The Tim Ferriss Show - #175: How to Cage the Monkey Mind

Episode Date: July 24, 2016

This episode is a little different. I visited the Googleplex -- the Mountain View-based headquarters of Google -- and had a public chat. I was interviewed and made sure that we covered some ground that has not been discussed before. There were questions such as: What has been the most important Stoic teaching that I've come across? How do I manage the many requests I receive? What are the factors or elements that have led to the success of the podcast? Where do I see myself in five years? If I could pick three people -- alive or dead -- to be in my personal board of directors, who would they be? How do I experiment with my dog training? What are my recommendations for longevity? How do I fight insomnia? And much, much more... As always, I hope you enjoy this episode and find it useful. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim. This episode is also brought to you by Headspace, the world's most popular meditation app (with more than4,000,000 users). It's used in more than 150 countries, and many of my closest friends swear by it. Try Headspace's free Take10 program -- 10 minutes of guided meditation a day for 10 days. It's like a warm bath for your mind. Meditation doesn't need to be complicated or expensive, and it's had a huge impact on my life. Try Headspace for free for a few days and see what I mean.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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say, athletics, business, politics, military. They could be from just about anywhere because there are patterns in the greatness and there are recipes, tactics, tools that you can use. This episode is a little different. I visited the Googleplex, that is the Mountain View based headquarters of Google, and had a chat, had a public chat. And I was interviewed myself. And I made sure by selection of the questions, I knew at least the first five to six or so that we would cover some ground that has not been covered before. So there were questions such as what has been the most important stoic teaching that I've come across? How can we stay humble? How do I manage the many, many requests that I receive in the inbound that I receive? What are the say success factors or elements that have led to the success of the Tim Ferriss Show, this podcast, and the patterns that I've

spotted. Where do I see myself in five years? If I could pick anyone alive or dead to be in my personal board of directors, who would they be? Three people, let's just say. How do I experiment with my dog training? These are things that many of you have asked me about and I haven't had a chance to cover before we get into human longevity, insomnia, et cetera. So I hope you enjoy this. It is a change of pace. It is shorter than the usual. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Welcome everyone. I'd like to introduce you to Tim Ferriss, author of the four hour work week, body and chef, host of The Tim Ferriss Show, the number one rated business podcast on iTunes, and a serial investor.

I'm your host, Jordan Thibodeau. So without further ado, let's give Tim a nice welcome. So Tim, what has been one of the most important Stoic teachings? So, Stoic philosophy is, in essence, the operating system that I use for making better decisions or try to use. It's very old, 2,000 plus years old, various iterations. And I would say that you can start many places, whether it's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations or the Moral Letters to Lucilius, the Letters of Seneca. Cato is particularly interesting to me, and one of the lessons that I try to implement in my life comes from Cato.

Cato was considered by many the perfect Stoic. I'm sure he was not perfect, as none of us are. But he would regularly, for instance, wear mismatched clothing in high-profile arenas where that was frowned upon so that he could train himself to be ashamed only of the things worth being ashamed of. So he would practice doing things that would earn him the superficial scorn of others. And the form that that can take is, can be very, very simple and you can do it in very small ways. But I have what I would call, for instance, and this is a ridiculous example, but that's the whole point. I have my party pants, which are these ridiculous pants that look straight out of Austin Powers. And I will occasionally wear those,

not to the extent that I would offend some guest host, like dinner host in some super, you know, I don't want to make enemies. That's not the goal, but I'll wear it in a place where I know that I'm going to get these sideways glances from everyone to try to inoculate myself against that type of superficial attachment to what others think. Uh, for a recently, I was wearing what I could best describe as like a creepy porn stash. It was a very ill-advised, half-grown mustache that looked terrible. It really did look, it was like chest of the molester. It was terrible. And I wore that around for like a good week and a half. And every time I would put up a photograph on Instagram or wherever it was, they'd be like, please, for God's sake, take that thing

off your face. And it was just an exercise. It was yet another exercise. And there are many different ways to do this. But I think that would be one that comes to mind is regularly practicing things that you feel embarrassed by but shouldn't, that have no grander importance whatsoever. So that when you train yourself to not be embarrassed by the small things, then when it comes time to make big decisions, stand up for something larger, you will have the training

that you need. And this is not necessarily stoic, but I think it's archilochisocus I'm not brushed up on my ancient pronunciation but the this is military this is a military context but it was we we do not rise to the level of our hopes we fall to the level of our training so what I like about stoicism is that it offers practical ways of practicing this the second second would be practicing your worst-case scenario. This is very similar. So, it's a larger meta example. Seneca, I think it's on fasting and festivals, or on festivals and fasting. I think it's letter 13, actually, in the Moral Letters to Lucilius, which I reread all the time.

