Breaking Bread with Tom Papa - Episode 277 - Tim Ferriss

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Today Tim Ferriss joins us at the table! We have an entrepreneur and investor on the program, Breaking Bread just got a whole lot smarter! Tim sheds light on diet, screen time, natural remedies, and much more! Tune in for his tips and tricks. Enjoy! Eat smart at FactorMeals.com/papa50off and use code papa50off to get 50 percent off plus FREE shipping on your first box. --------------- 0:00:00 Intro 0:00:39 Patreon Shoutout 0:01:29 Creating a card game, doom scrolling 0:04:21 Effects of covid, low information diet 0:10:40 Giving up caffeine 0:14:21 Designing game 0:17:10 The No Book 0:27:21 Off the grid during vacation and cleaning inbox upon return 0:31:20 Illusion of self 0:37:35 Uncomfortable moment 0:40:46 Factor Ad 0:43:40 Fist fight as a bouncer 0:49:05 Training your mind to remember your dreams 0:50:00 Depression 0:56:15 Supplements for brain clarity 0:59:01 Getting into the details 1:00:06 Taking subscriptions vs natural/behavioral remedies 1:07:02 Eating late and drinking alcohol 1:14:00 Dating and family 1:16:24 Coyote game 1:22:15 Duplicate blood tests 1:23:45 Gas station order --------------- Tom Papa is a celebrated stand-up comedian with over 20 years in the industry. Watch Tom's new special "Home Free" out NOW on Netflix! Patreon - Patreon.com/BreakingBreadWithTomPapa Radio, Podcasts and more: https://linktr.ee/tompapa/ Website - http://tompapa.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tompapa Tiktok - https://www.tiktok.com/@tompapa Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/comediantompapa Twitter - https://www.twitter.com/tompapa #tompapa #breakingbread #comedy #standup #standupcomedy #bread Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Payeighi show to face Responsible The condition's Colin Griffiths was the primary investigator on the study I'm thinking of so you could look it up. But something like two-thirds of participants ranked its significance, this experience, alongside the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. Right.

What the hell is going on? Yeah. And I think a lot of it is a sense of unity and the dissolution of self. Yeah. So I do think about this a lot. You do not need to take drugs. There are other ways to do it. Drugs just happen to be a very reliable way for a lot of people.

of getting the holy shit experience. It's breaking bread. Hey kids, if you love listening to this podcast and who doesn't or watching it to see my new shirt, you should join Patreon. It's a great way to support our podcast and a great way for you to get extra bonus stuff.

You get some follow-ups on our interviews, you get some stuff from the road. It's just a way to become another part of a larger, a larger, a more integral part of our community. Great way to support the podcast. And hopefully we're giving you some really cool stuff. The Patreon folks get stuff every single week. And we love them.

I mean, not much more, not more than you. But, you know, it's a different relationship. And I think you should be a part of it. Go to patreon.com, look up our podcast, and join. So nice to see you. This is so great. I've been reading and watching and all this stuff for such a long time. This is really, I'm psychless worked out.

Super, super happy to hang. Yeah, very cool. And congratulations on your, we'll get to it all. But this new game you have. Yeah, what a left turn, huh? Yeah, I know. So great. But it really makes me think, because it's interesting watching somebody who's so good at figuring out life,

always trying to learn more and do things and try and kind of innovate for you. yourself and then anybody who wants to digest your stuff. So to watch your journey of, you know, going through your life, you know, we kind of are along for the ride. Yeah. And for you to be putting out a game, you've got to be in a pretty playful place. Yeah, I feel like if I look at my audience, right, so whatever, 20 million people a month, the, if I look at the most obvious to me changes collectively.

over the last 10 years. A lot of mental health issues, loneliness, anxiety. And I don't think we're evolved for the doom scrolling and staring at screens from 18 inches away for lots of hours a day. I'm sorry, you see that in your audience or in yourself?

I see that in my audience. I think I've taken a lot of steps to try to counterbalance that because digital isn't automatically bad, but the dose makes the poison. Yeah. And you look at Jonathan Hayden, his writing on The Angus Generation and so on. There's a lot of good data on this.

It's not that controversial. But we're meant to be analog social creatures. Yeah. So games have played a big part in my life. And I wanted to just create a light lift for people to, I suppose, re-inject some of that, working with some amazing people. So I've had a lot of fun. I thought it would be faster than two years. Yeah.

We'll just make a game. Yeah, yeah, let's just make a game. Turns out making a simple game, very complicated. Very, very complicated. That's also true for every time I write a book, I'm like, this one's going to be short. Right. 500 pages later. Oh, God, another phone book.

Do I need to hire more editors? Right. I really like words. The isolation and the doom scrolling, I think about it all the time too, and I have two kids in their early 20s. And so I've been watching their dealing with it. The pandemic, that hitting us also. Yeah, for sure. I feel like we've all been in this giant car accident that we just want to walk away from and don't want to talk about.

Yeah. I think that added to it as well. For sure. I think also what COVID did, I think it created its own set of problems, of course, but it really just pulled the covers off of a lot that was already there that was easy to apply a smokescreen to with busyness and activity. When that was taken away, the problems that were being kept at bay or that answered questions, the festering, compounding problems just simply became incredibly visible because there was nowhere to hide. Right. On a cultural level and a personal level. Yeah. Yeah. And I've certainly had, coming from a family of addiction and bipolar disorder and all sorts of problems have had my own, I think, just kind of buggy software issues myself. Right. And since 2015, have had a small foundation that funds early stage science related to mental health therapeutics.

So this is an area I've really gone deep on for a long time. Yeah. I mean, you know, all is not well in terms of overdosing on digital. And I'm saying that also. Somebody lived in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years. So I'm not coming at it from a Luddite perspective. Right. But too much of anything kind of becomes its opposite.

Yeah. I forget how you describe it as, what was it, a low-information diet. Yeah. Yeah. A low-information diet, which I'm all. always the same way I do with food, I go like, all right, too much. I'm enjoying myself too much. Let's cut it back.

And the same thing with social media. Like I have to be on it. I enjoy it. I enjoy talking to my fans and friends and seeing what people are up to and staying involved with what's going on in the world. But then you're like, oh, I'm eating way too much of this. And the same thing as the food thing. Like when you do cut back, you kind of feel. better and then slowly get drawn back. How are you with your own low-information diet now? I'm very militant

about it. You are. And it's become a harder battle to wage or a harder diet to follow. So the low-information diet, this cultivating of selective ignorance, that's from the first book, the four-hour work week, and I still pay, I would say, increasing attention to it. So for instance, I'm on my phone right now. I haven't had social media apps on my phone for two or three years because you're not going to defeat teams of data scientists and computer scientists whose sole job is to make the product as addictive as possible. You're not going to defeat those people. No. You're bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. And I'm saying that as someone also who invested in a lot of these companies when they were small. Pre-IPO, Facebook, Twitter. I mean,

the list goes on. Yeah. And, I think that particularly when they reach a certain scale if the product is, well, from the very outset, but particularly when they reach scale, if you're using something for free,

you are the product. Your attention is the product that is being sold to advertisers and so on. And there's a good documentary. I think it's called the Social Dilemma where a lot of the people who built these tools talk about this. but I still, in moderation, try to use these things.

I apply some friction, so I still have, I still occasionally get lost in YouTube shorts or Instagram, but it has to be on a laptop. It has to be on a laptop. And you can use something. There are other ways you can block. There's an app called Freedom, which is actually a great name for it. Yeah. But if you need to get any kind of deep work done, writing, for instance, you can just block certain sites or what Wi-Fi access.

for a certain period of time. Right. But I do think the, just like, I don't know the equivalent would be, but it's like, if you don't watch your diet and you eat too much food,

you can develop insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and all of these, you know, really consequential diseases, I think the same is true psycho-emotionally for a lot of these tools

that people use habitually. Absolutely. I took this break and I'm like, you know, I was scrolling, feverishly at, you know, all the stuff that's going on of, you know, people and friends of mine and their nonprofits and getting their funding taken away and all the stuff that the administration

kind of like hit us with. It's been such a torrent. Yeah. So, and first I'm like, I'm going to just keep tabs and just see, just trying to figure out what's what. But then it just got into just that response. And I'm just, I want to check out D.L. Hughley site and I want to check out This guy and what? I can't believe they said that. And I put it away. Had vacation with my family. I'm not going to do it.

