anything goes with emma chamberlain - practical productivity, a talk with tim ferriss [video]

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

[video available on Spotify] This episode includes discussion of suicide. Please keep this in mind when deciding if, how and when you’ll listen. For resources on these topics, visit spotify.com/resources. i remember when i was little, i became obsessed with efficiency and with taking the least amount of steps to get everything done. that's why i'm excited to talk to tim ferriss. tim is a household name in the self-help world. why? because, wow, this guy is productive. he's an entrepreneur, investor, author, and lifestyle guru. he also has a podcast, the tim ferriss show. he's written five best-selling books, and created the saisei foundation, a non-profit that's focused on cutting-edge scientific research. he's the go-to guy for people looking for meaningful, practical, life-changing tips and hacks. let’s bring him in, tim ferriss. tim's foundation: https://saiseifoundation.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I remember when I was little, I became obsessed with efficiency. Okay? I became obsessed with taking the least amount of steps to get everything done. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is a household name in the self-help world, and he has a long list of things that he does. Why? Because, wow, that guy's productive list of things that he does. Why? Because wow, that guy's productive.

This guy does it all. Okay? He's an entrepreneur. He's an investor. He's an author. He's a podcaster. He's a lifestyle guru. And much, much more.

He has set a Guinness World Record. He speaks like a bunch of languages. He does acro yoga. He does break dance. It's like, okay dude, slow down. You know, he's one of those. It's like, oh, whoa, whoa, slow down. He's sort of the go-to guy for people looking for meaningful,

practical, life-changing tips and hacks because it's one thing to give a tip or a hack that's useful, but sort of impractical. It takes a level of mastery to figure out or distinguish what is a truly life-changing hack. So I'm very excited to dig in to that with him today. He's written five number one New York times bestselling books,

including the four hour work week, tools of Titans, the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers, tribe of mentors, short life advice from the best in the world, and more. He has a podcast, the Tim Ferriss show focuses on what we can learn from people who are at the top of their game. Definitely go listen to that. Definitely go read the books. I could go on for hours, but the last honorable mention is he founded the SciSafe Foundation, which is a foundation that focuses on cutting edge technology and research. He is, I think, a really special person because I feel like he is able to discuss

productivity in a way that feels human. It's not hustle culture. It's not, oh, you got to do the most and it needs to be the most shiny thing and it needs to be Instagrammable. He's all about finding the ways that you can optimize your performance, not only for success, but also for well-being and for fulfillment. And so I'm really excited to be talking to him today.

We will link the SciSafe Foundation down below if you wanna check it out. Also a quick disclaimer, we do discuss mental health, struggles, depression, suicide. If that's a sensitive topic for you, maybe don't listen to this one, Tim Ferriss. Let's bring him in. Nachos!

Hey, I'll take some. And some Franks Red Hot. Nah. You just gotta eat these boring nachos with no flavor. Frank it up! Frank it up! This guy finally gets it. It's the perfect blend of flavor and heat.

Franks Red Hot, I put that sh** on everything. Makeup wipes, we're done. You promised me so much. Late nights, quick fixes. It sounded great, but you always left a mess. Honestly, you're straight up irritating. I've been vibing with Garnier My Siller water lately. I can trust it with dirt, SPF, waterproof makeup.

It cleanses, soothes, and doesn't play games with my sensitive skin. It's not me. It's definitely you. Swipe right on Garnier My Seller at your local retailer or on Amazon. Parents, when you visit California, childhood rules. If you don't remember how awesome childhood is, just ask yourself. What would kids do? Dance to a giant organ played by ocean waves?

Yep. Camp in floating tree houses hundreds of feet off the ground? Check. Jump in a big tub of mud on purpose. Call it rejuvenation. We don't care. Just pack your fun pants and let childhood rule your family vacation. If you need help, ask your kids. Start planning at VisitCalifornia.com. Your whole thing is... this is the most productive man in the world. Oh, Lordy.

God save us. You know what I mean? Which is, I mean, what a stressful title. Burden. But I'm curious if this started in childhood for you. Like is this something that has followed you your whole life? Or did that become a part of your life later? I think a lot of it started early in the sense that from a really early age, I've always been a systems person.

So I got fired from my first job. I was a cleaner at an ice cream parlor called Snowflake. No longer exists on Long Island. And I figured out how to make the cleaning much more efficient. But that left me with a lot of extra time on my shift. And I just sat around reading magazines, which was not ideal for the boss, I suppose. So I got fired. But that interest in finding elegant solutions, looking for fewer moving pieces, I think that started really early. It's just a fascination for me. And that's part of figuring out how things work. And

my mom was very good at fostering that creativity. So if I expressed any interest towards anything, marine biology, drumming, whatever it might be, then she would try to point me in a more focused way in that direction. And then learning is just figuring out how things work. So fundamentally, I think that a lot of people have that interest, I might have a little more OCD on board. But it's not automatically stressful. I think productivity can be stressful. I think practical productivity that allows you to have some endurance is should reduce stress. But if you're trying to pack as much as you can into every minute, then of course you're gonna be a complete head case.

Do you remember your very first, like even before the ice cream shop, your very first sort of system? I'm actually trying to think of mine too because I've always had that sort of brain where I'm always trying to think of mine too because I've always had that sort of brain where I'm always trying to do things in the least amount of time. Yeah. Where it's like, how can I take the least amount of steps in my day? But that's sort of how my brain, that's how it started for me. But being productive was like, I want to do a straight line and get everything I need to get done, done on the way.

And by the way, productivity is just getting done what you want to get done. That's all it is. And you can make it, you can dress it up and put it into Tuxedo and say, well, it's about maximizing your per hour output or whatever. And you can, you can find these other definitions, but really it's just figuring out the straightest line from where you are to getting done, what you want to get done. And so I don't know if this counts as a system.

