Modern Wisdom - Black Holes, Denny’s Fist Fights & Japanese Handjob Culture - Rabbit Hole #4 - #1118

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

In the fourth installment of this new experimental format, we explore: - South Korea's government-funded looksmaxxing initiative. - Why everything you learned in school was probably false. - How to unlock an infinite handjob glitch in real life. - and much more… Guests: - Tim Ferriss is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster. - Tim Urban is a writer, blogger, illustrator, and author. - George Mack is a writer, marketer, and entrepreneur. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking of shiny heads, Tim, have you ever been to South Korea? Yes, I have. Okay. Would you like to go back? I would, yeah. Well, South Korean president calls for hair loss treatment to be covered by insurance, suggesting that government-funded lux maxing may increase the birth rate. His interesting proposal characterizes hair loss as, quote, a matter of survival. Hmm.

How do you feel about that, Tim? I think that is not the right solution to the problem. They have tried a lot in South Korea. I have spent time there. I would love to go back. It is often very distressful to people living with it. There you go. How do you feel? I am not distressed because I shaved my head starting with wrestling at like age 12, so I got used to it, thankfully. Oh, you upped it in?

As soon as I saw the option to white knuckle or shave my head, I decided to shave my head. But the, I think the stickier part here is actually some systemic issues related to things like rent in South Korea, because they tried a stimulus or something like $2 billion. to encourage procreation didn't work. And when you look at some of the issues in South Korea that are not obvious originally, because people point to idiocry like comps where they're like, well, everybody's waiting later,

they're getting more educated, da, da, da. But in South Korea, for instance, if you want to build a family, meaning you're going to need a larger apartment, they're very straightforward things that are a problem like your safety deposit for, or security deposit for the apartment is like 12 months rent. And people can't afford it.

So they're like, I can't afford. I can't afford it. I can't. So much, so many months rent for security deposit. It is. It is. And they're like, I can't afford it. Therefore, I can't have kids.

Who can afford a year of rent if they're renting? And I may be getting the month slightly wrong, but I talked to some crudence and they're like, no. It's like, I want to have a kid. And here are the reasons I can't. So I don't think fixing hair loss is going to actually solve that type of problem. Look, Tim, we're playing in the margins here because we can't get into the housing problem, okay? And the margins happen to be the top of the head. That's what matters most. The most

interesting explanation I've heard for South Korea is K-pop. In order to become a K-pop star, you have to sign your agreement, your artist's agreement, says that you're not going to be in a relationship while you're doing it. So they have created the most popular cultural export and import, I guess, or internal stars, have no families, no kids. Think about what happens when you do that. Like it's just, so inversion, easy as fuck the only way you can become a k-pop star is if you've already got kids that's that's how that's my solution anyway that's also these becomes he becomes like role models and now these role models have no kids those kids don't need rooms what are we talking about here yeah they can go on the road on the tour bus right with the well there was that guy in

Georgia so uh to try and fix the country or the state uh the country of Georgia in an attempt to try and improve the birthright there it's very religious I think it's very Roman Catholic and there's a rock star preacher guy and he said, I will personally baptize the third child of any family in the country. All of these families speed ran children

to get to the third. And he's done a meaningful increase in the birth rate because these families wanted this guy that was basically the most popular person in the entire country to like do the thing on the kid. Or you could just do what certain billionaires like the

CEO of Telegram has done and say, will pay for IVF for as many women who would like to have my... Spirming his way to... 100 plus. Yeah, he's a 2026 Gangus Khan. Yeah, he's doing it the nicer way. It's weird that most people don't do that, you know? So programmed to...

It's like we're programmed for the instrumental part of it, like the sex, but like not actually the actual evolutionary goal is not part of the programming. And if it were, it would be insane. You'd have every rich person would be sperm donating. Crazy would be like all these scandals. It would be people with thousands of kids. It's more ideas guys than operations guys, I guess. You know, one of the, have you seen the documentary of the guy who had a thousand children? No. So he started off as a sperm dome. The doctor or no?

No, it's not a doctor. Because it's one of those too. If you could search it, Jared, it's this big, thick, like Dutch looking guy. And he started off local sperm donning. But I think in the Netherlands, the limits 20. And he just started going to different jurisdictions, like playing around with it in the Nevelins. Was it not a guy that switched out the sperm for his own? There was a doctor. There was a documentary. He's like a Harold Shipman of...

We've got two guys trying to achieve the same thing, but very different routes in. Correct. Correct. And this guy, because there's a limit in the Netherlands, I think of 20 children that you're allowed to do it because they're then concerned of... Inbreeding. Inbreeding that may happen. And this guy ranked it all the way up to 1,000.

And then when he got banned from the Netherlands, he started going, I believe, to Kenya. just to... You're really going to stand out in Kenya if you're a guy from the Netherlands, aren't you? When the kids come out, you're really going to know that that's not somebody from Kenya.

Yes, yes, yes, yeah. There's a beast of everything. Guy's going to win, you know? But like, when you have a guy like that, you really want him to be, have a really, really good DNA. You want him to be, like, high IQ and good disposition. Your Formula One drivers to be doing this.

We need Max Vastappen to be like lighting as a spurt. You're having a meaningful effect on like the whole human gene. pool when you do that, especially like three or four generations later when there's 100,000 of your descendants in the world and they're procreating. Well, what does the future look like if it's the progeny of billionaires plus the hyper-religious, right? Like, what does that mix look like? You look at certain countries and birth rates by kind of subpopulation, say, and certain places in the Middle East and stuff, and it's very much the hyper-religious, right? So what does that mean in 20 years' time?

Yeah, I don't know. It's also the really impoverished people who were in a, environment where a lot of kids used to die in childbirth, but now they don't anymore, but the adjustment of, you know, fertility goes, goes to take a lag generation, so you have this huge ballooning usually, yeah. So that's also. Tim Urban, I want to know what's on your mind, man. What have you been, what have you been obsessed with? I mean, we'll get to pianos, I'm sure, but maybe, maybe that's for later after a few toothpicks. I, I'm very, when I'm writing a book, I'm just, like, in it and immersed in it. So I've been working out a book for three. years. It's the story of everything. It goes from the Big Bang to the end of the universe.

You know, I've always wanted to say, I think you should be just a little more ambitious, you know? Reach for the brass ring. You know, it's like secretly, kind of not as hard as it seems because you don't have to go that in depth on anything. So it's little dips. It's like a kind of like 100 blog posts in one. You're like World War II. That was a bummer, but it worked out. No, no, no. So for example. One sentence. No, no, literally. Sorry, Japan. We'll make it up to you. I was like, what do I do? I have the World Wars. I can't not mention them.

But like, there's certain things. I want to focus on things that people are like, I never knew that. Or like, that's so mind-blowing. Like, I'm not going to go, I'm not going to, we're not going to go deep enough. Everyone knows the basics of World War. Right. Right. So I decided instead I'm going to make it like a two-page story that's going to be an allegory,

which is a brawl at Denny's. Because I used to, because I got hooked on YouTube spiral of brawls at Denny's, it's very entertaining. And so then I came to my mind. I was like hooked on one that week when I was writing this. And I was like, okay, so you've got like, you know, you've got a bunch of tension in the room. And then finally, like, you know, Austria, Hungary goes over and just like, you know, slaps Serbia guy in the face. And then, you know, a bunch of, you know, and then you have Russia and France kind of are like, you know, these big guys who are friends with the Serbia guy. You know, I just so I just did this.

And I don't know. A lot of the times I'm like, we, I don't know if that's good. I don't know if people will like this. That's what I just did. I guess that's how we're doing the World Wars. And then I move on because I had to move on. The allegory of Denny. Yeah.

Because everything I have to think about, how do I get this in there in a way that's still fun and new and different? I don't want you to feel like you're reading a textbook or an encyclopedia. I would love one sentence historical event recaps. I think that would be a fucking wonderful idea. Just like fortune cookie history. Yeah, because Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy does the one-bite pizza review. And this is just a historical equivalent. It's like the Elton John diary entry.

Oh, I think it's bought a rose. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you taught me about this. It's a single grade. That or the Huntress Thompson one, which like tracked, I guess that wasn't a diary entry that tracked what his daily routine was, woke up at 12 midday, two cigarettes, cocaine, whiskey, MVMA, da, da, da, da, da. But yeah. Oh, here it is. Got up, tidied the house, bought a Rolls-Royce, had dinner, wrote candle in the wind, had dinner with Ringo Star. That was one day. bought a Rolls-Royce, wrote candle in the wind, had dinner with ringles. I wonder if tidying the house was meaningful to him? Was that like soothing therapy?

Or was that just buying time before he could justify walking to the Rolls-Royce dealership opened? I will never know. It's also two dinners in there. That's right. I think one of those is an error. I think the middle dinner didn't exist. We also used luncheon dinner. We used luncheon dinner interchangeably in the UK.

And then dinner is supper or something, right? You can throw that. You can throw tea in the mix as well, Tim. Afters is also not bad. Afters is dessert. Completely gets mixed up. I had to, so I also had to get, it's like speaking in one sentence,

I had to get from, you know, because I'm going, I did like ancient Mesopotamia pretty thoroughly because that's so, like, important. And like, you know, the first empire, which was the Akkadians and you have Sargonne the great, the first emperor and I did all that. And then I'm like, now I want to get to like the Bronze Age collapse and that stuff,

but there's a thousand years in between. So I decided, again, I'm like, what do I do? so I just wrote a, so I'm going to do this in one sentence, and it ended up being a paragraph for pretty long. I'd probably be a full page, but it's a one run-on sentence that goes through 2,200 BC to 1200 BC. So you got, you know, it's really speed run it. Well, but not usually.

Sometimes then I would slow down and, you know, spend 20 pages on, you know, the Bronze Age Collapse or whatever. But like, yeah, I think one sentence. You speed run Rome. You did Rome in a single sentence. No, Rome is later. Separate treatment. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, Rome, I had to say a little bit more about, but, you know, you're not going to go through the whole. How did you choose this book project? Because, so I write blog posts about anything, and it's a great format. Now, just so people understand what we're talking about, because I have more context than some people listening. How long are some of your blog posts? So the short ones are like 3,000 words, which is like, I don't know, 10, 10 pages. Yeah, something like that. And then early on, I was like, I can't go over, you know, 2,000 words.

And I was like, okay, I can't go over 3,000, 4,000. it just kept going up. And then I did one that was like 8,000, but like, we got some traffic. And I was like, people liked it. Okay. And then the next one. And then so I just had a problem where it was like one of these, you know, it's like someone who keeps taking like, you know, more drugs to get the same high. Like so I would just start like then getting more thorough and more thorough. And by the end, I was writing 40,000 word. That's a book for, like, 50,000 words is a proper book. It's like, 120,000 pages. something like that. And but, but so I had this format where I can write any length blog post. So I'm like, why would I do a book? I'm right. I have a, I have a, And then I was like, okay, if I'm doing a book, it has to be a topic that I could never do as a blog post.

Like, what's the ultimate topic that, like, is so big, it has to be. History of everything. So the answer was that's the topic. Now, I'm just going to pat your back a little bit because I know you're not going to do it yourself. One of your longer posts is it fair to say, I hesitate to even call it a post. But man of the hour, right? SpaceX is on a lot of mines. I checked today.

It's like $2.5 trillion market cap right now. So Elon liked your stuff so much And he gave you exclusive access to what? Yeah, so he read my AI post and was like, hey, I like how this guy writes This was circle went. This is 2015, beginning of 2015. So this is really early days with AI and with Elon, really. I mean, a lot of, he was very huge deal.

But a lot of people I told in my life, they didn't know who he was at that time. And SpaceX was some people knew about it. Some people didn't. And basically he said, you know, how he is. he's very like, he likes to trust people and be hands off in a lot of those cases. So he would say, he said, would you like to write about Tesla or SpaceX ever? Normally, if someone's like, you want to write by my company, I would say no. But like Tesla and SpaceX are as fascinating as any blog post could be, because they're about such bigger things than a company, right?

Also with the access that you could get. So then he basically said, you can talk to me as much as you want and also any engineer you want and they don't have to be media ready. But, and I said, because I said to him, like, and then on my side, I was like, I'm not like a, I'm not like a journalist who's like, you can't change anything. I'm like, I'll send you the post at the end. And if there's something like some proprietary thing, someone said that's not supposed to be in there, you can take it out. And they really almost took nothing out. It was like, it was like the cost of like a Starlink set. Starlink was an idea at that time. It was like, you know, little things like the bandwidth of a Starlink satellite. Things like random numbers,

they were like two or three of those. You can't put that in. Elon had like criticized someone that later they were like, nah, we don't want that in there. I was like, okay, I'll take that out. Other than that, like, they let it go. And it was, obviously, I'm like a space network to be in SpaceX, you know, the factory in Hawthorne. And just looking at the rocket up close, I got to like sit in a dragon and like talk to this. This is 2015.

2015. So early. They had never landed a rocket yet. That was the big thing at the time. No one has ever landed a rocket. SpaceX is trying to. People think they're crazy. And I actually, I did one of these because they started broadcasting their launches.

And I did the very, you know, it was like, I'm one of the very first ones. They were like, you want to do one when we're trying to land a rocket? I was like, sure. So I was like a guest broadcaster on the time when they landed for the first time. That's so cool. So like the seven-year-old in me was like, I can't believe this is real. It was like, it was very exciting for me.

And then later I wrote a big, big post about Neurrelink, which they launched the company alongside that post. So it was like, and then the scariest thing ever was the whole company now is kind of waiting on me. And I'm a procrastinator. Oh, with Neurlink. Yeah. And like, we're talking about how my posts always go longer. He thought it was going to be like a 6,000 word post. This one was 40.

And Elon, by the way, I think this chill. He was like, it's so long, bro. And I was like, this is how I am, dude. This is how, I don't know what to tell you. I can't not do it. There's so many, I can't talk about neural without talking about other brain computer interface. I can't talk about those. Then I have to talk about evolution.

And then I have to talk about the brain. The nervous system. How did it evolve in the first place? We end up back in like the most ancient part of like origin of life. But that's how I do it. And it was such a complicated story to tell because it was the concept of a brain computer interface. than the reason for it, which was like merging with AI and what the hell. So it was long,

but he sends out a tweet that was like, like, we'll be launching in a week. You know, wait but wide post will be ready like in a week. And I was like, no, it won't. So scary. So I ended up, I ended up like furiously trying to finish and I finished in three weeks. And I was like, talk about like good external pressure. That's helpful to have like Elon Musk publicly putting pressure on you. that was that. But yeah, and it's just great because you get to like, by writing that post, you end up just fully understanding like a whole industry you didn't understand before, right? So it was, it was fun. So amazing. Yeah. Yeah, they're blog posts and then there are blog posts. Right. Right, but yeah. So that's why book had to be something even bigger than something like that.

You thought the most watched TED Talk of all time as well. Second post. Oh, who beat you? Ken Robinson. Well, he was the first one posted, like back in 2007. Mine was 2016, so he's got a decade on me, but I'm like, I think he has like 80 million and I have like 78. And I'm like, come on, man. Like, just get to first. Put some paid behind it. Just put some paid advertising behind it to just. I don't think that'll, I don't think that. I've got a guy. I can't make it rip in Bangladesh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got one of those watch phones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could do that. Maybe for your Kindle version of your book or all your books, you just have, it's almost like signing up for Wi-Fi at the airport. Like you have to watch an ad. But in this case, they have to watch your

30 seconds. Just enough to trigger a play. That's all I mean. With the new book, let's say history is kind of like a stock market and everything's priced. I feel like World War II is very much, it's like Apple right now, right? Like people talk about World War II. What parts of history from your research do you think is like way more fascinating than people give it credit? Oh my God. I mean, almost everything. I mean, everything once you dig in. I mean, I was just writing about the Black Hole era. Do you know what that is? Like, it's, I'm going to get like, I might like have an existential crisis if I talk about this. But so basically there's the star era goes on for like 100 trillion years or something like that. So that the last stars will be born around 100 trillion years from now.

