#855: Tim Ferriss — How to Quiet the Ruminative Mind, Avoid Traps of Self-Help, and Focus in a World of Promiscuous Overcommitment

I'm recording this one on my iPhone because I was inspired actually by the episode you're going to hear, the person in question, Dan Harris.

“And I am now at a secluded mountain retreat to sit and stare at wall doing meditation.”

I'm going to share more on that another time. But this episode is going to be a little bit different.

I am in the hot seat this time. Dan Harris, more on Dan in a second, interviewed me for his show.

The 10% happier with Dan Harris podcast. And I thought it would be worth sharing here. We cover a lot of things that have been on my mind in more than one way. So for instance, my most recent brain stimulation protocol. And this was more an initially of conversations with the late Nolan Williams.

And there's been a lot of trial and error with different doctors, different researchers. And I think I've ended up someplace very, very interesting with non-invasive brain stimulation. But putting that aside, I've also been thinking for a while, meaning decades. But it's taken me quite a bit to actually fair it out the traps of self help, the dangers of optimization. And these are persistent, almost tectonic plates.

“I would say that are elements that you need to nudge in the right direction,”

or you can end up going very much in the wrong direction.

Dan is a wonderful interviewer, and we really got into this zone. So I thought, you know what? Why not share this? He is also the best selling author of 10% happier and meditation for fidgety skeptics. A 10% happier how a two book is done a lot more. He's also been on the Tim Ferriss show.

So you can hear him in the back kind of look. But I will stop there. You can find Dan Harris and certainly his podcast and everything at DanHarris.com. That's DAN, H-A-R-R-I-S dot com. And without further ado, please enjoy.

At the moment, I think this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. I don't know how to look up some questions. No, I just didn't think about that timing. What if I give the eye to him? I must have a netty bargain isn't it?

Living this show with metal impulse going on. Me too. I will show. Tim Ferriss, welcome back to the show. Thank you, sir. Let's be back. Let's see you.

Likewise.

“Let me ask you a ridiculously basic question, but I think maybe deceptively simple.”

I actually never know how to say is it deceptively complex or deceptively simple anyway.

My question really is how are you? How you doing these days? Mm-hmm. You've publicly kind of gone on a ride, talking about your own stuff, some of it quite heavy. I'm just curious how are you? That is a both deceptively simple and complex question.

My answer thankfully is really straightforward. Better than ever, I feel absolutely fantastic. We could dive into how and why that's the case. If you'd like, but I would say keeping it short and sweet for the moment, I would say fantastic. Better than ever, my body's all psychomotionally musculoskeletally.

I'm really feeling a holistically very good optimistic. We could keep going, so I'll let you take that anywhere you'd like to. I love to hear it. Seriously, I really do love to hear it. I would be curious to follow up and hear from you what has brought you to this point. Yeah, I would say a few things.

So one of the risks of personal development, or let's just call it more broadly, self-help, is that it can very easily become self-infatuation or self-obsession. Yes, and the counterbalance to that, the bet that offsets it is. It's very simple relationships. Really doubling down and tripling down on relationships.

We are involved to be a social species. And whenever you are in isolation physically or simply in thought loops in your own head, that tends to catalyze or worsen tremendously any type of instability or OCD or depression or anxiety or film the blank psychiatric condition. So my policies that which were already in place last time we spoke that I have really continued to

invest into are doing a past-year review every year looking at my top relationships that are nourishing, energizing energy in as opposed to energy out. And then blocking out time in advance for the entire year for extended periods of time with those people. Now extended will depend on your circumstances. For me, that could be anywhere from a long weekend to a week, spending say five days in the wilderness in Montana,

That will do not to denigrate therapy in any way.

“But sometimes talking more about your problems,”

if it were to solve all of your problems, would have worked already. There's a place for talk therapy, but it is not, in order to need to be the only tool to toolkit.

So simply spending time around your silly dumb amazing friends and laughing,

whether it's around a bottle of wine or a meal or a campfire really, really goes along. So that's one piece of it. Second piece is to hit a familiar thread is very consistent meditation. Typically twice daily, ten minutes, very, very straightforward in my case. And then also, if we're going out to the edges a bit technologically speaking,

“there is something that some of your listeners may have never heard of, which is accelerated TMS.”

TMS stands for Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation. It's a type of brain stimulation that is existed for decades, but the hardware and the software. Everything about these technologies has improved dramatically in the last five to ten years, particularly in, I would say, the last five years. Thanks to certain researchers like Nolan Williams, out of Stanford who sadly passed away in the last six months and others.

But what accelerated TMS looks like is typically up to, let's just call it, maybe one or two years ago, accelerated TMS takes what you might do in conventional TMS over several months where you go in. You have this paddle put against your head. It produces a magnetic field that just to keep it very simple either excites or inhibits certain parts of your brain. Certain types of circuitry, and that can be applied to depression.

It can be applied to neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, in some cases, it can be applied to anxiety, OCD and so on, depending on the target where you place these coils. And in the case of accelerated TMS, you're taking what you might do over three, four, five months and you're compressing it into one week. So every hour on the hour, 10 hours a day for one week, you're going in and getting, let's just call it a few minutes, three to nine minutes of pulses on your brain. And then you take 50 minutes off, you go back in, you get hit again.

And that has been referred to at least in one format, the Saint protocol, SAINT. They've shot away from it, but it was developed at Stanford and the Saint protocol in many, let's call them patients produces 70, 80% remission of depression that is quite durable. It's not one shot you're done. Typically, people will, let's just say, we'll do a five day sequence, then they might go in and have one, the three day booster sequences, three months, six months later. And this technology has tremendous effects.

I've experimented with this over the last handful of years.

The first time I did it, it had near miraculous results.

