminal work on ketamine as an anti-depressant in humans. And I think it was .5 milligrams per kilogram over ex period of time.

And it showed these amazing effects.

But now the .5 milligrams per kilogram has become this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners, including some scientists, sort of like this is the protocol. It's like, well, is it?

Yeah.

That was tested in that way.

But it doesn't mean that is the end all be all. I would say also just on the ketamine front. Very risk compound. High likelihood of addiction. Listen to that episode or just do some real deep dive before you ever consider having certainly

any ketamine at home. Whether that's through Johnson and Johnson. As ketamine, Spravado or through a clinic, my recommendation is do not have laws and just or anything like that at home.

“If you're going to do, if you're going to pursue that for different applications, I think it's”

very interesting for suicidality. It's one of the few things that I've seen if someone is acutely at risk of hurting themselves in some cases with an infusion or an injection few hours later. They go from, I'm going to kill myself today, too.

I don't know what I was so upset about.

That's creative. That's big. Yeah, I've seen that multiple times and so of other clinicians. That's one of the few interventions I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario that's pretty interesting.

So, I'll stop there for the moment. No, I love it. This is what I wanted. That's like, you're one of the few guests. You're one of the few people you can truly do this with.

I just want to know what you're feeling. That's what I love. You're just so deeply curious about so many things happening at the same time and they're just interesting and new and they help you be more curious and ask questions and I appreciate that because I'm like, why are we doing this?

People can see why I need to deal with the double answer of those you do. Yeah, no, it's great when you're looking at science, but if you're looking at some mistake you made yesterday and you're thinking about that for four days straight. Maybe not so helpful. How did you make that?

Was that ever a turn you needed to make?

“Oh, yeah, I mean, that's why I did the antibiotic plus accelerated TMS.”

Oh, yeah. What helped you make that turn? A few things, right? I think there's a degree of pain that especially over long periods of time, you want relief from.

And for some of us, that is just the looping roomitative mind that is turning on itself, so whether that's could be any number of things, right? Could be, and in terms of OCD, like my mom makes me look like a cakewalk with her OCD, but I'm not flipping lights, which is not washing my hands. No, no, no.

Which is not denigrated any of that stuff. It's like people have different ways of it manifesting for me. It's all internal. Yes. It's all internal.

But if this, I should have said that loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop. Imagineing outcomes, et cetera, perseverating on some conversation that I wish had gone a different way. And it's exhausting. It's really exhausting.

“And on a arrest in peace, no one lambs, unfortunately, passed away.”

But I was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because he pioneered at Stanford, also. He was a real polymath. A lot of very compelling research related to eye-b again. So eye-b again is an alcoholic derived from iboga tabernath, which is a psychedelic plant.

In this case, the witty tribe and others are using the root bark for these very long, super intense, Mount Everest of psychedelic, like experiences. It is not to be trifled with. There are some very significant cardiac risks for certain people. You can die taking this on like most psychedelics.

And he was the first to really put under a fine scientific lens.

Some of the neuroantomical changes, specifically in veterans. And yeah, I began is it's a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans. And specifically in case a traumatic brain injury, that's strange. This is not really something you see.

It's not something that people had observed with other drugs, including other psychedelics. And it seems to relate to something called glial derived neurotrophic factor. But suffice to say, I connected with him about that. And then it turned out this guy's not a one-trick pony. He also is one of the world leaders in non-invasive brain stimulation.

He accelerated TMS. And I started looking at the literature and the result. And I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I mean, this reads like science fiction number one. Number two, it seems unbelievable, like a total scam.

But I know it's not a scam. These are very, very top to your scientists. And when I realized that it could be applied to, well, few things.

When I actually was able to address it most successfully,

“I realized that the depression was born of fatigue,”

which came from anxiety, which interrupted my sleep. So the domino to tip was actually the anxiety piece. Much like it's kind of like, this is not the greatest comparison. But like the VO2 Max. It's like that's the output you can point to.

But the catalyst is actually the anxiety. And I was like, well, yellow. Let's try it. The safety profile looks really appealing. The actual stimulation is relatively speaking pretty low power.

It's been around for decades. It seems like mostly upside potential. There are some risks involved. People should be aware of when people can search, accelerated TMS and so on to find this.

But all in all, attractive for someone who's experiencing, in my case, the amount of chronic mental anguish. That's what kicked it off. How accessible is that now? So TMS itself, let's just say conventional TMS,

is actually quite accessible. Much like ketamine clinics are fly by night operations. Correct. So caveat emptor. You got to do your homework.

But TMS is very widely accessible. And often reimbursed by insurance. Accelerated TMS as far as I know is not reimbursable by insurance at the moment. Right. So it is available at certain clinics.

There's one that I've used called Akisha clinic or Akisha clinics in Sunnyville, California. But it's expensive. Yeah. It's expensive. Four of the five day.

My hope and also part of the reason why I volunteered to be like one of the first 60 monkey shot, the space with the desicclicering, this very low dose antibiotic and the one day is that if you compress the five days into one day, suddenly the cost should be much much lower. Yeah, of course, dramatically lower. And it's much more accessible.

Because not that many people can take a week off of work, completely off of work. Because your brain will be exhausted. Absolutely. When you have this treatment.

“I remember going in for my first day of stimulations at like nine hours of sleep.”

I was feeling like a million bucks.

I could jump in Jack's all day. Had my first eight minutes stimulation and I felt like I just pulled three all nighters studying for a test. I was so mentally tired. So if you do it, do not have any delusions of cranking out 50 minutes of work

in between these stimulations and going to happen. But the one day, man, it could be the future for a lot of people. And that is not widely available. But people can do some digging. There are clinics, not a lot of them.

The two main hardware companies are brain's way. That's one, which I've used, I've used both because I'm in my whole stick. And it's real. It's part of the mission for me as being the guinea pig and taking the notes so that not everyone has to.

Just in case there's collateral damage with sometimes areas. A brain's way has some very, very sophisticated hardware. And then Mag Venture is another one that has very well-developed hardware. As far as I know, those are kind of the two front runners. The other that I mentioned, which folks are specifically on the one day, ampah health.

I have not tested, so I can't speak to that directly. There seem to be credible people involved, but I can't. I haven't really done the due diligence. Yeah, good to know. Good to know.

I have so many friends and family who I was asking. Yeah, wanting to discover a very, very useful answer. Tim, I wanted to switch to some of the philosophical aspects you mentioned earlier. Earlier, like the things that you're fascinated by right now. And I was thinking about even as a society, how we seem to kind of oscillate between this

work-life balance to then hustle culture. And it seems that that just takes over the conversation for that period in time. So rewind back, probably five to ten years, and hustle culture was the thing. Yeah. Work-life balance is kind of made.

It's come back now, and then you could look back 25 years.

And we would do my work-life balance when it first kind of probably entered the zeitgeist.

And it was preceded by this hustle intensity culture, whatever is called then. And you all kind of talking about this idea of this achievement mindset that you had. And it's been useful. And then now looking at this acceptance mindset that you're almost looking at the value of both.

“And I think that's even this whole conversation.”

We're talking about the value of both or this and this or the connection between old and new and being curious. And I find that with work-life balance and hustle culture or achievement. Let's call it achievement, because hustle culture just sounds like working hard without maybe any direction.

But achievement culture and acceptance culture. Which feel like together they're so synergistic, yet we tend to just go between one or the other in different phases of our life. Yeah.

“Where are you at with making sense of that for yourself and thinking about it for others?”

I'll say something my surprise people.

So the first thing, as the guy wrote a book called The Four Hour Work Week,

I have no problem with 80 hour work weeks if they're good reasons behind it. So let me all just let that settle for a second. And I'll add something that normally I wouldn't add to that, which is like read the Serenity Prayer. The actual Serenity Prayer. Acceptance across the board for everything is effectively becoming a cow standing in the rain, right?

That's just complacency, passivity. And then completely unrestrained achievement is just a grey hand running around a track chasing a rabbit. And those dogs can't run very long. [laughter] But they can sprint.

So number one, if you can't control or affect something, that probably lands in the acceptance bucket. Right? Which is why I've not had social media on my phone for three or four years. Doomsgrowing? Not helpful.