And then like 20 trillion years later, the last stars are gone. And we're in the degenerate era. And there's just nothing except for little white drawers. And then that ends. And all that's left is black holes. And so how long is the black hole error? Because the black holes decay really, really slowly, really slowly. But then some of them bring me huge.

but there'll be a point at some point in the last black hole. It's holking radiation, right? Hawking radiation, exactly. It's like the tiniest little right around the edge, the antimatter, whatever. So I was like, how do I explain how long this is? It's 10 to the 106 years. Okay, so what does that mean?

How do you put that in the context? And the way I thought about it is, okay, imagine if we make a timeline where every centimeter is a billion years. So so far, this is how long we've gone. Big Bang today, right? And it's 13 centimeters. And now I was like, so how long would this timeline have to be to get all the way to the end of the black hole era? And I said, okay, well, let's just actually get.

I always want to like actually do the calculation. So I was like, let's imagine this is a ribbon with a half a millimeter thickness and it's one centimeter wide. And then every centimeter of it is of length is a billion years. So how long would it have to be? Turns out you'd have to, if you could pack, like, okay, if you imagine you'd patch this room tightly with ribbon. So it's just like this block, hard rock of ribbon, just packed as much as you possibly could in. You know, in every centimeter is a billion years. Okay, would that be enough time?

No, you'd have to pack the entire observable universe to the brim with ribbon, and that would get you nowhere close. You'd have to have to have some final number I came to is 1.4 billion observable universes with this ribbon to have, by the end of the last universe to get to the end of the ribbon, that's the end of the black hole era. So there's shit like that that I just... I'm going to put a wrinkle into it because after that, you still have quantum fluctuations. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, the dark era. And that goes on, that goes on for even longer. So the five stages of the universe, five ages of the universe,

sorry, book from 1996 goes through this. They had to come up with their own numbering convention to be able to name it. They didn't use ribbon. Yours is much more invented. That was way more nerdy. The dark era, which just comes after the observable universe. Sorry, after the black hole era is way more upsetting.

Because now, imagine you have an entire, You wrote a book that contains the history of the universe, right? And every page is an equal amount of time. You could pack, and it's like something like 16 of these. So a trillion times a trillion times a trillion observable universes, but 16 trillions, to the brim with pages. And from the Big Bang to the end of the Black Hole era, that whole thing with the ribbon I just talked about, is not even the first proton and the first atom of the first letter, of the first word,

of the first page of the first book. So I get upset about this. This is the kind of thing that when I think about it, then I'm like in bed and I literally can't sleep and I'm tossing and turning. And the next day my wife is like, why are you so tired? And I'm like,

it's too embarrassing to explain. But like I... I'm having an existential crisis about how long the universe is going to love. We won't be here, but that amount of time will pass. And that is weird. Like no one should want to turn a life.

There's an interesting theory about super advanced alien civilizations shutting down because toward the end of that era, you end up with an unbelievably cold universe, one that's significantly colder than ours now. Now, it's not much, but on the margins, this makes a big difference, because almost all energy usage blows off heat. And if you were doing simulations, ancestor simulations, future simulations, if you had, if you'd gone into the metaverse and decided to make this your new

place, it's way more efficient to do this the later that we go. So I'm going to guess that you came across this too. It's one of the explanations for the Fermi paradox, which is the paradox that asked why have we not seen aliens when there should be lots of them out there. We should see something. There should be some that are far more advanced than us, so they should really be noticeable out there, building Dyson spheres and stuff. And there's many explanations. One of them is they're all hibernating because they've all figured this out and they're going on this thing that will feel like a second to them, but they're just going to go past a few, I don't know, whatever it is a few hundred billion years. And we're just in this era where it doesn't make sense for an advanced species

to be conscious. So they just are all hibernating. It's like waiting for the ventilation guy to come and fit the AC before installing your new computer tower. That's one. It's like it's going to It's too hot. It's going to make the apartment too hot. We just go, shit. Let's go play pickleball for a while. He'll come in a bit. And then once we, once he's... Oh, it's hibern. It'll just be like a blink. Okay, we're here. Now let's keep going. But to us, we're just like, it's empty. No one's here.

Yeah. Fucking wild. It's really cool, dude. I got obsessed with that in Supervoids. The Beweta's Supervoid. Now, that, if you want an existential crisis. Another crisis. Yeah.

It's like a, so you should have a relatively uniform universe, right? A cosmic microwave background, but you don't. You have little fluctuations. This, even within little fluctuations, it should still broadly be pretty uniform. But it's not. There's these huge things. called super voids that are like millions of light years across. Some of them are the biggest ones are a billion light years across.

Boettus one might be a billion light years across. And it's almost entirely bereft of material for billions and billions of light years. It's insane. It's so fucking. There are some theories that even we are in somewhat of a void potentially, like that we're in a very uncrowded part of the observable universe perhaps. It's unclear. And of course, by the way, there's everything we're talking about, the voids.

we see everything. That's all within the observable universe, which might be like a grain of sand compared to the earth-sized full universe. This is just what we can see. And like that also freaks me out. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue. But recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy. produces inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Miter pure from timeline contains the

only clinically validated form of urethaline used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder. It's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now, you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom and using the code

modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom at checkout. Have you ever watched power of 10? Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you watched Power of 10? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Have you watched power of 10. Maybe Jared, you could get it on the screen on YouTube. But it's, because as you give me that kind of conversation there, I start zooming out of myself and I realize, oh, I am essentially nothing. And the power of 10, it starts with people in a park and it just zooms out by the power of 10, I think, every three seconds. So it goes from them in the park, like zoomed in on their face to above, to above, to above. And you realize

how quickly it goes all the way out to the earth, just essentially being nothing. But then what's the most fascinating part of this video is they then zoom in. So then zooms in all the way. Yeah, it's that top one there. This is the nearest I found to doing any psychedelic drugs without having to ingest anything. This is a staple of American schools. We watched this.

This was in school? Oh, I never saw this. This is how you ended up like how you ended up, Tim. This is just made a huge impression on me. Our picture will center on the picnickers even after they've been lost to sight. It's nice that they, Basically, this is making those picnickers the center of the universe. Yeah, that's pretty fun.

This must have been difficult to do without much computer technology. I know, I'm impressed. Dude, fire up the autism engine. This is fucking great. It's actually a beautiful meditation technique to sit there and do this, and then start realizing how many other people out there have their own thoughts. Yeah. This is something that, I don't know if you guys recognize this name.

So Ed Cook, who was a memory, competitive memory champion. He's from your motherland. He's a Brit. Then he trained, I think it was Jonah Lair, in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. So he took a layperson, in this case a journalist, and trained him up to be memory champion in the U.S. where they have to memorize a shuffled deck of cards for time and things like this. There are various events, kind of like a mental decathlon. But as a meditative tool, he does this, is zooming out.

And there's also a really, this is like the Brit roll call here, but I think Oliver Bergman is also one of your countrymen, wrote a great book called 4,000 weeks, which is tremendous. And one of the chapters is called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, and it's some version of this. But that is partially why I wanted to ask you, like to what extent do you find it helpful to think about this stuff, where perhaps it puts problems in perspective versus overwhelming in its magnification of your insignificance.

There's a great cartoon. I think it's by Aschopalman, and it's a guy saying, not only are your problems insignificant, you're insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. It's like this guy who's dealing with nihilism, and then it's like the reframe is, you also don't matter in the whole universe as well. So you can't have that effect that happens to people. Yeah, so I'm curious for you, Tim, personally. I think it does make me feel kind of cozy in a way. Like I think it makes me feel better because it makes me feel just like lucky to be conscious here for a second

as opposed to thinking like this is the baseline and oh my God, I'm going to like die and that's going to. I'm like it's so cool that I that for a moment in this universe like my consciousness formed. So improbable, right? Yeah. And like this tiny little also. So again, we just talked about time is really scary. space is really, right, crazy. And like you said, it then goes down to the small.

And, like, it gets even smaller than it does big. And that's cool. I'm like a, you know, Feynman has this great quote, like, you know, I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe. And it's like both of those, right? And it's like, uh, it does just make me feel like very lucky to be here. And then that, then, then it feels like I'm playing with house money a little bit. And then like suddenly debt doesn't, I'm like, whatever, man.

It's like, I'm, this is so cool. And just like, I don't know, one, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I'm tickled by these thoughts. I find it like endlessly. I get the dopamine hits I get from them. So to me it's just, it's usually a positive. I don't like reading about like the rise and fall of empires.

You know, there's other parts of the book that I'm like, that's not a nice thought because a lot of these empires are a bit close to home. At their peak, they were really sure or even on the way up or even on the early way down, they were just, this is it. We finally are here in the modern times and we figured it out. And like those empires at the past, like they made mistakes that we won't make. and every single one. They're at a catastrophic fall. I don't like that. Yeah. Well, I was joking with

Chris when we did an episode recently that as every, I think we spoke about this as well, that as every empire falls, nobody announces that the empire has fallen. So it's obviously up for debate, but Rome, most mainstream historians will say that Rome fell in about 476 AD. And it's almost because it's quite poetic because you have Romulus saw the rise of the Roman Empire. He was the first Roman emperor. and then young Romulus was disposed and that was the end of the Roman Empire. But the next day, there was no big announcement that the Roman Empire had fallen. So much so, you obviously have the split of the Roman Empire. I think in the 700s A.D. Charlemagne is announced as the official Roman Emperor.

So 300 years later it was still going on. Voltaire said the empire that calls itself holy Roman an empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. He said that in 1700 AD. So the actual, when it came to everybody deciding the Roman Empire had fallen, but it was officially announced, I think, by Francis II, it was the mid-1700s. So I joke that the most powerful empire today, when it falls, there'll be people that still think it's going.

Which is obviously people in 3000 will be like, well, of course, the US Empire collapsed in 1994 AD. And we'll be like, huh? What? It's like a punch-drunk boxer that can't admit that he's failing. But dude, your career's over. It's time to go. Me and Chris can confirm that there was no moment that it's certainly in our lifetime.

It's the BBC announced the British Empire had fallen. It's like, when did it happen? It happened, but when did it happen? Speaking of stuff that you learned in school, have you seen the retro codex? Have you seen this? Really, really cool website. So it's a website that teaches you things that you learned in school that are now disproven. So you can go in and look at what you're, you graduate.

graduated high school and it'll tell you what you learned in school and have now been disproven. Jared, can you pull this up for me? So I put this in as 2000s, which would be for me and George. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Lightning has struck several places multiple times Empire State Building is struck approximately 25 times a year. Wearing red near a bull will cause it to charge. Bulls may not be able to distinguish the color red from other colors. What triggers the bull is movement and physical provocation, not color.

The red cape is to conceal bloods. stains. Goldfish have a three second memory. Goldfish retained memories for weeks, months, and possibly years. George Washington had wooden teeth. He did wear dentures, but they were made of other materials such as tin, gold and lead. Human teeth from enslaved individuals. It's a bit gnarly. You need to wait 20 to 30 minutes after you eat to swim or you'll get stomach cramps and drown. There's no clinical evidence for that. There's another one. Go a bit further down for you. Oh, if you roll your eyes. You have taught in school and folk wisdom checked on the top left. I was like, I don't recall getting. If you roll your eyes, if you pull your eyes, if you pull a bit more. If you

tea in the pool, everyone will know because it'll turn water green. Hot water washing hands is not... Go back up. ...in cold water. Yeah, right there. Interesting. I'm learning a few things. Water temperature has not been found to impact the antibacterial efficacy of hand washing. I didn't even know that. After a person dies, their hair or fingernails can keep growing. Who thinks Earth is the only planet with water? I don't know about that. But in the 2000s, might you have thought that? Because Pluto being a planet would have been true when we went to high school.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, true. brown sugar is healthier than white sugar. Yeah, I just like, it's nice to find. And then obviously all of this stuff with the food pyramid, that's got turned literally upside down. So some of these will end up being overturned too, but yeah. Oh, for sure. I think when I was thinking about, you know, the way kids are educated,

I think that schools do something that I think in some cases, at least they traditionally, that is maybe the right thing to do, which is you teach the wrong story, the simple wrong story first, just to like let the concepts, and then later you start to build the nuance and you realize that the, but that's kind of, like, Thanksgiving. I think it's, I learned early on that Thanksgiving was this, like, wonderful thing, and the pilgrims came,

and the Indians at the time, the Indians were like, and everyone was happy, and they had this nice feast and, or, you know, just like, Columbus discovered the new world, but I'm like, no, he didn't, but like, and just like keep it, um, let, let the basic stories seep in. And then later you can be like, actually, like, this is like an allegory kind of for, that that represents like a much larger, more complicated and much nastier story often. And I think sometimes right now what they're doing is they're, you know, out of kind of, I don't know, you know, kind of political reasons or whatever, they're teaching kind of very, very like, you know, kind of a hardcore first story to really young kids right away that, um, that front loading the Nali version. Yeah, exactly. And maybe going

too far, even in that direction. Um, when, uh, Like, I think, I mean, this is a whole other can of worms, but I think that maybe I want to... But the disguise on. But, like, I know, I think that, I do think American children should be taught first all these great things about America. They should learn that they're in this great country that has complicated. It's not been perfect, but they've done a lot of great things. And it's this wonderful thing in patriotism and be really proud. And then later, later, then you can learn a lot more nuance.

Or it's the same reason that I think you shouldn't be teaching your kid. you know that like you think your dad's a good person but you know he cheated when in his 20s you know that he like did you know he got fired like you don't do that you start with that dad's great of course and then later in life and the kid's an adult you start I don't this is part isn't controversial anymore you start to then say

you know dad you know dad can say to you know yeah I'm not perfect I did this and this but like yeah you don't need to front loads kids are kids and like it's a very different kind of person to teach well also because I mean I remember talking to very close friend of mine who's got a bunch of kids wonderful guy, very successful in what he does. And I asked him what his parenting advice would be. And his first rule was,

you need to teach your kids to be optimists because action flows from optimism and agency flows from optosa. Right. And so what you're describing sort of creates a picture that you don't want to aspire to engage with and seems antithetical to that. You know, second, third, fourth graders just hammer climate change, climate change. Your future is destroyed. Like, why? Who thinks this is a good idea? Right. Little little kids. Well, and then the older generations are like, oh my God, these younger generations are so apathetic. I'm like, yeah, you're getting waterboarded with existential threat all day. Yeah, you would be too. I guess it makes sense that the younger you are, the more neuroplastic you are, right? And even like statements like that are quite reflexive. So if you go on, if I go on the news tomorrow and say it's going to be a sunny day, I have no impact on whoever it's going to be a sunny day. But a reflexive system is if I go. go on the news tomorrow and say, there's going to be a bank run, I have an impact on whether there's going to be a bank run. And if you go in thinking America is a terrible country, that's going to be quite a reflexive thing for your entire youth. I mean, it's quite funny listening to an, not that you were complaining to, but an American talk about the lack of patriotism in their

country. It's two Brits next to the city. Yeah, it's kind of like Chris talking to me about how he's frustrated with the size of his forearms right now. You know what I mean? I'm like, Okay, okay, I understand, but yeah, I think it's interesting for America to be going through that when you're still by far the tallest midget in the room. Right. Totally. And by the way, there's so much British history to be proud of. Oh, don't get me started. This negative lens.

Don't get me started, Tim. I declare, I said this to Chris previously, that we are the most insecure in terms of internal reputation versus external. So if you travel anywhere else in the world, apart from a few places, they often like love. the UK. But internally, they often criticised themselves the most. I'll never forget, a friend of mine came, his sister came home one day and she said, you know what? She goes, Britain is the racist country on earth. And he paused for a second. And he just said, compared to where? You couldn't answer. Is that a line about capitalism? It's the worst system apart from all of the other ones. It's just a crazy distortion lens and it's so self-defeating and it's like this crazy.