I went from having severe, and I've been officially diagnosed. So this is not just throwing it around loosely, but moderate severe OCD with lots of rumination. I'm not flipping light switches and washing my hands, but I have these ruminated loops that I get caught in. People, I'm sure, some less than can identify with this, where you just can't turn off these kind of compulsive thought loops.

“Could be a grudge, could be a fear, could be something you're planning for, could be a conversation you need to have.”

It just loops and loops and loops, which causes insomnia, which causes fatigue and just general wearing down of the system, which leads to depression. I've realized that's my sequence. It actually starts with anxiety, not depression under the gate. And I was having, let's just call it, seven eight out of ten symptoms when I went in to the first treatment I did of five days. That's really severe for people who are not clear. Like, it's really, really severe. Like, it's affecting every aspect of my life.

Had the treatment, there was a delayed onset, and even the scientists, most involved with this don't really have a great explanation for how or why this would happen. But nothing really happened for two, three weeks, and then flipped a switch and had basically zero anxieties, zero rumination for let's call it three to four months.

I've never experienced anything like it, and that includes psychedelic assisted therapies, which I know very well.

And have supported a lot of science underlying. This is a bit of a long answer I realized, but for people who are interested, I really recommend the conversation I do with Nolan Williams, then there are different types of hardware.

And I started to lose hope again, because I thought this was going to be a replicable, reliable tool that I could use.

I was so excited, and did a Hail Mary kind of last ditch. Round with the accelerated TMS recently, I did this in Northern California, instead of doing five days, so keep in mind, it's like let's just call it three months of TMS gets compressed into five days. Instead of doing five days, I did one day, but I pre-dosed with something called desicclicering DCS, as it's sometimes referred to in the literature, is in many ways an antiquated anti-biotic that used to be used for tuberculosis, and sometimes urinary tract infections, which affects the NMDA receptors in such a way.

“I think it's a partial antagonist, it might be an agonist, so don't call me on it.”

But the point is this little drug that is not typically used anymore is a catalyst for neuroplasticity.

And when you take this beforehand, you can do something like one day of accelerated TMS, and sometimes the results are better than what you previously, let's just call it seven years ago, would get from three four months. And I did one day, and Dan, this time around, it was just like a switch, basically the next day, and it has now been two or three months, and I don't want to set expectations that will be this way for everyone. It seems to be particularly effective, yes for depression, but it seems to be particularly effective in a very small sample size at this point for anxiety and OCD.

And it's just a different life, it is a different life, so all of those things in combination, plus the basics, right, the kind of basic macronutrients of health, exercise, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, diet and so on, are just doing their job together. The last one I'll throw in, and then I'll shut up, because I realize this is turning into a TED Talk, is intermittent ketosis, so the ketogenic diet and ketosis overall, which can be achieved a few different ways, which I'm in right now, is absolutely phenomenal for addressing a lot of psychiatric pains, psychomotional pains, that are failing to be treated by medication.

And there's something called metabolic psychiatry, Chris Palmer out of Harvard and other, have looked at this very closely.

All right, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I just want to assure you, TED Talks are welcome here, you're a podcaster, you know, long answers are fine, so please delete that sheepishness from your mind. All right, we'll do.

“I have a million follow up questions, let me just say, just high level, a different life, those three words really, I did makes me very happy to hear that that's what's going on for you.”

Thank you, Dan, yeah, it is impossible to overstate the difference between an eight out of ten of non-stop roominative monkey mind with a fixation on things that are anxiety producing to getting to like a one or two out of ten. Those are two different lived experiences. They are so far apart from each other, it's really remarkable. So you mentioned trans cranial, is it magnetic stimulation, TMS? Magnetic stimulation. I will drop a link in the show notes for people who want to listen to Tim's conversation with Nolan Williams with the caveat, of course, that you're not the researcher, the world's leading expert, you're more of the guinea pig and the patient.

“But can you tell us a little bit more about, is TMS widely available? Is it a thing that average people can access and also like how strong is the evidence?”

All right, I'm happy to tackle that with, as you said, the disclaimer, I am not a doctor in order, I play one on the internet, but I do spend a lot of time in these waters. All I'll say is that the evidence for TMS broadly, their decades of evidence with different applications of TMS. As we look at accelerated TMS, there's actually, I would say, very compelling body of evidence. Once we get into the van guard, which is always risky, right? And you don't necessarily want to be one of the first hundred monkeys shot in the space, but in this particular case, the pain was great enough that I decided to opt in.

Then you're getting into the bleeding edge, which is this desicclicering DCS plus TMS. That's very much at the outer reaches.

It's a very small number. In terms of accessibility, there are, let me start from the top in no particular order, but I'll just say that there's a hardware stack.

So the two companies that I'm most familiar with, which make hardware that I've used myself, are brains way, that's one company. Another one is Mag Venture. The hardware are different. I know people who have responded very well to both of them, right? So you can vet certain providers. I would say, not saying this is the only way. I'm not saying it's fair, perhaps there are other technologies out there.

As you would expect, there's a fair, bolus of fly-by-net operations that are promising miracles and offering, quote unquote, TMS, that is actually not following any protocol whatsoever.

“I think that's very unethical, but brains way, Mag Venture, are two types of hardware, and then you really want to look, it is available, is the short answer.”

TMS is available in a lot of major cities. It is not as widely distributed as I would like, because it is generally not covered by insurance. Accelerated TMS is generally not covered. TMS, let's just call it conventional TMS, is often covered by insurance, depending on the indication.

But Accelerated TMS, where you're basically taking a week off work and just getting your brains up ten hours a day for five days straight, typically not covered.

And part of why I'm so excited about the implications, if the data scale and our robust and show comparable or superior results with this pre administration of this drug, is that the ability of anyone, whether they are average, less going to financially stable or very well healed of taking one day off of work, is not only logistically so much easier if they're able to pre administer with this DCS, but it should be much less expensive. And so I'm hoping even if people have to pay out of pocket that these breakthroughs, hopefully they're breakthroughs, with combination therapies of TMS accelerated TMS and desicccerian will really make it much more widely available.