It seems like a very generous term for it. But I remember being very small, maybe three years old. And I've never talked about this, that's for sure. I don't lead with my room, room. So there's this car. It was like a little kid's car that I would put my knee on and then push, kind of like a kind of like a skateboard on of like a skateboard almost. Kind of like a skateboard is the way I used it for better speed.

And there was this one step in the house that dropped down into this living room. And I would clear things out of the way so that I could get maximum speed to fly off this thing. Which didn't always turn out super well. But that's what I was going for. What I wanted at the time was just max speed, and for me, this was like the Olympic ski long jump. Of course. Right, but I'm on my room, room.

So probably if I had to strain to think of a first memory, that's the one. That's so good. I mean, do you feel like productivity is boiled down to speed in a way? Like, do you think it's all about speed? No, I actually think that that's where people screw up. And I should say also,

I'm not like the Paragon of Ultimate Productivity in the sense that my trick, my trick if anything is really basic. And that is that effectiveness, meaning what you do, is more important than efficiency, how you do it. Another way to put it, whether you're trying to learn languages quickly or you're trying to build a business, like what you do is more important than how you do something because you can follow the herd, you can bend to the whim of the crowd, you can end up imitating

even people who are close and good at what they do, who happen to be in your peer group or cohort, you're not thinking for yourself, you end up getting really good at things that aren't actually that important. They're not going to move the needle as much as other things. So if you choose the right thing to do, then even if you do a B minus job, that will be ultimately more impactful than doing an A plus job with something that is two levels down in importance. And that can be applied everywhere, everywhere.

Yeah. Like, I'm curious, how, like, how do you make that choice? In someone's mind, how should they build the tier list of like, okay, what do I need to learn how to do? Is it like the most important is what's going to be used the most often or like, you know, like what does that look like? Yeah, there are a number of different ways to approach it. An easy way to remember at least how I tend to approach it is with this framework, which

was in the first book, the four hour work week, D E A L, which is define, eliminate, automate, and then liberate. We can run through this real quick. So define or definition is the most important. That's just really clearly defining what you are trying to accomplish. There are different tools you can use for that, but definition is number one. Where is your target?

Where is the center of that target? Can you quantify any of it? Doesn't need to be quantified, but that is helpful. The second piece, which is most neglected, is elimination. How much can you stop doing? How much can you remove? How many steps can you put to the side even temporarily? So that you're majoring in the major things and not in the minor things.

Because there are very few critical things and there are a lot of trivial things. And in the quest for, quote unquote, productivity, people tend to try to do a lot or do more and more. I think that is often a fool's errand. When you're young, I should say, and when I was young, you have to throw a lot against the wall in the beginning to just figure out what you're good at and what you like and what gives you energy instead of drains energy. And it's going to be different for different people. So you have definition then elimination, getting rid of as much as possible, then automation and you can use tools for that,

you can use systems for that, figuring out rules and kind of policies to defend yourself from your lesser self, right? And then you have liberation, which was taking advantage of different resources once you've liberated them, like time, right? Because you have money, which is renewable, so you can afford to spend that, and then you can regain it later in some ways. Time is a different thing. Attention is a different thing. Energy also somewhat of a different thing. So figuring out how to use these currencies best once you once you liberate more of them. And that sounds super abstract, but you can apply that to any skill you want to learn. You could apply that to building business. And what you define and then what you eliminate, it's going to be super personal. So for instance, I get asked all the time about writing books.

Should I write a book? How do I make my book a bestseller? That's usually where people start. How do I make my book a bestseller? I think I want to write a book. I'm like, do you know? OK. Oh, God. Why another one of my worst nightmares? Now, like, do you why do you want to write a book and asking five why is basically means

is an exercise a lot of people use. But well, I really want to share this teaching with the world this than the other thing. OK, why? Mm hmm. Because I'm sick of my job and I would love to do speaking. It's OK. Interesting. Why? Because I want to make an extra $250,000 a year and that would solve my problems. Okay, why do you believe that? And then you start drilling down and maybe at the end of the day you realize

actually when we do the math, you're fucking fine. You don't need to write a book. Even if you were to want to get to that dollar amount, this is not the most effective way to do it. Going through that type of process, which again, is just asking better questions. You can then pick the target. And the point I want to make here is like picking the target or picking the game you want to play is more important than winning the game, whatever game. Because if you're not aware, like beyond shelter and food and whatever, we're all playing different games. We're opting into different games. Maybe I'm playing the podcast game or the book game or the angel investing game or film the blank. And step number one is to figure out what games you're playing now.

And then to be really deliberate about what you choose to play. Picking the right game is more important than being good at whatever game you happen to land in. And you can figure it out pretty quickly. I do feel like a lot of people. Choose the game for the wrong reason. because it's so easy to see a sparkly game and be like, I'm gonna go do that one. Instead of, yeah, going and doing what you're maybe naturally good at, naturally gonna succeed at maybe.

Like it's a new way of thinking for me to be like, what is the end goal? And if it's like a financial end goal, you just need to get there. So it's like what you do to get there doesn't need to be this sparkly thing, I guess. You know what I mean? Yeah, it doesn't need to be sparkly. And part of what strikes me is very interesting about you is I think you've

been very good at taking steps back to look at what game you're playing in a way that is very Beyond your years and that's been impressive to me. So I think you're You're very good at this. I don't know why but you seem to be good at like pausing and stepping back Maybe it's just because you flame out and burn out and you're like I need to take a step back Yeah, it could be part of it. Well, it I think it actually is because I almost feel like I'm a very intuitive person. So everything I do is very intuitive and I can feel immediately when I'm playing the wrong game that it's not working and it's not even like I can

do it anymore. Like my brain shuts off and I go full depression immediately if I'm playing the wrong game. Yeah. It's sort of like my body telling me it's miraculous in a way. Like it's something I'm like I'm sort of perplexed by even though it happens. It's me. Yeah.