Crazy. Yeah. Jack Butcher's got this great line. He says, unlearning is a hundred times harder than learning. And if you're laying down those myelin sheaths and some kids who's five years old, six, seven, I don't know when you start to understand what climate is and what power structures look like. But yeah, you're probably best starting off with generalized optimism and getting into specific pessimism or specific scrutiny as opposed to generalized scrutiny. That's high school, maybe, you know, like maybe a little bit of Elementary school is just, it's just, yeah. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangy nectar, and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue,

helps to optimize brain health and regulate your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, there are no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want, and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to drinklmn.com slash modern wisdom.

That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Well, think about now, the UK, it looks like, I don't know whether this is actually going to happen. The UK is proposing a social media ban for under 16s, the same as Australia's had. And I haven't seen much of the fallout of this. I steered clear of X for the last couple of days. But I really struggled to see how this is a bad thing. So to steal on the other side, before you even get onto the 16-year-old, it's also a way you have to use identification now to use social media for anybody over the age as well.

Is that a bad idea? It's an interesting discussion. I'm not okay with it. Everyone's got a concern about digital safety. I understand that. Why have you abstained for the last few days from X? Busy. Okay.

I was like, what was the catalyzing event? It wasn't a choice. It was literally just busy. Touching grass? Yeah, trying to. Pathetic, man. Get it a lot. I was looking at photos of grass on X, actually.

It was better. He was too busy doom scrolling on TikTok was the actual thing. Few bugs. But the Australia thing, you're right. What? You're such a fucking techno-optimist. Carry on, carry on. What?

Come on, go, go, go. Don't interrupt. Don't interrupt. Winston Churchill said, stop interrupting my interruption. Winston Churchill once said to Randolph Churchill's son at dinner, the best thing ever, which is like, can you stop interrupting my interruption? Go on, you go, you go for it. I just don't understand what the counter argument is.

I don't understand what, it's such anchoring bias because we, develop the technology before we put the guardrails around it. And I think if you were to invent it today, having known the impact of social media, if it had been worked inside of a Faraday-Cage lab for a long time to look at what the impacts are, it would be like releasing cigarettes into the world, knowing the impact of them. I imagine that kids were able to smoke 70 years ago or something. I don't know whether there was ever an age restriction on smoking. I imagine the same would be for alcohol and you start to tick this up over time. The UK has introduced that lagging law for vapes now. So I think anybody born after 2010 will never be able to smoke.

And the age just keeps tracking up. So it's, if you were born, what, 2006 earlier, you're allowed to. And it's never going to change. You're never going to be able to smoke. That's just their attempt at, you didn't learn to do it in the first instance. Therefore, you're never going to need to do it in the future. But yeah, I mean, I'm in support of this. I'm interested. to hear what criticisms push back against it are, but I don't see any reason why it's a bad idea to put under 16s, put a ban on. The smart ones that want to start a business

and really need to learn the internet are going to be able to get around it. They can still be entrepreneurial, and the ones that don't, I don't think they're going to miss out on much. What do you guys think? In terms of age verification and identification. Is there an issue stopping kids under 16

from going on social media? Would you be in support of it? I would be in support of curtailing or forbidding it for sure. 100%. 100%. Yeah, I mean, spending time with Jonathan Haidt and so on.

I just think the evidence is so compelling. Yeah, I would. I would for sure. I wonder how much of an impact he's had. He has had. Just Jonathan Haight as a guy. He's had an impact with his small team on a, with state-by-state legislation changes.

They've been very effective for a small crack team of researchers and people working on policy. He also, before, I mean, in my last book was about political polarization and wokeness and all of this. And he was, you know, the chapters ranged from kind of like evolutionary psychology to his, you know, political history to kind of modern current stuff. And I had different kind of gurus for each chapter that were different thinkers that I would like, you know, be, be sourcing from. And he's the only one who was who is one of those people in every chapter. Yeah. He's kind of, you know, I don't agree with everything he says. He's a, he's a giant.

And this is before any of the antics. He's ever met him in first? Yeah, yeah. He's an actual giant. No. No, he's very tall. Oh, he is? Oh, I don't remember. He's He's tall compared to us, but he's not that tall. But he, yeah, for people, you mentioned anxious generation. Yeah, happiness. Righteous mind. Last name, yeah, H-A-I-D-T. And happiness hypothesis is one of my favorite books of all time. He's also just such a coddling of the American mind. Such a sweet, sincere guy. Yeah, also. I think if you're going to talk about stuff like that, the potential for you to be right-coded, if you want be effective, you need to signal a lot of placids, peaceful, empathetic, understanding both sidesy energy. Because if you even begin to lean right and center, it immediately looks like...

So my friend and I argue about this, because I have a friend who's very conservative. And he's very smart. He changes my mind about things sometimes. Sometimes he's over the top. But he, the people he can't stand the most are kind of Jonathan Haidt, Coleman Hughes, these people who agree with, who are, who are, you know, I argue to him. These people are fighting the causes you care about, but they're doing it way more effectively than you would because they're actually reaching center-left people. And if you start immediately being like, you know, super tribal and super right-coded, you'll never reach any of them. And he just sees them as such, he calls them media kiss-ups. You know, these people just, they still want to be, you know, they need. to, they always need to make sure that the polite society approves of them. And I totally disagree

with him because I think that John Haidt has done unbelievable impact against those kind of over the top left causes that he really doesn't lie. More effective. Yeah. And I don't even view it. It's not a partisan issue, right? I mean, I would just, because Jonathan's so terrible at asking for money, I would say as someone who plays with scientific funding and stuff like that, if people are looking for ways to kind of bend the arc of history and undo some of the wrongs and ills of social media and so on, I think funding some of what Jonathan is up to with very small sums of money has a hugely disproportionate impact. Just coming back to what is he done with his small team. I just wanted to throw that out there. The ripple effects of being able to genuinely, you know,

push the needle with changing policy with kids and social media is one of the biggest impacts you could make, I think, on the planet right now. You won't even know the effects. of it, but 30 years from now, I mean, yeah. Yeah. Sam, what have you brought from home? You've got a bag. It's looking. Yeah, I brought, just to done this conversation down a little bit, I brought a bunch of show and tell items. Uh, adult show and tell. I like it. Fire up the autism engine. So,

so, let's see, I'll, I'll start, I'll start with, you have a little engine that's, yeah. I'll start with this. So this is called bite. Okay. And the subtitle is pretty simple. Now, it's 124 bits, but it's bits as in little pieces of what look like candy. Mouthwash bits. And this was recommended to me by Dr. Tommy Wood. He's a neuroscientist, also a beast of an athlete, but a very credible scientist, very well-published.

And he and I were having a conversation about different approaches for neuroprotection, hopefully mitigating the risk of neurodegenerative disease, and oral health is a really big one. And yes, you can brush your teeth. Yes, you can use like a water pick or something like that. But xylitol is really, really compelling as an intervention. So you could chew xylitol gum. You could do this, that, and the other thing. But I found ultimately everything I read so compelling that I started using these, which he recommended.

And these are really simple. Well, you're going to need water if you chew on it. So you basically for travel, but also at home, rather than having mouthwash, you take one of these. I'll show what they look like. I mean, it literally just looks like a little piece of candy. candy or like an aspirin. We have water here. Well, I'm going to spit it out.

You can't swallow it. Or you probably shouldn't swallow it. So you just, you chew on it, take like a couple tablespoons of water in your mouth, swish it around for 30, 60 seconds, then spit it out and that's it. And you just do that. Why is that better than normal mouthwash? Because of the xylitol content along with a couple of other things. So for sort of antibacterial effects.

And I know people, I'm not going to mention this person by name, but MD PhD who had cavities started using xylitol twice a day and went back to the doctor or the dentist rather, no cavities. It's like, it's pretty interesting. That's end of one, of course. I don't know what's out there in the literature with respect to that.

But found it interesting enough and it's so lightweight as an intervention that I was like, okay, I will start doing that. Are you cool? And anything that you can kind of just like have on your desk and just like pop one in and, you know, while you're, you'll do a lot more.

Yeah, I mean, my compliance with this also with the amount of travel that I do is... Did it taste good? It's really... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tastes like, kind of like candy. A friend of my wanted me to get into organ meat, and I'm like, I'm not going to grind organ meat into my smoothie.

I'm sorry. He does this. That sounds gross. And then he got me these pills. Desiccated liver. Uncestral supplements? Yes, something like that. And it's like, you should take five or six and whatever a day.

And I just, because it's on my desk and I just like, see it there, and I pop it in. And I do it every day now. Now I have organ. So I understand when people are designing their workspace that you're supposed to keep it relatively undistracted. Like if you're going to be in creative flow mode, maybe you do want some newspaper cuttings and like some cool art on the wall.

But for the most part, we're trying to lock in and not get distracted. You saw right, having an environment that pushes you toward behaviors that you want to do, Sean Puri has a basketball on his desk and he thinks better when he's tossing. I played ball sports as a kid. It's the same. My best idea is almost always come when I've got a tennis ball in my hands or some sort of, and I'm just able to throw it. I don't know what's going on.

Maybe it just distracts the front of my brain a little bit. The other one is that OAM lamp that me and you have got. So this is a lamp around about this big, and there's a little stone on the top of it. And the stone is an FDA quality HRV sensor. You just pick it up, hold it in your hand, and the light goes up and down, and the sounds. And it's using an algorithm to maximize your heart rate variability. So it's resonance breathing that you can do in three-minute chunks. But the best thing is you can turn off all of the settings on it, and it vibrates.

It's like haptic. vibrates in your hand, pick it up and hold it, and you can watch a movie. I went and checked, because I talked about it on my newsletter this week. I've done 160 hours of resonance breathing in six months. Just this year, I've done 160 hours because I just grab it next to my, I've got one in my office, one here, one there, grab it and I just breathe in time with this vibrating thing. So if you're watching something with... It's just like subconscious. And you're just tracking it up and down and it's adjusting based on what your heart rate is doing. It's linked in with the Wi-Fi. So it's link it once, never think about it again.

The algorithm is cutting edge. And all you do is you just grab this stone and hold it and breathe with it and it vibrates. And there's one on my desk. So if I'm about to sit on a call where I need to be quiet for ages, I'll just grab it and have it. I mean, I mean, I don't hold it too close, but you know what I mean? Yeah, I have hundreds of fidget toys, like of all different kinds. And I get, like, I have a certain, like, dish on my desk that's that these are the ones that are in the rotation right now. And I have all the whole archive back there.

Where did you get your fidget toys? Oh, my God. Well, for Instagram ads is deadly for me. It figured me out. Yeah. Spex, there's a SPA-K-S.com, I think, is just that they have amazing, like, soft silicone-covered magnets and, like, stretchy things. And I have silly putty, and I've got mechanical toys. And, you know, it's an important thing for me.

That's why, if I don't have those, I'll bite my nails. That's why these toothpick things, or an equivalent, but the Newtonic neutropics are just a bit of an oral fixation. If you're working away, writing something, your business partner, and Josh, because he's a real caffeine fiend, like ex-Mwai fighter, now Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dude, like kind of hardcore guy, just started stacking them on a morning and got onto a call. I think it was with you and he had six in his mouth because he'd never taken any of the old ones out. He just kept adding them in. So he looked like a camel that was chewing on a bit of straw and he had all of these things poking out the front of his mouth. Yeah. I found that you've ever

been, you know, I don't know if you're like me, but if I'm sitting at my desk and a friend calls me and we're talking. And then I get really like animated. I say something, I'm like, yes, and I want to make this point. 100% I'm up and I'm walking, pacing, right? And I'll even if I'm driving and I get home, but I'm in a good phone call, I'll just keep looping around because it's something about the movement. And then so I think, well, why am I sitting at my desk when I'm writing?

Like, it's probably something about it my mind really lights up. Like, it wants to physically move. It's all tied together. So, like, you know, I'll just do a standing desk with one of those rockers or a treadmill. You know, they have these like little rockers. And it's just kind of like, I don't know. It just keeps you moving. But I don't know.

I just feel like, yeah, if I'm physically engaged. Have you ever played with dictation, any AI dictation or anything, as a way of brainstorming while walking? I've been doing that recently. I've done it for brainstorming, like, outlines of posts, talking through it. Yeah. But even better for me, there's someone on the other end, especially someone I, like, respect. So this is my assistant, Alicia, who's been working with me for 10 years. She knows exactly what I'm working on.

And she's like, you know, really tapped in, obviously. So I will just sometimes say, I'm stuck. And we will do a call and she will basically say nothing, but her being there. And she will give feedback at the end sometimes, but that's not. She knows the game is he's going to talk to me now and he's going to crack his own thing by the end of this conversation. So you don't record them or you do? I usually, well, I'll do is while I'm talking to her, I'll say a line. And I'm like, yes, and I'll write it down.

I'm like, where the hell was that when I was thinking alone? I think I wasn't talking to someone. So what my weirdest new habit that I've done is I've tried to essentially give up all thought by the brain. So let me explain. Lots of nitrous. So most people, or my former self, existed in the kind of simmering six. So the middle kind of ambient rumination, rumination, rumination. And the big trend at the minute is the whole like retard maxing, just stop thinking, which I think is a bit ridiculous. I think what you actually want is a barbell. So you want, sometimes you do the retard maxing mode. And then sometimes you're doing the Einstein maxing mode, but that bit in the middle disappears. So for me,

I stopped thinking in my brain. I only, what I mean by thinking, by the way, is if it's like, oh, Tim's got denim jeans on, that's a thought that's okay. But as soon as I get into a, wow, I've got this thing tomorrow. You've got to do the thing tomorrow. It's replaying the thing tomorrow. It's doing the thing about tomorrow. It's didn't think, if I catch that going more than two or three loops, it's okay. I can either think with my hands, so write it down. And Ralfaudeau Lohemison described it as when you would write rather than think in your head, you go from being drunk to sobering up. Because even the working memory that we have in our head is like seven plus or minus two.

I'm probably at the five mark. So that's one of the reasons why you look. I got advised once by a cognitive behavioral therapist who said you would never do like even a moderate equation in your head. Yet we will do the most complex life decisions just there for years, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, And it's an example of where the 10,000 hour rule actually doesn't work. If anything, you get worse and worse and worse. So either think with my hands, or as you mentioned, then, think with your mouth, or think with your feet.

So as you're walking. So as soon as I get in one of those loops, I'm like, it has to be no brain, hands, mouth, feet. I like that. Yeah. The story you just told resonated because when I was totally stuck on my first book for months, like, could not figure out how to crack this really important section. and hired a woman who worked as a ghostwriter, but I wasn't going to use her that way, to interview me on a phone call,

and effectively just ended up talking and cracked it by the end of the conversation. And I was like, oh, I just needed to get out of... And like, what is it? It's like self-referential... There's a part of your brain that is capable of this thing. And for some reason, when you weren't talking, you're thinking it's just not...

You're not accessing it. Like, it's strange, but it's... It's really wild. Yeah. Well, I assume... If I had to think about it from a neuroscience perspective, you're probably using more of your default mode network as you're ruminating.

As you're moving your lips, as you're moving your hands, you're activating a different part of the brain. And through that activity, it's almost like you're just releasing the taps. You must know from like Kelly Sarrett's stuff and just the way that the human body and brain works, why is it that we want to locomote as soon as we start thinking about something deeply

or we have that conversation? Because it's the same for me. If I get on a good call, even if I now have a habit that if somebody just rings and I've got nothing to do, I'll get up and go for a walk because hooray, it's good to get steps in. But there's other times where you start to get really animated and you just find yourself walking. What is it about the act of walking that makes thinking easier? I'm not sure. I don't know. I mean, Kelly Starratt,

people should look up becoming the supple Lepard. He's a very famous PT, performance coach. Deathbound. Really knows. If you've ever used like a lacrosse ball to loosen up or like distraction with a band or something like that, he popularized a lot of that stuff. The couch stretch named by Kelly, et cetera. So he's worth looking up. I don't know. There are people who do really well sitting still. My fidget fix is like Japanese slash East Asian like pen spinning.