It's going to take a little while, but it is available. I know there are clinics in, for instance, New York. I know there are clinics in California and Chicago that are credible. They may exist in other places as well.

“The other thing you mentioned in terms of having a different life is your focus on relationships, and I saw myself in that answer.”

There was a kind of desertification or desertification, I don't know, I pronounced that of my social life for many years because I was such a careerist and such a workaholic and in recent years have really turned that around and I see such a massive difference in my mental health. I'm curious, like you mentioned that in recent years, you've, at the top of every year, you kind of make a plan to see the people who, to use the cliche failure cup, had you gone through a period like I did where there was a certain amount of isolation or in attention to this lever.

So for sure, there were a few different reasons for that. I don't know of hindsight's 2020, but I think it's easier to see from my vantage point now. And it's a balancing act because there is compulsive socializing because you are incredibly uncomfortable or afraid of being alone or with yourself. Right, there's compulsive socializing to distract yourself, like protect yourself from yourself, which is problematic. And then there's compulsive isolation, and I would say I probably leaned far more towards the compulsive isolation, and there were two reasons for that. One was workaholism back in the day for sure, and I just felt like I was more effective able to produce more able to focus on.

“Business finances, whatever it might be in isolation, and there might be some truth to that. Then I would say there was also this belief that I think at the time was really implicit. I don't think I explicitly grasped it, which was.”

I've written this incredibly long essay that maybe I'll publish at some point, but talking about some of the dangers of self-help, and one of them is the following, which ties into what we're talking about and leaning towards isolation.

So, in effect, the analogy that I've drawn for some friends is you want to play soccer, but first you're going to read all the textbooks and get a master's degree and PhD in soccer.

And then you're going to practice dribbling and penalty shots and so on by yourself, and you want to become as perfect a player as possible by yourself before you ever actually get on the field and play the game of soccer, and you can start to believe that you're playing soccer by yourself. There's always more room for improvement, you're never going to be perfect, and if you get caught in that trap, which is the partial trap of self-help, you're always polishing this self, and it can become this real recursive dangerous trap, this fixation on the self, and you never actually fucking play soccer.

And at a point, you start to believe that you are, but you're not, you're simulating by yourself, life, but not actually engaging with life, and I have who knows, maybe this is a function of getting older, I don't think so necessarily, but for so many decades, I was interested in the cutting edge, cutting edge of everything, and I still am. But I've become interested equally in things that have lasted millennia, more and more than millennia, and I recommend if you're trying to learn how the latest LLMs differ from one another, et cetera, you also spend some time looking at evolutionary biology and studying the things that we have evolved to optimize for, to experience.

And man, it's just like, I think it was ergonomics, right? It's the economy stupid, it's the relationships stupid, right? If you don't have physical contact with people, if you have these in real life physical experiences, if you model that in animals, they become a complete disaster.

“The exhibit, the same types of behaviors that we now see, spiking in humans, anxiety, depression, lethargy, sitting in a cage not doing anything. We need this type of contact.”

So, I'd say that I've offset the bleeding edge with the very, very super dull edge of things that have lasted a long time.

Amen. Coming up Tim talks about the perils of self optimization and the secret to what we actually should be optimizing for the ketogenic diet, using AI as a means of working on your health, in other words, should you be talking to chat box about your medical stuff and much more.

Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

“Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, et cetera.”

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That's spelled C-R-E-S-S-E-T. Crescentcapital.com/tim to see how Crescent can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth. That's crescentcapital.com/tim. And disclosure, I am a client of Crescent. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course, all investing involves risk including loss of principle. So, do your due diligence.

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The question about to ask might bring us back to your unpublished essay about the dangers of self-help. But you mentioned the word "optimizing" and in some ways, I kind of think of you as like the proto-optimizer for our workweek and sure. I'm just curious where you are on self-optimization now. I would say that I still focus on certain areas to optimize. I still pull certain lovers and what I would say I have become much better at and it takes practice.

“It's going to sound so rudimentary is asking simply what are you optimizing for? Before you optimize. Why are you optimizing?”

And it's easy. I would say particularly if you are being shaped by social media, which seems to basically offer you the seven dead layer cardinal sins on a silver platter. You get to pick your poison. If you're being shaped by that, then you can end up optimizing without a direction necessarily or a question. You have an interrogated direction. You could be because you're following someone online who is a multi-billion dollar real estate developer/serial entrepreneur/film a blank and the chase for money is on.

But that never really gets interrogated. I think the four-hour week does a good job of raking down kind of a work for work sake and money for money sake.

So for me, I have three relatives right now with rapidly progressing Alzheimer's disease including those who do not have the genotype. If we look at a apoe status right there, apoe 33, whereas I'm apoe 34, so that's scary. There are other factors to consider for Alzheimer's. I am doing things to try not to die from something that is hopefully preventable from the perspective of cardiac health, cardiovascular health. And then also trying to mitigate my risk of neurodegenerative disease.

“And that's why I'm in katosis right now, for instance. And you know, juries out on some of this, but very plausibly there are mechanisms by which going into katosis on a fairly regular basis for a few weeks at a time.”

Let's just say in my case two or three times a year may have neuroprotective effects also anti-cancer effects. And people can listen to my interviews with Dominic Dagestino who's a researcher out of Florida or other people for the science behind this. And it's also an intervention and this comes back to your question about optimizing that is very, very well studied in the sense that I have very high confidence that the downside risk is low and very manageable.

Whereas if you're just mainlining, GLP1 agonists amazing results that we've seen in the literature so far, but have we had anyone on these for 10, 20 years? No, at least not 20 years.