Well, if I could, and this, this is just speculation of my part, but I would say that. Well, the first part is in speculation. The first part is language is relatively new. Spreadsheets and pro and con lists on the scale of human evolution, pretty brand new. And then we have millions of years of evolution and other means of knowing or evaluating our environment and things happening in our environment that we have trained ourselves, I think, by and large, to mute or ignore. We've come to overvalue the highly analytical, explicit numbers on a spreadsheet approach to things and problem solving, whereas it seems like part of what you're doing is just using all of these other means of sensing that are harder to put words into.

Totally. And I have, I mean, since I was very young, had challenges with depressive episodes. I think I've become much smarter about how I approach those and they become less and less frequent. We could talk about why that's the case. Me too. Far less frequent. In some cases, though, like depression can and I'll make this personal because I don't want to project all over you.

But I just say sometimes when I've been like, oh, I'm feeling depressed, it's like, no, you're getting a signal and your energy has dropped. That's not automatically the same as this constellation of symptoms that we would call psychiatric depression. And those signals are easy to mix up, but oftentimes it's like, no, this is an energy out activity and your body is making you pay attention to that. Yeah. As opposed to an energy inactivity, which is how I choose a lot of what I do, which comes back to like, OK, well, how do you choose the target? I'll give people just a, if it's helpful for folks, how I choose, say, the few big yeses. Yes, I was about to ask this. Because in a in a world of

infinite distraction and a million shiny objects and phones that force feed you temptation at all times and I'm a interviewed Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at one point he sadly passed away a few years ago but he said one of the key skills is being able to distinguish between let me get this right, an opportunity to be seized or a temptation to be resisted. And I think that skill is going to be increasingly important. It's going to become very obvious this year with AI and many of the tools are going to be used to inflict a fire hose of temptation on everyone, including the two of us. So how do I try to sift through that?

Part of it is if you have a list of, let's just say five things you might want to do, and I'm in a transition period for myself right now where I'm thinking about new things, 10th anniversary of my podcast is coming up in April. So I'm like, oh yeah, let me use this as an opportunity to pause and think about what next chapters might look like. And there are a few ways that I look at my list of possible candidates and start to filter. Number one is how do I succeed even if I fail? Or can I succeed even if I fail with these?

What I mean by that is if I try this project and by any external measurement, it fails. Whether that's book sold, subscribers revenue, whatever if it fails Will I develop skills and relationships or deepen relationships and develop skills that will transfer to other things? If so, that's not a failure like you can still have a very meaningful partial win even if externally it's a total failure if a very meaningful partial win, even if externally it's a total failure. If any of those candidates don't check that box, they're out. That has to be a pre-req because then you snowball your way into long-term success. It has never failed me. I've never seen that fail and it's done really methodically over time. You need endurance for that, which comes to the next

point, which is like energy and energy out. And by the way, if you're not really excited about something, it's not quite the right word. And I know you've talked about this, you know, passion and these words are kind of clumsy labels that we try to apply to what I think fundamentally is like energy and energy out. If language learning for me is energy in and somebody else wants to compete in that, let's just say money. Money was big in the language learning game, which it isn't, but, and they're like, okay, I want to do that because five other people I respected doing it.

And it seems like this exploding opportunity like AI or Web three a couple of years ago. Okay, fine. We're going to chase that. Yeah. If it's energy out for you and it's energy in for me, I'm going to win. Yep. There's just no way around it.

Assuming I have like the basic skills. So choose a game you can win, right? So there's the, will this help me snowball into success long term? Like will the skills and relationships transfer potentially to other things or persist after this, even if it fails or succeeds? And then beyond that, it's kind of doing an 80-20 analysis of what you're trying to do in your life, right? With whether it's finance, personal stuff. It's like, all right, let's rank order your life and break it down in some way,

where you could do this a million different ways, but it's like, all right, finance is physical health, mental health, like which levers are you trying to pull? Okay, if you've checked the first two boxes, then you check on the third, like is this addressing say if you rank each of those on one to five, anything that's a three or less you got to probably should deal with. Okay. Then you choose the overlap and that's where you go for. And you can fuck. Sorry, am I allowed to curse? Oh my God. Yes. So you can fuck that up every which way from Sunday and from Long Island. So I curse a lot. If you go through that process and you choose the right target, you can have off days, you can have off weeks,

you can have multiple days in a row where you think to yourself, what in the hell did I get done today? I don't think anything. I was looking at my computer a lot, but I don't think I actually did anything. But as long as you have the right target and you get a little bit done week by week,

I mean, you really can produce some some miracles from the outside looking in. But it's that front loading, that thought process in the beginning that really makes the difference. Because if people looked at me from day to day, week to week basis, and I've had some journalists or various folks pitch me on like shadowing me for a day or a week. I'm like, no way, because it's going to look terrible. Like I'm going to look so quote unquote unproductive because there's a lot of empty space. There's a lot of kind of feeling lost or being unsure of next steps.

And there are ways to improve that. I'm not totally terrible. next steps. And there are ways to improve that. I'm not totally terrible. But as long as I've taken my time in the beginning to do that type of deconstruction of things and assessment of things, if I have the right target, those off days don't matter. Every time I'm having like an off day or even an off week, well actually in the beginning, when I first started working and when I'd have these off periods, I would feel horrific. I'd be like, this is, I'm wasting my time.