That's a whole thing. People can find like a 20-year-old YouTube video of me showing like the basics of this. But I'll just sit there doing different types of spinning with a pen. That's my move. Pacing also. Huge pacer. For me, I think it could be. I'm just speculating here, but occupying a part of your mind that is, for instance, like the monkey mind, right?

I think this is part of the reason why flow states often include some kinesthetic component, right? Whether it's music, playing violin, or something like that, surfing, whatever it might be. I think that there is an occupying of certain cognitive faculties or looping mechanisms that is aided with physical movement. But that's just... It's like when my 15-month-old is annoying me, and I'm trying to do something, I'll just like hand her something to occupy her, and then she's like... Yeah. It's like a little like...

There's like a 15-month-old in my head that's like, ah! And I'm like, shut up, then it's... Fiddle the fidget spinner. Hurry up and fiddle the fidget spinner. Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb, everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly is fiber. Well, it turns out that 95% of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentus's Fiber Plus. Most fiber supplements are a one-trick pony,

one type of fiber solving one part of the problem. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get in a fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Mementis offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it every single day for 29 days. and if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee

by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. Question for you, Tim. Yeah, question. As you was talking earlier about the treadmills and all the fidget spin-devices and the Instagram ads and you buy and stuff, I had like a...

I was thinking in my head of if you was born 10 years ago, Did you say if you was born? If, sorry, if you were born, again, British English coming in. That's not really, I liked it. British English talk so much more cool than we were. If you was born around about 10 years ago. Listen to him, mate. Would you be my diagnosis of ADHD?

Yeah, this is like the age-old question in my mind is, do I have ADHD? Am I a classic example of it or not? And like, I guess I don't know. I wonder if I were born, yes, in that age whether I would have been, like, medicated because I was a class clown, but I did well in school. And it was ever hard for me to like, I always assume, think of like real ADHD is like, you're sitting during a test and you're just like, you can't focus on the test. You need extra time.

That was, once I had an adrenaline, like, oh, shit, I was like, I could focus really well. So I don't know. I don't know. Do you get calmer with stimulants? Are there certain stimulants where you end up, like, actually calming down and focusing? Or do you get agitated with stimulants or something? For me, what it is, is like, there's like a perfectionism that is, if once I, it's, it's, I can't transition. I'm awful at transitioning. I will procrastinate from starting work for hours. And once I

have to start, once I'm in it, now I'll get going and then someone will interrupt and I'll miss dinner because I just want to keep working. So it's like it's, it's this weird like I'm very, a lot of inertia for whatever I'm doing. And that to me is a huge thing. It's just like, there's no adult around making me start work. And I grew up with that as a crutch always. I had to go to class. I had to finish this. I had to. And now there's no one. So I will just self-defeat for hours and waste the good part of the day. And then finally, so that's why I would, again, another thing I'd do with my, with Alicia is, Alicia's your sister. Yes. I will share my screen with her at like 10 a.m.

And she's working on her. You've got to be very careful with that, depending on how your day goes. Yeah. You have spaces. You go to a safe space. And she is working on her own thing. I don't know when she's looking at my screen and when she's not. She's probably not usually, but she might be.

And so I'm not going to procrastinate in front of something that's mortifying. You've created a digital panopticon. Yeah, it's great. There are services that allow you to do this. They'll pair you with someone else and you work at the same time. I can't recall. But it has to be someone that really knows. If I'm on a certain research page, they might not know, is he procrastinate?

She'll be like, that's not relevant. What are you doing? You know, like, you're going too far. Will she actually police you? She usually, she's very like. Tim, no porn hub until 2 p.m. Yeah. She will say something in my name.

That, that, well, that. It's just World War II. I tell you what, I've got two things. Number one, we've discussed this earlier. I'm always trying to create new vocabulary for myself. I feel it activates a certain part of the brain. Do you remember my favorite word that I invented five, six years ago that you love? Fly dripping?

Yeah, fly dripping. So I was once stood at a toilet and you know men do this where they piss around the seat. And I was like, what's the word for that? Wait, piss around the seat. Yes, you know when somebody urinates on the toilet seat? I usually try to avoid this. Well, exactly. Public toilets.

There's a bit of like tax. You may see it, right? So I kind of came up with the term fly dripping for that. And what's useful about beginning to create your own language is, I mean, I have to talk about the benefits of languages. I'm using language. Interesting, this is the first word that you develop. That's the first word that I develop. Or terms as a whole.

So one of the things that worked with the high agency piece that I did, or even, Even just having that language meant that I had a name for essentially an idea that people already knew or that I already knew, but it compressed like 5,000 words into two words. And then I was like, hold on, I don't have a term for that. Well, it's quite meta. I don't have a term for that. And then Scott Alexander had this term called an idea handle. So if an idea handle, you can kind of pick up ideas by like coining terms.

So the two ones I've been trying to coin last week at the following. So number one, Keshe's Law. Like the artist, Keshire. Kesh's law is whenever you're creating art, try not to use any modern references, because it may come back to bite you in the arse. So the artist Keshire, I love, by the way, formerly known it.

This may not be the best podcast in the world, but we had the highest range. We've gone from Black Bolt to Kessia. Say what you want about the quality, but you can't knock the range. Keshire, her number one song was, started with, wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy.

That's tough now. So what she did, so what do you do? She had to rec on her own song. Yeah, so what she did was wake up in the morning feeling like me flopped. So now. When did she do that? So quite recently in terms of the rebrand around the whole P. Diddy escapades. Now she's come out and done, wake up in the morning, fuck P. Diddy.

Which is a little bit better. But she still has. But ultimately, if you put a P-Ditty bottleneck in that sentence, wake up in the morning, comma, fuck P-D-D-D-D-I. Keshe's Law. So whenever you're creating things, you've got to avoid modern things. Another law I've tried to create recently. I was watching, I don't know if you guys have seen the new Michael Jackson documentary on Netflix,

and there's a scene in there. It's only so much in Everland I can handle it. Yes, yeah. I forgot to him. Sorry to bring it up. You can walk out if you need to. There's a scene in there. that's explained some stuff that we've discussed.

Imagine you have an axis like here, so you have essentially being an awful person or crimes that you might be able to commit. And I'm not even going to discuss Michael's ones just yet. And then you have talent. So as you go, the talent can essentially get out of that axis. And MJ's... People are like, it's too funny. It's fine.

Well, MJ8, and there's something about music that, like, for example, no offense to you, Chris, I think you're a lovely podcaster. Okay. But if you started noncing, right, if you became like a... I'm not talented enough to get away with non-s. Nobody's like, nobody is like going... Yeah, but that Nival episode. You know what I mean? Like people, but music, so this is the crazy thing. So Michael is in the defense for this pedophilia charge. And there's the guy who did a documentary on him. And they're showing the documentary. So it's where Michael's kind of got his hand around a child.

And they're like talking about the child's talking about... how he didn't want to go into Michael's bed, but Michael asked him to come into his bed. So they're playing the whole documentary as proof of potentially his crimes. But within the documentary, it plays some of his music. So what's interesting, you have both the defense, the judge, the jury, and even the defense said when they played Billy Jean, he taught himself doing that. He saw the judge nodding his head as like, wow. MJ's law, you could be, the defense could hear your music and still bob their head.

You're still giving them like actual, like, pleasurable dopamine hits, and that makes that disendering. Yes. There's some, we talk about this a lot of people that are in the pop culture, thinkers, speakers, artists, whatever. How, who is it that's got the largest bank account that they could withdraw from before they go into? Bill Cosby was probably number one. one. And he, if you would ask me, before all the Bill Cosby scandal came out, I would have been like, Bill Cosby is the number one, like, least likely to be canceled person. And it turns out what he did was so bad that if you're going to, you know, like actually like, Rufi dozens and dozens of

young women that you're promising like career breaks to, that is so bad that like even Bill Cosby, that you can't even, you know. Correct. But you didn't have. I think that's it. If Bill Cosby had released a banger. I think music weirdly, it's almost comedy before. Music seems to destroy the human brain more than comedy. So for example, if you really dislike a comedian or they've done something awful, you can almost not find them funny, which is why I use the example then, if Chris was in court,

again, I'm not planting these rumors, but if Chris was in court for doing something horrific and they pulled up his 4K set with Matthew McConaughey doesn't do anything. But there's something about music. Someone really funny, I think it does have some of the same effect. Williamson. But not to the level. Not to the level. Now, another example would be, and this doesn't work for the whole population, but political tribalism is like this just powerful drug that just makes brains crazy. And so if your political tribe, you're really tribe, if you're a really politically tribal person and the person that you are that is, you know, part of your team, you'll forgive,

like, anything. And you can see this with a lot of famous politicians today. You can, like, and it's I think that the people of that tribe or you can see with like other kinds of tribalism like there are many people who refute Jesse Smlett is innocent

and there's every bit of evidence but like because it gets taps into a really tribal thing the people that see him is like on our side and the people criticizing him or the bad guys like there's nothing that could make them turn on it could I workshop a new word with you guys right now shoot all right I've been struggling with this because I like doing the same thing. I like these the invention of words, right? And so I'll

give two examples of ones that I'm proud of rightly or wrongly. One is a word tell adultery. So tell adultery is when you and your partner have watched a show together and then someone separately watches more episodes without you. Oh, that's good. Television. It's exactly what it feels like. Yeah, tell adultery. You're like, how could you? Right. Yeah. And then The newer one, which is like, it's not quite as good, but I like it. There's something there is hallucinatives, like the first generations to assume that LLM responses are fact to do no cross-checking. Hallucinatives, right? It's like, eh, it's not bad.

I mean, it's not as good as teladultery. Teledultery is going to stick in the lexicon. That one I put up this is like probably 10 years ago on Twitter. So, back when it was Twitter. So we'll see. Better than fly dripping. I stick. Fly dripping's not bad.

It's just such a niche issue. It's such a... I'll tell you some McDonald's and North West England. Starts. Start Nitch. Start Nitch. The one that I've been trying to figure out is,

and this, maybe I'm the only one I don't think I am, where everyone is so overwhelmed with notifications and bullshit on their phones that at least most of my friends have Do Not Disturb on. So they'll be like, sure, man, call me. And then you call them, and it goes straight to voicemail. And they're like, no problem. I'll call you straight back. They call you back and it goes straight to voicemail.

So it's this like, do not disturb death. And, but I have not been able to come up with like a pithy word for this. I, I always joked that if I could have a job, it would essentially be this. So if I could have any job in the world that I would do for coming up with these words. Yeah, the one I, so this type of thing or it would be like, you probably don't get it as much in America, but in the UK, you have the proper British red tops. So it'll be the, and they did horrific things. Wait, what's a red top? Red top will be like the newspaper, like proper, like scummy newspapers, but they'll have something like Wayne Rooney's Shagged a prostitute, there's a grandma, and they're running the story tomorrow, and they need someone to write the

headline. Oh, it's like a New York Post. New York Post. The ability to just, I actually hate the articles, but the ability for just somebody to give me a story and then just say, we need four words. We need some horrible pun. Yeah, yeah. In this headline.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about like disturb loop, like, or do not loop, or disturb apeed, which makes me think about like the human centipede. Like, Oroboros, like playing something in that could be fun. Or something with a boomerang. We could throw that one out to the audience too. Cool, yeah.

Best ones in the comments below for when you ring someone and it's Do Not Disturb and they call that back. I will say like, as a blogger, do not disturb all the way down. Like explaining things and coming up with like terms and stuff like that. And it's like most of the terms don't stick. And the like the posts are ideas of mine that have gone most viral or just stuck around the most or almost always like where I nailed the term.

And it really is like it is such an important thing. Because if you can really, I mean, look, look at the cancel culture. It was this concept. People said, you know, where there are, there's too much political correctness or like, you know, it's a little bit, you know, it's like, it feels like there's witch hunts. It wasn't quite getting it. And then this one term. Alliteration.

It labeled it. And that exposes it. Now you're acting kind of like that. And it just, it did a number on it. It was really like, it was a powerful, it changed the culture war, this term. I mean, so examples like that are just so, and people who can do that really well. Oh, can I throw out one more related to that? Bigoteer, like a racketeer, someone who labels others for profit or gain of some type of

bigoteer. That's right. Very nice. That's great. So what are some of the blog posts that have really nailed the terminology? Like, you mentioned the TED Talk that's gone really viral. And I think part of what was successful there was procrastination is something that so many people experience and was just, again, putting labels to things like I called that when you are

procrastinating, I said, you know, I described, you're in the dark playground. And it's a specific thing where you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, texting with your friends. I'm looking up one of your blog posts. You're texting with your friends and you're, you're doing whatever. And it is, you're in the playground, you're having fun, right? It's leisure time, but it's not fun at all. This is just dread and guilt and stress. and anxiety that you're here and you know you should start working and you feel this. It's not fun. That's why it's the dark playground. But now I get messages from, you know, mothers that are saying, my son, my nine-year-old son said, oh, mom, I'm in the dark playground. I need to get out. And it's like,

okay, you know, that was a successful term. And it's like, you know, it's interesting. The leverage that exists. What about the tail end? Yeah. Is that, is that, is that, am I uniquely affected by that? No, no, that one. And that's, this is why. Do you guys know this blog post? Yes, I think so. Yeah. You should describe it because this was sent to me by a friend Matt Mullenweg, and like, it's, I still think about it cost. You remember the guy that sent it to you. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

You want to, dad, if, yeah. So this was, this is why I like blogging, because I want to take lots of swings at the bat, swings, swings, swings at the bat, because then you might hit a home run once in a while, and you don't know which ones, but if you're just doing, that's why books is like one, like one giant swing over three years. I don't like that. And this is an example of one where I was procrastinating during the SpaceX post. I was writing the SpaceX post, and I was like, you know what I should really do is

write another blog post. Yeah. Classic. classic thing. I was like, I have an idea, instead of doing this like big giant mountain, I'm just kind of like, oh, I'm just going to do this little idea that I've had for a long time. But then I thought about it in bed in the morning and I was like, oh, okay, I know how I want to do it. And then I just got up and did it in a couple hours.

And it was one of those that really made a big impact. And the idea is that, so one of the things I like to do is just like use visuals or whatever to look at how much time we have. I like to zoom out. And I don't want to just unconsciously go through life and then be like, oh, wow, like, look how much time pass. I never, I want to be like, how much, let's just look at it. How many weeks are there left if I live to 90? Like, let's just, let's just see this for what it is. And so I'm not like caught, you know, I'm not blindsided by it later. And so I would think about, okay, you know, even just watching

the World Cup, I'm like, maybe we have 12 World Cup left depending on like longevity research. And that's if I'm lucky, you know, and how many Christmases, how many. Exactly. So I do this kind of thing. But then I kind of had a disturbing thought, which was not all of the important things in life are evenly distributed. World Cups are. Christmas's are. I grew up spending 350 days a year with my parents or whatever, you know, when I got older and went to camp, maybe 330, over 300 days a year with my parents and my sisters. And then you graduate and, you know, you either go to college or whatever you're doing, you know, if you move out of the city especially, you might see your parents, I don't know, 10 days a year, 20 days a year, I don't know, if they live in your city,

maybe you see them 80 days a year, whatever. But either way, the number is much smaller. And so then I, you know, I was like, well, if you actually add up the total number, if I just say I'm seeing them 15 days a year right now, so that's, I need 20 years now to capture one year of parent time when I was a kid, I was like, wow, if you look at the whole number, I'm 90, 5% way of the way through with my in-person relationship with my parents. And I was, I had this thought when you graduate from high school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. When you graduate. So now I'm even older, right? And so, and this is if you're lucky, if your parents live long lives. And it was super depressing. And also one of those things where I'm like, I need to, some thoughts I have that are,

you know, or ideas that are depressing and don't serve any positive purpose. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to just share my misery and spread it. This, I was like, no, this is important. We need to look at this. We need to look at this for, you know, two reasons. One, if you are living in California and your parents are in New York or whatever, and you are seeing them 10 days a year, and that's just a reality. Or again, with a friend, there's some friends I saw all the time in high school that I'll see once every five years now, once every five years sometimes. These are close friends. I might see that friend 10 more times, period. I might see my parents only, I don't know, 200 more times, 150, 100 more times. And so if that's the reality,

being, like staring it in the face and being aware of it will at least make you treat those times you are together as what they are, which is precious. Or also, you can maybe make a big change. I've had people tell me they move back home to where their parents are because of this post. Because if you go from living in California to you move back home and you see them now 60 days a year, you actually just brought that percentage down. Oh, instead of being 94% done, I'm only 81% done. Like, what, that's a, you can change the equation. So it's this actually really empowering thing. Or at least, you know, I'm not living in the same city as my parents, but I've become like so adamant about like we need to all see each other every eight weeks like somewhere. It needs to be revisit. We visit my sisters there. Then we visit home. Then we have Thanksgiving. Then you should all come here for this. So it's like it's helped motivate me to. I mean, and again, it's not pleasant. But having the delusion that we have endless time together is not helpful. It encourages a bias for action. Yeah. One of the worst things to do is to identify something uncomfortable that it feels like you can't change your fix.