Maybe some of the first monkeys shot into space like me with the accelerant TMS and the DCS has been on for that pretty time. That doesn't mean don't use GLP1 agonists, but understand that there are a lot of unknown unknowns. With the ketogenic diet, it's like look, a ketogenic diet and it's modern incarnation using heavy cream or other types of fats was designed for epileptic children.

That would be an example of something that passes the test for me of seemingly credible upside potential, even if we don't understand all the mechanisms limited downside potential.

“That I can offset with certain prescription drugs, let's just say, because I'm a cholesterol hyper absorber.”

And okay, great. We're going to do that. Intermittent fasting would be another one during ketosis or outside of ketosis. The one thing that has most dramatically changed my blood tests with respect to specifically insulin sensitivity and avoiding prediabetes, which runs rampant in my family. Intermittent fasting. In my case, that means I'm eating within an eight hour window each day.

It might be even a little shorter like 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. That's it. I just don't eat until 2 p.m. or 3 p.m.

And for some folks, it's arguably better for you if you do like a 12 noon to 8 p.m. kind of eating window. It's also called time restricted feeding.

“There's a lot of good science for this, not just in animal models, but in humans. And the results I've seen from that are just absolutely incredible.”

And it's so simple because you don't actually need to change what you eat. You're just changing when you eat. So this would be two that people might think of as optimizing. And then I'm taking a handful of prescription drugs to offset the cardiovascular risk because it doesn't matter if I am eating an all fat diet and all protein diet of vegan diet. A film the blank diet. There are certain bio markers that are just trash. They're so bad. And that seems to be just straight from the code straight from DNA.

And for that reason, I'm like ah, I'm going to spring chicken anymore. You know what? I think I'll just bite the bullet and take some of these. And when, for instance, I talk with my doctors now. The first thing is if you have a blood test and something is out of range. My recommendation would be before you get on 12 different drugs to deal with it. And if it's an emergency, it's an emergency. But if it's not an emergency, right? Like your triglystrients are high. All right. Well, it's probably not going to kill you in the next week.

“My recommendation would be talked to your doctor replicate the test. Do the test again the next week. Maybe on a different day. And see if you can replicate the error.”

Because for instance, if you had a heavy weekend drinking or a fatty meal the night before and then you do your blood test. A day. I'm the next morning fasted. Well, you might look like you're on the road, having heart attack in two months. But actually it was just behavior and diet. So replicate replicate that would be number one. Don't base the outcome of the basketball match on one photograph. Like try to get tested more frequently. And pay attention to when you're getting tested. So if you're, for instance, coming back to the example I gave, if you're taking your test, your blood test on Monday mornings.

Make sure your next test that you're comparing it to is also on Monday morning. If it's Wednesday morning, it might be completely different. By the way, if it's something like cortisol testosterone, et cetera. These things have diurnal cycles. They really fluctuate throughout the day. So if you get a test at 8 a.m. I've seen this with friends of mine, male friends who get a test like 8 a.m. And I have to interrogate how they did things for them to sure like homes this, but they're concerned about their testosterone levels for the free testosterone. They take a test at 8 a.m.

It looks great. They do another test three months later, six months later, they do it at 11 a.m. And it's 200 points lower. Looks crazy.

And it's not crazy. They don't actually, in this case, this guy had no problem. He was about to get on all sorts of hormone replacement therapy and all this stuff that is pretty powerful.

And I said, go back, do it at 8 a.m. Again, two weeks. Let's see what happens. Guess what? It was the same as the first test. So that's step number one. And then when I'm looking at possible interventions for me, again, I'm not a doctor. Don't play one on the internet with the way I approach it. And people get very little guidance on this. Most doctors are overstretched. They get 11 minutes per patient. The easiest thing for them to do is say, look, this guy has a problem or this gal has a problem.

If we throw these three drugs at it, it's probably going to fix it. My job as far as I'm concerned as far as my time allows us to keep this person from dying. Okay, start these three drugs.

But since I'm a cholesterol hyper absorber, that informs the type of drug I might take. Doesn't necessarily have to be something like a statin. And there were three or four drugs that I was suggested to take. And I said, what is the longest study of these with the best side effect profile that is the most innocuous that I can start with.

“And we can do another test in two months. This is not an emergency. I'm not about to have a pulmonary embolism or a heart attack. Don't have any arteries blocked. What is it? And it was in my case.”

Not everybody. Something called a Zedemib. Otherwise known as Zedia. Very well studied. Very well tolerated. I said, let me try this in case I am a hyper responder because sometimes you can be a hyper responder or a non responder. But I was like, let me just try it out. And statistically, very unlikely that I would be the doctor said, nonetheless, try it two months later, retest guess what? I'm a hyper responder. So I was able to use the minimum effective dose for medication and ultimately added one more thing, but how many decades of possible side effects did I just spare myself by doing basically like one and a half drugs instead of starting with four or five and doing that indefinitely from that point forward.

When you're dealing with your doctors to what extent do you consult AI? I have found personally that talking to a chatbot has been incredibly helpful. Now with the caveat that they hallucinate and they fuck things up all the time. So I'm not taking it as gospel because your chatbot doesn't get bored of you and doesn't have a 11 minute window to talk to you. You can really spend a lot of time and then what I found is that I can then run what I've learned by my doctors. Is that an experience you've had?

For sure. And I do use AI and these LLMs a lot. What I would say is that if you're going to do something like that, my recommendation would be, and I'll give a shameless plug just because I'm involved with this company. I think they're doing great things. You could use something like a chatgbt with there's some tools that are designed for learning like there's one called oboe oboe.com. Get some basic literacy just the ABCs of basic medical terminology that would be helpful for understanding things like blood tests.

“It's like a hundred words, maybe two hundred words, perhaps at the very very tip of the top if you want to be an overchiever. Develop an understanding of the basic vocabulary.”