For a million different reasons, I know people probably agree with this face value.

Nonetheless, like let's look at behavior, right? Make sure you do not say kind of situations. My friends, even some of my most accomplished cheaper friends. These are mega stars within business. I know one guy in particular, such a smart guy.

So good. He's got a wonderful family. And he took ex office phone a few years ago.

“And it's like he went through 20 years of therapy, right?”

It was like a month later, like everything's better. And then, I mean, I grew up straight with him. And a few months ago, he started sending links to things on X. And I was like, oh, oh, you're back on the sauce. Yeah.

But that happened. And he's like, oh, I got dragged back in this says, both the worst. It's like he's been, it just came out of POW camp. Like he's a mess. I mean, if you're listening, sorry.

I'm not a mess, but it's just like, it's not an improvement. It's a worsening of psychological state, right? So that stuff, it's like, if you can't act on it, or if you're not going to act on it, that has to go on the acceptance bucket, or in the ignore button and the selective ignorance bucket.

And then on the achievement side for me, I would say that as a way of kind of setting the table, one of my friends, Josh Waitskin,

a second ever podcast, by the way.

He was the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher. He's considered a chess prodigy. He hates that. It doesn't really describe him well either because he's become world-class, very like top one person, and a couple of different disciplines. It's very systematic, but one of his guiding tenets,

Maxims, is avoid the simmering sex. And that just means you're either off. Like you could be taken an app under a set of bleachers or something. Or you're on, like you are the great hand, right? You are completely focused and you're in sixth gear.

He's like a void everything in between. Yeah. So avoiding the simmering sex.

“And I and a lot of people I think are at risk of the gravitational pull of the default,”

which is the simmering sex. Getting interrupted by text messages and emails and responding to everyone else's manufactured emergency and so on. That's the simmering sex. And that will just murder you psychologically.

And so for me, I try to really oscillate between restfulness or sprint. The fact that matter is as much as I would like to think otherwise, I'm a working dog, right? I'm like a border colleague, right? If idle hands of the devil's workshop, then by extension,

it's like you leave a border colleague trapped in a apartment long enough. It's going to chew the couch to pieces. Turn into an erotic mess. It's like a lot of people are like that. I'm like that. It's good for me to have a mission a project.

Yeah, me too. It's just, and I don't think anyone needs to apologize for that. Yeah. So for instance, like with this, I have an 850 page draft of a book. And I'm like, alright, well, how what am I going to do with that beast?

I'll probably do a retreat where all I do is eat, sleep, exercise, write, that's it, and it will be full on as many hours a day as I can handle every day for a few weeks. Yeah. It's not going to be the four hour work week.

But it was with an end point. It's with a very precise purpose that I feel good about, that I feel aligned with. And that's fine. And then after that, I will probably bookend it by booking something

To just park it in zero. And I recognize that exact sequence of events will not apply to everybody. But if you just use the mantra of avoid the simmering sex, I think you can get a lot of mileage out of it. Yeah.

I like that too. I think you spot on. I think that's probably where I've knitted out to because I think that simmering six is the distraction in Israel, the stress and the tension comes from where you're trying to balance both at all times perfectly. I'll get distracted by, I'm trying to spend time with my family, but I'm still on my phone.

Yeah. Or I'm at work and I'm trying to make sure everything's okay at home. Right.

And you're never going to win that way ever.

“And you have to have these really clear.”

I was invited yesterday was Sunday and I was invited to a work thing, like last minute on a Saturday night. And like years ago, I would have said yes immediately because I thought it was extremely valuable. And I needed to be there and if I wasn't there, then I'd miss out on opportunities. And it was, I was saying to my wife and I had to say to her and he'd make myself feel better about myself.

I was like, I'm so proud as I know because I've really promised myself that my weekends are off time. Yeah. And that wasn't the case in the beginning. And I'm glad it wasn't the case because I was sprinting and I needed that extra work and that was important. And I don't feel bad about it.

It was the right thing to do. But at this point, this was the right thing to do if to be able to say, No, I really want a Sunday off. Don't want to run to a work thing in the middle of the day, which will probably take four hours.

And I don't need to. It's not an emergency.

I'm not solving anything.

Yeah. And yeah, that on and what do you think is the biggest, obviously the simmering six is the office answer. What do you think is the biggest thing people come up against when they're trying to do one and off? Like what's the hardest part of that?

Your friend, for example, who quit acts, felt the benefit, saw the growth, and then gets pulled back in. I think he had too much time on his hands. Right. Okay. He's a post-economic and.

Yeah. Or do you call me? Yeah. He has a lot of time for unusual rare reasons, right? But I would say that if you do not have a primary project or mission,

and it doesn't mean your job has to be something you love 24/7. Like working to live and just having a job that you can tolerate that you're good at. Great. Like I actually think that's fine. But if, on the other hand, let's just say you're not to put her.

And you're kind of floating around. Like maybe you have a few cool things you're pursuing, but there's no hell, yes. And kind of the long lines of direct service. You're going to be tempted to wander.

Yeah.

“And that's how you end up sitting on the toilet,”

looking at Instagram and they're like, I can't film my legs. Oh, I've been here 45 minutes. Like that's how that, that's how that happens. And I've been there. Yeah.

And it means you don't have big enough, yes. Yes, yes. You need a bigger yes. Yes. And I would say that the avoid the simmering sixth, though,

is unhelpful in so much as it's telling you what not to do. But that doesn't really give you a whole lot of direction. So another way to frame it is actually quoting a friend of mine, Chris Saka,

phenomenal of incredible guy.

Just like one of the best investors I've ever met, his stories and that's. And his question is effectively, like, are you living offense or defense? Right. So if you're responding to everyone else's agenda for your time and email, defense. Right. If, for instance, I don't know when this happened, maybe you've experienced this,

but guess people feel so stressed out and short on time, that a lot of very busy friends in mine are now catching up on Sundays. Sundays is like they're catching up on email day. So I get texts that are like about business stuff. And my response has to be for sanity, because if I engage with that,

I'm playing defense and breaking my own rules and business. So I'm just like, hey, bud, exclamation point. Sorry, don't do business on weekends. Like, text me again on Monday, Tuesday, whatever. Yeah.

And in Dr. Suez has this amazing Ted Geisel has this amazing quote. Those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. Right. It's like if somebody gets pissed off about that. Yeah.

Guess what? Let them up out. Yeah. And with all my friends, they're like, love that. Cool.

Yeah. Talk to us with us. Yeah. They're fine. Yeah.

So I would say aim for offense, not defense. Offends means you're deciding what you want to do. And you're applying a certain amount of time or energy towards that. Yeah. Before you're reactive.

Yeah. I, you know, Jim Collins, the writer of author of good degrees and built a last in these iconic books. He tracks his creative hours. Mm-hmm.

“And I think for every 365 day, period, he's got to have 1,000 and something hours.”

And he tracks it daily.

If he's running behind in the county, so someone's got to change.

Mm-hmm. I don't take it to that level. But I try to make before I manage in sense. I really try to reserve the hours after I wake up for creative work to the extent that I can.

I actually think I do my best creative work incredibly late at night. But that is socially incompatible with any type of partner. Yeah. So I've had to switch things around a little bit. Have you, wow.

Have you really? Oh, yeah. That's impressive. I mean, my work week for our body, for our chef, all written. I'm not between, like, 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.

I would do research during the day. Yeah. But the actual synthesis writing I said, it was all done very, very late in the night.

“So how have you managed to change yourself to a morning person?”

I don't think I am morning person. Right. I would say that there are a few things. So one is recognizing relationships are the meat of life. Mm-hmm.

If you're vegan or something, the sustenance of life. I wrote this blog post just went up like five days ago. I spent so long putting it together called, you know, the self-help trap. Like what I've learned after 20 plus years of quote unquote optimizing myself. Talking about some of this, but basically reorienting Maslow's hierarchy of news,

which by the way, Abraham himself never made a pyramid.

And he added an update to that. People who are accustomed to thinking about self-actualization of the top. Yeah. He actually added self-transcendence later. And it was always something that was moving and shifting.

Mm-hmm. But I have recognized for myself for quality of life, for the experience of time dilation, just getting more life out of your years, right? Not just adding more years to your life. We could talk a lot about that.