And, you know, it's not like a lightning strike. But I was, you know, I didn't really actually realize the effect, the positive effect it had is when I got off vacation and got back into New York and opened my phone. It was like, oh, let me see what's been happening. And I literally was felt like, I was such. to myself, oh, this guy's back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy's back. The guy who goes through and feels this anger and anxiety.

Like, I was, it literally was like creating both things, both activities, being off and being on it, created a different personality with it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, and I will explain why I'm not suggesting total ignorance. This isn't the ostrich's approach to life where you just stick your head in the sand. But I recall at one point taking a full break from caffeine for a few weeks. And then I went back and I had been drinking. Not coffee. I thought it was actually pretty restraint.

But I was drinking maybe, I don't know, six cups of iced tea a day at this Thai restaurant in San Francisco a long time ago. And I went back and I had two. And I thought I was going to crawl out of my skin. I was so anxious. Right. Fidgeting around, I was like, oh, my normal was drinking three times this amount. Maybe that normal is not normal. Right.

Who was I? And on the low information diet side, really, it's pretty simple. And if you're old enough, you can ask, like, was I running my life effectively? How did I feel 20 years ago when this wasn't even an option because the technology didn't exist? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's really trying to only spend your.

attention on things that are relevant and actionable in your life. So reading the New York Times to feed righteous indignations so that you have something to complain to your friends about or criticize other people for is not relevant and actionable. Right. Unless you count a bad habit that you're developing. That's it. But if it's like, what does this do for my family? What does this do for my career. What does this do for my well-being? Okay, sure. If you're taking something proactive from it and using it, great. But otherwise, you don't need it. Right. Right. Yeah. That's my perspective. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but so far I haven't seen all too much to suggest that the opposite approach is, is very healthy. We'd like to thank the good people at

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365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Quince, Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Papa, P-A-P-A, for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash Papa. Yeah, no, I don't think it is. But it's, but there's, you're, when you say that we're the product, it's, it is so scary because you're like, all right, I'm reentering. So I'm just not going to, I'm going to delete a couple of those sites and I'm just going to use it for my positive thing. But they're so sneaky before you know it. They've, they've figured out something else that you're. Oh, for sure.

Obsessed with and gobbling you up. Yeah, the, the personalized algorithmic feed is to, you know, too good. It's really too effective. So, I mean, the only, like, the way to win that game is to not play the game. Right. Is how I feel. Yeah. Just completely, you know, and I put the limits on it. I haven't taken them off my phone, but I put the screen time limits on it, one hour a day of all social media. Have you been able to do that? At least when I try it. I, I guess some people can have, like some people can have like bear claws in their house and not eat them. I'm not,

I'm not that person. Right. Right. So when I'm like, I'm going to use it for 15 minutes, then I'm sitting on the toilet, I'm like, why can't I feel my legs?

And I'm like, oh, I've been sitting here for an hour and 15 minutes looking at bullshit. Yeah. And then they say, you're at your limit. Do you want one more minute? Do you want 15 more minutes?

You want to just ignore it? They give you those options. So I'm like, oh, just do 15. Right. Just one more hit. Just one more hit.

That's how I'll stave off this addiction. Just one more hit of heroin. Yeah. Just for old time, say, come on. Yeah. It really, analog is such a nice word. Yeah. It really is a good thing.

And I'm long analog. I think that I'm not sure what form that takes, but if I were a betting man, I'm not saying there's going to be a full-blown butlerian jihad along the lines of Dune where the people rise up to kill the thinking machines. Maybe. It's not out of question. But there is, and you're already seeing this in a lot of forms. We're sitting here in New York City, and there are, for instance, game nights right now that started with three people and now there are hundreds of people who are going to running clubs instead of going on dating apps.

I mean, there is actually a pretty strong countercurrent. It's just nascent at the moment. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's in like these weird little pockets. Your design for this game is really great. I literally could look at this coyote. I really want to put this on a shirt. Oh, it's so beautiful. Thank you.

Who did that? I spent a lot of time on that manually and using computers. Yeah, I wanted to be a comic book penciler for almost 20 years. Whoa. So when I was in high school, I was an illustrator. In college, I paid some of my way and expenses as an illustration. Illustrator and the graphics editor of a magazine. And then, of course, for the finishing touches and making it actually look the way it looks

there, you need a good team. Yeah. And those were the folks at Exploding Kittens. But all sorts of Easter eggs on that. And that is, that was a fun experiment because the back of the card, I just love, I just love how it turned out. Yeah. And it's very, very different from most card games that are going to use, say, a cartoon character

or something like that, which we have on the end. actual play side of the cards, right? Yeah. Yeah. Funny story about the salamanders. Tried to make them axelotles at first because I've got a thing for axolotles. But the reason that we have the salamanders is... These guys?

Yes. Yeah. Is that if you have... Let's just say you have humans. Yeah. Well, you've got to put every type of human on those cards. You can't have something that looks like a specific ethnicity, a specific gender. So when you try to do that, though, when you try to find this middle ground,

Like, what is the human that will look like everything? It looks like a weird fat baby. And that didn't work. That's funny. And I was like, you know what's really hard to tell the gender of? Fucking salamanders. And they're pretty cute. So let's try that.

It's great. I hope I'm glad to curse on this show. Yeah, you are. From Long Island. So it's hard to suppress. It's funny. People ask that a lot. I don't know what vibe I give off that people are always like,

Are we allowed to curse? Oh, you know, I assume I was just on a podcast like, I don't know, a while back. Yeah. And I was just ripping F-bombs like I was getting paid for each time I uttered it. And then at some point, this very, very kind guy is like, you know, this is gerated family program. Oh, really? And I was like, ooh. Sorry.

Sorry about that. Yeah. Feel free to liberally use the bleep in post. Can we talk about the no book for a minute? Let's talk about anything you want, man. All right, beautiful. Yeah. I was just reading up on the blurbs of it and how you did it and how you, how you, the thing of the, I was excited about it initially just because saying no to things is not a strength of mine.

Yeah, yeah. And when you, your partner who you wrote it with, he's talking about you and how you can say no to people and he can't and he has a really hard time with it. Yeah, this is Neil Strauss for people who know the name. Yeah. He's written a bunch of amazing books. Yeah. And what else has he written?

He wrote, well, he wrote for the New York Times for a long time. And he was a music critic. He's got a hilarious piece of hate mail from Phil Collins on his wall. Oh, really? Oh, my God. It's so good. That's me. He wrote to him?

Yeah, yeah. He was like, fuck you very much, Neil, Phil, you know, with this long letter. That's great. But Neil probably earned. But he wrote a number of biographies, I think the dirt, which was Motley Crew. He's done a lot of these types of books. And then he wrote The Game, which is a controversial one, but was a huge bestseller emergency after that. He's had, I think, he's done a lot of ghostwriting for folks.

Cool. I mean, Rick Rubin, the creative act. That's Neil Strauss. Oh, wow. One of the more recent. Very, very good at collaborating. But he's fucking terrible at saying no. And so he was harassing me about this book

because I wrote 75,000 words or 100,000 words, which is for any reasonable person, like two books, but I guess I'm long-winded. And I had it, but I recognize, like a lot of things. It's like, oh, you think you're 80% done. Congratulations.

you only have 80% left. It's that final stretch. And he kept harassing me. And so eventually I was like, Neil, if you were kind of drunk. And I was like, if you really want me to finish this goddamn book so badly,

why don't you help me finish it? And it was just to get him to shut up. And then the next day he's like, hey, that thing you said, do you want to talk about it? So that's how it came about. Yeah. And saying no,

saying no is difficult. And he gives an example of saying no to like a good friend's costume party. Yeah, the birthday party that requires a costume. And you don't want to go. And then your wife wants to go.

And you can't just sit up and go, no, I'm not going. Yeah. And then deal with the ramifications. Yeah, what was funny about that too is I was like, can you think of? Because the way we ended up doing the book was he's the sort of student along for the ride. Not to say I'm perfect, but I am pretty good at saying no. Yeah. And I have systems for it.