So that you can also discuss these things in shorthand with your doctors. So once you develop basic medical literacy, you could also use that to learn how to read studies. Learn how to read a scientific abstract and study. That would be one of the best investments you could ever make with your time. Spend an afternoon doing that or two afternoons. Holy shit. The ROI that is unbelievable. Like the number of medical problems areverted. The number of medical procedures areverted. The number of non-obvious solutions found that my basic literacy is helped to solve for is unbelievable. It doesn't take very long.

So I would use the tools to kind of do that first. It's that will help you with prompts. The answers are only going to be as good as your prompts.

Once you've done that, then I use I use AI all the time and there's an expression which has been helpful for me.

“I can run pretty hot. I think that's chilled out a lot, but I can run pretty hot. I'm typically very impatient.”

I have been since I was like a toddler. And the expression is, don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, right?

But it goes further from that. Just because somebody doesn't reply to you doesn't mean it's a personal fraud.

Just because someone does something stupid and they answer one of your questions out of the three email them, you can be like, "Ah, you can get really wound up." But I would go further than that, which is, don't attribute to malice or incompetence. What can be explained by a busy schedule? People are busy. Everybody's busy. But what you can do is you can have to developing this basic literacy. You can go in and then you can ask questions that your doctors may not have time for.

I am always checking for contraindications between medications and also supplements because doctors will miss these. They will miss them.

They might not miss the most obvious, but there are some that are not as obvious. For instance, there are sleep medications like Trasodone, which really affect the search and urgent system.

because you're quote unquote taking a sleep medication, and then you go out and take something that's contraindicated for this entire class of certain and specific antidepressants.

Like you can get yourself into trouble. So I will regularly check for contraindications. That's one thing I do. I have friends who have uploaded their whole genome to some of these LLMs and asked for insights, and they've identified some remarkable things. The risk in doing all of this is that you may uncover issues that if you are prone to anxiety, for a lot of reasons, I'm kind of inoculated against this with medical stuff, because I've spent so much time in the medical and scientific world.

“But give you an example. Another thing that I do once a year, or twice a year, is a full body MRI. And there are companies that do this. I think biograph is the highest level.”

I've seen a couple of people have cancer's missed, which isn't great. So if you get a full body MRI and you are over the age of 40, you're going to find something. You're probably going to find some type of internal cyst. You might find that you had as a friend of mine did, like a small brain aneurysm, like you're probably going to find something. And the question is, can you handle that? Can you handle either doing something about it, which is presumably while you're doing it in the first place, or can you deal with the overwhelming likelihood statistically?

And you're going to say, yeah, we found x, y, z. You don't need to do anything about it. We'll just keep an eye on it. Are you going to be able to handle that without becoming a stress case who's combing through LLMs and web MD all day, making yourself crazy. Anyway, I'll stop there. But yes, I use these tools all the time. If you're going to use one tool, use another tool to fact check it.

So if you get something from chat, GPT, absolutely have that thing cross examined by Claude or another tool, do not trust these tools with their first answers.

Just on the pan scan thing, the full body MRI, the ultimate, this is a bit of an aside, but I have figured out the ultimate health hack, which is Maria Doctor, because she can't get out of here and I ask her a lot of questions. But she is really against these pan scans for the very reason that you just stated, which is, you will find something and it may stress you out or it may put you in the market for a procedure you don't need. Yes, so it's interesting, the differing POVs on this.

“One of my favorite quotes is be suspicious of what you want. That's a really quote, go away back. It's like you we think that we want all of the health information we can possibly get, but you should be a little skeptical and suspicious of that.”

If you've never dealt with a huge amount of health information at high resolution.

So yeah, it's a very personal thing. In my case, you know, psychologically this particular type of data overwhelm them pretty good with. So I asked before about where you are with optimizing now and you said you're more surgical now and how you optimizing, you listed a bunch of areas, including how you eat. You did put out a podcast in August of 2025 talking about some of your rethinking of optimizing. I just if you curious like where are you at with that now.

“I think that optimizing is the how, right broadly speaking, how you do something.”

Much more important than how you do something is the few some things that you choose in the first place to do. This applies to learning quickly, this applies to making a lot of money, this applies to getting in great shape. What you do in a sense matters a lot more than how you do anything. You can get very, very, very good, very optimized, very efficient, doing something unimportant that does not make it important. You do very good at doing something that you probably shouldn't be doing in the first place. Modern productivity porn is indiscriminate in how it applies optimizing to everything and everything, right.

And there's some very funny morning routines that are these YouTube videos that are like four or five hours long right of people going through their day. There's a point at which your morning routine just turns into like a five hour warm up for life each day. That's obviously a really extreme example, but for me, if you were to have a nanny camp like hidden in a little stuffed bear. And my house, my office, this Airbnb where I'm right now, and you watched me on a given day, you just be like, what does this guy doing? I mean, it's like a poorly programmed room, but like I don't, is this like Blair witch project, like it doesn't seem to be doing much work, like what is he doing?

That you will also have the endurance for because you're kind of it's easier for you or you're obsessed with it. Okay, what am I obsessed with? What am I doing in my off hours? Okay, let me try to find a venn diagram with that and then focus on those things I'll test it for a very short period of time. See if number one I can sustain it if I am actually as good as I thought it would be. I need to be the best in the world, but better than average. Then over time as I'm throwing a lot against the wall and then I'm looking back and saying, okay.

“I tried these three things where I made these four investments, I had these assumptions at the time, did they pan out? Why or why not? And then course correcting they're actually very, very, very, very few things you have to get right.”

In my opinion, to have an incredible life, you don't need to be great at a lot of things is my perspective. It's like, look, I remember talking to Jerry Seinfeld and one of his conclusions was, if you lift weights and do transcendental meditation, that'll solve pretty much all your problems. And I'm paraphrasing, but it wasn't too far from that. It's like if you lift weights and do TM, it will solve most of your problems. I like that because I think there's a whole hell of a lot of truth to it that distilling down and it makes life seem much more manageable.