I'm not getting anything done. And now I lean into it because I've realized that those periods are very productive because you're doing work and you're subconscious. I feel like sometimes the off day, the off week can be productive. Do you agree with that? To an extent? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, busyness is often laziness in disguise in the sense that you're not willing to sit with those spaces. So you choose something that's easy. You choose something that's sexy. You choose something that's shiny because it's that's sexy you choose something that's shiny

Because it's right in front of you and it's easy to do and then guess what then you end up with five kind of cool things that you're not particularly good at that drain you and That is your schedule and that target that you chose so carefully in the beginning just disappears Although usually if you go through the trouble of choosing it, it doesn't disappear quite as easily. And those empty spaces are important. I like to accomplish and have some end product to show for myself at the end of the day or the week as much as the next person. And that is important for positive reinforcement. the next person. And that is important for positive reinforcement. But if you look at the best scientists I've ever interacted with, a lot of the best creatives, there's a lot of negative space. And they actually deliberately create that for themselves. And my feeling

is, and this isn't across the board, there are always exceptions. But like, if you feel like you are rushing, you are rushing almost certainly in the wrong direction. If you feel like you're rushing, you're going the wrong direction. Because if you've chosen something that you're somehow uniquely or close to uniquely well positioned to do, right?

Because it's energy in, you're building these skills and relationships. Since it's energy in, you're going to have some endurance, etc, etc. You don't need to rush. Yeah. Right. Because the window of opportunity isn't going to close really quickly. If however, and I've seen this with a lot of folks, you're chasing some specter of a fast disappearing opportunity

because Whatever the latest thing is is what you're sprinting towards right you're going to have to rush or you're gonna feel like you have to rush and Chances are 10 people can do it just as well if not better or maybe there are 100 people or a thousand people and you've chosen the wrong game. That is a bad game and so for me an indicator that I'm probably running in the wrong direction with my hair on fire is if I feel rushed I probably should take some time to think about what target I'm aiming for. I probably should take some time to think about what target I'm aiming for. In the California Road Trip Republic, we believe you take adventure for a ride.

Whether coastal cruising, mountain motoring, or redwood roaming, discover beauty around every turn. Your California road trip can kick off from anywhere. But it should always start at visitcalifornia.com. Then buckle up, crank those tunes, and ride with us in the California Road Trip Republic. When did writing a book become a target for you and why? After college, my senior thesis almost killed me. It really was a brutal experience. And I went to Princeton where a senior thesis is a requirement and it's a huge part of your

four-year departmental or I should say your departmental average is a huge piece of it. So it's very high pressure. I don't know how long mine was, 170 pages or something. I mean, by far and away, the longest thing I'd ever written. Yeah. And it just absolutely crushed me. I didn't know how to handle something of that scope. It was very complicated. And after I was done with it, which took way longer than I expected, I made this vow to myself that I would never write anything longer than an email ever again. I was like, I'm done. I get it. I get that. I'm done. I'm done. And the way the first book came about is actually how I'm thinking about exploring my next chapters a bit is teaching a class. So I had this professor at Princeton. I've been really part lucky, part by design, but a lot of luck in terms of having

some teachers who've had huge impact on me. And Ed Schau, Z-S-C-H-A-U, was teaching this class called High Tech Entrepreneurship. And it was based on the Harvard case study method, where they would use these real case studies of, say, business X has this problem or this goal. What should they do? Hear all the facts. Pause. And then students have to figure out what they would do. And then the second half is, here's what the company did.

And then he would bring in the CEOs or the former CEOs of these companies to explore their decisions. It's a great class. It's a great class. So I started giving these lectures and I think I guest lectured in this class from 2003 to 2013 or something and every class asked for feedback from students. I would you like favorite piece, how could it improve? Because I always ask for that kind of feedback. I do this all the time

with everything. And sometimes Princeton kids can be snobby pricks and this is one guy put in, I don't understand why you're teaching this class to like 30 students, why you just write a book and be done with it. And it was not intended to be a serious recommendation. It was just a dickish response. Yeah. But that stuck in my head and I was like, I don't want to write a book. And then I reached out to a friend. This is years later and 2004 who was an author and I basically showed him my

notes from the class and I was like, you know, I've been thinking about what I'm going to do next. I don't think I want to write a book, but what do you think of this? And he replied with, you should definitely do it. And I had some conversations. I got turned down by a bunch of folks. I ended up finding a guy who was a superstar editor who had just become an agent. So he was new to that game, the agenting game.

I was new to the writing game. We ended up really hitting it off. And we signed. The book got turned down by 27, 29, somewhere in that range. Publishers got turned down by everybody. And then somebody bought it and then I had to write it. So that's how it happened. But it was not as though I had this burning desire to write a book. Interesting.

It was one of these things. And I think things that I have done that have been most successful, per se, have been the things that I just cannot get out of my head. Like I have to do them, which is what I say to people when they're like, maybe I'll write a book. I'm like, you should only write a book if you have to write a book. Yes. It's almost like it has to haunt you. It has to haunt you. And you almost have to like resent it.

And not like in a weird way where you're like, leave me alone. I don't want to do that. It's almost like it starts like that. And sometimes not always, but I've noticed with me too, like even with YouTube, it was like, I had to do it. Yeah. It's the same thing. But I was like, oh, it's not going to do well. Like I don't eat whatever. Yeah. You just, you feel, you know, the muse keeps like tapping it

in the forehead long enough. And you're like, ah, for fuck's sake. I'm going to be fine. What would be your advice, I guess, to somebody who is so obsessed with productivity and like, you know, in success and this, this, and that, but they're miserable? Yeah. That's a big question. A lot of things are fundamentally driven by a desire

to improve our lives, but we can get distracted by these secondary metrics. So I'll give you a very simple example, investing. So you have your saving a certain amount of money and you have that money to invest. Why are you investing? People say, well, I'm investing to grow my money. Okay, you're investing to grow your money. Why do you want to grow your money? Well, because then I'll have this money and I'll have retirement and then done. Okay. Why do you want retirement? Well, because I want security. Okay. What is security?