Clearly, you can tell. And it says, set aside a certain number of days, say each month, which I do, during which you will be satisfied with the cheapest and scantest affair, where the roughest of clothing, et cetera, asking yourself all the while, is this the condition that I so feared? So practicing poverty, which would then empower you to make decisions because you know the worst case scenario isn't that bad. And for that reason, among other reasons we can get into, I do one three-day fast every month. I do one seven to 10-day fast every one to two quarters. And there are other things that I do on top of that, but those are a few that come to mind.

Excellent. In your podcast, you've talked about the monkey brain. Can you explain what that is? The monkey brain or monkey mind is, I think, inside all of us in some capacity. It's this incessant internal dialogue, or maybe not even a dialogue. Maybe it's just some stern or irritating roommate that you have in your head. And we can all think back to, say, elementary school. I remember there was this kid in my class. He was always misbehaving. And I remember at one point he got up.

It was like third grade and the teacher suddenly froze and we turned around and he had a fork over his head and he said, I am the master of the universe. And he stabbed an electrical outlet and just got like blown backwards. And you know, then there was this kid who would walk over and he would always, he would like build a building out of construction blocks. And then inevitably it would fall over when it got too tall. And then he'd just lay down and cry. And I think that as we get older, we learn to not do those things because you'd

be put in a straitjacket. But as a result, they're internalized. So all day we're walking around with some version or combination of all those things. And the context in which I probably brought it up, the monkey mind, was as it relates to my morning journaling. So I do regularly journal. Sometimes I do what would be considered morning pages. Other times I use something called the five-minute journal, which we could talk about.

But the goal is not to write, per se. I'm not doing it for someone else. I'm simply capturing my monkey mind, its litany of complaints or insecurities on paper so that it's not caught on repeat for the rest of the day. I'm simply giving it a two-dimensional prison or playpen so that I can then move on with my day and hit mute at least for a brief period of time on those things. But it's, I think that if you want to be less reactive to be the author

of your own life or business career, whatever it might be, you have to be able to do deep work and think long-term and rationally. And for all of those things, you need to get very good at identifying where you're being overly reactive to thoughts, to external factors outside of your control, whatever it might be. That ties back to the 5-Minute Journal. It does. The 5-Minute Journal is a journal that was created by a reader of the 4-Hour Workweek, actually. For those who have read the book, it was their muse. So one of their cash flow focused businesses in the context of lifestyle design. But you take two and a half minutes or so in the morning and then again at night.

And so one is effectively a focusing and planning exercise. There's also a gratitude component, which I think is very critical for those of us who are driven type A achievers. It's very easy to constantly be focused on the future. And just to pause for a second, I heard someone say that depression is an obsession with the past and anxiety is an obsession with the future. Well, if you look at achievers, they tend to be very future focused. And as soon as they hit a goal, they're like, don't have time to celebrate this small win. This isn't good enough. Bigger, bigger, better, et cetera. And that is a pattern that can be very self-destructive, even if you rack up a lot of wins at the same time. So the gratitude component is extremely critical. That

takes about two and a half minutes each day. And it also helps to identify your focal points or your priorities so that when inevitably that 10% that's left of the monkey mind pops up to like dance in front of you and distract you from your objectives you set out for the day, you can return to that. And then at the end of the day, it's basically a performance review. And I find it incredibly helpful and a lot of ROI for the time invested. Excellent. So it seems like it gives you a degree of mental clarity. Yeah, it does. And I think that what separates, if I think about my podcast, I've interviewed 100 to

150 world-class performers across every possible domain imaginable sports entertainment politics art chess it just goes on and on that the difference between somebody who's good that like the you know let's just call it the top quartile of the population in their chosen field and the top one%, it's the degree to which they can focus to determine their goals and maintain that focus. Gotcha. It's one of the largest distinguishing factors. Excellent.

Now, with people who've achieved such success in their careers or in athletics or whatever, what do people do to maintain their humbleness? Humility, I think, is not too tough to maintain if you create the proper environments. And I'm not a huge fan of self-control or willpower. I think it's really overrated. It's like, oh, well, like fat people are fat because they just lack the willpower. It's like, no, that's a stupid, lazy answer or just a shite observation. Like if you look at behavioral modifications, like they just have lack of incentives. They have lack of social accountability. Maybe they don't have the

information that they need. Uh, and you can create environments in which you can train. And I come back to this over and over and over again, but there are a few things I think that are very helpful. One is memento mori. So remembering that you're going to die and putting that, it's also very stoic. They're somewhat obsessed about death, even to a degree that I find weird. But memento mori, so constantly revisiting death and realizing it forces you to put your life in a broader context of civilization in the world. And I think that in and of itself is very corrective. And how do you practice or develop that sense of memento mori? I have a quote on my refrigerator.

That's from Marcus Aurelius and meditations, by the way, is effectively a war journal. While Marcus Aurelius, who was the most powerful man on the planet at the time, emperor of Rome was on military campaign. And he would write these entries to do exactly this, to remind himself that he was just a man.