If people feel like they have to win this super ultra decathlon of life, or instead of 10 sports, there are 150 sports you have to be good at, who's going to actually swim out that and cope with it? Well, nobody.

“So for me, it's like, look, if I had to just pull a rabbit out of hat right now to pick a few, I'd be like, read nonviolent communication, like figure out how to talk to people without sounding overly defensive or aggressive.”

Like, a life, unless we're going to be a monk of some type or a nun, and even then, probably, there's some crazy internal politics at the Hamlet and China, if you, you know the Abbott, you're going to have to deal with that Abbott.

So work on your communication, take that very seriously, it's like the connective tissue for everything. Don't invest in things you don't understand.

You see, it's like winning doubt, read a few books and like low cost index funds in the S&P 500, like go look at the graph over the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years. You might have some hard dips here and there, but if you're trying to get fancy and invest in like individual AI stocks, like, wow, maybe you'll pick Amazon and Google out of all the trash there is right now, but most of us won't, I don't think I can do it. Lift weights, try to do some zone to trading where it's like, you could speak in single sentences, but you don't really want to do that for like 30 to 60 minutes a few times a week.

And then, like, don't eat processed crap, Michael Polymerals, right? If your grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredients, don't eat it, try that.

“I think you'll do pretty well. Hard argue with any of that.”

Coming up Tim talks about why we need to say no more often, and the tools you need in order to get better at saying no, doing a digital detox, defying your careers, and a new game he designed. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. It has been a wild year for money and the markets, but managing your cash doesn't have to be a guessing game. Wealthfront has a simple solution to help you cut through all the chaos and manage your money with confidence. With the Wealthfront cash account, your cash can earn 3.3% base annual percentage yield from program banks.

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For more information, see the episode description. One of your current projects is called the No book. And the book, as Tim has pointed out, may come out in 10 years because he's working on it slowly, but he has released a couple of chapters online. And I've read at least one of them, and it's really interesting. So, before I say too much, maybe you could describe what is the No book and why are you writing it if only slowly?

Yeah, I have an 800 page draft right now, so it's going to need to get whittled down a little bit.

But the No book started something like, boy, six years ago, where I noticed a lot of people in my audience.

My listeners, my readers struggling with focus and saying no.

“Because fundamentally, the road to where you want to be in life is Wizard of Oz, golden brick road, is saying yes to a few things.”

A few things. They're just a few things you have to get right. That's the yes road, and it's very few things. The guard girls for that are no. You have to say no, the entire way. I was writing this book. I reached out to a bunch of my friends. These are very accomplished friends. In this case, to ask them for their recommendations. I thought they would help me write this thing, and they were like, oh my god, are you kidding me?

This is the biggest pain in my life. Please send me an early copy when you can. So my friends were, there were a few who were actually very helpful, but the vast majority were like, oh my god, I thought that life was going to get easier. It is only gotten harder with respect to saying no. It just became this massive project, so I put it on the back burner. And then a friend of mine, Neil Strauss, some people might recognize that name. He's written something like 10 New York Times Best Sellers.

And he's terrible at saying no. It turns out. And he was busting my balls about not writing this book and he kept harassing me about finishing it. And he was actually kind of creating a kerfuffle over a group dinner after a few drinks.

“And I was just like, Neil, if you want to read this book so badly, why don't you just help me finish writing it?”

And I thought that put it to bed. And then the next day, when we all sobered up, he was like, you know, if you're serious, well, we talked about it. At the same time, I was noticing with social media, certainly, with AI, it's going to get a thousand times worse. First of all, the external forces that want to distract you are almost unbeatable.

It's incredible how sophisticated they are. Secondly, the way that enables self-interruption and distraction is something that humanity has never seen before.

There is this incredible pain in terms of paradox of choice, right? What should I do? Who should I listen to? What should I watch? What should I pay attention to that is fracturing the psyche's of people? And this, by the way, does not discriminate. Geographically, does not discriminate economically. It's like up and down the chain, left, right, front, center, everywhere. The problems just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

So, wrote this book with Neil, basically, as the student.

“And what's fun about it, I think it's my most entertaining and hilarious book in a way, because I'm giving Neil these assignments,”

and then he'll try them, but it'll be like passive aggressive, and it'll screw one up, or he'll actually not do 50% of the assignment, and then I'll follow up and he'll have all this guilt. But we have real examples of like emails he tried to send. Text messages he's trying to send. He's trying everything in the book and learning as he goes. And I would say there are a few people who have proofread the whole thing, and they'd proofread it like a year ago. They've come back, and these are fans of my stuff who've read my other books, and they're like, this book has had a huge impact on my life, and they still can be examples.

So, to then answer the question of, well, what exactly is the book talking about? How to say no in a world of compulsive, yes, but what's important to note about this is it's not enough to just have a couple of index cards or templates for doing exercise for saying no. If that would have worked, it would have worked already. Sure, I can give examples, and I give tons of examples of lines that are helpful for saying no, like Martha Beck, who was like Oprah Winfrey's Life Coach. There's an amazing woman in her own right for a lot of reasons. She turned me down for something, and I include these real nose, because I kept my favorite declines and rejections over 10 years, and so I share a bunch of them, and she said to me, "I really wish I could, but I can't do the life Tetris."

This is like, "Hey, I really wish I could, I just can't do the life Tetris." And so I give examples like that, but that is not enough. Once you start really digging into why people have trouble saying no, it's not only because they lack templates. It's because of certain core beliefs, which are thoughts we take to be true to kind of quote Byron Katie. And philosophies, they have, that they're not even aware of, that make it almost impossible to say no. And that could relate to FOMO. It could be related to a very scarcity-minded, limited number of opportunities, a belief that you can't generate opportunities yourself.

“Well, if you have to wait for things to come as inbound, and I hit these very early on.”