What is that feeling that you're going for? Well, it's ultimately for a lot of people feeling more peace of mind on a day-to-day basis. But what do they do? They decide to put it in the latest shit coin crypto, whatever, that is bouncing all over the place and they're stressed out of their minds. And I'm like, if you get distracted

by the secondary metric of compounded annual growth rate, you're gonna make bad decisions. You have to keep the fundamental underlying driver in mind. So I would say that for people who are miserable in the quest for productivity, often it's because they forget about the layer one. I'm using crypto terms, but meaning the fundamental layer, they forget about the fundamental layer driver, like the primary driver they should be attached to, and they're getting distracted by metrics

that are higher up, that are vanity metrics, or they're just distracting metrics. Right? And not to beat this drum too hard, but it's like modern tech platforms are not designed to maximize your well-being. Oh, just to be very clear. Oh, no, they're not. And we can come back to that. But I will say that for people who are miserable with productivity, I would say generally it's

because they probably have a target that is energy out instead of energy in. Or they have not taken the time to define a target, which is even worse. And secondly, it's the belief that productivity means more is more. And for me, I'll add one more thing to that. But for me, I'm always looking for, if you look at any of my books, one of the commonalities is searching for something that is called the minimum effective dose. Okay. You want to get a suntan? Going out in Australia, laying on the beach as pale as someone like me for like three hours straight, probably not the right way to start. Right? Like you want the minimum effective dose.

If you're using medication, right, especially with things that are a little dicey like Tylenol, Cedaminophen, which can have incredible liver toxicity if you take too much. And it's not that much at all. You're looking for the least you can take to produce the desired effect. That's how I think about productivity. I'm trying to do, and there was a very famous, I'm blanking on his name, track athlete who had many athletes with world records.

And he said, the goal is to do the least necessary, not the most possible. And that is a fun puzzle for me to try to solve. And I used the word elegance very deliberately. I mentioned it earlier. It's like the fewest pieces in the least dose to get what I want. Because when you aim for that, you get fewer side effects just like with drugs. And the last thing I would say is a lot of folks who are striving to be hyper productive and they're really stressed out. It's because they have chosen a really crowded,

what you might call, red ocean. A brutally competitive, fast-changing game. Totally. Aim to be a category of one. Choose an uncrowded game or create a new game for yourself where you can be the one and the only. Ideally. And part of the reason I'm looking for what my new experiments might be is that when I started, for instance, the podcast in 2014, there were already podcasts. So there was a proof of concept, but it was not mainstream in any capacity. And it was very uncrowded.

There was a lot of room to be differentiated. It is very hard now. I feel that super hard. It's so hard. It's very challenging. Yeah, and and it's it's not just because it's crowded It's because within that crowd there are a lot of really good people incredibly good totally and For me, that's that's like to use the casino analogy I've been playing single deck blackjack and then they're like, well, we're actually going to play with three decks. It's like, oh, that makes counting cards a lot harder.

Yeah. And then they're like, you know what, Mr. Ferris stay exactly where you are and they move the tables. And now the roulette now the roulette is in front of me. And I'm like, I don't want to play this game. Yeah. Not from a purely competitive perspective because like you have to be careful about competition, I think it can make you very unhappy. But for me to feel energy in, I want to feel like I am doing something that I am uniquely suited to do. Right? So I'd say that if I were going to be a productivity

doctor and diagnose the most likely causes of that misery, it'd be the few things I just mentioned. We're in a real like hustle culture of it all to use the lifestyle hustle. I know, I used that in the beginning. Bring it back to that. No, but I mean people, like the hustle culture of it all, where it's like all about looking productive,

like, you know, that's what it's all about. I think it can get very... Dangerous. Dangerous, very unhealthy. I'm also curious, sort of speaking of social media, like I feel like one of my greatest challenges when it comes to focus is social media addiction. Because a lot of us now have to use social media

in one way or another for our job, like whether you have a bakery, or you are, you know, you're the bakery, you're like whatever it is. It's like, if I didn't post on social media, I would delete the apps to not be addicted anymore. But I can't. So I open also.

Let me push back on that. This might be helpful. Because I'm so addicted to my phone. Yeah. I don't have any social media apps on my phone. I'm not saying that is optimal if your goal is to grow your following. Right. is to grow your following because the platforms and the algorithms dictate what you will be rewarded for as an obedient little puppy, you know, begging at the heels of whatever

platform you happen to be on. That sounds a little harsh, but you get the idea. Oh, I know it's real. Like the rules of the games, like how confident can you feel in your choice of game when the rules of the game constantly change? No wonder you're stressed out. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

And what I would say, though, is like I'm making up this example, but like some of the top contemporary artists in the world, individual artists they posting every day, I guess probably not a lot of them. So I would say you might be right, you can't stop. But that seems like a hypothesis worth testing where you could say, okay, I'm going to do two weeks, no social. Now, to do that though, you have to decide how you're going to evaluate whether you need to or don't need to. For that, you would need other metrics. So this is where I think it gets challenging for folks if they, for instance, have sponsored posts on social and that is their

metric as an example or in stories or whatever it might be. Then yes, you are captive to the platform. But if you have other products, if you have coffee, you can assess your progress, what you need to do or don't need to do by something other than the metrics the platform gives you. And this is just a long way of saying, you can test it. You can test all of these things. They are not permanent decisions. Right. Absolutely. So I know I can't. And I'll add one thing to that, which is sometimes the pain isn't acute enough. So I listened to your episode from 2021, rock bottom. But you said something, which I've thought a lot myself.