He was going to die. It would all be dust. And it sounds depressing until you realize the clarity and lack of waste that comes from constantly repeating those types of things. Then you have memento homo, probably getting the pronunciation off, but that is remembering that you are just a man or a person. So we don't have, we, those in this room probably are not going to commission like Julius Caesar, someone to hold a laurel wreath over your head

while you're doing a procession, like the Roman triumph to say, you were just a man, you were just a man, you're not a God. Uh, but the way that you can very easily humble yourself is to always try to be the weakest person in the room in something like every day you should be the weakest person in the room at some point, whether that is in a meeting, whether that is in a sport, whether that is in a gym, whether that is in a chess match, it doesn't matter. But I always try to be the weakest person in the room. And I remember when I was 15, I had my first time over, first time overseas for any extended period of time. I was in Japan for a year, and I ended up being a judo player.

I was competing in judo. And the high school that I went to was not particularly strong in judo, but I was the big fish in the little pond. And I got very high and mighty. I thought I was just the cat's meow. And I wasn't too overt about it, but I was very satisfied with how well I was doing. Went to my first tournament and I got demolished in seven seconds by this guy who weighed 40 pounds less than I did. Like, you know, that was it. I was

done. And I got up, I'm like, I'm fine. They're like, no, you're the loser. You're done. You are done. And, uh, I was so demoralized. And I was the only white guy in the tournament. And there were a lot of people just hoping that they would be able to wag a finger and laugh. And I mean, love Japan, but it's like, I get it. Very homogenous place. So I ended up going after that to a cram school for judo, like a juku. They have it for all sorts of things at night.

And I went to Tokai University's judo cram school. So Tokai University produces gold medalists in the Olympics. They're really, really tough. So I went in, and I was 15 at the time. And I got just annihilated by 12-year-olds. I mean, talk about embarrassing. I mean, if you can try to flash back to high school, and you're like, Oh, you know, and you're getting, you're like a sophomore in high school getting killed by sixth graders or seventh graders. So embarrassing, including women. I was getting

torn to pieces and I got trashed for three or four months. And I was like, wow, I don't feel like I'm making a lot of progress. My endurance is getting a little bit better and went to a tournament that had the same competitors as the previous tournament and just walked through everybody, just steamroll because I had a better cohort group. I was the weakest in the room. Right. Uh, as long as you're trending in the right direction, it doesn't matter if you're losing. And so that would be, that would be one approach, just like every day. Schedule it, plan it, be the weakest person in the room in some capacity. Nice.

So bring it to communication. You have multiple people trying to reach out to you and contact you. How do you manage all of those requests? I suppose the short answer is I don't manage all those requests. The irony of the four-hour work week, among many others, is that my systems have to be 100 times better now than they were when the book came out. Because if you look at my assistants and the various inbound channels that we have, or try to avoid but nonetheless have,

it's 1,500 to 2,000 direct messages of some type every day that hit me and my team. That's excluding all the tweets, Facebook mentions, Google Plus, et cetera. It's ignoring all of that. So the way that I try to think about handling that is having rules set in advance. So for instance, if we were to take a corporate or startup analogy, you don't want to decide how to respond to a crisis when a crisis hits. If you think you're going to have a disaster, you want to role play it out and say, all right, if A, then B, C, or D. If X, then Y, and Z. And do have a plan in place so that, and this all ties back together, if disaster strikes, you are not reactive. You don't make a compulsive, or not

compulsive, impulsive decision that could destroy a lot of what you've worked to achieve, including your reputation. So with email, I have very particular rules and I will block out periods of time. For instance, I'm going to take July and I did this about two years ago in Bali. There's actually a good piece in Inc magazine called the four hour reality check. That's, that's not a bad read about this, but I'm blocking out July to focus on writing and deep work in that capacity. So I have to set up systems and rules in advance so that I don't have to be on email or calendar or phone, which is what I did for a month in Indonesia. I'm going to do it this time overseas. And so the important thing is deciding

on your policies. And I've realized for myself that I do moderation very poorly, whether it's caffeine, booze, like if I'm on, I am on. And if I am off, I am off. So that is why I decided to take a startup vacation, effectively retirement as of about nine months ago, I realized for, this is just one example. I was drowning in email intros to founders and cold emails and pitches and this, that, and the other thing. Whether I do 100 deals a year, 10 deals a year, one deal a year, if I have to filter and look at all of the inbound to make decisions, it's almost the exact same amount of work. Does that make sense? So trying to pare back in moderation is, it's a fool it's a, it's a fool's errand. You just

end up doing the same amount of work. So I will decide like, am I doing speaking engagements or not? Period. Am I doing say interviews or not? Period. Am I writing for any other sites whatsoever? Cause I get hit by people who want me to write for this and this new startup to write for such and such established media that's trying to branch into whatever. No, like the answer for that is absolutely not because I'm focusing on my own writing and the five minute journal and all these things help to allow you to practice that focus. Uh, and then there, then there are tools, right? So there's a very small subset, let's just call it 1% to 2%, that get me closer to the mountain that I see in the distance, which represents the goals I've already set for