That is where people really, really don't like, you know, this is how bad social media is for you. And people push back against that a lot because I feel like it's out of my control. I kind of agree with the problem, but you haven't yet given me, or the solution feels a little bit more out of reach than that. I mean, I just start, I personally started taking my whole family on a family trip every like year to two years and did that up until my parents were physically incapable of doing it. But that post was a real catalyst. Conversations that I had with Matt and other people about it. And I was like, okay. Like, look, I'm not going to move back home.

I don't have any desire to live in the middle of nowhere. But at least we can block out like two to three weeks of concentrated time where we're sharing these adventures together. We have the anticipation of the trip leaning up to it, which is a big piece of it. We have the memories. That is that from you. That from you is one of my favorite idea.

Look at this, just mutually philating each other. one of my favorite things from you is that most... You promised it in the text to me, so here we are. That is true. Like Bonnie Blue. Range. Your insight. Range, dude.

It's the highest range. Highest range on the planet. Your idea that the holiday that you go on, you should book them as far out in advance as possible because so much of the enjoyment is done in anticipation. There was this great study done a while ago. I did my master's dissertation on the effectiveness of anti-alcohol advertising. on students at Newcastle University. I wanted to see what sort of interventions we can do to try and reduce. This is when drinking was a problem, not drinking, which is now the new problem. But the thing that I

realized is doing a little bit of reading and a bit of research around this was a study was done looking at when people enjoy nights out the most. And this included people that were drinking. So you'd think, how many drinks deep is it? Is it when you arrive at the nightclub? Is it when the music, The mainline DJ comes on, the headline DJ, and everyone's there and they're having a great time. Now, it was in the flat in the apartment as you were getting ready for the night down. Like the middle of the bullseye of dopamine and human satisfaction is things are about to get a little bit better than it. Friday at 3pm at work is the happier moment than like midday Saturday. Correct.

And by the way, the inverse of that is if something shitty is that I'm going to dread is on my plate, I want to know about it as late as possible. I had six months to think about that I have a TED talk hanging over this horrifying thing over the horizon. I wish someone I just told me a month before you have to, if you wanted to speak at your wedding, tell me freaking 10 days before. Do not give me six months from like, after that wedding, I have to come up with a really good speed. Oh, that's so good. Yeah, because you're front-loading the paint as well as front-loading anticipation. So you want to know about good things way ahead and you want to know about that.

Tell me about the gang-bang a year in advance, but tell me about the tax return one week before. Depends on the details on that one. Which side of the gang-bang you want to be. That's true. That is true. The most depressing version of your kind of tail end thing. It's this old proverb in China. And it essentially goes along the lines of like the saddest feeling in the world

is to grow the desire to take care of your parents only to realize they're no longer there. So this proverb in Chinese culture, I'm like, Jesus Christ. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man, I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in.

Never happen. See, most people, like Jared, don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best N.A. bruise on the planet. You can find Athletic Brewing Co's best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to

the link in the description below or heading to athletic brewing.com slash modern wisdom using the code, modern wisdom, a checkout. That's athletic brewing.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer, terms and conditions apply athletic brewing company fit for all times. Bottoms up. There's a great line that I came across. I want you to read to you. You guys, it's from Salhigune. It says, you'll regret it if you get married. You'll regret it if you don't get married.

You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kikigard said this 200 years ago as follows. Whatever you choose, you'll regret it. Because the problem isn't in your choices. It's in romanticizing a life. Grass is always greener. A person always finds an untravel path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice.

It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. And that was that Douglas Murray line. In life, we must choose our regrets. and you go, okay, in advance of a big decision, you might want to think, which decision do I want to live with? But the better question is, which regret could I not bear living with?

Yeah, that's the one. It's a little like if you're, you know, someone who you can't be too perfectionist about finding your life partner. It's like, which flawed person and flawed relationship are you going to choose? And each one is going to have a different set of flaws. And I think in both of these cases,

internalizing that is very helpful because it can make you realize that if I have regrets, It doesn't mean something horribly wrong happened. If marriage is imperfect, it doesn't mean I did something wrong. And so it can help you accept, which is half the battle. I mean, it's like regret is only really painful when you feel like I wish I could, I made a huge mistake as opposed to like this is part of life.

This is a call that I made. So thinking about pendulum swinging in one direction or the other going from, we were worried about binge drinking in 2010 when I wrote my dissertation. And now in 2026, we're worried about. about sobriety culture coming and taking away the way that people are able to communicate and spend time and socialize. An equivalent for this, I think, and I've messaged Scott Galloway about this too, as a famously unmarried man in his 30s, the conversation of you don't need to think that deeply about your life partner to now a lot of the biggest reels that Scott's done and Warren Buffett,

the single most important decision that you're going to make in your life is your life partner. this is a piece of advice that distributes unevenly to people. It makes people who are already prone to overthinking feel even more pressure. Meanwhile, the people that were just blasé making decisions on vibes are just coasting through it. And it's applying even more pressure. I think this is, it's a noble insight, which is, hey, this is an important decision. And if you choose wrong, it can make your life hell. But the don't choose wrong turns into, I must perfect.

I must become a perfectionist in choosing right, and it creates paralysis of analysis. This is David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box. Fucking money, by the way, really, really good. Yeah, it's really good. But, yeah, that, that... What's the basic premise? I have an old one to recommend, too. Constraints breed creativity.

Oh, yeah. If, I mean, he is really great at bringing stories together, but he has this, what was it called the Magic Company? What was that? It was all of the engineers from... Apple, and it was the first ever Goldman Sachs Idea IPO. So they didn't even have a product, but they just had such an amazing team that they IPOed just with ideas. And they were able to do, they had unlimited budget, they'd IPOed before they had a product. And he gives this example of

a story where they were going to create basically the iPhone before the iPhone. And one of the engineers said, I'm going to run it from 1904. Let's say, it's going to be 100 years, something like that, let's say. And another engineering team came in and said, well, why do it from then? Why not do it from further back? Because people might be using apps for historical recording and stuff. So, okay, well, I'll do it from year zero. And we'll get up to 2004, whenever it is. And another team came in and said, well, that's stupid. Why don't you go all the way back to the beginning of time so that we've got a full calendar that people can. And it ended up, what could have been four lines of code turned into this huge and wieldy project.

This is general magic. If you don't, general magic, that was it. There's a great documentary on this, and it's also like, if I can interject for a second, it's like Yodaworski's Dune. I don't know if you guys have ever seen this documentary. It's about this ill-fated attempt to make a Dune movie, which was just like, I guess it was made by this crazy man named Yodeworski. And it goes through all these disasters, and it didn't work out, but the team ended up being Geiger, who designed the alien.

and so on the the talent density of that failed project was so high it's hard to believe this is true with general magic too right you had like very very young tony fidel who went on to create the ipod and the iPhone you've got a person went on to create android uh it's it's kind of nuts and despite that or in despite i say in spite of having this incredible talent density it's like if you don't have constraints, well, if you have a lot of brilliant people, a lot of ideas, that could actually be a fatal recipe. Correct. Yeah. Constraints. This is another, we say coming in with the term is really important. Well, it's also just like, I don't know, just getting a certain, like, anchor concept that can help anchor your rationality. So, like, one of the things I've always

thought about with relationships for perfection, because I'm, I'm like this. And one of the times when I was able to kind of like, finally, you know, pull the pen. Yeah. is because I think I grew up a little bit and was in enough relationships when I was like, again, the fact that like every, they're all flawed, every single one. So, but you also don't want to be like, well, they're all flawed. So this relationship is fine and it's actually really bad. Like, right? So it's more like what are up there, if there's 30 things you would love to have in a partner, you're 100% going to be missing a bunch of those in every partner. But what are your deal breakers? Like actually think about two or three or four. Don't get too much for these that are like, this is critical to me. I will not marry someone who does not, you know, whatever. I was going to say on both sides of the fence, because there can be things that you must not have

and things that you must have. Exactly. And I think it's a mistake. It's not being perfectionist enough to sacrifice on those deal breakers. And I think it's being way too much for perfectionist to be like, you know, it's like she's not,

you know, she doesn't love to jam music with me. And I did that with my previous girlfriend. And that's a must. Like, you can't have a ton of those or you're never going to ever, no one's ever going to be enough. One of the biggest issues in relationships that people don't talk about enough are bedtime lag issues. Like if you don't go to bed and wake up within maybe an hour of your partner, I think that there's a lot that you're missing. Like just literally,

you're missing out on a lot of time together. But I think it causes an awful lot of friction between you and your partner because like you're going to be woken up when they get into bed. They're going to be woken up when you get out of bed. Sleep's really important. It's health effect, can to begin to resent them if they come in at a different time. Maybe some people are laissez-faire enough or a deep enough sleeper that it doesn't really matter. But I think aligning the sleep rhythm is probably one of the sort of unseen. That should be a, in order to get into the conversation, that's probably across the board, a piece of advice that most people should follow. I'll plead devil's advocate, just because I have historically had very strange. Big sleep gap relationship.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's in some very good relationships, including my current relationship. but it's a few hours, I would say. Very often it's like one to two hour gap. She'll get up before I do. I think it can work if you are okay with going to bed at different times. Also, as soon as you have a puppy or a child, like, you're on the same schedule. Or if someone's doing the morning, the other person's going to sleep. So actually it might actually be adaptive.

Yeah. If you've got someone that goes to bed at three in the morning typically, and you're like, okay, well, you're obviously going to do the night shift up until three. And then if your missus is usually getting up at five, it's like, all right, I'll just run that back a little bit earlier and then. I usually'm up a little later and I'll usually like close down the house and like clean up the kitchen a little bit and like turn off all the lights and like take the dog out. And then like she'll be more likely to wake up and do morning stuff.

Before we move on from terms, we are still struggling to fucking name this podcast series. It's currently rabbit hole, which is the working title, but we're still struggling. Was it, uh, fuck me. Good dudes, good vibe. Rabbit hole. Fuck me's pretty good. Fuck me. Yeah, yeah. Artists.

Fire up the autism engine was another one obviously. But yeah. What's wrong with rabbit hole described what we've done today? We've just gone down 20, 20 rabbit holes and me, you know, underground burrow to a different rabbit hole and then come back up. It's funny, the power of a name, though, right? You know, here's a little test for you. Here we go. Have you ever heard of a book called Women, Love, and Relationships?

No. No, because nobody fucking did. So this book released, I think it was in the 80s or the 90s, sold nothing. So he came along, changed the title. and just jazzed it up a little bit to men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and it was the best-selling buck of the 90s. And just it was basically the same book, different title. Well, it's like, was the last time you had Patagonian toothfish? Not recently, right?

Chilean sea bass. Now we're talking. I want a toothfish. Question. Given that we've got two authors and one fledgling author. at the table, what is a book that you think is amazing but failed because of its name? Ooh, great question. So mine, my kind of go-to for this is a little bit niche, but it's mate by Tucker Max and

Jeffrey Miller to become the man-women want, the evolutionary psychology-inspired dating book for men. Is that a bad title or is it too generic? I just think it should have done, because models by Mark Manson, also I reckon, had he given it a little bit more magic, would have been, because it's still, great and sold relatively well, but could have been significantly better for what it was. Made by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller is one of the best, if not the best book for guys to understand, understand how women think, understand what their fears are. It's very like sort of both sides

of the spectrum in terms of being understanding about women, being pro men, without being too apologetic. And it fucking rips. And I think they even renamed it once. I'm not sure why. But that's just one that comes to mind. Fuck, that book was so good. And it didn't take off. and I feel like there was a big unlock in the name. I think with a book, it helps. I think with certain things, like a company or even like a blog, maybe, it's like, like, XKCD. I think if I were advising my friend before that started, I would have been like, no one's,

it's just four random letters. Like, no one's going to remember. Someone will be like, you should, you should read that blog. It has the four letters. And they're like, what? It's obviously a massive success. You want to explain what it is for people? XKCD is Randall Munro's.

He's this, you know, brilliant comment. He's a, you know, he does a, he does a three comic Monday, Wednesday, Friday. He also puts out books. It's like comic strip. Yeah. It's a comic strip. But it's like nerdy in science and it's just, it's amazing. And it has a giant.

Been around forever. Yeah. Cult following. Yeah, he's been doing it forever. And he probably gets more reads than like anything. And like the, you know, the comics of the newspapers these days. I mean, he's probably bigger than. But so I think, although maybe the fact that not everyone's heard of him, maybe it

maybe it would be even bigger. I mean, that's true. I don't know. I think, I say, people say, what's your blog name? Wait, but why? And they go, what? And I'm like, I just, I'm sorry. And it's, I just was looking on, I was looking on Go Daddy and I was like, I need a domain that has a dot com and I had my hundredth idea. And I was like, okay, that's one. And I had like a small list of ones that actually had dot coms. And I was like, sure. I think like, it names in certain

situations are overrated. I think with books, probably not. I think books maybe is something that it's, but I think, you know, I think company names. I think if a lot of really, dumb company names there. Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the nature of the company. I'm literally having this conversation with one startup right now, like whether to keep or change. And in their case, I don't think it matters because they're B to B to B and selling in a very, like, long sales cycle to sophisticated buyers, as opposed to a product that is B to C, where it's like a consumer-facing product where you want people to be able to easily say, hey, have you tried X?

And if they can't remember X, you're kind of dead. I do have a book example. There are a lot of books that didn't do particularly well, but I don't think it was solely due to the title. This one, I think, might be title-related. I've probably sold half the copies that this book is sold in total at this point, because I've talked about it. I have a bookshelf in my guest bedroom with just this book for people to yank.

But awareness. Anthony DeMello. Anthony DeMello. Yeah. And it's got, you know, the subtitles, the perils and opportunities of reality. that's the better subtitle. They changed the subtitle to conversations with the masters, which makes no sense to me because this conversation with one guy

and transcribed conversations. But that book, if I had to pick one book to read on an annual basis, that would probably be the one. I mean, I have some other close runner-ups, but that one for sure, and it's so short. Why? What's the kind of reflections from the book? I would say it is honing your ability to,

observe your own thinking and your own state. And without that meta ability, I think you're striving to develop other faculties is severely, if not wholly handicapped. You have to be able to sort of observe, to the extent that you can, without enhancement, there are certain drugs and so on that help with this, or practices, like different types of meditation. But without any augmentation, it's very hard to look at your operating system, right? What are the biases, what are the weights, almost as if you were an AI model, right? Like, what has been built into the confirmation bias and the narratives over time that you inherited from parents or whoever it might be that have not actually been stress tested that you didn't arrive at through any type

of firsthand experience? Or maybe there was one outlying experience. It was tremendously painful, and therefore you lived from that point forward for 15 years with this fifth. built your on reality, which actually isn't defensible, but it's sitting in the background, governing how you make decisions. And it's incredibly colloquial. It's lectures that were transcribed and cleaned up. And it's unforgiving in its delivery. It's very harsh. So some people don't like it. It's very in your face in some ways. But I have had so many people, friends of mine, including people who are very, very accomplished, either get, either get more done, or I feel like they have removed, like, gauze from their eyes or pain from their life,

or all of the above after reading this book, which is like 150. It's called Awareness. Awareness. Yeah, it's a red cover by Anthony DeMello. He was a Jesuit priest, also a psychotherapist. And he's pulling from a lot of different traditions, but it's very pithy. You would, I mean, I think all you guys would like it, but I was thinking of you, George, because of the naming, right? His sort of idea handles that you then carry forward the stories that he tells. I mean, I've read it like 20 times. So, of course, I've had some reps. But even after one reading, the stories that stick with people are so compelling and funny. It's a funny book. It's a really sticky, effective book. I think that WNZIP file of, I say that one word and it unlocks this entire, you know, I still have an obsession with language. I've always loved language since I was a kid. And one of the problems, if you do 1,100 podcast episodes where you kind of obsessed with language is you can sometimes get nerdy on it and you can start aphorism maxing, maxing, maxing. But for me, it's really important if I've got a single sentence that explains a huge concept. One of the best ones I came up with last year was idea, advice hyper responders. So advice doesn't land evenly.