Discipline doesn't work. Discipline is unreliable. In any case, I was talking to Neil along and his. His ex-wife was in the background, but they were close friends. And I was like, Neil, can you think of something recent where you have trouble saying no? And he asked Ingrid, his ex, and she's like, oh, yeah. And like, in two seconds, she's like, whoever it was, Chelsea's costume party or whatever. And he's like, ooh, right.

Yeah. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And he kept saying yes, right? It's hard, though, because... He kept saying yes. Like, let's take that situation. Your wife wants to go to this. It's a mutual friend's costume party.

and your wife wants to go and you do not want to go. And you say, no, it doesn't end there. No. If you have, what I like about the Neil example is his wife distinctly

didn't give a shit. Right. When you have to maintain peace on the front, that's a different situation. Yeah. And we get into some of that in the book, which by the way,

I ended up still putting on the back burner to focus on this game for a host reasons we could talk about. So it's like, it's 800. page draft. And there's a good chance.

I mean, I think I know how to winnow it down, but I was like, you know what? This is going to take probably another six months to do right. It's not a whole body yes for me. We could, we could explore what that means in terms of like what to say yes to, what to say no to. But like there's part of me internally just like the millions of years of pre-language evolution that was like, this is not energy in for you right now. And I was like, okay, let's shelve it.

Like I can pick this up later. With the book. With the book, yeah. Just right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's, 800 pages of bones. I mean, I guess there's a lot of fat there too. But the saying no, here's the part of the reason why it's so long, is that a book on saying no is actually a book about making choices. Right.

And that touches everything. Yeah. Right. So as soon as you try to isolate. it, it's not actually that helpful. Because much like some of the other writing I've done, let's just say before our body, write this book on physical performance and spending time with coaches of all different types and athletes and so on,

I had certain friends of mine, very busy people, to be fair, who are like, just give me the index card. Tell me what to do and I'll do it. And the success rate with that was exactly 0%. I could give it to them. Right. It never worked. Why?

Because there was some underlying malfunction. or some disabling story, which could just be up too busy, that prevented them from ever sustaining that behavioral change. So it's like you have to address the behavioral change piece. You must. Right. Yeah, for it's a stick. And that takes pages.

Yeah. Yeah. It just does. Yeah. Yeah. You always want that quick thing. Especially even the titles of all the four hours stuff. Yeah.

Four hours. Thank God. Because I don't have five. Exactly. which is part of the reason I retired the four-hour jersey after the third book. I was like, okay, enough is enough. Enough is enough. I can explain why I use those titles, but let's move on.

Let's go back to the no thing because it is a, when you said his wife didn't even give a shit, that is a thing that when you're in a relationship, you always think, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to say no to the party. And then she's going to be mad. And she's going to attack me for that. And then because I didn't do the other thing. And we played out these scenarios with your closest partner. Oh, yeah. And then you say, I don't want to go to the custom parties. Like, yeah, that's cool.

I'm just going to go with Skyler. Well, by the way, you also play out those scenarios with the person who's asking you to come to the party. Right. You're like, if I do this and then this and then they're going to hate me and then, oh, my God, they're going to talk shit to this other person I care about. And then I'm never going to get invited to anything ever again. And sometimes you're just like, Hey, so sorry.

There's a good line. I'll give people something they can use. This is from Martha Beck, actually. In an email she sent to me, she's a friend. I was life coach for Oprah and all this stuff. She's amazing, actually. But she said, I really wish I could, but due to life Tetris, I can't do it right now.

Short line, just due to life Tetris. Can't do it right now. That's a good one. And I would say half the time you use that with something in there, yeah, no problem. You're like, oh, you mean that like horror action suspense psychodrama. That script I wrote.

That script isn't getting sold? Oh, wow. Yeah, you always think, I always say, it took me a long time to realize people don't need you to go on about why the decision you made. Like they don't need to hear all of the things. Just say, no, thank you.

Yeah. No, thank you. We're okay. Really wish I could. I just can't make any word. Yeah. And, you know, when the, another reason the book got long is because the initial version

I wrote, or a lot of it, I thought would work. And it was based on a lot of the lessons learned. And basically starting around 2006 or seven, I realized that, no, it would have been 2007, 2008. I realized that I was having a lot of trouble saying no to stuff. And so whenever I got a decline that was really good that left me feeling better or was just like short and sweet, I would save it. So in Evernote at the time, that was the app that I used. Yeah. I just started collecting dozens and hundreds of.

really good declines. Right. Then I would use them. And when I just handed that stuff to Neil, I think this is the real example. I was like, hey, how's it going? Have you implemented A, B, or C? And he's like, well, actually, I'm like in Copenhagen right now.

I'm like, why are you in Copenhagen? He said, well, I agreed to be on stage for an interview at this conference. And then he asked me if I would co-host it. And I said, yes. And I'm like, Neil, is any of this working for you? And he's like, oh, yeah. And also the guy asked if you could stay at my point? place in L.A. and I told him yes. And I'm like, Neil, what is going on? And so I basically just

started giving him deadlines and giving incentives. I'm like, okay, let's try this. I was like, there are three things. You have to go into your inbox and like decline three things or text messages. Right. Use one of these like five copy and paste things. And if you don't do that, I think it was, you know, I'm going to donate like 500 bucks to your politician you hate the most in your name. So it's on record, something like that. And I gave him three days to do it, and I think within 60 minutes, he'd already shot them off. And all three turned out not just okay. Like, one was like, no problem.

The other one was like, oh, my God, that's such a great response. I'm going to borrow that. How about we do email instead of phone calls from now on or something like that, which actually fixed more problems than he expected. And I was like, exactly. And yes, there will be people who take it personally. There will be people who get really pissed off. And by the way, if you want a low-conflict life,

maybe you start spending less time with high-conflict people. Yeah, right, exactly. Do you really do the thing that you mentioned about when you go on vacation, you put out a message that says, I'm away. You can get my team if you need me. Anything that when I come back from vacation, I'm deleting every message and starting from scratch. Do you really do that?

Yes, if people want to read the first few chapters of the no book, I put it up on my blog at Tim.com. Yeah. It's good. And if you search around, there are a couple that are not easily searchable that I put up also after making some edits. But the example, that particular example, yeah, I went off the grid for three to four weeks, which I do every year because it improves all of your systems and rules and policies and stuff. You just have to clean up your life and your business and how. you run things. That's one of the reasons to do it. Yeah. And in this particular case, right, it was like, I'm going to be off the grid, off a phone and computers from this date to this date.

Since I will never catch up when I get back, I'm not going to read your email. And if it's relevant later, please send it again. Yeah. And I'm going to delete everything. And if it's an emergency, you are, if you actually know me, you know how to reach my assistance. So find them. If, If you put emergency in the subject line and it's some bullshit, like, I will put out a fatwa on you. I mean, I say that differently, but you get the idea. I'm just like, don't do that. If it's just a pitch for some nonsense, like, don't put emergency. Yeah.

And that's it. So I do occasionally do that. And you could say, well, that must be nice, right? The luxury of being able to do that. Yeah. I'm not saying you, just like the universal you. Yeah. But people really underestimate what they can do.

Yeah, you really can do that. You're not the president of the universe. Like, people don't need you all the time. I know it's nice to think that. And I know the feeling. Yeah. God, I'm so important. Oh, they're really waiting.

What's going to happen to my friends and family if they can't reach me for a week? Yeah. They'll be fine. Yeah. It's the answer. Oh, it's brilliant. I read it three times. I'm like, could you imagine just coming up, just walking back in and going, no, I'm starting fresh.

I'm going to start with zero in my inbox. The biggest challenge for people, if they ever try that the first time, is going to be following your own rules when you get back. Yeah. Select all, archive. Yeah. That's going to be the hardest point. That would be very hard. But if you want a very easy psychological lift, just do a search.

And you can do this by date in your inbox, Gmail, G Suite, whatever. And anything over six months old, just archive it all. Right. So that you don't see that on red count. Yeah. You are never going to read those emails. Yeah, right. They've been in there for years.

Yeah. And furthermore, it's like if you have really important things you think you might miss, chances are they're from a handful of people, right? Maybe it's lawyers, maybe it's accountants, maybe it's family. Okay, great. Just call each of those people and be like, are you waiting on me for anything? No? Great.