And actually, I think they're in the sample chapters that people can get. If people go to Tim.log/NoBook, so Tim.log is the actual URL/NoBook, one word. I think it's like 30 or 40 pages of the book that will get into this. But a lot of folks will say, "I'm too nice for that." We unpack that because there's a lot there, right? Must be nice for Tim or film a blank because they're already successful.

I don't have that luxury, right? Okay. Well, let's actually double-click on that and start to interrogate some of these beliefs. And on and on and on. So, saying no in a durable way, like really developing a toolkit, which as far as I'm concerned, is a self-preservation necessity now.

When I first started at six years ago, I was like, "If people really want to get 10x results in their life,

and continue to apply the things before our work, like 80, 20, et cetera, they really need to have a reliable toolkit for saying no. But now, looking at social media, AI, social media, enabled AI, blah, blah, blah, blah. What it's going to do to inbox is messaging, et cetera. With personalization, spam, you film a blank that are indistinguishable from humans. This is like knowing how to breathe, as far as I'm concerned.

“You have to have a toolkit like this, you're going to be a roadkill, I think.”

That sounds probably very dramatic, but it's like I'm sitting at Silicon Valley right now for my first trip here for a few weeks in duration in like eight years.

I'm telling you guys, the stuff that's coming is going to be amazing. It's going to be incredible.

It's also just going to be catastrophic for a lot of minds that are unprepared with the proper toolkits. So, saying no is important. Agreed. And it's a huge struggle for me. You have a beautiful phrase in your book, "Promiscuous over commitment." And I am really, really guilty of that. There's another nice phrase. You say the book will help you build a benevolent phalanx protective wall of troops to guard your goals.

“We don't have time to talk about all of the tools in there, but is there a tool in particular?”

You think that would be very, very powerful for people?

Yes. Absolutely. A lot of folks have perhaps heard the apocryphal story of. And I think I give proper credit in the book, and this is one of the chapters that people can get. So there's plenty of value that people get from the free stuff, but I mean, I'm not even selling it yet. So maybe I'll give away more. One of the culprits, one of the biggest causal factors for why people have trouble saying no, is they don't have big enough yeses to defend.

And for instance, if you had a brand new child, if you had, or someone you loved, God forbid had a serious cancer diagnosis, if you had a tiger by the tail and knew that you were working on a business, I'm using an extreme example on purpose. They could be worth billions of dollars. You would not have trouble saying no to things. Right? So then, like we go back to the other end of the spectrum and say, well, if you don't have really clearly defined big yeses, that get you excited, that have the potential for a huge payoff, not necessarily financially.

And you're kind of searching around your inbox for things to answer, right, when people send you an invite to a dinner, or they want to have coffee to pick your brain, or it could be anything, a costume party you don't want to go to. That's a real example from Neil, actually. And you're going to say yes, because what's scarier than having lots of little permiscuous over commitments, it's a big void. So the impactful story that I was hinting at, is the story of the professor who comes in, and I want to say this was from originally Stephen Cubby, or maybe Stephen Cubby adapted it.

It might have been in his teaching and not in the books themselves, but the story is along these lines. Professor goes in and he puts out on the desk in front of the students, like a large mason jar, a handful of big rocks.

“Big rocks, three or four, a bunch of gravel, and then a bunch of sand.”

And he challenges the students, asks them first how they would fit as much as possible into the mason jar, and they try different approaches.

So if you put in the sand first, then you get a little bit of gravel in, can't fit the rocks. Well, did I, if you put the gravel in first, then you put in the sand, maybe you fit one rock, okay, and ultimately, the lesson is you have to put in the big rocks first, then the gravel fits around that, and then you can fit in the sand. In the version that I tell, I make a modification to that, and I say, no matter what they do, there's still sand left over on the table.

“And I think the lesson is, if you're looking at this in terms of commitments, right, the big rocks are those kind of life-changing, yes, the few things you need to protect on that golden road to get really where you want to be.”

Then the gravel, to me, are like the smaller, but critical things you need to do, got to follow your taxes, got to do A, B, or C.

And then the sand is all that extraneous stuff, mostly distractions. You can fit some of it, but if you schedule all that stuff first, it's going to crowd out the gravel, or it's certainly the very least going to crowd out all the big guesses. So in the sample chapters, I just walk people through how I do this past your review, and like how I actually pick the big guesses, because the book on no is equally a book on to answer the question, how the hell in a world of infinite options in a world of temptation around every corner, do you pick a few things to focus on?

“That are really high leverage. How do you do it? That seems like a simple question, but it's actually a very hard question to answer.”

So I would say that if you're having trouble saying no, underneath that, probably, is the fact that you don't have a big enough yeses that are worth defending.

And then there's a lot that leads from that. How do you commit to a yes and ensure against reneging or something else? This is intended to be, hopefully, like all of my books, a very practical book. So what happens when you screw up? There's an entire chapter on how to renegotiate commitments after you have already over committed, because guess what? If you have that tendency, you're going to over commit. You're going to look at your calendar for the next few weeks or months and say, good Lord, I'm screwed.

And then what do you do? You're going to have to have some very potentially uncomfortable conversations. So we're learning to renegotiate commitments is also an art form that is going to be included in it. Fundamentally, it's big yeses worth defending. I would say is another one. And sure, there are lots of things that you can do that you can do today. You don't have to look at any of these chapters. I have not had social media on my phone in three years. Because I feel like you are bringing a modern life to a gunfight if you have these tools on your phone. And if it's too scary to unplug for three years, you don't have to commit to that.

And then it's like, do a one or two weeks social media fast at least on your phone. So I can still access social media. If I need a hit of the heroin, I can still access social media through my laptop. But it adds enough friction that I'm not going to end up looking at Instagram while I'm on the toilet and wondering why I can't feel my legs 40 minutes later, right? It's going to avoid that type of thing. Or the compulsive sort of dopamine scratching whenever you have free 30 seconds jumping into social media. This is not good for your ability to focus. It's not good for your ability to single task. It's not good for your mental health when you always have that escape.