People who have a predisposition toward it tend to take it on board a lot while the people that didn't already pay attention to it just coast past unchanged. I'm like, fuck, like that explains so much of why certain people have their traits exaggerated while the people that the advice is actually for. Like the prescription to work harder seems to be absorbed much more by people who are already working too hard than people who don't work hard enough. And I'm like, fuck, that now explains it opens up this entire world for me. And it was a term that I needed for myself.

And if you're a super successful author, who's got a ton of readers and distributes all of this stuff out, you can move the entire sort of cognitive topography of everybody that comes into contact with it. And then people who don't even know the book or don't even know where it comes from. Yeah.

Spreads even bigger than the readers. Meme being one of them catches on too and starts to change the world. For the advice hyperresponder, was there any examples of some maybe bad advice that you hyper responded to and then some good advice that you have ignored or still ignored to this day? I think the one about working harder is a good example of that as a person whose proclivity predisposition was always to lean into, I'm not doing enough, I should be working more,

I need to be more diligent, I already pay way too much attention to stuff. And it sounded to me like type A advice for type B people. I just took that advice on for me as a type A person and it made it worsened my imbalances as opposed to correcting them. But it's the thing that's interesting about that, the type A advice for type B people or type A people have type B problems and type B people have type A problems. The reason that's particularly interesting is that on average, maybe more people do need David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder than Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that they're already enough. Perhaps that across the whole world, it would be better for more people to pay more attention and work harder. But for a certain cohort of people, mostly people that

listen to podcasts like this one, they actually need to hear the opposite message. They need to be rest day maxing, not workday maxing. And that ties into awareness. I mean, that's where I think like the most important possible skill you can develop is self-awareness. And just being able to see, I go too far here. I'm not going to listen to that advice. And if you see that about yourself, you're not going to fall into that trap as much. One of the problems with that prescription, though, is that people who are already self-aware will take more self-awareness on. Yeah, and then too much self-awareness is not great. It's restricting.

Yeah, you're too self-conscious and everything you do. Bingo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. Yeah. You also, probably self-awareness is, yeah, when you think too much about yourself, one of the exercises I was trying to write about the other day for the book, this interesting little thought experiment for you two gentlemen,

which is imagine we have... Gentlemen, hold on now. I don't know my hands. Imagine we have a room here, okay? And there's 10 people inside the room. But one of them is secretly miserable, but they're keeping it together. Everybody else is moderately happy. Now, think of everybody in your life that you know.

Who do you think you could send in that room and have the best probability of figuring it out? Figuring out which one. And who would be the worst? Obviously, don't answer the worst one publicly. But if you think of those two people in your head, who would be the best person? Esther Perel. Why? What is it about them?

I don't know. I just feel like she is so unbelievable. perceivable perceptive of, and I mean, I know this, I mean, of her talks and stuff, but I know her personally, and I just feel like she just like sees what I'm actually trying to say or what I'm actually feeling like really, really well, which is part of why I think she's so magnetic in her. Also an amazing podcast with couples were. Oh, yeah. Which is, I mean, and that's who's, who's better at doing a podcast with couples? Couples therapies usually this person who barely knows you two can within a few minutes start

to see stuff that you don't see with each other. It's like, that's an incredible power. Yeah. They're also, I mean, I would think of, for instance, my friend Kevin Rose, super close friend, serial entrepreneur, amazing investor, great guy, EQ off the charts. Off the charts. So he would walk in and observe the room. And I think with millions of years of evolution tilting in his favor, I don't think it's necessarily something he could verbalize, but he would pick it out. It's an interesting idea of, is it a trainable skill?

What's also interesting is that you could kind of replace secretly miserable person with psychopath, con man, having an affair, and you'd probably pick loosely the same people to be able to go in to do that. And it appears that it's closely related to theory of mind, which seems to come online at four years old. So a three-year-old almost has no theory of mind. They can't understand that Tim has thoughts or thinks differently to me, and it happens at four years old. I think that's when lying starts as well. Yes. So this ability to be able to think, oh, think how Tim thinks, and then sometimes think how Tim's thinking, I'm thinking. Yeah, I know. It's funny watching up close, like, there's stages before that. First is like, I am the only person. And everyone else is like a, is like a fear from my per, my, everyone's affigment of my imagination. And then there starts to be like, oh, like other people are here and they're real. Like they actually have their own consciousness, but they're all here for, you. me. They're all here. And then there starts to be, like, a kid, and everyone smiles at you in the grocery store. And it's, oh, everyone's doing their own thing. They're not here for me, but everyone

likes me. Everyone's good. Everyone loves me. And then you start to realize, like, oh, I'm just a random person. And like, I'm not a kid anymore and people aren't like, all smiling. The first existential crisis. Yeah. Well, and actually, there's a lot of theories, uh, as I forget who originally, but it's, you know, this oceanic feeling that you have when you think everyone is there for you and that everyone loves you and everyone knows you is some people cannot let that go and the desire, the deep desire some people have for fame is forever chasing.

Oceanic. Yeah, the oceanic feeling is this feeling this, you know, that you're in this ocean of like love and just what. And then later you feel this very cold loneliness and fame is like, if I can be famous and everyone knows me again. Everyone loves when I'm admired, you know. And it's this, and I think a lot of people have a real, 13 to 15 year olds have like this, a lot of people go through. I think I went through this at that

age, like this, you want fame more than anything in the world because it's the ultimate like being popular in school. But like it's like them, you know, and then most people grow out of that, but I think some people don't. To your question about trainability, I think, I think it is trainable, but different people have better raw materials for some people, right? It's like vertical jump, muscle mass. Like, sure, you can improve on those metrics a lot with really, really thoughtful training, and I think that's true, but some people just get it. And I think it goes beyond human-to-human interactions, too, right? Like, I'm very, very, very interested in dog training and mammal training, writ large. Actually, it goes beyond mammal training. That's like a whole separate. Why?

Because I think that it's interspecies communication, however primitive it might be, is fascinating in and of itself. I think that, I mean, dogs in particular, like the relationship between dogs and humans is kind of crazy. Like if you start to look past the familiarity of seeing dogs everywhere, like, yeah, dogs. And you're like, wait a second. Like, think about how unusual it is that we have effectively co-evolved over time. Yeah, there's an animal that lives in my house. Yeah, it's an animal lives in your house. Actually, like, this is like a companion slash guardian.

I grew up with four cats. Look, cats are great. But, like, cats are animals that live in your house. are sort of in a separate category if they're trained. And I think a certain different type of awareness and consciousness comes online for dogs, vis-a-vis training, as you develop kind of labels for different things. So for all of those reasons, but it extends to equine training and how that could be, apply like animal interactions to people with autism or PTSD.

Like, you see some wild stuff. And this doesn't end up being limited to, to, to horses, for instance, in the case of the therapy, I've seen instances I volunteered at a wolf sanctuary in Colorado for a period of time, which is a long story, but wolves that had either been injured, trapped by ranchers, or raised in captivity, which is a terrible idea. Please, people don't get wolf dogs or anything like that. It's really, really awful on a lot of levels.

But there are these ambassador wolves that they have. I think it's just called Mission Wolf. in Colorado if people want to look at it and possibly support it. But these civilians can come in and visit and donate money if they want. And the ambassador wolves will go straight up to people who are seemingly having the most pain in the room. It's weird. It's weird. Yeah. Or the people who are most withdrawn, like autistic and autistic kids and things like that. And it just raises a lot of really fascinating questions. I've seen some videos of dogs that are there to stop seizures. if people are about to fall and have seizures,

maybe people have got epilepsy, epilepsy, and these dogs are giving us some pheromone. They can use them for autoimmune disorders, they jump up before someone has the collapse. It's able to be there and it jumps up and, because when they're shaking, the dog sort of lies on them like a weighted blanket or make sure that they're not going to fall over.

And there was a woman that was taking some, I don't know why there's a video. Maybe it was a ring doorbell camera, like internal doorbell camera or something. And she's taking food out of the oven. And the dog jumps up and, pulls her back. So, you know, when you're sort of crouching down, she's already halfway down, grabs her in the back of the collar and pulls her to the ground and lies on her. And she's

fine. And she's thinking, what is this dog doing? Is it okay? Is this something that's going to go on? And then she has seizure. After the dog's been there. So insane. So this raises, yeah, I mean, if we want to get into like Crazy Town territory. Let's go, Tim. Well, I'll do, let me do non-crazy town and then we'll segue to Crazy Town. So the non-crazy town is the reason I bring up the dogs is that you will, I've noticed that the same people who have the highest EQ around humans often have the highest EQ around animals. Right. So they like intuitively know how to interact with animals or be guarded around the right type of

animals. Say a dog that's really quiet may actually be really afraid and could be aggressive or they can read that type of body language even though it's a different species. Whereas some people have no awareness. They'll walk up to a dog that is clearly uncomfortable, and they'll come top down to, like, put their hand on the dog's head. It's just like, oh, my God, you're just asking for trouble. Or they're not paying any attention to their kids.

Like, why do so many little girls have dog bites on the faces? Because little boys are kind of assholes. They like to poke dogs and stuff. But little girls like to hug dogs around the face and neck. Dogs don't like that, right? And parents aren't paying attention. So it's not actually necessarily the dog's fault. It's the parents' fault.

So I think that EQ is not, limited to human to human. And that just relates to the theory of mind stuff. Maybe the theory of mind can be expanded to dogs. Dogs are like a pattern recognition machines on four legs. I want to personally. That's part of why I think, like, I notice with my dog, like, she can, if I'm about to leave, but I haven't even started getting ready yet, she can tell something's different

the way he's, you know. Yeah. But, but, you know, I'm interested in dog training. I'm not a good dog trainer. My dog is not very well trained. But I... training a mammal will make you realize an important skill, which is you are a mammal. And your brain, if you treat your brain like a dog, and great things can happen.

You just become a behaviorist. Yeah, because you're, you know, the idea that, well, I'm a person. It's like, no, no, you have a, you might be a person with like, you know, this higher consciousness. In your head is a mammal brain. And it's not that difference. You choose you about how to train yourself. Yes. Seinfeld talks about this in training his mind like a dumb little puppy.

Yeah. And I shouldn't say dumb little puppy. It's just like a blank slate puppy. It doesn't know what to do and whatnot. It's a primate brain. We're all like this consciousness is stuck inside of an ancient primate. I mean, that's what it is. And so it's like if you realize that and you're like, like you said, you want to have positive,

you want to have things on your desk that encourage you. I mean, that's what is that? That's because you're as a dumb primate that is going to be the person sitting at the desk. How else have you applied this behaviorist? dog training lens to yourself. I mean, just, just for a, yeah. I mean, really, it's, so I should say, like, if we're talking about like BF Skinner and Skinner boxes, like we're getting, you can get into territory where you, you don't, you basically assume, and I'm simplifying here, that something does not exist if you can't observe it externally, right? But this is how you get into, like, oh,

animals don't feel pain. Oh, blah, which by the way, we assumed about infants for a very long time. It's not that long ago that people were operating on infants without anesthesia, right? Crazy. So, I mean, I'm careful with the Skinner stuff. But when you get into, like, classical conditioning, operating conditioning, there's an amazing book called Don't Shoot the Dog, which has a terrible title. Maybe this is a good example of a book that failed. Don't shoot the dog.

But it's written by this woman, Karen Pryor, who worked in training marine mammals, right? Dolphins and so on. and a lot, I think she and her colleague also worked with the military, like training cats. Like, the military is trained cockroaches to, like, turn light switches on and off. I mean, this is not science fiction. This is real stuff. Like a crazy town now. So it's like, how do you do that, right? Oh, yeah, I'm not even, I'm just getting warmed up.

Oh, yeah. But this is well documented. Like, that's not fiction. Sidebar, the mosquito-sized or the fly-sized drones out of China. Right. I don't if you guys have seen these videos, holy shit, terrifying. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, we're still Stevenson when you need him to make some predictions.

But I took myself completely off the rails. Don't shoot the dog. Mosquitoes. Don't shoot the dog. Karen Pryor, when you're training, say, a marine mammal, right? Okay. Dolphin doesn't do what you want to do. You can't hit it with a rolled up newspaper.

You can't chastas the dolphin just swims away from you, right? So you end up focusing on positive reinforcement, right? Providing rewards for the behavior that you're trying to shape. and behavioral shaping is also just an interesting concept I could explain in a second. And she started using different auditory cues, and that converted into clicker training for dogs. So to teach a dog what to do or not do... Hang on, sorry. The training of dolphins is where the clicker for dogs comes from.

Yes, from aquatic mammals. No fucking way. Yeah, because they would use whistles. We're clicking at dogs because we clicked at dolphins. They used... I think they used whistles. but it's the same idea. Because you're trying to indicate to this dog,

and this applies to humans too, like what is the right behavior, what is the wrong behavior? But for instance, like the dog shits in the house, you come home two hours later, and then you punish the dog, it's so temporally dislocated.

The dog has no idea, right? It's not effective. It's just going to make the dog less likely to offer behaviors because it doesn't know when it's going to get punished, right? And I, look, I understand approaches to e-caller's, and I think they have their place and so on. But this is just to say that when you start digging into this and you start thinking about behavioral shaping. So I'll give an example of behavioral shaping, a simple example.

And look, I'm not a professional dog trainer, but I do find it really interesting. So, for instance, if you're trying to get a dog to sit is really easy. But if you have a treat, right? So you're using a lure, and you start with a motion that's, let's say the dog's right here, it's standing and you do this, you push it back behind its head. It sits down to get its mouth closer to the tree, right? And then over time, you lose the treat because now it has figured out how this dance works, and then you get to a point where you're using like the international sign language for sit.

And then you start to pair that with sit and then this, and then you can actually remove the manual signal altogether and just use the ruble cue. right but if you're trying to get like a dog to turn around and do a spin which is more of like a vanity trick than a safety thing or a functional thing but as soon as it turns slightly, it's not going to get it on the first go-round. You click, you give it a treat. And so you're basically encouraging it to continue that behavior. And you can shape really complex behaviors over time as long as you're not trying to boil the ocean at once. So how does that pertain to humans? All of it pertains to humans.

Whether you're trying to train yourself, whether as you're building a family, you're thinking about, you know, like you're not going to crate train your kid, although you kind of do, I guess, with the crib in the sense. But I think a lot of this applies. And people get upset and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe you're comparing a baby to a dog. And I'm like, guys, evolutionarily speaking, like, we're not that different. I mean, there are some important differences. And it's like, yeah, we've got more, you know, white matter and so on. But. Don't breastfeed a dog. Yeah. Yeah. Don't have a day. Yeah, I've been fostering a dog for the last six months who was going to get euthanized.

She was on the street. And so I've been very much in the thick of it with a dog that was effectively a wild animal off the streets. A really adorable dog. Looks to be, haven't done the genetic testing, but like an Anatolian shepherd mix. So very tawny colored with a black muzzle. This isn't the one that I meant. That's your... Different dog.