If something is mediocre or a little bit painful and you can tolerate it for a long time, that is oftentimes a more precarious situation than really acute devastating pain because the latter forces you often to do something. Yes. Sometimes you need to manufacture that though. Yes. So for instance, right now you're like, I'd love to but I can't, I can't, I'm not sure. It's like, okay, let's say you continue doing exactly what you're doing. What does your life look like? Mental health, physical health, friendships, finances, this, this, this.

If you look out three years, all right, five years, okay, 10 years. Sometimes it's fine. But usually, if someone is like, I don't know, I'm not sure. It's like pebble in the shoe that right now is a little irritating, but on a hundred mile march, like you're going to tear your feet to pieces. Yep. And so I do that type of telescoping out a lot. I'm like, okay, if I continue to do this as I am, what are the costs of inaction?

Because I think often folks will look at, and this is a lot of the four hour work week honestly, is like breaking down risk and thinking about risk differently. Right, so like let's just say the risk of taking two weeks without doing any social posts, yourself, and we think about the risks of that action. That's a new thing, but we don't compare it to something because when something is is it we say how it's risky the follow-up

We should always ask is compared to what? Yeah compared to what and In this case the compared to what is doing the same thing for the next two three five years And when you sit down you evaluate then you telescope out sometimes like, oh shit, like doing no social for two weeks is extremely low risk. Because the potential payoff is so high. Totally. So why not? The past two weeks, for some reason, I've been horrific with it. Oh, it's been terrible. And I feel terrible. Like I do. I feel bad. I'm anxious. I'm like dissociated a little bit. Yeah.

Weirdly, for some reason, when I'm on social media too much, I have like negative existential crises, like over and over. Like it makes me weirdly existential in a bad way. We're in no way evolved to. Thrive in these secondary digital environments. No. We, you know, how long has it taken even a small percentage of the population to get accustomed to lactose? I mean, these tools are brand new. And I'll tell you a quick anecdote,

which is I spent, I travel a lot. I mean, I really enjoy traveling and spent some time in Ethiopia, in the north, in the Tigray area, and going from spot to spot and have this driver, there's a group, and by and large, people seemed really happy in the rural areas. And then we came across this one village where people seem pretty surly. And I was like, that's weird. Yeah. Why is that? And he goes, oh, it's because they got satellite TV. I was like, what? What do you mean? And he goes, well, now they can watch the Kardashians and they can watch all these people with fancy cars and fancy lives. Wow. And now they've concluded their lives suck. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist. And if you take that and you basically put 5 million horsepower into it, you have social media. And I don't think social

media is all bad, but there's enough. It's very, in my experience, it's increasingly difficult, especially with the kind of tick-tockification and competition that we've seen across platforms, to selectively engage with social media and just peel out the positive. It is very hard because you're no longer limited to accounts that you follow. You get served anything that will captivate your attention, which can then be monetized. Yeah, I feel like that switch is when it got harder to have boundaries with it. I don't have TikTok, which is nice. But I do sometimes have a little foam up. Actually, I didn't for a long time. And then recently,

like sometimes I have a little foam up. Like actually I didn't for a long time. And then recently I was like, this is such a, this is the platform. And I'm not there. And it's not that I was like, oh, I miss watching it, but it was like, I want to be present there. And I had this like feeling that I hadn't had, you know, I hadn't had in a long time. And I was like, why am I feeling that? So that's something I'm analyzing right now.

Why am I feeling that? That's where something like the Five Wise doesn't have to be exactly five, but it's just like sit down with a cup of coffee and journal and just... No, I'm actually going to do that. Just do that. It takes 10 minutes. I'm curious. It's amazing how much you can get out of like 10 to 15 minutes of structured journaling.

It can be so fast. So like the five wise or morning pages. I'm a huge fan of morning pages by Julia Cameron and Rothe artists way. It's just like you wake up three pages of writing out whatever is in your monkey mind. Yep. Bitch and moan complain.

It's not writing. You're not going to show anybody. Just like get it out of your head so you can move on with your day. Yep. Trap it on paper. And it's the simplest thing ever. writing, you're not going to show anybody, just like get it out of your head so you can move on with your day. Yep. Trap it on paper. Mm-hmm. And it's the simplest thing ever.

What do you think about going cold turkey on something? Like for example, social media, how do you decide whether cold turkey makes sense? I do cold turkey with stuff all the time. I know. And you kind of have to. Like, yeah. I don't do moderation well. And I do moderation well and I don't think I shouldn't say that It's not like I'm abusing everything that I yeah you as a do but

Keep it simple simple usually means instead of like titrating off of social media saying well instead of using it for 30 minutes in the morning I'm gonna use it for 10 minutes in the morning. What in? God's name makes you think that you could possibly do that? You are so outgunned. You are so outfunded. You're so out researched. These platforms are not going to lose.

Like you're bringing a knife to a gun finally. It's not gonna work. It's gonna be very challenging to make work at the very least. It's like do the easy thing first. And the easy thing is cold turkey in my opinion. Yeah. Do the simple thing first. Yeah. There's another exercise outside of Ted Talk a handful of years ago on this topic called fear setting.