If so, throw it at me. Yeah. Great, done. You're done in 10 minutes. There's some good stuff that I keep in the ass end of the emails that are like a recipe or a photo. I should just move those out of the inbox into some other place. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of good tools now. I'm kind of wedded to Evernote because I used it for so long. Yeah. But Notion, there are, you could use all sorts of different note-taking apps where you can move that stuff in. Or just copy and paste it in notes on your phone. Yeah, just put in notes. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It was interesting thinking about, you know, I had read the forebody, the... four-hour body, the workout years ago. And, you know, since then you've had other successful iterations. And, you know, you're one of those people who when you talk, I listen because you're like, okay, this is someone who's, God save you. This is someone who's, you know, not wholeheartedly, but not entirely.

That's going to be the back, the testimonial on the back of my book. I listen. I don't always act. Damn it, Neil. But yeah, because you're always thinking and you're always trying to like kind of kind of hack life and and figure out ways to just live a better life. Do you feel like there is that there is something, do we need something more than self? Oh, my God. Because we're always, right?

because a lot of what we're always doing is like, oh, I got to take care of my physical, my this, my mental, my, do you have, in your life, do you have something more than self? Or do you think that there is something? I think,

I think it's hard to operate in the world without this skin-encapsulated ego. But I think Tony Robbins put it this way at one point. Like I, I, I, me, me, me, song and I'll just quote one more person and then I'll riff and answer your question but I was chatting with Russ Roberts recently who runs econ talk he started podcasting in 2006 well and has done a thousand plus episodes and he quoted somebody else this is turning into a game of telephone but it was

God is not me right so if you're looking for all wonder transcendent and escaping the prison of your own loops, that is going to be at least a lack of focus on self. So self-improvement, therefore, can sometimes reinforce and amplify the neuroses that you're trying to escape by pursuing the self-help in the first place. Right, right, right.

So certainly for me, frankly, like, immersive social interactions of any type. It could be dancing. It could be playing games with friends. It could be, for instance, in two weeks, I'm going to altitude in Montana and Idaho for wilderness survival training, and I'm bringing a couple of friends. And we're going to just be up in the mountains, completely off the grid for, I guess, seven days or so.

That's great. And anything like that where you are thinking less of yourself. Could be meditation, could be swimming. but really I think the magic is in, for me, immersion in nature, and pursuing awe, there's some really compelling writing about awe and wonder

and the therapeutic effect of these things out of Johns Hopkins magazine and a few other places if people want to look it up. And we could talk about it. I hesitate because it's such a topic de jour, but certain psychedelic experiences make this very clear.

Yeah. make this very, very, very clear. And psychedelics are not a panacea. There are risks. There are definitely people with conditions where they would be highly contraindicated. But you have people, for instance, who are participating in studies, whether it's major depressive disorder, or any number of other conditions, terminal cancer diagnosis with concomitant depression. And when they have their first experience with, in all cases, within a laboratory setting, synthetic psilocybin.

A lot of participants, and I don't remember the exact percentage, Roland Griffiths was the primary investigator on the study I'm thinking of, so you could look it up. But something like two-thirds of participants ranked its significance, this experience alongside the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. Right. What the hell is going on? Yeah.

And I think a lot of it is a sense of unity and the dissolution of self. Yeah. So I do think about this a lot. You do not need to take drugs. There are other ways to do it. Drugs just happen to be a very reliable way for a lot of people of getting the holy shit experience. Oh, I see. Right, exactly.

Oh, there's something else. Yeah. Yeah, that I'm a part of, but I'm just kind of like in the river. Right. Right. This sort of, I mean, we don't have to get too Sam Harris about it. too Buddhist, but the illusion of self, which gets very labyrinthian and kind of esoteric. But broadly speaking, like, you are a part of all of this, right?

You're not this isolated, independent actor. And I think the Protestant work ethic and rugged individualism that is so much the ethos of a lot of America has some great. great outputs. Yeah. It also has some pretty significant side effects. Yeah. Yeah. When you start separating it out from the greater good,

or just that your participation in that is actually affecting something that's larger. Yeah. Yeah. And also feeling isolated. Yeah. I mean, feeling independent or aiming for independence is the other side of the coin is feeling very, very isolated and lonely. Yeah. And I think it pays to be aware of that.

And kind of microdose the social analog stuff. Like there's a lot there. There's a lot there. Join a drumming circle and try to think about your email. It's going to be hard. Try to think about your petty grievance against your coworker who cut you in line at the salad bar. It's going to be very hard to fixate on that. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Do you... Drumming circles just made me sound so topango. Oh, man. I swear I'm not wearing crystals right now, guys. Well, that's funny. We do a thing on this program called an uncomfortable moment.

Yeah. Where we take a deep dive into... You know, sometimes we look for things on people and if we just in our research kind of find something. And I don't know if this is somebody projecting that what might happen to you if you eat too many psychedelics.

But they say... That's pretty good. That's pretty good. My favorite touch is that all the hair. Oh, you know, I'll take the hair. You was a big old hippie. Yeah, it gives me more options. Cut down on my forehead glare.

I will take the hair for sure. It is funny, though, like once you, you know, I've eaten all of it. And I used to, like, follow the dead for a while when I was in college. and a little after. And you, this does make sense when you do gobble up a bunch of stuff. You're like, no, I totally get this. I couldn't stay there. Yeah.

You know, I had to move on with my life because I had shit to do. But it's not fully off menu. Right. Yeah. You know, I would say that, and this is quoting Dennis McKenna, who wrote the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, I think is the name of the book. That's a great title. Great title.

Which is about his life. and growing up with his brother, Terence McKenna. Oh, yeah. And the passage says something along the lines of, and I'm going to butcher it, but you'll get the gist. You know, people think psychedelics are getting blown to smithereens and entering the 17th dimension and coming back, you know, thinking that you have ESP and might become the next president of the universe.

And that can happen. Sure. That was definitely a strong paraphrase. Yeah. one might even say completely made up i got it but that's the idea he said what psychedelics are more often is a very intense experience of the present and i agree with that yeah i really do and just by having an intense experience of the present a lot happens including feeling quite good afterwards quite relieved afterwards unburdened for a period of time and there there there could be

many mechanisms for this. I'm not saying it's just the content. They're also potent anti-inflammatory effects of certain psychedelics. I'm finding some science right now related to that. So who knows? Yeah. But it is undeniable as a subjective effect that this is even observable effect that this is seen in a lot of people. Yeah. It's an interesting thing because we're talking about, you know, getting way from self and whatever is that thing

you can tap into going into nature, going into what it's like all there are there are a lot of roadways to get to that nice place where you kind of calm down and things are a little in perspective psychedelics is one sitting in a room

with no noise is one hiking in the Grand Teton's is one what do you do I do TM we'd like to thank the good people at factor meals for sponsoring today's program. Factor meals between busy schedules and summer plans. Sometimes all you've got is a couple minutes. Factor helps eat smarter with tasty chef-prepared meals that are dietitian-approved and delivered right to your door.

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I just knew Factor was there for me, put it in the microwave, and I had this great meal and felt great after it. Really great. Eat smart at FactorMeals.com slash Papa 50 off, and you can use the code Papa 50 off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code Papa 50 off, PAPA 50 OFF at Factor Meals.com. for 50% off plus free shipping. Get delicious ready to eat meals delivered with Factor. Go to the website right now. Take a look. It's a great way to not only eat healthy,

but a great way to support our little podcast. Thank you, Factor. Can I ask you a question? I'd seen a reason to stop now. Okay. Would you ever get in a fist fight? Yeah, I've been in fistfights. When's the last one?

Oh, God. when I was working as a as a bouncer to also help pay my bills in college. Oh yeah? That's probably the last time I got in a fist fight. What kind of bar was it? Well, this is going to, it was

bars around so I went to Princeton undergrad. Oh, this is so funny. I was a bouncer in Princeton. I swear to God. Are you serious? I swear to God. Go ahead. So it was at the this is going to make it sound. Very great Gatsby. So at Princeton, they have these weird things called eating clubs.