With relationships, plus friends, family, it sounds so self-evident. But how many people do we know? Maybe you look in the mirror and you see them who at the end of a year, if you asked them,

“did you spend as much time as you would have liked this last year with your 10 most important relationships?”

Almost everybody's going to say no. So really taking that on as a challenge?

If I'm sacrificing 20% of my output because I'm forcing myself to pretend to cosplay as a morning person,

that's fine. Yeah. Right. Now, one could make the argument and it's not totally off-base, right? That, well, that's convenient for Tim to say.

Because, you know, he said decades is putting things out. That it's so lucky to have done well enough. But I don't think that does hold some water, but it doesn't, it doesn't really hold all the water. That's not, I don't think it really expression.

But the point is, I have through sprinting, right? But not ending up at the simmering six over many decades, right? Or like the simmering seven or eight, which is even worse. You're running hot. I have burned out so many times that coming back to the meditation, right?

Do less than you think you can do. If I dial back, let's say I lose, quote unquote, lose 20%. And I don't burn out.

“Well, that's like playing sports and not getting injured, right?”

If you get injured, you're out for two months. Yeah. And then you have three months to rehab. Mm-hmm. You didn't save any time by being tense.

Totally. You lost time. Yeah. So I feel like, also not being a morning person, like some folks, I have so many friends.

I just like, I wake up among fire, so jealous. Now, change, playing with your fuel source can help us. Yeah. But I feel like if, even if I have less energy, what that means, I just have to be very smart and selective about what I apply myself to.

Yeah. So it makes me more selective with projects, more focused on trying to do. So I'm like, all right, Friend X gets four hours of lightening in a bottle every morning. I probably get maybe 90 minutes depending on how much caffeine I've had.

So I need to make those 90 minutes count. Yeah. And that's actually a helpful forcing function for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think going back to what you were saying about doomed scrolling and screen jump.

I mean, this sounds against so basic, but it is the stuff we will struggle with. Like, I had to really make a commitment that if I was on a screen, that I was only on one screen at a time. Yeah. Because what I would find was someone else in my wife,

and I would sit down to watch a show in the evening. And I'm like, there's very little TV that gets my attention enough to really commit. Yeah. And I'm not someone who generally loves using their time to do that. Yeah.

But at the end of a long day of work, and it's been busy, and we've had dinner together with connected, and you just kind of want to zone out. I don't have the energy.

and the evening I can hang out with friends or family,

“but I don't do creative work in the evening.”

And so mine's the opposite, where I have less energy at that time, and so kind of switching off is kind of nice. But switching off and feeling like I wasted my off time is not a fun feeling. I don't enjoy that feeling.

So we'd watch a show, and I wasn't committed, and then I'd be on my phone, and I'd kind of be on my laptop, too. And now I haven't achieved anything at worth. I haven't deemed scrolled well enough. And the screen is boring me.

And now I'm feeling like I'm wasting days, like in the evening. I'm like, adding all these hours up and going, 'cause I wasted three hours in front of the TV, and I didn't do anything. And all of a sudden, there was a show selection problem,

so we saw a doubt, where it was like, okay, let's find something we actually care about watching. But the other part was just, okay, I'm going to leave my phone in another room, where I just can't get it. I don't work at this time, so the laptop can't be near me.

And I have to do this old school thing of sitting in a theatre and my own house, like saying, okay, I'm at the movies now.

And what does it feel like to go to the movies, and watch a movie

which we all used to do, and go to the theatre without any other distraction, and actually enjoy your experience in it. It's been huge for unlocking presence and enjoyment and entertainment, even from a stillness point of view.

“Because I feel like we're not even doing rest properly,”

which is why we can't work properly. (sighs) (indistinct) I was just gonna say, I mean, I am very plugged in to technology and digital.

I mean, my main business per se is actually angel investing, which I've done since 2008. That's actually the larger piece of my professional life from like an economic perspective. So I'm constantly involved with tech.

I lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years. And the people who created these tools, a lot of them, and I'm in the social dilemma, people can check out. Treat it like smoking. It is incredibly bad for you.

Even in moderate doses. So what I would suggest to folks, and I mentioned all of that being plugged into tech,

simply because if I were omniscient, I'm like,

"I don't have any social apps on my phone." People are like, "Well, Tim can do it, but that's nonsense." Yeah. Because he's an edge case. Like, no, no, no.

Like, my, a lot of what I do is predicated on knowing what is happening. Yeah, same. And I still have no social media apps on my phone. And what I would say to folks is,

even if the counter argument is, well, I need it for my business. Okay, fine. You can still access through a laptop. Okay.

And guess what? You can still record videos. You just have to batch upload them later, or schedule them in advance. You just can't be self-interrupting

with these apps on your phone. Yeah. If that is within the realm of possibility, try for two weeks. And my feeling is,

if you can't do that, if your entire livelihood does not depend on it. You're addicted. Just like an alcoholic. Just like a smoker.

It means you have a problem. Right? And I would say, look, I can talk about meditation and biologic medicine. This and that and the other thing,

if you just get off of social media for two weeks, just like my friend,

“I think it will basically do the same amount of good”

for a lot of folks as 10 years of therapy. Hmm. If you're constantly tapping a vein with social media as you're doing that therapy. Hmm.

Also a feeling that I'm caffeine. I think that's also true for cutting down a caffeine. Talks about that? People are like, I'm anxious. I'm like, how much coffee do you drink?

Like three, five gobs. I'm like, that's liquid anxiety. Hmm. Of course you're anxious. So coming back to the fuel thing.

So maybe it's not a problem solving problem. Yeah. Maybe it's just a biological issue. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. And caffeine is not a fuel. Right? It's forcing you to use your fuel faster and look, guys, I understand actually how chemistry works

and the data scene and so on. But let's give it simple. Right? It's not adding fuel to the system. It is burning fuel faster.

Hmm. Also has a pretty profound effects on glucose levels too. If you ever wear a CGM and you have a bunch of coffee, it's like, oh, wow. I'm suddenly way out of range.

Hmm. So when people have a caffeine crash, it's not necessarily because the caffeine is wearing off because you still have trouble sleeping at night. It's because your glucose spikes and then crashes.

Oh, we're back to the fuel problem again. Yeah. Yeah. The fuel problem. All roads.

It's a little need to fuel. We need to fuel. We need to fuel. We're looking for the 4-hour fuel. But now, let us know.

We've got to chip with this. That was a phase monster. First. Yeah. Talk to me the day acceptance piece.

Like, what's been the hardest thing to wrap your head around with acceptance?

Well, I give two examples.

“The first is that personally doing any type of meditation”

that involves observing rather than suppressing or fixing. Right. So if you have frustration coming up, restlessness. Aversion. Just labeling it and allowing it to be.

Like a mother, consoling a crying child. That's hard. It's hard. But I think it's a valuable practice. So in that, that's something that I've explored.

There are lots of good apps out there. You know, I'm involved with the way. So. And I used it, but prior to getting involved with Henry Schuchman. But there are many good options.

Right. There's called those headspace. Lots of different options. But I would say that specifically.

Exploring something that cultivates your ability.

To observe things that you would call uncomfortable or negative, without trying to change them is valuable. All right. The second, in terms of acceptance, is relational. Humans are crazy.

And like every human's nuts. Like irrationality is just table sticks. Yeah. Like we're not. Which is why any of them, like if the efficient market theory stuff

or it's like we're all rational agents acting in our own best interest. I'm like, have you met? Have you actually walked out a cornerstone? That humans? Like what are you talking about?

Yeah. So in relationships. I'll give a resource. There's a audiobook. There's no print person called fierce intimacy by Terry Real.

Who is an amazing therapist.

You should have them on the show. Yeah. That guy is incredible. And very opinionated. Very, he does, he's not one of those therapists.

He just echoes questions back and forth. You're like, Terry, what do you think? He's like, what do you think? Like he doesn't do that. He's like, let me tell you like you're being an idiot for these reasons.

“And like you need to grow up because of these reasons.”

He's not exactly like Dr. Phil or anything. But he's very, very good at what he does. And fierce intimacy along with his other materials. He's not the only person. The, the, the got men are pretty interesting.