Different dog, yeah. The rear feet are slightly externally rotated, so it could be some great Pyrenees in there. But much smaller. The Anatolian Shepherds can get huge. They're found in Turkey. They're found in the Caucasus region. They can get up to like 150 pounds, 200 pounds.

At least 150. They're huge. She's a lot smaller. She's about 60 pounds. So I would guess that she's a mix with something else, possibly German Shepherd or Belgian Shepherd. something like that. But man, when you're starting with something that is really feral, it's different. And what's the original dog trainer? Like the actual dog trainer is the dog's brain

offering dopamine treats. So when you give food, it's not the food, it's the dopamine hit that the brain gives that makes the dog one. And so this is what, before humans were there to train dogs, animals across the animal kingdom for millions of years have been trained by their genes to act a certain way using dopamine treats. And then and so it's just, and then so all we're doing is leveraging this system that's already in place in the dog's brain. And we're saying, oh, we can we can get the brain to do a dopamine hit when for that and tie that that. And then the dog can tie that hit to this behavior instead of the thing it's programmed to be tied to, which is get food. Yeah. So a big part of it is figuring out, right?

because humans have been selectively breeding dogs and all these weird shapes for millennia. Yeah. Is what does this dog respond to? Yeah. Because some dogs are really food driven. But then your brain is also giving you dopamine treats. Sure.

And this is what social media platforms do is they are geared towards flooding your brain with dopamine treats when you give it attention and therefore add dollars. Well, we also think of ourselves as like the masters of the universe. but it's like to what extent did we domesticate certain plants and to what extent did they domesticate us for propagation, right? I mean, it's like, it's a fun question.

Oh, yeah. Say more on the tumble down the radical here. Yeah, I mean, it's just like if you look at like wheat, corn, soy, et cetera, I mean, they've been very effective at propagating themselves as a species. And I don't want to attribute like anthropomorphizing the wheat necessarily, but just from an evolutionary impact, just from an evolutionary, and sort of propagation imperative. It's like, how did they end up being so ubiquitous?

I just think it's a fun question to poke around. Well, when I was studying like history and you're looking at, oh, we domesticated, not just plants who domesticated, the horse, we domesticated, the dog. And now the modern cow, the modern, you know, house dog, they couldn't survive in the wild because they've been domesticated. So now they rely on this artificial structure. and then you read more about humans and oh shit what is civilization we domesticated ourselves yeah we cannot survive as you bring us back to 50,000 bcc pluck any i mean maybe you're like one of these people that might

most of people i know we would die we don't we're not our natural habitat we cannot live in it just like the the maltese cannot live out in the natural wolf habitat habitat we can't live there because we domesticated ourselves and this is one of these weird things where we now live within this structure that we only can live in, just like a house, it's like a dog can only live in a human house, a dog pet. We can only live in this civilizational house. None of us know how to, again, very few of us know how to hunt and truly gather and do the things. Would that not be different slightly that we have, like, genetically, anatomically, in terms of our features and our functions, humans are not too dissimilar to what would have been around

50,000 years ago, but dogs would be very different to what was around previously. If we had been born back then, culture would have been. We haven't gone to the full extent that, yes, that is, I mean, I'm sure there are some little changes, but yes, like maybe we're less aggressive than we would need to be back then or something like that, but you're right. We haven't domesticated our biology, but when we are now raised in this world, we have totally domesticated ourselves psychologically and intellectually and just in the skills we have. And it just, it kind of, you know, it just explains a lot. And then you see an interesting thing.

clashes back in, you know, when first civilizations were developing where you have these wild people, essentially, clashing with domesticated people. And that doesn't always go, you know, sometimes the weapons got good enough eventually that the domesticated people couldn't be fucked with. But for a long time, these, you know, stephords, Mongols and others, you know, whatever, the Hans and many, many others would come down with no technology at all, but they were essentially wild people. Again, they had to be. Except for a horseback archery. Yes.

They had horses. They had horses. They had horses, but like on the wild to domesticated scale, they weren't very far. And when they would clash, it wasn't just that they were really great with their weapons. They had this level of kind of wild brutality and, you know, which, you know, and kind of a lack of a civilizational notion of empathy for human lives or whatever are worth something. I mean, the Mongols thought of humans as cattle as another, you know, whatever. killing them was not a moral wrong. And that was this huge advantage. So it's just interesting to like when you, you know, this is what's scary. It's very scary when you think about civilizational

collapse, talk about AI apocalypse, things like this. I mean, what's scary is just the power goes out. That means the internet goes out. I mean, you'd see a lot of very domesticated people in a total chaotic situation. And it would be, yeah. People lose the shit really quickly. I was in San Francisco and I was volunteering for something called NERT, which is the Northern California Emergency Response Team, and it's a volunteer coalition of people who are distributed throughout, in this case, San Francisco. And it's done in collaboration with the police and fire department

to train volunteers to respond in the case of a highly destructive earthquake or natural disaster of some type. and I remember in the very beginning, they effectively said, okay, the broader San Francisco area has population of X, whatever it was, 1.2 million people. Guess how many fire engines we have? And they defined, like, what a fire engine was and so on? They're like, 10. Okay. So what happens if we have a conflagration, which I think is a square block on fire of X magnitude? And they're like, you should expect to be without water and electricity in these following areas for this period of time, like seven to ten days. I remember I was living in Glen Park in San Francisco and PG&E had a rolling blackout. I was like, okay, power's out. And for like the first few hours, people were like wandering out outside. It was a Saturday and they're like, hey, your power out. Yeah. Wow. Nice to you, Bob. You know, everyone's very civil. And then it's like five or six hours. And then people start to realize, oh, all of my food, my freezer is going to thaw at some. And

point. And I think the water may have also been off. And around like 10 hours post, there's one guy in the neighborhood who had a little Honda generator because he was a burner. He went to Burning Man and he was like keeping his stuff frozen. And one or two people wandered over and they're like, hey, Joe, could I borrow that after you're done with it? Clearly he's not going to be done with it because he's using it. And I think it was at like hour 15 or 18, there was an entire throng of people. who are these like hyper-liberal peace, you know, live long and prosper, live-and-let-live types, who are getting openly hostile about who would get to use his generator next. This is less than 24 hours.

So the basic courtesies of modern life fall away very quickly. There's a whole wild person in every human that is completely contained in a normal situation. I sometimes I'm in a coffee shop and I see all these people standing in line. And I just like suddenly have a split screen to like those people like stabbing each other for food. And then I was like they come back here and I'm like, you know, it's a little, like, it's the, you know, it's all fine when it's fine. And, you know, I don't know. So let me say a couple of things real quick. So this is going to sound strange. Not to like defend, you know, Genghis Khan and the step hordes. But steel man pillaging for a second 10. Not not pillaging. There's a book. I won't recommend it to be by one of the, I mean, a name everybody. would know. There's a book called Genghis Khan in the Making of the Modern World. It is

from like modern postal systems to infrastructure to religious freedom. They did kill and rape a lot of people. But that book is worth reading, especially the first half of it, just to get a full grasp of the historic implications. The second, just to give an OG podcast shout out, Wrath of the Cons by Dan Carlin. Oh, my God. Hardcore history. Every Dan Carlin episode. I mean, honestly, still maybe the best.

No offense. No offense. Best podcast of all time. Dan Carlin, hardcore history. Rath of the Cons. It's like a five-part series. Each one is four to five hours long. Oh, so many.

And you will not be bored. You will rip through it. They are. I mean, this is a whole other topic. Yeah. But like, history podcasts are one of my favorites and he is the goat.

Yeah. I heard that he used to do them in a single take. And if he messed up, just restart a game. Oh, God. It wouldn't surprise me. He's a perfectionist. I mean, that's why they took so long. Is he still doing, I haven't seen any of the sure, but part of the reason I also love Dan as an example is that wherever you are, whenever you are, you run into whatever industry, these things that are taken to be true because they get repeated a lot, right? You have to post X times per week. You have to do this. You have to

do that. No one's going to listen to a podcast that's longer than 60 minutes. And Dan was like, I'm going to do one six-hour podcast or five-hour podcast once every six months. And he was top of the charts forever for years upon years. Not many people are doing A-plus work. And when you are, none of those rules apply. Yes. Yeah, the rules just didn't apply. The first timeline that we've found for this is there will always be room for better.

Yeah. There will always be room for better. It doesn't matter what the industry is, you know, it just something really great. There's just not very much of it. It doesn't matter how many podcasters, there are very few people are doing A plus. It feels like that's accelerating now. Because you have LLMs churning more shit out. And you're going to have more video models churning more shit out.

It feels that whether there's less quality today, or it just feels maybe there's less quality relative to the amount of quantity. So it's also a discovery problem. It encourages everyone to average back to the mean, right? It regresses the aggregate of content that's being. And then people get discouraged and think, oh, there's so much content. Like, what's the point? It's like, no, no, no. If you can do something great, it will just rise above this and the world will see it.

Speaking of novel content, the Japan and USA Algo crossover because of the translate mode that happened has resulted in some pretty spectacular outcomes. None more so than Kenki Kids account. Have you seen this guy? Okay. So he describes in his bio on X as a company employee living in Yokohama's Kanai area, originally from Yokohama, born in 19. 1885, currently 41 years old, single, 41 years with no girlfriend history, non-appealing to the opposite sex, an attractive amateur virgin like sex services, hobbies are watching soccer, overseas travel, planning to retire early from the company at age 50, has given up on marriage

and is currently seeking a comfortable single life. So it's interesting about this guy. He's been tweeting about this thing different. How does one hell of a bio? How did he end up picking so many characters? I think you're able to compress things down on in Japanese. Yeah. Pressing for a dog as well. He's been tweeting visiting different hand job parlors in Japan and is using the revenue paid out from X to fund his future

trips. He's essentially unlocked an infinite hand job glitch in reality. Chelsea supporter. It's also just no one in the Western world talks like this. It's just a very specific Japanese... So there's a quote tweet. Go to the quote tweet, Jared. It's where he says,

today, both my regular handjob spot and the married woman place are running discount events and I'm torn about which one to go to. That's quote tweeted by an American saying Americans be like, I can't even get some chopped foyd from a dating app to go on a $250 date with me while the Jopran bros are like, damn, the handjob parlor and the milf joint are both on sale tonight. I don't know which one to pick. And he is using the X revenue in order to fund his handjob. It's like the most honest man in the world. It's unbelievable. You said a calendar reminder for Black Friday? Hanky kids. Dude. Unbelievable. Yeah. The cross-

over from American people finally being able to see Japanese content on X has resulted. I mean, I did love the, I don't know if you've seen these split videos of like Japanese cleaning the stadium after a game and Nick's fans. You brought this up. Yes. Even what's interesting, when the Japanese team played at Wembley against England, they clean the change in rooms afterwards. The players even did it. Completely different cultural difference.

What's interesting, though, is you have these languages merge online. I'm assuming you're going to have podcasts, language merge. do you actually lose less the cultural differences as much? One of the reasons why Japan is so unique is because they did that, Suku, right? Whilst the rest of the world was all mixing ideas, if you left Japan, killed. If you tried to enter Japan, killed.

So it's so unique and so alien. It's like the Galapagos of culture. Yes. And I wonder with... It's a great way to put it. With the internet now, do you actually have... Because I can feel it already that English culture is becoming a bit more American. Or even like this internet.

It's not even American now. It feels like it's post-American. It's becoming more online. It's just global. It's just the online culture. The internet is like the anti-Japanese isolationist culture effect. Yes. And then what's unfortunate is then what's nice is when you have all these independent cultures and each one does something really well. When it all starts to blend, you really lose the variety. The variety is where variety is the, in both evolution and cultural evolution is the engine of creativity and growth. And growth. And it's like instead of having a bunch of different brains in a room brainstorming, you just have kind of like one thinker.

And it's a shame. Someone wrote a blog post a few years ago about where did Emo's and Goths go? And the question was that subcultures need time to wasify. And if you've got this sort of global permaculture thing that's always moving and any bit that moves in one side of the membrane affects another bit over here, it's like everybody being on a bouncy castle at the same time. And somebody that jumps up and down over there impacts everybody else. So you don't have time to silo off to create this sort of weird niche trends, music, tastes, language.

Now, you see subcultures on the internet with language, but very quickly, like, look at looks maxing. All of that immediately now has become common vernacular because one part of the bouncy castle is now affecting. To me, you know, I'm just pulling from words you're throwing out. You want a podcast name idea? Yes. Bounty Castle gang bang. Bouncy Castle gang bang. I'm actually not far off.

It's evocative. It's very visual. It's either that or fire up the autism engine. It's one of those two. It is visual. Why have you mentioned goffs and emoes then? When was the last time you thought about gotts and emails? Yeah. And I always ask Chris this question and ask you two guys this, which is when the fascinating thing about something fading away is that you don't notice it fading away because by definition it's fading away.

Is there anything that's currently fading away or has faded away that you think we would have forgotten about until you mentioned it? A good example is the voicemail. the voicemail if you watch i was watching breaking bad and the um there's about five minutes every episode of like a voicemail scene where it'll be the voicemail will be playing across the house and it's just disappeared it doesn't exist but nobody really disgust it because by definition if something's fading away there's stuff that's fitting in too like mullets mullets are back and oh that's very very bad that's what i'm waiting for you you're actually only able to grow mullets i don't know if i could make uh well i can't do like the flat

mullet, which would be my sort of like aspiration, because I was just not going to work. So I could do like a power donut rat tail. Power donut. Power donut. Power donut rat tail also not a bad podcast name. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

Not a bad grinder name as well. Power donut. You know what I'm talking about, right? Like Professor X. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds like a wonderful couple that could be born out of grinder, power donut and rat tail would get together very well. What else are you brought from home?

You've got this bag. I brought lots of stuff. I'm going to throw out some fun stuff. You're talking about like humans, modern humans in the wild dead, right? Domesticated dogs in the wild dead. One exception, if you take domesticated pigs and release them into the wild, they rapidly undergo physical and behavioral transformations within just a few months. They develop thicker, bristly hair, longer snouts, and tusks.

Like, they literally revert back into savage animals within months. Does anyone study what's happening to them? Cool. They call it phenotypic reversion. Wow. And have you brought one? There's a small peg. You brought a feral peg.

Wild boar. I brought a whole stack of things. This is exciting. Oh, wow. And then so we can talk about the... Oh, drugs. You brought drugs? I brought drugs.

So this one is, I'm still, like, juries out, but the data are pretty interesting. This is, so this is Av-McCall. I know exactly what this is. You know what this is. So some people have heard of something called sulfurophane, and I'm going to pull this up so I don't misquote here. Let's see if I can find it. Bear with me here.

I love when my autistic news feed and Tim's autistic news feed come together. They merge together. Yeah. So, all right. Just say it. Just get Tim to get you on. What's that? Carry on.

He needs more frosty beverages. Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay. So this stuff, so sulfurane people might have heard about like broccoli sprouts were kind of making the rounds a couple of years ago. And I think Rhonda Patrick should be giving credit for bringing this to light for a lot of folks. And this does not contain sulfurane itself, but a precursor and an enzyme. So your body then produces sulfurane.

And I'll explain why I'm bringing this up. Because I've been taking this for probably nine months. and predominantly because there is some possibility that it could help with mitigating the risk of neurodegeneration. So that's, again, whether it's the xylitol or this stuff, having multiple family members with Alzheimer's, I'm paying a lot of attention to prevention. You'll have done your genetic testing as well, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah.

What's interesting is quite a few people in my family, and I know this isn't the only really. risk factor, but there are APOE-3-3, which should be the lowest risk of Alzheimer's. It could be protected. And yet. So there's other dysfunction. And in this case, you know, sulfur-fan reliably activates NRF2 related pathways in humans. All right. So the, it's promising but not proven, slowing aging, preventing cancer, preventing dementia,

extending lifespan, treating chronic disease. It's basically detoxification. But the reason I brought it is that my. supplement regimen has been very consistent for at least two or three years. And I do constant blood tests and so on, just did a blood draw this morning, actually. And in the last maybe six months, I've been getting, could be coincidence, but more compliments and questions about my skin than ever before. And I was like, what is going on? Is this just coincidence or is something going on? And so I looked at the two things that I've added, to say curiosity, nothing new other

I was like, okay, diet's the same. There is the Avicol, and then there is urolithin A. Using timeline? Timeline. And it turns out that it is plausible that this stuff helps with skin tone. Rondas thing was, that was for microplastics, right? Avicol. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, there's a bunch that it does, but yes.