And eating clubs are like co-ed fraternity sororities where past, I guess, your sophomore year, you're no longer in a residential college and you don't get your food for free. It's kind of weird. And so you have to either cook on a hot plate in your dorm room, which people had a place like Spellman would do

or you had to join one of these ridiculous clubs and you have to pay for it. And some of them have, all of them have different person So you would have like the old money legacy wealth kids who would be at a place like Ivy. Right. So like JFK and some of the most actually F. Scott Fitzgerald were both part of Ivy. Right.

If I'm getting my history right. And then you have like cloister, which I remember is being like rowers and swimmers maybe. Cap and Gown was lacrosse players. which is a very big deal at Princeton. Yeah. And then the most dangerous place probably was a place called Tiger Inn, which was football players

and rough and tumble. But they weren't necessarily the problem, although sometimes they could be. It was that there were sports events going on at all time. So if you had football players coming from a bunch of other schools or throwers, no offense to throwers, but they can be a handful,

like shot putters and stuff. TI was where you got paid the most money. money because which which okay I was working I was working in a library this attic guest library getting paid like six bucks an hour and a friend of mine was like hey do you want to yeah but do you have any interest in being a safeguard that's what they called bouncing and they pay $20 an hour like $20 an hour yeah all I need to do is risk my health every time I work I'm in get out my aggression yeah so I had this is just part of the job everybody hates bouncers unfortunately That was part of it. And I did bounce at other points a little bit in like San Francisco. And I was like, this is much more dangerous now. Like people have guns. This is much more dangerous.

It's out in the wild. Yeah, just as a favor to a friend once. But actually, when you say fist fight, sorry, this is going to get nerdy for a second. So my background from a sports perspective, I was very, very, very small until sixth grade. I was born premature at all these health issues. Right. So my mom put me into kitty wrestling because the puny kids can go against the other puny kids.

Right. Whereas playing a sport with mixed sizes, I was going to get killed. And so I had the wrestling. I had a lot of wrestling. I competed for a long time. Yeah. Then I went and ended up competing in judo.

So that adds a bunch of stuff, foot sweeps, chokes, armbars, things like that. Right. And then continued kind of along those lines. But the reason that I got, I think the regular safeguard agency paid their, their bouncers like 10 or 15 bucks an hour. The reason I was getting paid 20 or 25 is that I would not punch people. Because the last thing you need, if you are like the admin of Tiger Inn, is some billionaire's son being an asshole deserving a punch, getting a punch, and then having Daddy Warbucks sue. With evidence on his face.

That's the last thing you need. Yeah. So I actually never hit anybody. I had a lot of people try to hit me. Right. But the floors were really slick with beer and you could just like sweep out their feet and grab them by the collar and drag them out the door. Yeah. That's great.

Getting in fights is to state the obvious, really not worth it. Never. Really, really, really, really not worth it. Yeah. I've had people try to start fights with me since, just like drunk people in the mission in San Francisco. Right. And I never take the bait. It's too dangerous.

Yeah. Nobody wins. I went to Ryder down the street in Princeton. That's how you describe Ryder. And you bounced? Down the street from Princeton. And I was a bouncer at a Mexican restaurant in Princeton called like Casa Margarita or something like that. Yeah, I'm sure that was the name.

And I had to wear like this sky blue polo shirt and khakis. and I was the bouncer of the whatever night they had. It couldn't be in the softest bouncer situation. There was nobody fighting. I just had to collect money. I dragged one guy out and I had a broken arm and I just put my cast around his neck and tracked about it. See, which makes you the smarter man.

Are you ticklish? I am not very ticklish. Interesting. I am not very ticklish, yeah. Do you remember your dreams? If I This is going to be a very Tim Ferriss answer

If I train it, I do So I got very, very If you train it Yeah, so I got very, very interested In lucid dreaming There's a great book Called Exploring the World of Lucid Dream By a guy named Stephen LaBerge

Who used to be at Stanford And You can very easily Improve your dream recall And then get to the point Where you can induce lucidity Which means you're aware of the fact You're dreaming

And you can manipulate the content of your dreams What? This is a train of your dream. trainable skill. Really? And it's also a very doc, it's a documented, proven phenomenon.

This isn't just a bunch of woo nonsense. Oh. And there's a lot of overlap. This is nothing new, but scientifically studying it is. Tibetan dream yoga and so on if people want to dig into that stuff.

Right. It's pretty phenomenal to play around with. And it does take work, though. It does take work, which is why I let it lapse all the time. Right now, no way. Don't remember my dreams.

Right. Do you ever have recurring dreams when you were younger? Not that I remember. Yeah, I don't. Some people have really strong recurring dreams. I don't think I have those. I very, very rarely have nightmares or anxiety dreams, incredibly rarely. Which is funny because I run anxious all the rest of the time when I'm awake.

You know, what's so interesting about you is when I heard you talking about that you would get depressed. And at certain times, you would be depressed. And it was like, wait a minute, no, you have it all together. You're the one that gave me these tricks. What do you mean? Yeah. You seem like a superhero. Yeah, I think a lot of it is strong genetic predisposition.

Yeah. Just the code steers that way. But I will say, I mean, my dad was crippled by depression. I really crippled by it. Wow. And you look back in the family tree and you're like, oh, all these dark clouds. what's going on here. Right.

But it's impossible to totally separate nature versus nurture, but I do think there's a very strong genetic component. Yeah. Because I don't necessarily get caught up in the story. Like I'm aware that this state is unhelpful. Uh-huh. But I will say with, and I could mention a few things that have been incredibly transformative with a number of different strategies and tools,

I would say up until maybe 10, a bit over 10 years ago, I was probably having three to four major depressive episodes a year. And those could be weeks long. They might be more than a month long. That's a lot of time.

Wow. And in the last 10 plus years, probably been 13 or so years, I might have one such episode every two years. Wow. And you can't overstate. That's huge.

Those are two different lives. Those are two different people. Completely. So just because I teased it. Let me just throw this out. So yes, psychedelic assisted therapies with professional guidance, but that is not the only tool in the toolkit. One I find equally interesting is different types of, let's call it, bioelectric medicine. This is going to be a big thing in the next 10 years.

But specifically something called accelerated TMS, trans cranial magnetic stimulation. So accelerated TMS, look up Nolan William. at Stanford to learn more about this, but they see 70 to 80% remission of depression in a lot of patients. What is it? It is a type of brain stimulation. It's non-invasive. And depending on the technology, it could be a cap.

There are places in New York that can diminish this. Unfortunately, you won't get reimbursement for accelerated TMS right now, which is very condensed. But for a lot of people, it's still going to be worth it. Or a little paddle that they'll kind of press against the side of your head. And it will stimulate or lessen activity in particular target areas. And we could get very deep into the science. But in the accelerated TMS, you're basically getting 50 short sessions of stimulation in a five-day period. I actually think, I've been talking to some researchers that there might be a way to truncate that to one day by pre-administering something called D.

DeCyclicerine. I think that's coming. And that's very exciting because taking five days out of your. life and getting stimulated every hour on the hour for 10 hours a day. Whoa. Not a stimulation, but you're in the clinic that long. It's like eight minutes every hour or so. But the results that you see, I mean, I've seen people transformed with durability

and shocking transformations that absolutely rival psychedelics in terms of effect size. And the results you see, just to give people some numbers, if you look at, let's say, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy applied to cut. Complex PTSD. So a complex PTSD that has failed multiple interventions with people, I remember I think it was the phase two trials. People had an average diagnosis of something like 16 or 17 years. And complex PTSD, these are people with, in some cases,

symptoms so severe, they can't go out and work, they can't drive around, they sit in their house with their shades drawn, can't hold the job, et cetera. I want to say it was something like, after two or three sessions, please fact check this, but it's something like this,

like 55% or 60% complete remission of symptoms. No longer qualify for PTSD. Diagnosis. More interesting to me, and this is the part that kind of raises a lot of questions about some of the fundamental assumptions

of psychiatry is that with those two or three sessions, I think it was six months later, the number, the percentage of patients with complete remission went up, not down. Wow.

What the hell is going on? Yeah. Right. But you see some similar outcomes with accelerated TMS. Okay, so there's the brain stimulation. I think focused ultrasound is going to be very interesting in the near future too. But the last one is metabolic psychiatry, which is diet-driven, mostly I would say using ketosis, which was originally, or I shouldn't say originally, but in the early 1900s used for epileptic children. I completely stopped seizing or reduced frequency by, you know, 80.