Yeah. But Terry Real specifically has a number of principles that undergird his entire approach. And one of them is when it comes to relational ships, objective reality doesn't exist.

So for instance, right? He gives this example. I'm going to butcher it. It's very funny when he sells it. He's like, all right.

Let's say husband and wife are out to dinner. Waiter comes over, takes the order, walks away. And the husband says to the wife, honey, you don't need to yell. And she's like, I wasn't yelling. And he's like, yes, you were.

And you see where this is going. Yeah. And let's just suppose. And he, he gives this example. The husband says, well, honey, you know, I thought this might come up.

So I actually hired professional audiologists. And brought in recorders and based on the decibel level. Let me show you. In fact, based on any conventional definition you're yelling. Like, is that going to help?

Of course not. But in disaster. So in terms of interacting with the significant other as this context is describing, accepting that we, for each of us, our interpretation of reality, our experience of reality is real. And if you try to fix it or win the situation by arguing over object reality, it is just a dead end. That is what we will do.

Yeah, it's what we will do. That's literally all we have to do.

“I think I think men are not not to get too gendered.”

But let's call Spade of Spade, guys. Like men are particularly bad in terms of who are usually doing this. Women do it too. But in effect, accepting, for instance, someone's upset. All right.

And trying to be curious. And this is going to sound like some hand wavy. You know, cumbaya stuff. But it's like trying to be curious before you react. All right. That is sort of the key piece.

It also ties into all the productivity. All everything is so related. It's just like, do you have the space to think or are you just reacting to that text on the Sunday? You need the space. And there are a lot of ways to cultivate it.

One is meditation, sure. But it's not the only tool in the toolkit. Right? If you're by the way, if you've had three cups of coffee and your sympathetic system is an overdrive, what are you going to do?

You're going to bite someone's head off. Yeah. Right? So that's another lever you can pull. Okay, fuel. Are you depleted?

Okay. Well, let's fix that. And then on the relational piece, you got to practice in the messy reality of relationships or just doesn't count. You can read all the relationship books in the world. You got to practice it.

And historically, I did not put it mildly, grow up in a household that modeled conflict, resolution very well. And mind lots of yelling and screaming. It was, I didn't.

If I learned anything, it was all of the most counterproductive ways to handle conflict. Yeah.

Surprise, surprise.

Didn't produce miracles of positivity.

“But in the last, I'd say, ten years had become much,”

much better. Oh, Terry Real, a debt of gratitude. And my, one of my exes who introduced me to Terry's work. And my friend Kevin Rose for that matter. Not to say Terry is the endopial.

Just resonated with me. He's like different people have different parenting styles. Some people love Dr. Becky Kennedy. I tend to resonate with her stuff. But other people resonate with others.

And but for me, when it comes to to return to your question, acceptance, man Oman does that matter a lot in relationships. And there are many different iterations of it. So those would be two, right? There's the, how do I sit with uncomfortable feelings

without the necessity of fixing them or suppressing them? Hmm. Which, by the way, ties into work. All of them. And housing culture and social media use.

Compulsive social media use. You're like, hmm. I'm bored. I don't like it. I need to do access.

Yes. Yes. Now, some people might get a little pedantic and say, bored isn't a feeling. You get the idea.

Yeah. It's an experience you don't like. Hmm. That highlighting and that connectivity that you just put together. But the main piece on how the objective reality is,

what we always debate is fascinating.

Because it's the simmering six of relationships. Like, it's, it's the distraction. It's the focal point that steals everything away. Hmm. Because that's all we ever think is the thing to solve is object reality.

“When, if you accept that, that's how that person fell in that moment.”

Yeah. Regardless of whatever objectively you experience. You think objectively you experience. And that's really hard to do because we're so wired to be like. But this is the truth.

Yeah. And in relationships, there's almost very little truth. If perhaps, like me, it sounds like like you. He didn't, you grew up in a household where, like, conflict.

Hey, makers were modeled really well. But like, resolution is not modeled well. I think his name is Marshall Rosenberg. Might be getting the name wrong. But nonviolent communication.

Yeah. Read the book. Yeah. Yes. It is shlocky in the sense that there's a format and it can feel a little.

Repetitive, but guess what? In the beginning, if you're coming at, from a, an upbringing that didn't teach you anything helpful, for on the conflict resolution side, you need a format. You need a template. And it's incredibly, incredibly helpful.

If only for, there's, there's a whole process to it. People can just look it up. I'm sure chat you pd or anything. Also give you good overview. But at the end, make a request.

Don't just bitch and mom. I thought, how you feel what your partner did. Have a request. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't just tell them what not to do. That's actually not helpful. And I really had this driven home. Part of the reason I like exploring all these weird different looks and crannies,

is you realize how much you can copy and paste other places. Yeah. So a friend of mine, Jason Neymar, he's the co creator of something called Accru yoga. You know, we're in Silicon Valley, for instance, everywhere. Yeah.

So part of you see people with other people on their feet and they're doing all sorts of cool stuff. And in those circumstances, it's basically partner acrobatics. So it can be pretty chill. If somebody is, say, like, standing on your hands, saying, uh, don't push your heel down, is very unhelpful.

And you should kind of dangerous.

“So instead of that, you say, more toe, more toe, right?”

It's, you always want to give them direction for what to do.

Yes. Not what not to do. Yes. And it applies to conflict resolution as well. So that the nonviolent communication and also sometimes you can talk about the objective reality.

Yeah. But you can't do that when one or more people are dysregulated. Yes. You just can't. It's not going to work.

And that also counts for yourself. So sometimes. All right. I'm in a great relationship right now. My relationships have never been better.

Like the last few years, every one of my relationships, there are as good as they have ever been better. If I am feeling dysregulated, maybe I had too much coffee, maybe whatever it might be, not to throw coffee into the bus, but it is the world's most consumed stimuli.

Too little sleep, a bunch of bullshit going on on the business side, somebody dropped a ball, whatever. And my partner wants to talk to me about something. If I'm not resourced, I'll just say, babe, I'm happy to talk about this.

Let's do it at dinner. Yeah. I am really unresourced right now. I'm just not in a place to have a good conversation about this. And I'm pretty pissed off about a few things.

I have nothing to do with you. Yeah. And she's like, okay, cool. So you also, on either side, need to be able to agree that that's an option. Yeah.

And the productivity with that, sometimes I find like, I'll say to my wife, like, I've got a crazy week coming up. So just in advance, I'm just letting you know that this week,

or presents that I usually have to deal with,

something because I can pre-entend I'm going to feel. Yeah. Get based on, you know, and luckily, you know, I have a partner that understands that where I'm like, Hey, I'm traveling this week.

I'm only literally back home for like, three hours. And then I'm back out. And it's like, just people being aware of what your week even looks like. Because we kind of walk around thinking, I'll partner, shouldn't know.

Well, what is this sound like? Go on. This sounds a lot like what we're talking about with,

“how do you get someone to do the two weeks of meditation?”

Yeah. You can have almost anything that you want in life if you manage expectations early. Yes, yes, exactly. And I think we assume that we know our schedule

and that our partner should somehow know that we have a busy week

this week because we're coming home, like, offering them buffet and all the way like, you know, whatever. It's all our fun. Well, I've got to, you know,

it's, it's almost like we're trying to send all these cues without just spelling it out. Yeah. And just saying, hey, this is what my week looks like. And what does yours look like?

And I try and do that a lot as well. It's fascinating. You said that we've been asking these questions about life and relationships and philosophy. Like, you know, thousands of people ever.

Yeah, forever. But at least document a thousand years at this point. And I feel like we are still somewhat answering, asking some of the same questions. We were mentioning this earlier,

and I know you actually have a blog that a website that allows people to ask these questions.

“I want to ask, what are the questions that are worth answering?”

Because I feel like we ask a lot of questions. And now with AI, we're asking more questions than ever before. Which by the way, I think is better than the answer generation that we grew up in,

which is having the answer was smart. When we both know that asking the right question is smarter, which hopefully AI can help us get better at because we all have to get better asking questions. But what are the questions that are worth asking?

Because I just feel like we're distracted by a set of questions that are not valuable. But the questions that I keep returning to, a lot of them, I borrow from different sources. And I pointed out the book right behind me,

letters from a stoic, "Send it for the younger." That's the penguins' classic edition. I've probably given away a hundred copies of that book. Stosis and Buddhism also a lot of parallels.