Mm-hmm. Where you're just as you would with goals, right, to have a goal that you have some chance of accomplishing. Mm-hmm. You can do the same thing with your fears. So if you're like, I can't do this. No, but no, if I do that, then I'll become irrelevant. If I do this and people will forget about me. If I do this, then if I don't do that, etc, etc. You need to take those cloudy nebulous fears and put them on paper in some structured way. And I'll just tell people how to do it. Go old school, piece of paper, pen, and you're gonna have

three or four columns. The first column is like all the things that could go wrong at the very top. It's like what you're considering doing or not doing, stopping social media for two weeks. All right. Write down all the things that could go wrong and get as specific as possible. In the second column, you write down what you could do to minimize, like to reduce the likelihood of each of those things happening. Okay, and then in the last column

You just write down what you could do to recover even temporarily if that thing happens like how could you reverse the damage or? Minimize the damage. Yep. That's page one Page two is the cost of inaction. Okay, if if I don't do this thing And I telescope out like one, three, five years, what does my life look like? You're making explicit something that is implicit that if you choose not to do this thing, you're making a choice in another direction. What are the costs associated and the risks associated with that? And I would say one time out of ten, you're like, you know what? That is

risky. I shouldn't do that. Nine times out of 10, you're like, this is fine. I am risking like a three out of 10 temporary setback that I could reverse for like a nine out of 10 durable benefit. Obvious. Like the choice is obvious. What happens though, when your intuition or so you think, see that's the thing about intuition is that you don't know what it is. It's so hard to know when you get a feeling, is this intuition, is this anxiety, is this delusion? You know, like what is this?

How does one balance their intuition with being sort of analytical and rational in a way? Can you give any examples of where intuition has really served you, point you in the right direction, and maybe an example of where it didn't serve you, right? Where maybe intuition, because sometimes intuition is used as a guise for like justifying doing what you want to do

or what is comfortable. See, that's the truth. That's the truth, because when I think about it, anytime I've used intuition and it's steered me in the wrong direction, friends, boyfriends, that's most of the time. I knew deep down it wasn't my intuition, but I convinced myself that it was. Whereas, like, I'd say intuition serving me right has been more

career wise, you know, like being like, okay, you know what, working with this, with this company doesn't feel right and I don't know why because on paper it looks good, but to me it feels bad. Okay, so that's a great example. Yeah. And so here are my thoughts because the intuition, especially we're sitting here in LA, right? Intuition comes up a lot. Yes. At every bar tonight, it's Friday tonight, we're all going to hear it. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of intuition in chat tonight.

So a few things. I would say, first, if you rely on what you would call intuition a lot, practice using some frameworks, right? And this is sort of just a meta comment and then I'll come into the specifics. If on the other hand, you're very head-centric, as I have been for most of my life, I would say, then practice tuning into what you might call your intuition, like your body feel. If you're used to constantly thinking in terms of frameworks and protocol, listen to this and that other thing, how do you feel, right? Like with this company, with this person, when you're on the phone, are you constricted? When you get off,

are you drained? Are you checking the time because you want to get off the call? Like pay attention to that stuff, not as much the content, because content doesn't matter if you feel like your system is giving you a yellow or a red. Yeah. And then I would say intuition to me is most interesting. When it contradicts what you've arrived at in your head, that's when that's when I pay attention, right? When I'm like, God, like, oh oh my, you know, these friends or these advisors

that tell me to do this thing on paper, like, oh, this looks great. And there's part of it. It's just like, uh, yep, I would wait. Mm. That doesn't feel good. Yeah. That should be. And I've become, I think, very good at this.

That's an automatic. No. Yeah. It's like, there's something in this pre-language evolved sensing that is telling me, fuck no. And when I have overridden that, it's never worked out. There's always some problem later. I'm like, damn it, I knew it. It's the worst. It's the worst. You know, we did this deal and you can't do a good deal with a bad person or an Untrustworthy person. Yeah, so I find intuition most valuable when it is actually

Subverting what you think you want absolutely, but it's always such an unsettling feeling like I had that about about college for me Yeah, I was like, this is just not right. Yeah, like this is not right I can't do it right now. And I got so depressed because I was like, this is my dream is to go to a good college for what reason I had and ask myself why. That's for sure. And then my body rejected it.

Yeah, I went into full depressive episode and then I knew like this is just wrong. Speaking of that, we are both depressive people. Okay. How is that impacted? I don't know, everyone's different. I like, you mentioned earlier that the more wise that you get, the easier it is to sort of get through those moments and not fully crumble under them.

But well, there's a bit more to that story. So depression runs in my family, manic depression as well. I don't have the manic episodes. And I'd say historically, I've had, it's really hard to pin down a number, but I would say four to six extended depressive episodes a year on average since I was adolescent per year. Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah. And they could last anywhere from let's say two weeks to like two months. And there have been years when it's basically been mostly

depressive episodes. Since 2012 2013, that frequency is probably down to like one every two years. Wow. And they're typically pretty short. They're typically one to two weeks. And I would attribute that to a few things and to really provide, I guess, a harrowing example of how bad that can be. I mean, in college, I had a date on the calendar to kill myself and came very, very close and through a host of very lucky coincidences, ended up getting snapped out

of it because my mom called me because I had reserved this book at the library. I was taken a year off school. It was related to suicide. The reminder on a postcard got sent home to my parents' house. I forgot to change the mailing address. And she got it freaked out, called me, and that sort of snapped me out of my own self-imposed delusion in a way because you put on these very dark glasses when you're in those states where you can. Oh, I know. where it seems very personal. You're the only person you're uniquely flawed.

Nobody else has this problem. And objectively, you realize, at least in my case, like your life is pretty good, so I'm fucked because this is never going to get better and it's permanent, therefore X, which is often some type of final exit. And if that had happened now, all digital notifications, I wouldn't be here. Right? I got it all planned out. I had the whole thing figured out. And that didn't happen, thankfully. And then I would say the contributing, some of the contributing elements that have helped are different

therapeutic modalities, like, for instance, IFS, internal family systems created by a guy named Richard Schwartz. What is that? So internal family systems is a therapy technique that as its basis uses a type of role playing that allows you to interact with different parts of yourself. Interesting. So you might have defenders who are trying to protect you in certain ways by provoking certain behaviors or beliefs, and they have names for these different parts of yourself.