And for a lot of people who will never, I shouldn't say never, probably at this point should not use psychedelics. People with something like schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, any history of psychosis in the family, even if it's not you. Yeah. You put them on a ketogenic diet and a lot of these people get off all of their meds and a short period of time. I believe that. It's wild. And there's a guy named Chris Palmer out of Harvard. People can look up.

He has an entire book on this subject. it's it's super super fascinating and there are things that you can do possibly that don't involve following this diet forever because ketogenic diet can be challenging to follow yeah but for instance like before we had this conversation I took 11 grams of exogenous meaning supplemental ketone called beta hydroxybuterate and it's just like your brain immediate it's like click within 10 minutes and you have really twice the turnover where do I get it You can get it online.

You can find, I think there's one called Ketone Aid, which was created by one of the scientists, last name Veach. And there are one or two other sources, but look for specifically, actually I'll make it just easier because some of these are really, really expensive. Like what I drank, that one serving,

is probably like $20, single serving. Right. But there are others that are a diester. There's one called Ketone, Q-I-T-O-N-E. It's a powder. You can just throw it in your coffee and use it as a creamer, mix it up, and that stuff works pretty well.

How long does it last? I would say it's really person by person. For me, I would say I feel very clearly the effects of something like that, Q-I-T-O-N-E, for 45 minutes to an hour and a half. That's great.

With some of the other more aggressive, I suppose I would say, and very expensive, ketone mono esters, Actually, and that I lied, it's not technically beta-hydroxybutyrate. It's a much longer molecule. I was going to say. But it is based on the patents out of Oxford, which was developed in conjunction with DARPA, actually.

So sort of the innovation lab side of the Department of Defense, which has created some amazing stuff. Yeah. In any case, the, I think that is worthy of a lot more investigation. Yeah. And I've already seen in the scientific literature some case studies. I have neurodegenerative disease in my family, Parkinson's Alzheimer's. Right. And I've just seen multiple people disintegrate. Yeah.

So I'm personally very interested in some case studies where they took this exact monoester that I consumed before we had this conversation. Yeah. And didn't change the diet of someone with Alzheimer's at all, but gave them three to a day of this and their regaining a function was really kind of head spinning. Wow. Doesn't totally fix it, not even convinced it reverses anything like amyloid plaques or tau, but just from a functional perspective, the changes seemed really, really impressive.

And yes, it's end of one in this case. And plural of anecdote is not data, but case studies matter. for future research. Yeah, yeah. So you can't just add in that direction. Yeah. This might be, as you're talking about it, the reason your book is 500 pages.

I get it. No, I like to get into the details because I hate, well, it hates a strong word. Well, like these books that you buy, that you want to help you, they don't give you a lot of detail. No. You don't know what the next step is.

Right. You have to do all this additional legwork. You're like, oh, I didn't realize this was going to require me to get a PhD in being Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, exactly. And they just end up with these kind of hand-wavy motivational speech platitudes. And I'm like, this was a waste.

This book was a waste of my time. I don't want to write that book. So I'm like, you know what? It is going to be long. But when you're done with it, you're going to know what to do. I didn't mean it as far as content I meant to just because you take this stuff and your brain's all happy and wants to go. Oh, yeah. So you're just like, bing-n-n-n-a-lap.

Yeah. This is relatively new. I mean, a lot of the experiments with the exogenous ketones. I've been, I've been screwing around with it for a few years. Yeah. No, I was just talking about this with a friend of mine. She was on a press tour and she's tired. And I'm like, yeah, this is why people in show business did cocaine in the 70s.

Because coffee's not getting it done. Yeah. But there are other things to get it done. What's your, I was thinking about this last night. I really wanted to ask this question. I have a physical coming up in like a month. And I've always been like borderline high blood pressure. Like I'm always like on the cusp and they're like, you're good.

But, you know, eventually you might end up on. blood pressure meds and I'm always like I carry pride like no I can just stay in shape and I can do it myself and but at a certain point the doctor tells you you should go on something what's your philosophy of just take what they got or I used to have a pretty similar bias against not taking prescription medication trying to do it through diet and so on and I still try to fix it behaviorally if there's an issue if something's out of range. But what I've also seen, at least with respect to something like Alzheimer's, most interventions with Alzheimer's fail. But in a lot of cases, it's not necessarily because those interventions don't work. It's because they're applied

too late. In other words, by the time you see symptoms, it's very hard to untangle that Gordian knot. Right. So I have really followed the advice of someone named Peter Attia, Dr. Peter Atia. He's Hopkins Stanford trained. I mean, he's very credible. He wrote a book called Outlive. I think that's the best book on the subject. There's a lot of nonsense out there.

There's a lot more noise than Signal. Yeah. But in effect, he's saying, look, if you look at your family history, you look at your labs, you look at this and do an assessment, they're really four-fifference. five things that are most likely to kill you. Right. And pick the top one or two. Yeah. And really take proactive steps to try to minimize your risk of those things.

And so for me, you look at my family, at least all the males in my family, it's cardiovascular or slash cardiac risk. Right. It's like heart attacks, strokes. I mean, it's, yeah. That is very consistently the killer. That's us too. And no matter how I change my diet, I've tried everything. I've tried, ranging from carnivore to vegan to fasting for extended periods of time, everything in between, it does not matter.

I just have the code that dictates certain markers are, if we are to believe the data, which I think are actually pretty compelling. Not a good idea, like all cause mortality is highly correlated to elevated certain elevated biomarkers. And so I'm like, you know what? I, fuck it. Like, I'm going to take, I'm going to take some prescriptions. Now, the way I approach that, and I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, so please consult your professional. But I want to try the easy, well-studied thing first, right? So in some cases, especially if you only do one checkup a year, and the doctor only has 11 minutes.

Yeah. They're going to say, I think you should get on these three meds and hop on it. Yeah. So maybe you get on this, this, this, this, and this. And first of all, I don't like having a single snapshot per year, so I do it probably four times a year. Really comprehensive blood testing. Plus a number of other things.

Lung CTs underrated, for instance, full-body MRIs underrated, whether that's biograph or something like pre-newvo. You can really spot things early with doing these things. but for instance in the case of my heart stuff there are many different reasons why certain markers could be elevated so one size does not fit all I happen to be a cholesterol hyper absorber

and so you can take a very very kind of surgical approach to that and rather than take a whole slew of stuff I was like well let's start with something called a zetamib best known as zedia it's been studied forever it seems to have very low, it's very well tolerated by most folks.

And they were like, yeah, it's probably not going to do what we want to do. I'm like, well, maybe I'm a hyper responder. That sometimes happens. And they know this, of course. And I was like, okay, well, let's try it. I tried it. And lo and behold, it did like 70% on the job.

Right. And I was like, wow, okay, that's a pretty light lift. And I feel good about that. And I might add some more to it. but so go in with your eyes open and participate in what be a little active don't just take things mindlessly read out live it's the it's like

if you want to live longer but you can't take a few hours to read a book you got a problem it's kind of like I've heard people say with TM they're like oh you don't have 20 minutes to do TM you need an hour right but the last thing I would say on on this the physical side is you can can fix a lot behaviorally.

So for instance, in the last, having just seen a lot of metabolic dysfunction of my family and insulin and sensitivity, which you don't find through just off the rack basic blood testing, right? They might test your fasting glucose and you get lucky and it happens to be low when they take it. They also look at something

like hemoglobin A1C, which is kind of like your three-month running average of blood glucose. I'm simplifying it. but my mom had all of this missed for a long time or her dysfunction because they weren't looking at insulin and they hadn't done an oral glucose tolerance test where you drink this dextrous water and they take multiple readings.

And I realized, you know what? My values have been creeping up just like hers. My brother's almost certainly the same and I just did about two months of intermittent fasting. And I've done longer fast, like 10-day water fast and stuff. That's going to be too intense for most folks. It is not convenient. Actually, it costs you a lot of time, but it can be pretty unpleasant.