A lot of overlap. One would be, and this is actually borrowed from politics. Someone who co-ran the war room for Bill Clinton, put this in one of their books. I was on a road trip, and I just grabbed it from you as a bookstore.

But the questions stuck with me,

“which I think they got from Newt Gingrich,”

and it's like they also are diametrically opposed to Newt politically. But they were like, "He was ruthlessly efficient and effective." Gaining control of the house and blah blah blah. And the question was, "Are you hunting antelope or field mice?" And the story behind it is effectively like,

"If you're a lion, sure, you can keep yourself alive by hunting field mice." I'm just eating like a hundred a day. Or you could put in the energy and the focus to kill an antelope. And then that last year, the day or two or three, or whatever the number might be.

And that's a metaphor for, in effect, coming back to storytelling about, "Are you doing a bunch of little micro-projects, putting out fires, living on defense, juggling 10 different kind of cool projects instead of one big yes, if so, you're eating field mice.

And it's like that's no way for a lion to live. You can survive, that's not really living. Like you need to hunt antelope. So to encapsulate all of that into one question, "Are you hunting antelope or are you hunting field mice?"

Do you ever hear people who just say, "Well, Tim J, I don't want to be a lion." You know, you guys like being lions, you want to be lions, you want to go chase antelope. Like, "I don't want to be a lion, I just want to chase field mice." Like, you know, like, "Well, what do you say to that?"

Because I always find it interesting.

I feel like, again, mentally as a society, we go between, you know, Taipei, winners, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, hey, I just want to have my lot in life and be happy. I'm glad you actually, you're asking about this,

because I think lion, okay, king of the jungle, et cetera, it implies almost that person using the metaphor might want to be an apex predator, king of the hell, whatever. That's an unfortunate side effect, maybe if the picture that it paints,

but the point is coming back to people falling apart when they have too much free time. All right, this is a huge reason why most retirements fail and people have their health, go off a cliff, as soon as they retire, and many cases.

It's about knowing what your big thing is having a focus. And that's just what we need as humans, plain as them. It's like emotionally philosophically, humans are in the meaning making business, you can't do that with triaging email. You cannot fool yourself into thinking that that is deeply meaningful.

There's a part of you that will know it is not, and you will suffer accordingly. So that's how I would answer it. Yeah, it's just, I'm glad you went there,

with meaning making in that people assume that,

“oh, you just, and there are some people who just want to win, right?”

And that's not even to do with meaning. So you could go kill a big antler, and still not win, because you didn't have meaning as a human. Yeah, well let me give, I'll give a, I'll give a, it's not even a counter example, it's a compatible example.

Yeah. Let's just say it's a kindergarten teacher, and her North Star is like, I want to put as much time as possible into whatever makes the lives of these kids better.

Yeah, beautiful. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, that's he is doing is managing the bake sale for the PTA, adding to that.

If those are the parents of your students, no, it's not. No. Therefore it's a no. Yeah.

Right? Is responding to email from friends or text from friends or asking you to go out to have drinks on a Wednesday night? Gonna contribute to that? No, it's actually going to be kind of productive for no.

Right? You can still have fun.

I'm not saying don't have fun,

but you can have a North Star. By the way, it doesn't have to be one thing forever. That can be very intimidating. Like, what is my purpose in life? What is my mission?

It doesn't have to be this permanent thing. For me, it generally isn't. For me, it's like, I mean, I do have overarching things that got my behavior as values,

but I will just go completely immersive into film the black biometric medicine for six months. That's it. That's all I care about. Okay.

“How do I translate that into something usable in the real world?”

Yeah. Or, you know, for supporting science, really to psychedelic assisted therapies and starting 2015, like, for a long time, that was it.

And if you were like, well, I want you to do policy work. Or this that related to it. I'm like, nope. That's not my powers on.

I'm focused on science. Okay. And I made it. It's supporting the science, not capitalizing on it.

So I had a rule like no investing in for profit companies related to psychedelics. Not that that makes someone, you, we need those. But I was like, for me,

that's a hard boundary. And okay, great. I feel like I've kind of done what I set out to do in that world. So I've largely stopped.

Yeah. I'm out. I passed the baton. Let other people do it. So it doesn't have to be forever.

It doesn't have to be some grand giant thing. It could be teaching your kids. Yeah, it's focused. It's central. It could be, for instance,

if I consider doing adding, I mean, I'm a promiscuous activity at her. I love hobbies. And yeah, I'm just all over the place. And now that really focused on my current relationship,

that's going incredibly well. Thankfully, right? If you're just crossed. Thank you, Scott. And I borrowed this from a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett.

He's an amazing performance coach and PT.

But at one point he told me, because he also does tons of activities. He said, he's only adding new activities, a consumed time, physical activities, that he can do with his wife work it.

Yeah. That's it. No soul activities. It's like, wow, what a great forcing function. Yeah.

Okay, cool. So with my partner, that's it. It's like, what can we do together? Okay. And you can change your mind six months later.

Yeah. It's like, okay. For now, that's it. Yep. Only adding new time consuming hobbies.

Yeah. If I can do them with her. Absolutely. That's, that's a great question. That I think counts as a big yes.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So that's a great question. Yes.

You have to be unpacked. I know it's good. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one.

“You know, another one, which I think about,”

and I had been thinking more and more about, is what if I could only fix this, only fix this is even tricky with the cheaper types? What if I could only subtract instead of add? All right.

So I'm sure this is true just about everywhere with humans, but you have some type of medical issue, or you're trying to achieve X. You want to add things. What new software can I use?

What new magic supplement can I take? Add, add, add, add. All right. What books can I read? Well, what if you turn all that around,

you're like, what if I could only achieve whatever the goal is, or solve the problem by stopping reading certain categories of things? Yeah. Example given getting rid of your social media. Yeah.

What if this is not medical advice, just informational example? But I am incredibly, I think, intermittent fasting and fast mimicking diets are incredibly undervalued, incredibly undervalued.

So cutting food out could be better than figuring out the right. This is a harder conversation to have with doctors because they're generally in the business of adding. Because they only get 11 minutes on average per patient in the right. But for instance, you know, I've seen,

it's like I could take to his appetite or GP1 to try to. And there might be some reasons for it. There were protection and so on.

But I could also do intermittent fasting, which is portable.

Proven, right?

“Humans have been going pretty to that food for a very, very long time.”

Since before we were humans, so to speak. I don't know what sapiens. And the changes that you see with something like, and just to define what I'm talking about specifically in my case, intermittent fasting would be 16 hours of fasting, eight hour feeding.

And generally within that eight hour feeding window, I'm having two big meals. That's it. And it's Mark Matsin, the scientist, MIT, T.S.O.N., who's done a lot on this.

But you, you want to have at least 16 hours, so that you duplicate your liver of glycogen, and then your body. Develops the machinery to turn on ketones more effectively. Right?

But you do that. I mean, my entire family has insulin and sensitivity.

I mean, we have a lot of wonky genetics for this stuff.

And if you're getting regular testing, don't just do fasting glucose. Get your insulin measured and also do an oral glucose tolerance test. There's a lot more it should test. But at least hit those three.

And after four to six weeks of intermittent fasting, number one, all of my energy dips that I used to remedy with caffeine gone. I completely gone. Let's just stay in energy.

And when I woke up, I was awake. All right. One of the benefits of ketones. And my lab work, the oral glucose tolerance test, my doctor's for like, A++.

Four to six weeks. That's nothing. It's nothing. It's also, well, we can come to, We want to talk about a set of set of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets of sets

“- So how do you develop the system to block or say no to these things?”

- Totally. - Okay, subtractions subtractions. - Correct. - As a flip, I would say, on the default, very helpful. Similarly, you can ask whatever your common practice

is or whatever rule you have in place, like what if I did the opposite for 48 hours or a week? This, what if I did the opposite?

I think it's very powerful.

- Give me an example of something that you could flip that way. My first job at a college was as a technical sales guy at a mass data storage company. So we're selling at the time. I mean, it's laughable now, but, you know,

petabytes, oh my god, these network storage systems to movie studios and national geologic survey and so on. All of the experience sales guys got in the office whenever they got in the office, it's called nine.