myself. And I'll have metrics. I'll have KPIs, key performance indicators for these things, like podcast growth. And a great commencement speech by Neil Gaiman everybody should check out called Make Good Art. It's fantastic. But he talks a lot about this. And then the question is,

what are the tools or policies, tactics that help with managing that subset that I am going to tackle? I use tools like Schedule Once for scheduling. It allows other people to find times and to avoid the back and forth. If you guys want to see something that'll be painfully humorous, you can check out, I think it's Let's Get Drinks in, I believe, the New Yorker. Somebody can look that up. You'll be like, that is my life. I remember there was a tweet that I sent recently, which was adulthood, I'm paraphrasing, adulthood is saying, sorry for the late reply until one of you dies. It's like, that is a sad state of affairs. So I'll use schedule once I'll use a tool called boomerang, which allows me to not just automate follow-up reminders. If I don't hear back from someone, but to set parameters.

And secondly, this is very underused as a feature to send in the future. So the way you train someone, just like training a dog or a manatee or anything else, it's the same stuff. There's a great book called Don't Shoot the Dog that you should all read about for training humans also, is you can extend the time between which you respond to certain types of people. And it just teaches them that you are not on IM. Email is not messenger for you. So sending in the future, very helpful. Processing email. I use Gmail offline a lot.

So I'll process email, batch process email offline so that I don't have the psychological trauma of feeling like I'm doing whack-a-mole, where I send off two emails and I get five back. I'm just like, I can't. I'm drowning. I can't do this. And then'm just like, I can't. I'm drowning. I can't do this. And then you're like, I should go watch Game of Thrones or whatever you use to procrastinate to avoid that batch processing offline.

Hugely valuable. And there are other things that I do. I'll give one more, which is if you send an email, try to think of if-then scenarios. So the engineers in the room will probably do this naturally. I'm just thinking in terms of scripts or algorithms. But if you send an email, you're like, hey, can you meet up next week? And that's the end of the email. That's a bad email.

So can you meet up next week? I suggest this time or this time. This is my first choice. If you can't do those times, please suggest two or three times in this time frame that work for you. Let's set it for 30 minutes. Being really specific, it takes an extra 30 seconds on the front end and it will save you 20 exchanges on the back end. So just always thinking, is there an if-then line that I should put in this email before you hit send? Saves a lot of time. But I try to move as much as possible off of email to things like slack

Dropbox Etc whenever possible it was I mean is designed for emergency military communication for what we use it for current, right? So most of us here in audience have listened to your podcast and it's been wildly successful What do you think drives a success of the podcast? I think the podcast is successful because I, I knew I had a guaranteed audience of one. And that means I was scratching my own itch. Uh, in the case of whenever I try to design something for a market, it fails. Whenever I just do something that I couldn't find for myself, then it does fine. It seems to be the trend. So I'm scratching my own itch. And what I was missing was the long form flythe-wall conversation, but also the tactics and the really detailed nitty-gritty how-to stuff.

And all the books came about this way. I was looking for something, looking for something, looking for something. I was just like, fuck, I'll just write it myself. This is too annoying because I would gather all these resources. I'd be like, okay, I will at least compile this. And in the case of the podcast, I wanted to try to spot the patterns and all these experts. And I was already doing this type of prep work for the books by ferreting these people out. And it happened, it's just so happens that I would have these dinners or drinks with folks who are the best at what they do. And I would think afterwards, usually two or three glasses of wine in, man, this is so good.

Like, I wish I could just share this. Like, why don't I just record this? And then if any of you heard the first episode, so sloppy with Kevin Rose, because I was so nervous, even though he was a close friend, still is a close friend. And he was just like busting my balls the whole time. Cause that's what close guy friends do to each other. And so was just like busting my balls the whole time because that's what close guy friends do to each other. And so I was just drinking way too much. And I remember recording the first podcast. And I'd committed to doing six. This is important.

I can mention why. But I was skipping through the audio, just checking on the quality. And it's like two hours long, two and a half hours long. And about an hour in, I was so anxious for whatever reason. And I was like, well, Kevin, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. And then I was like, all right, whatever. Click forward like an hour. And the same exact phrase came up.

And it was like, well, Kevin, I want to be respectful of your time. And I was like, oh, my God, this is terrible. And I had this like lip-smacking tick. And all this stuff was like, oh, the shame, the shame. And I committed to six. Because if you only do one, you're going to quit. Or most people will. So you commit to six. And the question I asked myself, because the success,

you ask what makes you successful. There are actually a bunch of questions baked into that. There's what makes the product something that could be successful. There's what makes it something that spreads. But there's also why it survived, which is maybe the better question. If I had tried to do something fancier, like fill in the blank, something that is produced really well, like Freakonomics Radio, I don't have the experience or the resources,

I would have become overwhelmed and I would have quit. So rule number one is if you want something to be successful, you can't quit after two episodes. You actually have to get to a point where you're learning curve hockey sticks. And I believe for my format, for podcasts in general, that's at least six episodes. So the questions that I think have allowed it to succeed for me and for me to feel successful doing it because I enjoy it is number one, how do I keep this fun? Number two, what would it look like if it were simple? Like I ask myself that question more and more all the time now. What would this look like if it were dead simple, stupid simple?