I'm telling people things they probably agree with, but perhaps have an implemented. So you can do something like that. You can use an app like freedom. There's an app called freedom that you can use to block certain things for certain periods of time. I mean, there are these technical tools that you can use, but at the very base you can't use more window dressing technical tricks to fix like fundamental problems with goal selection. Big yeses were defending and core beliefs. If I say no to this person or something bad is going to happen.

Okay, well, these are sort of ruby cons you need to get comfortable crossing in the sense that my experiences. This is also deals experience. He had tons of fears as did I at the beginning stages. It's like when you start to stand up for the things that are important in your life.

“I think this is a doctor's suicide quote, but it's like the people who mind don't matter and the people who matter don't mind. You actually do a lot of pruning in your life that you should do anyway and it's a forcing function for that.”

It's so interesting. It really is about courage in the end.

It is and you can train that you can train that. It's not something you are born with or without. That is something through actually understanding what your fears represent. And like what's underneath them, it could be for childhood. It doesn't necessarily have to be able when you start to actually examine them. There's an exercise people could do today. Also, they can find a TED talk on this called fear setting. You start to do fear setting around these fears. You defang them and guess what? Suddenly you have this thing that others might call courage, but what it is, it's clarity.

It's clarity around the actual downside, which is limited versus the upside of protecting these big guesses over a year two or three. And I will say not to continue to be this dead horse, but with all of the noise that is here, but that is coming with AI, it's going to be ten a hundred a thousand times worse within two years. If you can single task on important things for not even four hours a day, two hours a day, without interruption, you are going to be from the perspective of let's just say an attention economy and the top one percent of performers.

It's never been easier and it's never been harder in a way.

I'm going to lose you in nine minutes, so I do want to make sure I quickly ask you about coyote, another of your projects.

“This is a game that you've designed. Can you, what is it and why?”

Yeah, so coyote. So it's a tiny little card game that I designed with some of my friends at exploding kittens, which people might recognize, they have a lot of very, very popular games. And it's a fun family game, it's something like if you could imagine. It's a little bit smarter in the people who play. It is a casual card game, you can learn a few minutes each game lasts about ten minutes.

And the reason I created it, I always wanted to make a game number one.

And this is actually a good illustration of some of the stuff that is in the book that will come out in a hundred years, but people can apply it today.

“Which is I choose projects based on which projects will allow me to win even if they fail. What does that mean?”

I assume that any project could fail for reasons totally outside of my control. It's happened before, it'll happen again, happens to people every day. So how am I then choosing things to commit to? Well, generally I'm doing all these two experiments on various things, like the diet and this, that and the other thing with projects, it's kind of like a six month commitment. I'm looking at like a six to 12 month project where I really go all in, by the way, that makes it easier to say no to things.

When you're doing a sprint, as opposed to a very slow walking marathon. So I'm committing to something that I think will be six to 12 months. And I am optimizing for what I will learn at the density of learning and also the relationships that I'll deepen or develop. So it could be the new people could be with people already know. With the belief that those relationships and those skills or knowledge will transcend that project, even if the public hates it, even if, in my case, for instance, China tariffs for a nine, the game that sold for nine or ten dollars coming from China that just kills the economics.

Not that this was ever a money making thing for me, but it's like there are things that came up that made this suddenly much harder from a kind of business perspective. And thank God I checked those other boxes because fortunately it's got like 9.7 or 9.8 stars on Amazon and it's available everywhere. It's doing really well. But what I really care about is like, Elon Lays, the co-founder and CEO of Exploding Kids has become a super close friend. He was a good friend beforehand, where even closer now, this guy is one of the most amazing polymaths I've ever met in my life, awesome hilarious guy.

I've learned about overseas manufacturing, I've learned about you name it, right? I've learned so much and those are the reasons for me picking this and if you look at, for instance, there's a blog post people can find for free. Angel investing, like investing in early stage companies, which is like 90% of my net worth, which I started well before I could quote unquote foreign it. There's a blog post called creating a real world MBA, which explains kind of how I approached it, which was the same way I approached this, learning and relationships that I think will transcend that project and snowball over times that it's very hard to lose long term.

But coming back to the game itself, if you've got kids in between the ages of, let's say, like it says 10 on the box, but really it's kind of like age eight. If your kids are pretty smart to like age 15, this is kind of a no-brainer, like the game works really, really well. Adults also really like it, so it's not just for kids, but if you've got some kids around or adults who don't care being a little goofy, then I think it's a really simple, fun game that hopefully does something cognitive for folks as well. I was kind of the goal, coyote game, you can find it everywhere.

It is always an enormous pleasure to talk to you, Tim, and I know you say no to most shit, so thank you for saying yes to this.

Yeah, I love what you do, man. I love what you do. One of my very close friends who is a professor at a very well respected university had pains in his body. This is just horrible, pervasive pain in joints in his body for years and years started using 10% happier, meditating every day.

“And it was like boom, within four weeks, pains went away crazy. I have some theories on that. I think it's actually might be synchronized breathing and biggest nerve stimulation, but that's a separate conversation.”

And I just think you put a lot of your very thoughtful and you do a lot of good in the world, and I just enjoy hanging out. So it's always a pleasure to connect. Thank you. I really appreciate that immensely. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

“It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on.”

They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast, guests, and we strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off with a weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.log/Fryday. Type that into your browser, Tim.log/Fryday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Back in the day, this was 2004, maybe. I had someone approached me in a coffee shop and said, "Good night, mate!"

And introduced himself, "Who was that? It turned out to be founder of H.E.1." Believe it or not, way back in the day. And people often ask me, "What has survived after 20+ years of testing every supplement under the sun?"

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