So 16-8 fasting just means you're only eating. For instance, like today, for me, it'll be 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. until, say, 10 p.m. Right. That's when I eat. I'll have two meals and that's it. And just by doing that, not changing what I'm eating, maybe even misbehaving a little bit. Not a ton. But just by doing that, my insulin sensitivity and all of those markers, I just had a blood draw a few weeks ago, it is the most immaculate. It is the best it's been in a decade. Really? And the only thing that I can point to that I changed was time restricted eating, this eight-hour feeding window. Interesting. And there's quite a bit that's been written on this so people can find plenty of information. I'm sure that Peter Attia has spoken about this. There's a guy named Dominic Agostino who's fascinating.

Yeah. Who really knows a lot about the stuff. And other scientists on shows like Rhonda Patrick, PhD, and she has quite a bit on this. It doesn't need to be complicated. Yeah. What I just told you is talk to your doctor. Yeah.

But it's amazing how something like that can, like, what's that that's resetting whatever system is. Yeah. Or just stop eating three hours before you go to bed. Also, that by itself can do so much. It's kind of bananas. I'm pretty good with that. But last night I left,

I had a late spot at the comedy cellar. Yeah? I was so hungry. A woman almost died in my show. What? Yeah, she was having a seizure and the show had to end. I guess I was a little frazzled. So I had one martini.

And then I walked home and I got a turkey sandwich. For shame. For shame. I know at like 10.30. I never eat like that. No, I... But it was pretty fun. I do eat like that sometimes.

And here's the thing. Like I... I feel like if your strategy isn't resilient enough to handle a few of those every once in a while, what are you doing? And also here's the thing. It's not all or nothing, right? Partial wins matter. And for instance, I was going to interview Rhonda Patrick, and she talks a lot about, like, the real very compelling reasons and evidence behind not eating late, right?

Like, just don't eat within two or three hours ago. to bed. Right. And then the toxic effects of alcohol. Yeah. And I was having dinner in New York City. This is a couple of weeks ago. And I'm having a glass of wine and I'm eating dinner at 10.30 at night. And so I had the printout of my research on her with this part highlighted. Yeah. Right. And I made sure the wine end like she would get the time stamp. And I was like, am I doing this right? Yeah, every once in a while. Life is meant to be lived. No, I know.

I have my, we were with some family up in Boston last week and a great couple. My wife's aunt and uncle. And they look great. They're in their 70s and they just look amazing. They're just, they look better than when I met them 15 years ago.

And so they're just, and they're not like, you know, really stressed or like really, like you wouldn't think like, oh, this is like a crazy fitness couple. But they just, they're just mindful. And they said, we're kind of off alcohol. They said, we're off alcohol.

You know, everyone, all the, all the stories now are it's the new cigarettes and all that kind of stuff. And it's so bad for you. I was like, yeah, but. But I like it. I'm with you. I understand. All that makes sense. But there is a benefit to opening up a nice bottle of wine.

and the two of us sharing it and having that moment your stress the connection like you said those things like your game

like there's a connection we're going it's more than just the substance we're putting in our body and I said there's probably something to that

and we took the late afternoon break went to the hotel came back for dinner they're like we're drinking tonight another one bites the dust but there is something

that there's a different kind of benefit to that. I mean, you see this Mediterranean diet research and they're like it seems like a glass or two of wine a day makes you live longer. And that's obviously not what the scientist, right? But they kind of infer. And

just like you said, my theory for a long time has been like, yeah, it's poison. I get it. It's not like respiratory, making it live longer from two glasses of wine. You'd have to drink 27 cases per day. Yeah. It's a low level poison. But if you spend time in Greece,

you spend time in Italy, you spend time in Spain, what do they do? They have long meals with friends. Right. And the alcohol is just a social lubricant for that experience. Right. Same in Argentina. And a lot of this stuff is genetically bound. I hate to say it.

It's not determinism. I think there are a lot of things you particularly do, and this is what Peter focuses on, and he walks the walk. He's legitimate. extending health spin. So you may not live much, much longer, but you can, I think, preserve function,

ability, strength, your ability to do things you love for a lot longer than prior generations. Right. Be healthy longer. Yeah, but I do think, like, there's a point, like, you just might have a countdown clock genetically, and it's like, I just, I look back all these advances in medicine.

Uh-huh. Oh my God, you know, like, infant mortality down 20-fold or whatever, right? Like antibiotics. What a miracle. Oh, my God. Yeah. And I just look at all the males in my family on both sides. Like, yeah, around 85. That's it. I'm like, it's just been, it's just been.

That's all this toy gets. It's just been the same forever. Yeah. So, and I don't see any downside. Yeah. On assuming that is going to be the case, I'd rather be pleasantly surprised. then buy the hype around all of us living to 120 or 150. I just don't buy it.

Every generation has had its handful of people claiming this, and they've all been wrong. Right. And who knows, maybe AI will be the savior. I think certainly what AI has done in, say, alpha fold with Demis Hasebis, and just we will have breakthroughs. Sure. But.

I mean, there is something, too. You know, my parents just turned 80. Yeah. And, you know, they're solid. They're good. You know, their parents died younger. You know, there was diet back then. They were smoking and whatever.

But it seems to me, anecdotally, that there's a lot more thriving 80 people in their 80s now than there was when we were younger. Yeah, it could be the case. I don't know. You know what I mean? And I see a lot of people disintegrating, too. So it's hard for me to say. Yeah. And then people just die in their sleep.

60. How old were your parents like 14 when they had you? They were, yeah, they were young. They must have been young, right? Good old Catholic family. You're right, exactly. They were high school sweethearts. I remember spending time in Ireland and I just, I was so accustomed to the U.S. to ask about

to asking people, do you have brothers or sisters? I just started asking how many dozens of brothers and sisters do you have? Yeah. How many are there of you? Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if there's something to that, too. Yeah. kids younger.

Yeah. Oh, I know. I know. Maybe. It's a lot. Yeah, it's amazing. It's over before you even start getting tired. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if you're younger. What about you? What about you, Timmy? You know, you do all these good things. You help all these people. You probably should have some kids and maybe a beautiful wife. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's... You can't play coyote by yourself, you know.

I can't play coyote by myself. That was good. That was good. Oh, man. Are you in love? I'm dating a wonderful woman right now. And I've had, you know, who knows where it'll go. I've had two very long relationships.

I mean, five or six-year relationships, which outlasts quite a few marriages I've seen. Yeah. And, you know, they didn't work out for any number of reasons, but still friends with them, wonderful, amazing women. And family's definitely the next adventure. Yeah. Right? It's like, yes, I enjoy.

doing the books and this and that. I recall, Roland Griffiths, rest in peace, that scientist I mentioned. What an incredible scientist. He became a really dear friend, and he's since passed away. Stark reminder, you need to do your checkups,

get your endoscopy, colonoscopy, and so on. He ended up having, getting diagnosed with stage, I guess it was stage three or four colon cancer, then metastasized. It was like before you knew it. He was gone. but he said to me, because he had his kids later in life,

and when he had his first kid, his brother came up to him and slapped him on the shoulder and said, welcome to the human race. I just feel like, for me, this is definitely a fundamental part of the human experience that I want to have, and I think I'll really enjoy being a dad. That was the biggest thing for us.

My wife and I, we were like trying to figure out, like, you know, we're both entertainers, and are we going to do it? And it's like, well, we're kind of thirsting for every experience we can have. on this planet. Like we're doing everything. Like we're going, traveling and eating and entertaining and searching and doing all this

stuff. And it really just came down to, for the two of us, we said, why would we pass on what seems like a pretty big experience? Yeah. Like, why would we deny ourselves that one? Yeah. And maybe the biggest. And it's ruined our life, but it was worth it.

Yeah. Seemed good at the time. How do you play Coyote? I haven't played it. I am going to play it. My family likes games. Yeah, it's very simple. I looked up, because there's some cool stuff on YouTube and shorts and stuff of people playing.

And it looks like they're having a great time. Yeah, there are lots of people playing. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's got legs. I mean, it's been one of the, because Walmart had the exclusive for a couple of months, and now it's going everywhere. Yeah, cool. But, I mean, yeah, people are having fun. So, how do you play?

So you can think of Coyote as, and this is actually how it came about later, I'm one of those idiots who really loves rock paper scissors, especially if friends have had some booze and other benefit of booze. Yeah. I could play for an hour with my dumb friends. It's so much fun. Yeah.