And then from nine to five, they're sending emails and making cold calls, right? Trying to reach CTOs and CEOs mostly. And I was having terrible results doing this. And most of them were having terrible results,

but that's how they did it. So I went, I'm fresh out of college, so I was just copying them. And at some point, I'm like this sucks. And I'm almost, I was one of the lowest pay people

on the company, I'm like, I'm living in a very expensive part of the country. This is in the Bay Area. I'm eating a jack in the box for God's sake. To the drive through,

I need to, if I'm gonna make more money with commissions, I need to solve this.

“So I was like, all right, what if I did the opposite?”

What's the opposite? Don't make any calls between nine to five. Okay. And I started making calls between seven and nine and then from five to seven.

And what I figured out very quickly is that part of the reason the results were so bad between nine to five is CTOs and CEOs are busy. Of course, they are, so they have gatekeepers. They have bullet professors in the form of people who say no.

- Yeah. - And those people are usually gone for four nine and they're gone after five. And so I had multiple experiences of calling pretty large companies.

And literally the person who answered the phone, like a receptionist was the president or CEO of that time. - That's crazy. - Within the span of, I wanna say two or three months, two very large competitors who had New York

and LA offices. I sold, I outsold all of our large competitor, which I think was publicly traded even then. Outsold their entire offices combined. - Well.

- By doing what? - Just by doing the opposite. - Yeah. - 'Cause if it's not working, yeah. It's not working.

- Try the opposite. And if that doesn't work, okay. Try something else. - Yeah. - I mean, with the podcast, for instance,

like everybody almost everybody, even still today, offers advertisers net 30 terms, net 60 terms. For people who don't know what that means, that means that you run the ad, they don't pay for it for 30 to 60 this.

And that can create a lot of complexity because you need someone to chase them down.

there are lots of invoices and accounts payable, accounts receivable, there's all sorts of shenanigans that goes on.

“And I was like, all right, well, what's the opposite?”

- Pre-pandlet, that's it, everybody beat this. - Yeah. - What does that look like? Okay, and another maximum I guess of mine is like, fry the ideal thing first.

- Yeah.

- You can always do the standard, later,

or you can do the complicated thing later. But like, what would my dream be? My dream would be people painted bats. And was able to make it work. And I was like, wow, well, I'll be try that first.

- Yeah. - And there are a lot of examples like that. - These are great questions. And everyone can find them a Tim.blog is the website. They're literally thousands of pages of free stuff.

If you go to Tim.blog/17, however you want to spell it, the number or spell it out, and there's a PDF with 17 of these questions. - Amazing. - And I use them all the time.

I still use them all the time. - When you see all the time, do you have a regimen of how often you read them? Or just whenever it feels right, it's more when they feel right.

- Yeah. - So I would say most frequently, if I'm starting to grime my teeth, or just wake up and I've got the type of grown, probably time to break out the talk.

- Yeah. - Something is not, something's shaping. - Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. - Or on the flip side, for instance, I'm going to be getting involved with, and they're going to be very exciting, big project.

- Wow. - And it's like, OK, these are going to be very fast-moving, very competitive. Let me test a whole bunch of assumptions about these industries, because I'm advising typically to be helpful.

And I will pull these questions out. - Yeah.

“- What does everyone say you need to do?”

- Yeah. - OK, is there anything to support that?

- Or like science, is it just that somebody did that first,

and then everybody else copied, and they're like, "Well, that's just how it works." - Yeah. - Which is usually the case. - Yeah.

- OK, you know, what is doing the opposite look like? Well, the might that look like. And 80% of it's going to get thrown out, but you don't need to 100%. - Yeah.

- You just need one or two little levers. So I use it for the good stuff too. - Yeah. - No, I love that. I love having a core base of questions to come back to,

rather than just remind us of reflections, or questions just great, because you can usually tell us straight away that you've been chasing too many fields mice. - Exactly. And what I like about that is it's,

you know, I've tried for myself over time to make these questions like tighter and tighter. - Yeah. - Because when I'm running around, even if I'm not journaling,

if I'm just sitting on a train ride or a plane, and I'm thinking to myself, man, why am I stressed out? - Yeah. - And I have other tools that I'll use.

People might be familiar with some of them from the four hour work week, and I didn't create them like $820, et cetera. - Yeah. - Calendar reviews, past your reviews,

all that stuff, fear setting. But you can just sit there, look out the window and ponder some of these questions, and then you're like, hmmm, yeah. - Too many field mice.

- Yeah. - Too many field mice.

I'm always slightly hungry.

Why? Right? Existentially, there's some malaise. Why? I'm eating field mice. - Yeah, it's when we were walking over to the studio and we were talking on the way, and I was saying, yeah, like I feel like this is finally a year where I'm,

know what to say, no, too, what to say, right? It's that I didn't ask you in that way, and I loved that language for it, because it was that. I spent years over committing, under committing,

not, you know, all the versions of it, like you just said, do the ideal, do the opposite, figure it out. And then you start going, okay, no, and I'm finally found a flow to ask in these questions,

and yes, what, the flow will be disrupted again by something else, and those questions will become valuable again. - Yeah, you're never, it's not said it, forget it.

“- Exactly, yeah, and that's what it's like,”

meditating or weightlifting or whatever. I guess it's a practice, so you come back to it. - Yeah. (upbeat music) (dramatic music)

- I also find, like, if you just get good at what, if you can figure out the process of doing one thing well, that process usually helps you do multiple things well. - That's all the same. - Right? - As far as I know.

- Don't you feel that way, like, yeah. - For sure, it's easy to lose sight of that, right? It's like, I was just in New Mexico doing a short meditation retreat, which I find helpful, and there's nothing like what you've done,

but you're sure, sure. - Sure, sure. - For a little check-in with some teachers, and one of the meditation teachers is Valerie at Mountain Cloud in San Fernando, Mexico. Used to be a very high level, like world class flu player.

She and I were comparing notes on, in her case, flu, and then I used to compete in archery,

holy shit, I totally, I was having some challenges with meditation, and I was having a really hard time of this period. I was just like, really frustrated a lot of time. And I thought to myself, oh, wow.

(laughs) Her discussing flu made me think of archery, and there are all of these things from archery that I can just copy and paste directly in a meditation. - Yeah, yeah.

- And then, literally right after that, the next three sets, totally different world. And I was like, wow, how funny it is that even at this point, after making a career of drawing parallels between fields,

I had sat there and I'm like, I need to get better at meditating, and hadn't even looked in other areas of my life to copy and paste. - Literally, yeah.

- I love it. - I love it. - Come on, Ferris. - No, I feel like that all the time, I was recently, I got, I mean, not that I,

I'm not even sure if I'm gonna do it for real, but it was like, I got sent an audition for an acting gig. - Huh? - And it was interesting, the role was interesting,

“and I was like, how does it feel to be a flowering?”

It's a bit fun, like, let's see. And then like, all the like fear came in, around like, what if I do and I fail and like, what if I send an audition tape, when I look like a fool and what if someone like sees this

and then thinks, all my other stuff is, you know, what have all the stuff that, and I was like, where do we like, why am I, and I was like, oh, of course I'm scared 'cause I haven't got a coach.

And I haven't done any classes to see if I even enjoy it or like it, and I haven't even done the scales version of like, you know, making different faces, and then I got a coach, and it was like within hours.

I was like, oh, I could do this though. I could give it a go if I wanted to, like, I could give an audition, not saying I could get the role. I could do the audition with a little bit of confidence.

Because now I had a system and I had tools and the coach would talk about how like, it was like, you know, if you didn't fail to, you got to be able to like be big.

And you go, so I always try and get everyone to be a 10.

And so you start at a 10, and then for TV, you roll that emotion back down. - I'm so introverted, this is like my nightmare.

“- Yeah, I remember doing a little bit of TV”

way back in the day and they were like, okay, just more energy. And they kept telling me more energy and I'm just like, bro, maybe this isn't for me. (laughing)

- But for me was the technique, it was like, really helpful to go, he's like, acted as a 10. And then for TV, you'd roll it back to a temple. And I was like, what a cool, like, technique. And I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

And I was like, I was like, it's gonna ask you, have you read the book, The Zen of Artury? - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, I thought I was like, I was doing this. I've got some favorite stories from that book.