Okay, Ferris, I know you like feature creep. I know you love writing 700-page books, but let's hold back on that for a second. What would this look like if it were easy? Try that first. So I think those are a few things, but it's very, very, very, very tactic-rich. Routines, habits, what is the book that you've gifted the most to other people? What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like specifically exact times? How do you make your coffee? Yeah, you have coffee. How do you make your coffee? You know, what brand do you like? Why? And just

I try and harness that OCD in a way that is helpful instead of making my relationships implode. Right. Something like that. Yeah. So I think, I think that's been it, but scratching your own itch. It's like, if you have a guaranteed market of one, i.e. yourself, you're ahead of 99% of the entrepreneurs out there. Right. Now, you've done almost like 100 plus podcasts now? Probably 150 episodes.

Okay. So now you have a wide enough sample statistic to see of these successful people. Are you seeing commonalities as leading to their success in their careers? I think there are a few things that come to mind right away. The first is, now this could be a selection bias. Maybe I'm choosing people who are more prone to have certain things in common than others,

or I'm attracted to people in a way that biases this, but at least 80% of the people I've interviewed across all domains have a daily meditation practice of some type. Certainly, if you want to cut down on monkey mind, the first step is just to become aware of it and kind of observe it like a really shitty comedy in your head. It's like, what is my brain doing? This doesn't make any sense. And 20 minutes in the morning is a great way to do that. And I'm not particularly in favor of one versus another. I found TM, Transcendental Meditation, to be very helpful because it's presented in a very secular way. And I find the white noise of a mantra, the word mantra bugs me so much, but a word that you repeat over and over again to be very helpful. But Vipassana, there's a good book called Waking Up by Sam Harris. Sam

Harris, who's a PhD in neuroscience, has been on the podcast and talked about this. Tara Brock, also fantastic. 80 plus percent have some type of meditation practice, even if they don't call it meditation. So I've, for instance, interviewed Amelia Boone, incredible endurance athlete, the most successful female, uh, endurance, uh, athlete and obstacle course racing in the world. But also in like 2012 at the world's toughest motor, I think it was about 1200 competitors and night, probably 90% male. She came in second place out of everybody. That's a 24 hour race. I mean mean she is super tough and you know she said well I don't really have a meditation practice and I was like what do you do when you're

running she's like I either listen to like one track over and over again or I sing one track to myself over and over you know well that sounds a whole hell of a lot like meditation to me and then I got Arnold Schwarzenegger for instance this was a really cool example. He did, he does everything a hundred percent Arnold. Like when he goes, he really goes. And he did, I think it was transcendental meditation for a year. And then he felt like he hit a certain plateau in the benefits and he stopped, but he said that the benefits persisted for decades. Very, very cool idea. The prospect of that is very exciting. So meditation would be one.

Two, of the males, and we could theorize as to why this is the case, but of the males, a high percentage of the interviewees over the age of 50 skip breakfast. Very high percentage. Wim Hof, General Stanley McChrystal, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. There's a long list. Pavel Tsatsulin, the Russian who effectively brought kettlebells to the U.S. Remember I asked him, my usual soundcheck question is, what did you have for breakfast? And he's like, breakfast, coffee. I was like, we need more of a soundcheck.

He's like, Tim, I like to keep it simple. I was like, ah, all right, all right. Pavel's awesome, one of my favorite episodes. Let's see. I find just as interesting as the patterns, I find the differences reassuring. Because, of course, I think we're pattern recognition machines, so I'm looking for the secrets.

It's like, okay, just net-net. Give me the, what do 80% of these people have in common? So I can just do that, that's my recipe, and then I'll have everything that I want. Great. Do everything that I want. Be happy. Oh, that'd be fantastic. But what I've realized over time is that what appears to be the case, because you have, at first I was interviewing all these people and they're like, I wake up at 4.30 in the morning, like Jocko Willink, the most decorated special operations commander from the Iraq war. He's like, wake up at 4.30. And I had a string of about 10 of these interviews where And he's like, wake up at four 30. And, uh, I had a string

of about 10 of these interviews where they're like, I wake up at four 30, I wake up at five. And I was like, Oh God, I don't want to wake up at four 30. For me, like I'm waking up at the ass crack at dawn is like eight 30. Like that's a major effort for me. Cause I go to bed so late and I've historically done all my best writing between like 11 p.m. and like 4 or 5 a.m. And then I had a few folks who were very late at night. I was like, oh, thank God. Okay. That was close.