Did you see, so I brought this up last time, but I didn't get chance to actually say it. I had it ready for last time. So the microplastics numbers were wrong. The gloves were the source. So the University of Michigan researchers just amended a core assumption about microplastic signs. Latex and nitrile gloves worn by the scientists doing the measuring shed sterate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene.

Standard infrared and ramen instruments couldn't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic. So you know that every American consumes a... credit card sized amount of microplastics every year. Like when you pick up the little petri dish because it's human blood and feces and tissue samples and stuff, they're picking it up. But the way that it bends, the reason that gloves are able to bend is that tiny, teeny, teeny, teeny tiny bits break off. That's why it's malleable. They switched from that to some other type of glove and it just went through the floor. I like that. I was happy to see that. All the microplastic research looks like it could be

wrong. Wow. That's not to say that we're not consuming, we probably are, but the numbers, I think, are 100 extra. Credit card doesn't sound that bad. I'll eat a credit card once a year. How about that could it be? I'd front-load it. I'd get it all done January 1st. Just get the Amex in. Yeah, kind of grind it up. So just to be clear, not a doctor, don't play one on the internet. This stuff, right, the Av-McCall, biologically plausible, reasonably safe, interesting human data, but not yet a slam-dunk clinical intervention, but still, interesting because it activates your own detoxification pathways, as opposed to being an external antioxidant they consume. So the sort of hormetic stress response

could be really interesting and have broader benefits. So that's why I'm talking out. You do have cred with these kind of things because you're like annoyingly healthy looking. You like the healthiest looking person. Thank you. You seem very like robust and unsickly all the time. Thank you.

Yeah, I'll be 50. I'll be 50 before you know it, which is crazy. The key is to go bald early. So your photos look remarkably similar. I think as you get older, bald is an ad. You end up like, it's hard to age you. Yeah, no, exactly. That's what I'm saying.

Oh, here's the giveaway. Yeah, if you're trying to do like the dead squirrel comb over or whatever, white knuckling, dead giveaway. Should I talk about these things real quick? Yeah. So I have, when I was a kid, I collected, I mean, comic books. I was kind of my first business was buying and selling comic books. Wanted to be a comic book penciler forever.

Was an illustrator throughout school, paid a lot of my bills in college as an illustrator. So I love graphic novels. And what I've found as I'm being domesticated, not domesticated, but trained through LLMs and everything else to have shorter and shorter attention span effectively, right? I'm trying to offset that. But another insight that I've had for me personally, I am, and we talked about the affantasia, I guess it was, and hypervisualization. I'm so visual that often as I read or. even if I meditate, we could talk about how meditation factors into this, but I'm conjuring these images constantly, which can be very distracting. Conjuring what images? Just visualization in my

head or scenes or whatever. Like, there's constantly, and as I'm here, there's like another movie playing in my mind. It's like watching like two screens with different movies. So will it tend to be like a past event or a future event or is it completely random? Could be that. Could be just random bits and bobs. So I've taken to going back to graphic novels, because once you are reading a story with visual accompaniment, it occupies that part of my brain. And I just love graphic novels. So I thought I would share after reading like dozens and dozens over the last couple of years,

some of my favorites. This is something is killing the children, real uplifting. This is going to be made into a very expensive series by Netflix, but basic premise. The artwork is amazing. Story is really fun. And basic premise is, monsters are real. Only children can see them.

And there are these cabals of monster hunters. It's a beautifully simple premise. It looks very light. Yeah, it's great. If you're into the sci-fi stuff, this is Lazarus, which is kind of a post-apocalyptic.

These cartel-like families run giant swaths of the United States and the world. It's about their kind of geopolitical battles and how technology factors into it. If you want something more fantasy, and this gets into some deep psychological terrain and inner turmoil, but it also throws in lots of fantasy tropes. So it's kind of like fantasy plus a bit of steampunk monstrous, which just based on the cover, I was like, I'm not going to like this at all. In full disclosure, I like the first, maybe like 200 pages, the most of what I read. But the testimonials and stuff are insane.

So this is another one that is beautiful. I tend to be very biased towards the stuff with really gorgeous penciling. Daytripper, this is from Brazil and does not have any sci-fi, any fantasy. It's sort of a reflection on mortality. It's about this young man who has a star author as a father whose shadow he's constantly living in, who, as his job, writes obituary's at a local newspaper. But it gets much more interesting. So how long, like, does that take you to read compared to like a book? How many page book is that to read?

You'll rip through this, which is part of the reason why I'd say, like, if you're going to get in, like, this is 250 pages. I read this in three hours. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, you get through it very quickly. It's also an expensive habit. If you're using hard copy, right, I mean, this is going to be $25. As someone who takes forever to do the simplistic drawing, and granted, these people are far more talented artists.

Like, I mean, today maybe they're using AI. But like, when I look at this, I'm like, no, these are all, it's. So, just this one picture. Yeah, yeah. The artwork in all of these is tremendous. Amazing. Have you ever read a comic book? Not in a while.

Yeah. So as a child. Yeah. I've never, basically never. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some. I think I could get into it.

There are some iconic... Calvin and Hobbs, I used to me. Calvin Hobbs is amazing. Calvin Hobbs is amazing. Look, I mean, Sandman, there's some real, like, genre busting, graphic novels. This one is from France, Amma, which I'm currently reading, really deeply philosophical, very psychedelic. This one also gets pretty trippy, as you would guess by the name.

What I'd suggest that this is impossible to get as a hard copy, it's very, very challenging. Just get the Kindle. Get the Kindle versions. and Kindle, or I should say Amazon, acquired a company that allows you to read these graphic novels panel by panel, and it has this like zooming in, zooming out function that is beautifully designed. That's why they put the new full-color Kindle together, I think, to try and encourage people to get more graphic. Oh, it's beautiful, and I'll actually, I'll actually just... It's bode well for all of my... Yeah.

The graphic novels are not easy to read on mobile, but on, say, laptop or iPad or something, it's... What I want is, and I don't know if it would apply to this, but for my books and for a lot of... others that have a lot of visuals is I want audio I want audible or some to be like you're you're listening and then it's like ding you look and the screen just has the current drawing the current image and then you see you put it's put it back in your pocket and it's like ding oh it's a graph yeah right and it's why this supplementy materials available here's your attached PDF yeah such a game yeah that's what I do it's attached from PDF it sucks uh I've got into dungeon crawl a call have you read this book that's a fun one fuck me it's a fun it's I mean so red red rising

is the most addictive fiction series that I've found pretty much ever and they're about to release, Pierce is about to release book eight, I think, soon. And I got told, you know when you get a book suggestion from two or three different people who don't know each other,

yeah, all right, I just obviously need to do that. I've triangulated, they've triangulated me as a, and even the second recommendation, I'm like, okay, yeah, I should admit it. Dungeon Crawler Carl, so it's a lit RPG, literary RPG. So you're basically reading,

imagine somebody played a video game and you read a description of what happened. That's kind of what it's like and it is fucking unbelievable. And this guy is on book 8 or 9 now and he released the first one in 2020. Yeah. When are the what,

and I remember the number of reviews was insane. It's fucking wild. Dungeon Crawler Carl for me is up there with Red Rise. Very different. It's very edgy. It's really lighthearted and fun. There's a lot of inner monologue. There's interplay. You can tell that the story's going to get huge and unwieldy. There's progress. What's interesting is because he's leveling up. He's playing the game. Or he is the game. And as he goes along, he levels up skills and he's got to make a choice between which class he wants to be or this one. Do I want to make this particular sacrifice in terms of my strength and my dexterity or my intelligence? Or what should we upgrade this pet that we've got as and what armor should I put on? And you'd think, oh, that sounds so dry and boring. But it is.

It's got me. It's got me. It's happened to the same thing that makes those games addictive to play, probably, right? Watching someone upgrade. Yeah, whilst getting to read. 82,000 reviews on Amazon, 4.7 stars. Goodreads. Goodreads is 427,000.

It's insane. Since 2020. It's pretty fun. I only got through book one, and I enjoyed it. So I didn't make it beyond that. I don't know how you stopped at book one. Yeah. He was about to choose his class.

How did you stop at book one? I know. What have you been reading recently? Anything good? So for a long time I've been alternating between like, because for my writing, I'm constantly reading like nonfiction history or science, you know, whatever, things like that. For right now, I'm just reading a book called, what's it called? Something with Time by Carla Raveli.

The Order of Things. The Order of Time. Yeah. Benedict, come back. Dude. The audio. I would listen to him read anything. thing. So Benedict Cumberbatch is so good and he's reading it. And that's a book where talk about

people who listen to books on like 2x or whatever. I want to do that in like 0.4x because I have to constantly pause and just like think about what he just said and try to absorb. And then I go back. I'm going through this short four-hour book over like so slow. But that's for work. That's like for my book. I usually alternate between like history podcasts and sci-fi. Those are my right now. So I read the first book in the Expandse series, which I liked. I didn't love. I liked, so I didn't keep going. And then I read my wife, like an Instagram post of her favorite,

or the books she read in the year with the favorite to the least favorite stacked. And I usually don't cross over that much, but I was like, that top one, it's their top books or I read it. And it was so good. It was called A Fraction of the Hole by Steve Tolts. He's this Australian author, takes place in Australia. and it is so funny and it's such an adventure and it's this just fantastic fiction book

and it's not that well known and it was just such a joy and I would never have just picked that up in my own but I loved that and then and then I more recently obviously I read the whole three body problem trilogy which is by the way an example of one of those times when

I couldn't do that either oh really oh no here again I love the bailed out full Let me tell you. Let me just, this is very important. So there's three, there's three books. The first book is only a sixth of the length of the whole thing. Because the second and third book are much longer. The first book is a B, B plus. It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the first third of it is slow. So it is really, if you don't lose people there, you're going to lose people there. When you get 200 pages into the second book, the rest of, no, no, no, no, no, no, I know that sounds bad. Remind, this is 1400 pages. This is 45 and it will work side. This is 400. This is 400. 1400 pages, the series, and you're only 500 total pages in now. The next 900 pages is the greatest thing I ever read. It's the biggest adventure, and it's not like the first part's bad. It's just a little slow, and it's then it just takes you on this ride.

You've never been on. So if you haven't gotten, it's so worth a shame. I'm halfway through the first book, and I'm not kidding, it's taking me 10 attempts. Just, just move. I need to grind it out. You have to. My thought process with things like this, and particularly as I'm writing now, Good news. This takes an hour.

Great. I like high octane. And maybe it's just like my standard as a writer that I try and apply to somebody else. But I'm like, why did you have to wait? There's two and a half pages. If you watch Breaking Bad, the first scene of Breaking Bad, some trousers land in an air. There's an RV driving. Walter White's got a mask on with three people passed out looking dead in the back. And he's got a gun in his pocket that comes out in the first five minutes.

That's what I want. I don't think that's ideal. that's ideal in this case first of all it's like once you get to the end you also like

the beginning has more meaning to you I totally agree but this has managed to be so popular despite things I'm saying and this is by the way

an example of an author who actually I think didn't do a great job with the title which was not three body problem the title is

remembrance of Earth's past that's the title of the full series and no one knows that because basically readers were like we're going to pretend you didn't say that. We're going to come up with their own title.

It's a little bit like Game of Thrones. They didn't name Game of Thrones a Song of Fire and Ice, which is the actual title. They're like, Game of Thrones. The first book, that's going to be the title of the whole thing. Because it's just, I like when the fans kind of decide for you that we're not going to. It's interesting when something succeeds. And then the real, like, nuanced conversation is how much of it, it succeeded despite what's value of this. Because often, and you could look at Steve Jobs and go, the answer is turtlenex.

and carrot juice. But, I mean, those are either completely irrelevant or in despite of, and it tends to be like one power law that exists. And my correlation, not causation. Yes. And that's a real constant IQ test. Yes. So you're saying three body problem could be your vote for book that succeeded in spite of a bad real title. And, and a slow first 500 pages of the 1400. I mean, I've heard that Dune, but I've heard that Dune goes real up and down as well. So my problem is, I just stuck with the first one. Yeah, I read the first Dune. It was good. After three body problem to me, it's just like,

I read six Ian Banks books from the culture series, and they were really good. It's just, it'll never be. What makes it so good? The three body problem? Yeah. I mean, I think Dune is a masterpiece, right? I think Herbert was a genius.

The writing is not great. It's very, like, kind of just like literal note. It's not funny. It had to be translated as well, too, I guess. It had to be translated. The characters are super, like, boring people, like, playing, you know, there's no character development. This is a three-by role.

Yes. You're selling me well. No, the plot, the plot is the best plot I've ever read in my life for anything. It is the most gripping, rich plot and the concepts in the plot are so mind-bending and delicious. And everything that I've ever thought was cool. You know how like interstellar, which I don't think was actually that great in movie, but they had some killer concepts. Like, you go to this planet and time is different and you come back and your seven-year-old,

old daughter or whatever is 25 and it's like whoa right it has so much of things like that like the coolest thing i've ever heard like he now weaves it into the plot um and and and again it's really one big game theory i don't want to blow it for anyone but like in the first you know two you know 20% of the very first book the the plot is launched and it's one it's not a bunch of things it's one thing happens in the early part of the first book and then the rest of the book is basically playing out game theory, what would happen? How could this play out? And it's 1,400 pages of this is one story that's happening. This one thing that happens. And then what goes on from there? So I just think anyone who likes sci-fi or like space or like just, it is, you've got to get through. So the first book,

the first book in the series is three body crawl. It's three called three body crawl. And then there's the dark forest and then death's end. And again, once the dark forest is one of my favorite books of all time. And the death end is also one of my, these are like two of my favorite absolute books. And again, people also, it's like, oh, the first book is slow, but that's only a sixth of the whole series. So, yeah, that's what I would say. Well, I mean, seven eaves by Neil Stevenson, the moon explodes in the first line. Yeah. The first line of the book, the moon explodes. I love that. It was, it was something like, it was just after midday on a Sunday when the moon exploded. That's the first line of the book. Wow. It's pretty good. Boys, I appreciate you all. You're all

fucking awesome. Tim, you're going traveling for a bit, so I'm not going to see you for a while. Yeah. What have you got going on? Where should people go to keep up to date with the shit that you've got happening? Just go to tim. blog, just put up a blog post talking about how nonfiction is imploding, thanks to LLLLAMS. If you want to see real sales numbers on

disruption, that's there. Tim.blog, sign up for the newsletter. Tim.blog slash Friday. It's got 2 million subscribers. It's fun. It's free. So, right until my book is out, that can't, no one can buy that. That's fall of 27.

So for, well, who knows? Um, weekbooky.com is my homeland on the internet and all my posts are up and they're usually pretty evergreen. So that's still fun, I think. Um, but likewise, I would say newsletter is the thing to do because I don't post that often. And I only send an email out when I post something. So it's not annoying. And I always encourage people to get on board there. Uh, high agency.com forward slash books. Um, find out about Oblamov, who I spoke last time. My 400. page Russian novel where a man spends the first 50 pages worrying about how he's going to get out of bed. That's a... Having just criticized a man, he's been 500 pages. Read it, read it and see, like, what job of sit there? The most exciting time in bed. All right, my beauties, I appreciate you all. I'll see you again soon.

Thanks go. Boys, yes. There we go. How old. How nice. Yeah. Fun of shit. Yeah. Boom.

Good job, everyone. This, the amount of treats was such a... I had so much fun. These are incredible. Thank you. Take some away. Yeah, they're fine. Take some away with you.

Oh, that was so much fun.