- It's a great book. - I've got some other way, yeah, because I was talking to my music and they ties into a lot of what we're talking about. One of my favorite short books, I can't remember who recommended this to me.

Might have been Seth Gooden, it's called The Art of Possibility by, I wanna say, Benjamin Zander blanking his wife's name, which is embarrassing, but Zander's E-A-A-Z-A-N-D-E-R. And it's a conductor, very high-level,

orchestra conductor, and it is a wonderful book. It ties into everything that we're talking about.

“So for folks who want, I think it's like 150 pages,”

there's nothing really, really exceptional book. - Well, yeah, that's cool, I love it.

- Tim, you've been so fun to talk to as always.

This is like, this pleasure, man. - So you're such a fascinating individual, truly, and I'm so grateful that you've always been to human guinea pig, because it's fun being in your mind and talking to you just about things you're exploring,

because I think it brings back a zest for life naturally. It's contagious, it creates this curiosity in everyone, and at the same time, I think we've talked about so many practical things that people can actually apply in their lives.

I wanted to end with two segments. One of them is a bunch of questions that we just got from our audience that we love, that I wanted to throw at you. - You may to keep my answer short, or what do you want? - No, these ones, you can flow a bit, yeah,

you can riff a bit. These are questions, kind of what you were saying, questions that you asked repeatedly. There are certain questions that we found our audience loves knowing the answer to from different people,

and so we throw them out to you. So this one is, what makes a good friend? - What makes a good friend? That is a damn good question. I would say, it's someone who says what they mean,

means what they say, who's reliable. You know, someone you can share your joys and sorrows with over time, I mean, that's about it. I would say that over time, this applies across the board, intelligence and quotation marks,

because what does that even mean? Has become less and less important to me. Like trustworthiness and reliability, come way before that now. - Yeah, not to say my friends are stupid. Like my friends tend to be, they tend to be pretty smart,

but I'm not sorting first by that.

- Yeah, I love everyone who's made it now, I was wondering, wait a minute. - I love the vague sense. What's the difference between being efficient and cutting corners?

implies aiming for short-term gain,

but long-term side effects or consequences.

“Cutting corners implies you're not doing something you should do.”

And I would expand that further just to say that, I do not focus on efficiency as much as people think. Efficiency and I'm borrowing from Peter Drucker here, also the effective executive, everybody should react. - Absolutely.

- Holy cow, what a great book. But Peter Drucker, paraphrasing, effectiveness is doing the right things and then efficiency is doing things, right? The way I would reframe that is what you do, like picking your big yes, matters a lot more than how you get there.

It's kind of like if you're starting a Kansas and you're entitled to California, but your car pointed towards a New York, it's like you could be Mario and Dreddy. - Yeah.

- Doesn't matter, you're going to the wrong direction. - Yeah. - So the what matters a lot more. - Yeah. - What advice has made you the most money?

(laughing) - This is a good question, I like this. - Yeah. - It's hard to attribute to one person, I wish I could, but it's from a couple of different folks.

Well, I'll actually give a nod to some folks who have informed the thinking, aiming to be a category of one.

“So don't aim to be the best, although I think that's fine”

once you do, what I'm about to describe, aim to be the only, right? Which we were chatting a bit before we started recording about how the podcast landscape has changed. And it would be very hard to start my show now.

- Absolutely. - You would need to be more probably narrowly focused and differentiated a bunch of different ways. - So for that, there's a great essay, if you can find online at kk.org, Kevin Kelly wrote 1000 true fans,

I think it was true 10 years ago and it is going to become ultra true, is AI starts to gobble everything. One thousand true fans, you got to read it. The law of categories, a chapter from the 22

immutable laws of marketing, I think I accepted it in tools of times or tribe inventors because that chapter had a huge impact. Blue Ocean Strategy also, those are all related.

So the advice to basically aim to be the only,

definitely one. Another one would be, this relates to, I guess, the angel investing and so on, is to, and Mark and Dresen, very famous, not to printer and technologist and investor,

but also the late Scott Adams controversial guy, but certainly was very good at what he did with Dilbert, had similar echoes of this, basically talking about two things. The first is that it trying to become top one percent

and this relates to the first point, like Michael Jordan, in basketball, very hard, yo-yo-ma, very hard, almost everybody is gonna get cut. But if you can be top, say, 25% in two fields that are rarely combined, right?

Software development, although I was gonna kill that, but software and let's just say debate or a law degree. Oh, that's interesting. I tend to think about combining top 25% of fields that are rarely combined.

And then the last one would be choosing projects based on acquiring skills and either building or deepening relationships that transcend that project, 'cause a lot of my projects fail by any external metric. But if I'm building friendships with very interesting people,

who are smart and I'm developing skills that are kind of transferable over time, you just win. It's very hard not to win. That's great advice, that's huge. That's so much in the huge advice. Thank you, uh, this one.

What's something that the top 1% obsess over

that most people never even think about?

I mean, this is gonna sound self-serene, 'cause my eight-harm virtual research book is about this up, saying no. The absolute sacredness of focus. They're all, I mean, some people are better at this than others,

but in their own way, they are very, very militant about that. In a way that's very different from, say, the top 40%. Yeah, yeah. Right, like the top 1 to 5%. Even if they don't realize it, have set up systems

or they have employees or they have, you know, no available email address or whatever. Or unusual ways to calendar. Even if they don't realize it, they're very, very good at firewalling their attention. What's the allure of, yes?

Like, what is the allure? Is it people pleasing? Is it distraction? Is it busyness? Like, what have you found to be there? I think those are all good answers, right? So I think there's FOMO because everything in modern marketing

is intended to foster fear of missing out. But if you only have one good idea or one good chance, your script. Yeah.

“You need to develop and you only do this their experimentation”

and time on the field, the confidence in your ability

This is incredibly important, and I mentioned angel investing a bit

“for people who don't know that just means investing in my case”

and companies very, very early, right? So when two people and an idea on an app can investing in those people, if you don't have the ability to say no, you run out of money. You're dead, game over. That's the end of your angel this time, right?

Because most of them are going to go to zero. And I would say that that seems like something that doesn't apply to everyone else, but guess what, you can make more money later. As far as we know, you can't create more time later, back to Senika on the Schroerness of Life.

And people are really burning time in ways they will realize or pretty terrifying. But FOMO is piece of it. People pleasing is another, which generally is short-term nice long-term mean.

You can always end up paying the paper without one.

It's like, you're going to have to have an uncomfortable conversation. Do you want to have two years of pain before that? Or do you want to just do that now? Yeah. Then I would say, "Filled nice."

Right? If you don't have an antelope, and someone else is like, "Hey, come help me with my antelope." "Hey, why not you come to my party about my antelope?" You're like, "Antelope, sexy." All right.

Sure. I'll say it's your party. Sure. It's a magic show. Sure, I'll do that.

That's sure I'll do that. Yeah. Yeah. And what have I said? Before you know it, your calendars follow a field nice.

Yeah. Those are some of the pieces. You can spend a quite a lot of time on that diagnosing. But those are a few of the big ones. Absolutely.

Grounds. What's the emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself? The emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself in a vacuum without the acceptance

piece is that you always think you're broken, and that is too high a cost for anyone

to pay. It's an expanded discussion in the self-help trap blog post that I wrote. By the way, I think it's probably now within 24 hours I knew it was going to be my most popular blog post of the last 10 years, probably. Wow.

It's wild. I didn't know if it would resonate, but... Yeah. Holy shit.

“The cost to constantly improve yourself, almost by definition, you have to constantly be”

looking for ways to fix yourself, which means you're looking for ways you're broken. And that means you're always in the red. Right? There's always one more problem. And so the feeling of peace eludes you by one more workshop, one more book, one more

retreat, one more psychedelic, whatever it is, you're always going to be one step behind.

If that's the only lens through which you're looking at that, the achievement, self-employment side. If you have the acceptance side, then you can start to balance out the wobble board. Yeah. So I would say that's what comes to mind.

Yeah. It's almost like the old idea of climbing the mountain and pausing to look at the view and then climb some more and looking at the view and... Yeah. You'd never go on a hike and not stop and look at the view.