And what I realized is, and there's a quote, I'm going to masquerade, but I'm going to paraphrase here that I think it's W.H. Auden, A-U-D-E-N, I might be getting the last name wrong, but routine in an intelligent man is a sign of ambition. And I think that what is important is not having a specific routine. It's having a routine. That's it. Like you have a routine that allows you to preserve your decision-making and in your creativity hit points, sorry, Dungeons and Dragons for the things that actually matter. So that you're not waking up and every morning deciding what to have for breakfast. You're not waking up every morning and maybe deciding what to wear, right? Steve Jobs, et cetera.

I have quite a few friends who wear the same thing effectively every day. So in what ways can you preserve your decision-making budget, your creativity budget for the things that you are uniquely good at and that really matter? And the answer seems to be you have a lot of routines and you can have your own routines, but what's important is that you have a routine or routines that you stick to for periods of time. That seems to be, and there are many, many, many, many, many different routines, but those would be a few. A lot of them, the majority of them are insomniacs. So take heart. Just because you're an insomniac doesn't make you successful, but it seems to be a symptom

or a common side effect of a lot of their behavior. And then scratching their own itch. Almost all of them scratch their own itch. Almost all of them scratch their own itch. And this is actually super important. I think there's a lot of rah, rah, like motivational speaker business advice out there that is utter horseshit. And I think one of the biggest delusions, illusions, or just hoaxes is like optimism. Think big. The passion's going to drive you by like, that's how the people who are really successful are successful. That might be the story you read about in the magazines because it makes for a fun hero's journey type of story. But the people that, that I've been most impressed by ask themselves all the time, what is the worst case

scenario? They're budgeting for the downside. So in other words, they're not using optimism to allow them to take action. They're not just like, you know what, I'm going to jump off the cliff and grow wings on the way down or whatever the, you know, the cliche is that you might find on like a calendar and office space. No, they're saying the way that I do things that other people think are high risk or other people think are risky, dangerous, whatever it might be, is because I write down the worst case scenarios, ask myself, what can I do to mitigate these things from happening? And then I ask myself, if they happen, what can I do to get back to where I am now? And I realize these risky things are not risky at all. They're totally reversible.

They're just speed bumps if anything goes wrong, really, in the grand scheme of things. And so they get a lot of at-bats. They're really good at capping the downside. Branson has said this. As much as he has a lot of rah-rah stuff, you drill down into it. He's really good at deciding what is the most I can lose if I do X? What is the most time that I can lose if we do Y? And then making decisions based on that sort of that loss limit, if that makes sense. So that's very heartening because I've never been, I mean, I would like to say I'm a follow my passion kind of guy. I get excited about things. I want to scratch my own itch. But I think that the real toolkit is getting really good at asking, you know, is this the

condition that I so feared? What if? And once you sort of neuter the worst case scenarios and depower them, you're like, oh, yeah, this is fine. Like, this is totally fine. It's not any riskier than just investing and watching a new TV series on Netflix. Maybe you get three episodes in and you're like, damn it, I can't believe I watched three hours

of this crap. You choose another series. It's not the end of the world. Right now, that's true. Narcos. Watch Narcos. Very good. So good. Family for season two. So good. Oh, that was such a head fake at the end. But I'm kind of happy yeah sorry i digress i know

billions also good uh but i digress again yeah no when i saw narcos i didn't actually like some of the things that happened like did this really happen oh yeah yeah i spent a good amount of time in colombia and in medellin on a road that was called the road of death because Pablo Escobar's henchmen used to drop dead bodies down ravines on either side and they would just be piled with bodies so yeah tough history yeah yeah um that's really hard to transition you're stuck on 101 in traffic and you're like cursing the gods be like oh these sides of the road aren't littered with bodies could be a lot worse yeah could be a lot worse so period break all right period semicolon so next transition don't use don't use semicolons yeah i've seen many careers ended on this or m dashes i love m dashes lazy. Now, are there plans to write a book about these podcasts and the experience you've had?

You know, I've been toying with it. I put some feelers out on social media to see if people would be interested because usually when I end up doing something, it's when it's less painful to do it than to not do it. So the insomnia for me, I've actually become, I'm much better at getting asleep, much better falling asleep. But, uh, usually when I end up pulling the trigger on something, it's when it keeps me up for like four or five nights straight. And just like the ideas are coming. I'm like, God, stop, make it stop. I want to go to sleep. But it's that excitement, good stuff, uh, which is how the four hour work week happened. It was like waking up and writing down stuff and be like, ah, let me go to sleep. Get out of my head.