And if people want to hear an example, I interviewed Dick Schwartz on the Tim Ferriss show and I was a little hesitant to do this, so we agreed that I might not publish it, but it's a live session. Like he takes me through it. And it's a structured way of having you interact with these parts, have conversations with them, identify when they came up, like how old are they, what age are you when this kind of player entered the stage. And I've seen tremendous effects from IFS by itself. Then you can layer in other tools that are sometimes very advantageous. In the case of IFS, IFS has been adapted in part to a protocol used with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. So post-traumatic stress disorder, in this

case treatment resistant post-traumatic stress disorder, were at least with the phase two trials, I think the average was something like 16.8 years or 17 years of diagnosis, which meant these patients had not found a solution to address their PTSD symptoms for an average of, let's call it, 17 years. And they do two or three sessions with MDMA assisted psychotherapy. MDMA assisted psychotherapy, the IFS parts work. Parts work is another term you'll sometimes hear. And I think I'm gonna get the numbers slightly wrong, but they're not that much off. It's something like 58% or 60% were asymptomatic or they no longer met the criteria for PTSD after two or three sessions plus integration work and prep. And at the, I want to say, six or 12 month follow-up point, that number had gone up to something like 68%,

which is very rare in psychiatry. So for me personally also, psychedelic assist therapies have been a critical component. They're not a panacea. There are risks. But I can honestly say that in combination with good therapists and supervision that I think these things have not just saved my life, but allow me to re-envision and re-author the beliefs that govern my life. And that's a big deal.

Certainly a big deal. Certainly a big deal for me. I think people are too cavalier with these compounds now. Yeah. Right? Like you can't walk down the street in LA without like somebody offering you a matcha latte with magic mushrooms in or something.

Yeah, yeah. Seriously. And they're like, oh, I'm really healthy now. I no longer drink. I just use ketamine five nights a week. Yeah. And you're like, well, time out, time out. Oh my God, that's everyone I'm gonna see in like eight hours tonight. Oh yeah. It's Friday. Yeah. So I do think that people are taking these things in ways

that are going to be very problematic later. Yeah. But in the right circumstances with the right supervision, I think these tools are incredibly powerful for if you look at say the researcher of someone like Gould Dolan, this incredible researcher who I think is currently at Hopkins, and her belief is, and she's testing this as a hypothesis, of course, is that some psychedelics reopen critical windows where you can effectively, and these are my words, not hers, but recontextualize experiences. This is certainly how a lot of subjects would explain the PTSD and MDMA, where they can revisit this traumatic experience, whether it's war, sexual abuse, whatever it might be, and recontextualize it as an adult so that it in a way kind of

overwrites the disabling stories. And that's hard to measure. So a lot of scientists are looking for mechanistic ways to explain these changes, but it's very difficult to do. The content, from my perspective, matters a lot because you look at the durability for most psychiatric medications that may be used for, say, maintenance, suppression of symptoms, or addressing any number of things like depression. You take these drugs and they're three to five times a week or every day, and if you get off of them, you have to be very careful because they're withdrawal symptoms and there are lots of contraindications. And these, I should say these conventional frontline drugs are really critical and very effective

for a lot of people. They also don't work for a lot of people. And when you say take someone through a trial where they have one or two high dose psilocybin experiences for say treatment resistant depression or major depressive disorder. And they report 12 months later that they have not had any return of symptoms. You can't explain that by the presence of the drug because the drug, the half life of psilocybin is so short. Psilocybin being what is considered the active sort of constituent element in magic mushrooms,

slosopy mushrooms of different types. What I find so deeply interesting about psychedelics is that I'm gonna borrow from a very famous psychotherapist named Stanislaw Grof and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's close enough, that what the telescope did for astronomy and what the microscope did for biology, psychedelics will do for the mind. In terms of, I think, probably overturning or at least augmenting very long-standing beliefs about the brain and mind, many of the effects we're seeing are just so far outside of the normal purview

of psychiatry that it's hard for me to offhand pick something I find more interesting. Because our conception, our beliefs and conception of reality are, if we're talking about base layers, right? It's like, that's layer one. And everything else is built on that. So if you start to, if you can learn more about that, and you can use these not just to help individual people in clinical trials, but also to get a better understanding of how we create reality, because let's not be, let's not make any mistake. Like we are constantly creating reality as we go. There's a book called The Case Against Reality by a scientist named Donald Hoffman, which I think makes this very compelling.

But if I were a mantis shrimp or a sparrow, this room would not look the same. Clearly. So as we learn more about the user interface as we experience it, I think we'll have some very, very compelling breakthroughs in terms of not just treating psychiatric conditions or we might consider dysfunctions, but also to help with broader mental flourishing. Totally. So I think that's what we're seeing with psychedelics right now. So that's the long story long, I suppose.

To end it off, what's your piece of advice for the listener? It could be something broad. It could be something niche and random. You could go full indie with this piece of advice, like hit it however you want. Yeah. The pieces that comes to mind is not from me. It's actually something I heard first from Someone named BJ Miller. So the doctor BJ Miller Is a

He's a physician who has done a lot of work in hospice care He's helped thousands of people to die where he's shepherded them through that experience and he also was experience. And he also was the victim of a terrible accident when he was in college. He was electrocuted, lost three of his limbs, I want to say. And nonetheless, has incredible sense of humor, very smart guy. And I asked him what he would put on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, and his answer was, don't believe everything that you think. And I had to worry about that. And he said,

I think it was a bumper sticker in Berkeley. So that's okay. That's okay. But don't believe everything that you think. Yeah. A lot of what we think has not been stress tested A lot of what we think the things we take to be our beliefs are not our beliefs there are parents beliefs or expectations or the product of difficult experiences or maybe fantastic experiences that have distorted Things and those things have not been reexamined. And they're just, it's a gold mine waiting for you. I love that.

So don't believe everything that you think. Amen. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. It's such a pleasure. Likewise.