Yeah. It's a ridiculous idea. You'd never just go, "I'm only going to look at the view when I get to the top." And then there is no top because you just keep discovering a new top. It's like, "No, I grow, we got to a flat piece of land and then I stopped and we had

a little sandwiches, had some lunch and looked at the view and had a bit of peace and appreciate how far we'd come." Yeah. And furthermore, I'll just add to this the hyper individualism of most self-help. I think is very problematic and I want to keep this not printed from becoming a TED

talk, but Pema Chodron has a really great poem, who Henry Schuchman introduced me to actually and I won't be able to recite it because it's pretty long. But it effectively, it's from when things fall apart. Yeah. And talks about sending the mountain top, just as you were describing, the problem with

that is that you leave your alcoholic sister, your schizophrenic friend behind. And then when you get to the top, you realize, "Oh, it just descends." And actually, the mountain descends back into the messiness of human relationships.

“So that's, yeah, well, if you want to be on the playing field, yeah, that's powerful.”

I think it's really another question. Like a question that I'm asking myself right now, which is not one of the 17, is what if almost everything you did or project you added had to improve your relational life. Somehow, that's the criteria, because that's your antelope right now. Yeah.

Well, it also feeds and reinforces and strengthens everything else. Or what if, just to make it simple, you put you together to do list. What if, for the next week, two weeks, the first thing you had to do was one that was going

By the way, it doesn't need to be a big thing. Yeah. Sure, could be having that long overdue, hard conversation with your parents, but that's a lot of relief. It could also be saying high to your significant other in the morning and kissing

“him or her on the cheek before you jump on your phone, right?”

Yeah. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Totally. Yeah. Our last one of these, if someone feels behind in life, what would you tell them?

I'd say a few things. That's say, number one, it's never too late. I've seen so many examples of people doing amazing stuff, starting in their 50s, 60s, 70s, Jim Collins actually is a new book. I don't know if it's out yet, but what to make of a life, profiles, something I 30 people.

And these are incredible examples of success and a lot of them did their most important

work in their 50s, 60s and 70s. So it's not too late, number one. And number two, I'd recommend, I'm giving so many book recommendations. Yeah, it's great. She's like, oh, God.

We'll make it. We'll make a list from this podcast. So 4,000 weeks by Oliver Burke, man. Oh, I love that. Yeah, I think it's a phenomenal book and there's a chapter in that book specifically.

You can find it online called Cosmic In-significance Therapy and people's you check the cell. I end. This is not a similar, I got it, Tim's becomes a nihilistic, I'm a no, no, no, no, no. This isn't nihilism, but you can make your problems seem less life for death by zooming

out. And Oliver does this very well. Yeah. Yeah, Ed Cook, he's the world class memory competitor for a long time.

“He trained, I think it was journal there, writer, to become national memory champion in the”

US in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein, I mean, the guy's a step. And Ed Cook will do the same thing, even though I don't even think he knows who Oliver Burkeman is, which is like, imagine zooming out to like above his house, if he's really stressed out. Like zoom above his house, then zoom out to like above the city, then the country, then

out to see in the planet, then zoom out in further looking at the solar system and there's

something to it that almost always takes some of the pressure out of the tires and it's

like, okay, at the end of the day, and I don't think this is bad news, but like we are a bunch of monkeys on a spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos, so maybe the fact that somebody said a, you know, center really pissy email to you like, like in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, yeah. Like, okay.

Yeah. And I need that for myself, too. I'm not used to lagging a finger at people, I'm like, I can get wound up about that. I'm really good in crisis and with giant like projects and problems, it's the dumbest shit in the world like somebody cuts me off at the buffet line and like an airplane lounge

or something. And I'm just like, really, that's where you're going to get wound up about for like two days. Like for the next eight hour flight, you're going to think about that guy. What's the whole thing?

Yeah. So trust me, it's like I'm drinking the medicine too. Yeah. Absolutely. No, no, I can relate to both.

It's like there's times in life where thinking what you do matters is everything. Yeah.

“And then there's times in life that embracing your own insignificance is the only way to”

function. Yeah. There's a great Bertrand Russell quote. It's along the lines of, you know, the sure sign of impending nervous breakdown is taking one's work incredibly seriously.

I'm something like that. I'm portraying it, but it's very close. Yeah. I like that. And the dose makes the poison.

Right? Like you have to believe in what you're doing. Yeah. And at the same time, kind of recognized like we're on the moment show here. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. As the bullets say to hold it, you have to hold it and you hold the burden you hand, but not too tightly. So you hold it too tightly.

You suffocate. If you don't hold it at all, then you can't help it. And so it's, yeah, it's hard.

And you're always going to go in between.

Yeah. You got to crush a few birds first. And let if you go to figure it out. Exactly. Exactly.

All right. Tim, we end every episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one sentence maximum. So these are short. So Tim, these are your final five question number one.

What is the best advice you've ever heard or received? Don't believe everything you think. Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received? You need money to make money. Question number three, what did you use to value that you don't value anymore?

Hmm, achievement without acceptance. What did you never value before, but that you do deeply value now? Emotional experience. Really? Yeah.

I mean, I thought emotions were just limbic system liabilities for a long time. More changed your mind than that. Well, a few things. I mean, I realize you just can't get around it. Like who we're kidding.

Right. Like. Yeah. Great. No, but I think it's a really good conversation.

That's that's that's one. Yeah. You just can't get around it. So coming back to the strategy. It's like, yeah, good luck with that, Ferris.

Yeah. And even if you could become spark. You're going to interact with people who are not spark. So we're right back at square one. Yeah.

And that's one.

But we can't. If you want. If you want. Yeah. I would just say the two experienced the full richness of being human.

You have to embrace being human. And a very large part of that. Is emotional. Emotional. Yeah, well said.

Fifth thing called final question we asked this to every guest. He's ever been on the show.

“If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?”

That's a smile and say hi first. Yeah. And I'm borrowing that from from Gabby Reese.

Amazing woman who I interviewed alongside Laird Hamilton a long time ago.

But yeah, go first. Sirs. Yeah. Smile and say hi first. It changes everything.

It actually does. Hmm. It actually changes everything. We're talking to a woman brought at the energy you hope to get out of it. So yeah.

There's another. This isn't. This isn't poetic. There's another one. Somebody told me one point.

I'm like, oh, God, that's good.

“They said if you walk out one day and you beat an asshole, that person's an asshole.”

If you walk outside and everyone's an asshole, you're that asshole. Yeah. It's true. I don't plan you though. Don't get some ketones from the academia.

That's a record shower. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope everyone checks out. Tim.blog forward slash 17 for the 17 questions.

And people going to read your new book. Kind of to get you want to talk about that. Yeah, sure. People can get. They go to Tim.blog.

That is a URL kind of confusing.

We're just type Tim.blog and you can get. I want to say 175 to 200 pages of my various books. I want to read plenty of action, tons of actionable stuff. It's not just buttering you up for the book. Like you don't ever after by the books.

I mean, there's more in the books, obviously, but there's. Yeah, if you go to Tim.blog, you'll find 175 plus pages. And then for the no book, which is kind of the codename for the book about saying no. Definitely my funniest book so far. Because I did it with Neil Strauss who acted as my student.

And he was so bad. So who comically bad at saying no, there's a lot of funny exchanges. Real text messages and experiments and stuff. You can find I want to say 575 pages of that at Tim.blog/nopebook. And yeah, so all that stuff.

All that stuff is very people can check it out. Well, thank you. Well, everyone has been listening and watching. Make sure you tag me and Tim on Instagram. X, TikTok, wherever you're.

Doing the show or seeing clips. I want to know what resonated with you. What you're practicing with. What you're trying. What you're exploring.

I love seeing how what we discuss here. Turns into realities. So let us know what you're taking action on and Tim. Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back on the show.

We went to some nine years again. You're very good at what you do, man. It's fun to watch. And it's fun to experience also. Easy with someone like you.

This is like a dream. It's like my favorite kind of episode. The best. Thank you. Yeah, thanks.

Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat. With Adam Gron. On why discomfort is the key to growth. And the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.

I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think Envy is the thief of joy.

“I think social comparison is invaluable.”

This isn't I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.