Let me go to sleep. And, um, so for the last week or two, the, the idea of sort of distilling the patterns and learnings and the stuff that was like not in the podcasts also like the experiments that I've done afterwards or in between or other interactions I've had with these guests, there are a lot of just really actionable, awesome habits and tools that I've actually tested. So, well, let me take a poll. So how many people here have listened to the podcast? All right. Of those people, how many would be interested in like a distilled synopsis of the best lessons learned in the podcast? All right. So it's like a 60, 70%. Yeah. I think there's a decent chance. I just think it would be, and I'll tell you why also it's not the reason you might expect what, what i suffer from most what pains me the most about the podcast is the like embarrassment

of riches that comes out of a two and a half hour conversation because i do i have one of these coming out a week i don't have time to actually digest and reflect on all the stuff that i'm putting out right i do as much as i can but i just just don't have the bandwidth. And now I've done 150. I'm like, in part of me, it's like, I don't need to interview anybody else. Like, this is enough. Like, I want to do it because I enjoy it. But I'm like, if you can't figure out how to improve any aspect of your life from these 150 people across like a hundred different disciplines, you're an idiot. Like Tim Ferriss talking to myself. So it's like, go back and review, review idiot. Like you've done tests before. Life is the test. Start studying or you're going to like have a

panic attack. So, uh, this would give, if I were to go back and try to distill all this stuff, it would give me the incentive and opportunity to do exactly that, to go back and actually pull out all these things. I'm like, Oh my God, that's right. Like the most successful people in the business and investing realm recommended Sapiens. This book on evolutionary biology effectively. It's like, that's weird. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Maybe I should read Sapiens. Yeah. Fill in the blank. There's so many examples like that. So it should be done by july right alas i'm fast at many things book writing is not one of them but uh it wouldn't be it certainly would not take as long as as some of the like soul crushing projects that i've allowed myself to right

expand from like four hour chef was supposed to be 250 pages. It ended up 670. After 250 pages were cut, it's like, what was I thinking? Like, oh, yeah, I'll do 30% of the photographs myself. How hard could that be? Oh, yeah, it turns out photography, really tough to do well. So I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. So I got two more questions before we go back to the audience. The first question is so good that I almost forgot it. The first question is, what are your plans?

Where do you see Tim going in the next five years? TIM FLETCHER- Tim in five years. Tim sees Tim. This is like Hulk speak. I see in the next five years, well, let me pause before I answer that to say I've never had reliable five-year plans, 10-year plans or otherwise. And I treat my entire life as a series of two-week experiments and six-month projects because, and maybe this is just the way I cope with life and decision making, but I

feel like if you make a five or 10 year plan that you can reliably hit, almost by definition, you have to set a plan that is below your current capabilities. Like if you're an A student, you have to set a C plus plan for it to be 100% achievable. That I think is just a great way to paint yourself into a very unattractive corner. So two week experiments, six month projects is kind of how I view my whole life. But if I had to guess, I would say five years, less hair, better gymnastics, which is my new thing. one of my new things. But larger picture, I see myself doing the podcast or some iteration of it, just deconstructing experts and world-class

performers on a much, much larger scale. I think and want it to be 10 times bigger without sacrificing the nitty gritty, the nerdiness, or going into the details. It's like, if I want to talk about exogenous ketones, which by the way, internet are not androgynous ketones, exogenous ketones outside the body with like Dom D'Agostino and talk about Navy SEALs and rebreathers and all this geeky shit for an hour and a half, that's what I'm going to do. And if I'm having fun, hopefully other people will. And so I think that will continue to be a component because whether or not I'm publishing it, that's what I'm doing anyway.

So I'd like to, but by doing it publicly, I force myself to get better. It's a strong incentive to refine the blade. I think that, you know, there's a chance I'll have family. We'll see about that stuff. We went on a conversation about my thoughts on marriage and relationships. That's a whole separate thing that requires a lot more tequila. Or maybe a four-hour work week.

Yeah, that's a whole separate thing. Four-hour parent not coming anytime soon. Somebody was like, what about the four-hour relationship? I'm like, what is that, a guide to one-night stands? I mean, that's a best-case scenario. I feel like other people have written that book. Don't need to do it. Uh, so, uh, I think five years from now, I hope to be, I hope to be better at simplifying. I think I'm good, but I know I can be better. I would like to, I, this is the first time in a long time that I've ever said this. Like I want to still be doing what I'm doing with the podcast. I'm just really loving it. And like with

books, if anybody, well, I know there are people in the audience who have written books and I'm not going to have anybody confess their sins now, but it's like you get through a book. And I remember it was 90% done with the four hour body. And I was talking to this author. I'm like, ah, God, I'm so bored of this. Oh my God. I can't stand rereading these chapters. I'm 90% done. I'm almost there. He goes, Oh, congratulations. You only have 50% left. And I was like, Oh God, you're so right. And it's just so painful to give birth to these things. It's like crowning with like a, you know, Tony Robbins head. That sounds terrible, but it's like, Tony, I love you. You know that.