But that only has so many legs. And we, meaning myself and all, Alon Lee and at the time, we were walking around, drinking a lot of coffee in Toronto after a bunch of failed sprints to figure out a game. Like, we prototyped and experiment with dozens of different options. This is like rock paper scissors in a group with 20 different gestures where you can sabotage other players.

That's what Coyote is. And Coyote is called Coyote for a lot of reasons. But the primary reason is because of all the trick. extra mythologies associated with coyote. And so you lay out a lineup of cards and each card has the action cards, the salamanders we were talking about, has a gesture and a word, right? So you might put your index finger over your nose and say mustache or anything else. You might have to lean and make a fart sound.

I mean, there are a lot of them. Okay. And so far, so boring, right? You go around the table and you go like boom, boom on the table with your hands and then mustache. And you do the mustache on, boom, boom, and it goes around the table. It goes around quickly. But then you have these coyote cards that you can play,

which make it a lot more interesting and a lot more confusing. And then you have attack cards, and the attack cards are important because there are certain people, like mathematicians, musicians, you only learn this through a lot of playtesting who will smoke everyone. And that's boring if one person always wins. So now you can handicap that bastard by hitting them with attack cards. And each person has three lives and last person standing wins. And you can also create your own cards.

And I've seen some really funny stuff. The videos, you know, the videos that have like 40 million views now and stuff like that, in almost every instance, they've created a card that is funny. Because there was a lot of stuff that I had to yank that might have been not suitable for work or that just wouldn't work for distribution at like a Walmart target. Yeah. Right. Like there was like the vampire card was originally like you throw your hands into the crossed on your chest and it was just suck it. Right.

Like suck it. Suck it doesn't fly. Right. But if you can create your own card like I was playing with a bunch of, you know, that picture of the hippies. I was playing with some of my hippie friends. Uh-huh. And there were a couple were pretty high, which is really funny to watch because it does not improve performance. Yeah.

But one one of the girls there came up. with, I like, where you give everyone the finger. And it's just like, it's stupid. But stupid counts. It's fun. You don't have to do it that way. I will say that kids are good at this. So it's also a game where kids stand a chance of winning.

Like their reaction speed is good. Right. Yeah. So that's the game. It's like takes a few minutes to learn, 10 minutes to play. Yeah. Every game is different. You're in charge of how hard you make it.

And the last thing I'll say, which is it's a Trojan horse. but this is a good brain workout. Oh, yeah. And I'm hoping to actually run some studies on this game with some neuroscientists

at, I'm not going to mention the schools, but the universities, but the, I think there might be something to it. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, yeah. It's, if you have trouble with sleeve,

if you've got some insomnia. Right. This is not a medical claim, but like playing a few rounds of this, will definitely take it down a notch. Oh, it's cool. I just like, I've had it in my hotel all week, just this box. And it's just a cool, I just like, I felt cool having it.

Yeah, the art, I'm really happy with that. Yeah. That, I originally sketched out that box on a piece of printer paper during a Zoom call. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, you're good. And, I mean, you know, I still like scratching the art itch because I never, I never made happened back in the day being a comic book penciler maybe i could have but back in the day comic

books were not as cool as there today right like marvel movies didn't exist yeah uh so this this has been a really joyous experience so hopefully people get yeah very taste of that when they play they got cool eyes both of them have expressive eyes yeah yeah very expressive eyes well done thanks man uh what is all right so you so i should just go to my physical should i not get in shape for my physical. Should just go? I always feel like I got to get shape.

You said you had two or four weeks? Yeah. Might be a little close to deadline. And here's what I would say also is you don't want to spoof it. So I had a friend reach out to me. He's like, I've got my blood test in four weeks.

How can I make it as clean as possible? And I was like, bro, you do so much damage to yourself. You need an accurate picture of what's going on. Yeah. Another thing I'll say about another thing I'll say about blood tests real quick again. sorry to make this repetitive but not a doctor

so we got it double check it but if stuff comes up and you're about to make a ton of changes with medication and so on take the test again the next week on the same day at the same time and see what happens

because there's a lot of fluctuation there are lab errors that happen more often than people would like to admit and for instance also do your blood tests ideally on the same day at the same time and here's why

I'll give just one example if you drink on the weekends you don't drink during the week and then you do your blood draw first thing Monday morning and then the next time you do it on a Wednesday well right those are different states if you had a huge argument

with your wife or husband the night before didn't sleep plumbing burst and your cortisol is super high, but you don't disclose that to your doc, you can end up on a bunch of medications that are unnecessary. Right. So when in doubt, duplicate the test,

do it again. And I would also say, if you drink on the weekends, don't do Monday morning. Right. Yeah. And when I'm driving to Ocean City, Maryland, on Saturday,

which is a long road trip, to go do my show, if you were to make that trip and you stopped at a gas station, and what snack would you get? So, well, let's see. What snack would I get? If I had to get a snack,

I would probably get almonds of some time. They'll usually have mixed nuts. If they have some jerky that isn't a candy bar in disguise, I might get some jerky as well. Right. One of the freeing aspects of at least dabbling and fasting

is that you realize you don't need to eat. Right. You can take a break. You're not going to die if you take an eight hour break. Now, if you need to eat before performing, it's a different story, right? But I also travel.

Yeah. I travel with stuff. So there's, for instance, this venison jerky call, it's not really jerky, there's sticks there. So they're pretty moist and delicious from Maui-Nui venison.

A lot of professional sports teams use this. Oh, yeah? It is the most nutrient-dense red meat you can buy because it's wild harvested in Maui. I know. And it's Axis deer, which is originally from India, but it's invasive in Hawaii.

Huge, huge problem. Huge, huge, destroying lots of ecosystems and causing coral reef damage from runoff. It's pretty wild. So anyway, I travel, before I go traveling,

I'll grab a bunch of those and just throw out in the bag. And... I'm in therein protein bars in my bag. Yeah, yeah. Protein bars could help just, again, make sure they're not Snickers bars

with like a little bit of protein added. Right. Some of the drinks, I mean, if you're looking at, for something that is maybe not ideal but can still be helpful, you could

depending on your tolerance, just getting some, like, 2% milk, honestly. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not a baby. Well, I mean, we're not cows either. Or like a muscle milk or something,

some type of protein. There's a bunch of crap and fillers and preservatives and stuff. But I would say generally my go-to is almonds without something covering them. Right. Right. Yeah. And if I can, maybe some type of jerky. I'm trying to think of the brand. There is one

type that's actually... Just look for low... No sugar. Yeah, look for as little added sugar as possible. Right. As well as nitrates, if you can avoid them. Right. But that's what now again. So, um, I'm not hearing Pringles? in the list. Yeah. Prinkles, I like Pringles as much as the next guy.

Maybe this will make more sense to people. I also have one cheat day a week. You do? Saturday I go just absolutely apeshit. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah. I had you pin for someone who doesn't do cheat day. No, no.

I do cheat days one day a week, and I've done that for decades. Okay. You know, the reason, so there's this thing called the slow carb diet and the four-hour body, literally hundreds of people, I'm not exaggerating, have sent me picks,

and I put up a blog post with these people too. They've lost 100 plus pounds on this diet and have failed every other diet. I don't think it's because of the composition of the diet. It's because I explain to them.

Have a notepad or put it in your phone. Whenever you really want to eat some junk food or whatever you like that's not allowed, just put it on your Saturday to eat list. You're not quitting it for life. You're quitting it for six days. You'll be fine. Right.

And I think that is why there's so much compliance. So, yeah, tomorrow I'm going to go nuts. This is New York City. This is a food town. Oh, my God. If I can get like a filthy water dog from a stand and some ice cream sandwiches, like, yeah, I'll do it all. Nice. Nothing's off limits.

Oh, that's good. Well, that's good to know. All right. Pringles. I'm going to eat Pringles and not get in shape from my physical. And then I'll circle back with you. Yeah. Don't like chug a bunch of, you know, hot lard before you go in for the blood test.

But you want to get neck. your picture. Yeah. Well, this was great. I hope you had a good time. Yeah, had a great time. Yeah. It was really, really cool to finally meet you. Yeah, good to hang man. You're very good. Yeah. Good at leading the dance, which I really appreciate it. Yeah, well, we'll do it again. Yeah. All right. That'd be awesome. Thanks, man. Thanks.