But it's just like an image of birthing. I would have preferred Total Recall with Arnold. Or Arnold. Or something. Yeah, so probably also painful and kind of freaky. So let that haunt your dreams, everyone. But with the podcast, it's like when I finish a good interview, I did one with BJ Miller,

especially with someone who's not widely known. BJ Miller is a palliative care and hospice expert who's helped a thousand people or so transition to death. And I finished and I'm just like, I feel so much smarter after having had this conversation. And it just makes me so stoked to do it again a week later. So I want to be continuing along those lines, but I fully expect that doors will close that I think are currently open. Doors will open that I don't even know exist at the moment. And that's part of the two weekweek experiment, six-month project plan. So I'm okay with that. That's part of what makes it exciting, quite frankly. If I had a predictable plan, I think I would run out of steam.

I wouldn't have the gasoline or the electricity, those of you who drive Teslas, to make it work. And I hope to be taking, I don't think I take myself too seriously, but I hope to even to a greater extent be embracing and creating absurdity in the world and laughing at myself because I think it's very hard to get anything serious. I think it's really hard to get anything truly big and serious done if you take yourself too seriously. Another reason why I do drunk Q&As sometimes on the Internet. I'm not drunk right now. I can verify, yeah.

The final question, let's say you had a personal board of directors, and you could put three people on there, living and dead. Who would those people be? Personal board of directors, three people. I would say the first few that come to mind would be Benjamin Franklin the merry prankster himself just such a colorful character and multi

faceted really incredible amateur who was able to best a lot of the professionals because of that beginner mind and lack of fear and I think that prankster like nature was very helpful. The Walter Isaacson biography of Franklin is so good.

So, so good. It slows down for me in the sort of last third, but the beginnings are so incredible. They're really fantastic, highly recommended. Second, Richard Feynman, probably. The physicist, I guess, from Caltech, largely associated with Caltech. Another prankster. Just like another polymath slash prankster who used to, in addition to being a world-class physicist at Los Alamos and whatnot, he became a safe breaker just to annoy his superiors.

I wouldn't suggest this in today's climate, but he used to break into these safes at Los Alamos, take out the top secret documents, and then put them on his boss's desk and then close the safe and just leave it there. Not for extended periods of time, but just to cause his boss to have a complete panic attack. Learned to play the bongos. Had some debate with an artist friend, and they got really fired up.

And he was like, well, I'm going to teach you about science. And he's like, all right, well, I'm going to teach you how to paint. So he got really into painting, and he would go into strip clubs to paint strippers. Like, I love this guy. It was hilarious. So I think Feynman, although I might not be able to get a word in edgewise with him and

Franklin at the same table. And then probably need some serious person with some scars. I mean, not that they aren't serious, but maybe like a Marcus Aurelius type, who's like somebody who's had the weight of the world literally on their shoulders and has had to make life and death decisions. Yeah, I think maybe a Marcus Aurelius. I'm not sure if I can get him to laugh much. Maybe a Musashi, although he'd probably kill all of us.

Musashi Miyamoto or Miyamoto Musashi. Anyway, yeah, I'd say Marcus Aurelius. I'll go with him. Sounds good. So thank you so much for coming out. I listen to your podcasts every week. Thank you. And to actually see a face that moves with them is a neat experience.

His head is so much bigger than I thought. Do you look like a bridge troll? I apologize for that. I look like a bridge troll? No, I look like a bridge troll. Oh, this is good. We're getting off. Limbering up.

I look like a bridge troll. Look at this thing. It's like a narwhal or something. All right, continue is good. We're getting off. Limbering up. I look like a bridge. Don't look at this thing. It's like a narwhal or something. All right. Continue. Sorry. So I actually have a Molly question, which, by the way, where is she? Molly.

Totally thought you would have brought her with you. Yeah. So Molly is my pup. She's about 11 months old. She's hiking right now. So she's probably in the Marin Headlands with a walker. That was not the full mic question. Yeah. So I know she's 11 months old. I actually with a walker. That was not the full-length question. Yeah.

So I know she's 11 months old. I actually have a nine-month-old puppy. So follow a lot of what you talk about in your Five Bullet Fridays about her and the toy that spits out food. And I know that you do a lot of testing experimentation on yourself. And I was just wondering, as you're raising a puppy, not inhumanely, but do you do any kind of testing experimentation in her training?

DAVID MALANI- Right. So testing experimentation with Molly. So in between the beatings, you mentioned humane. No. No beatings. No beatings. I'm testing all the time. And it's not like I'm putting her in a Skinner box

or anything. But I think that it is a great, as with I think many things in life, like how we do anything is how we do everything sometimes. And I found that getting better at training Molly, being attuned to her needs, but also being consistent with my training and sequencing the training in the right way. So just in the four-hour chef, when I talk about meta-learning and discs like deconstruction, selection, sequencing, I approach dog training the same way, which is really just animal training, including humans. So don't shoot the dog, great framework to start with. And I think crate training, huge. Even if

you have an older dog, I think that clicker training for just precision super helpful karen prior is pretty good for that also and uh training for attention as a prerequisite to all other skill training and you can do that very easily by for instance getting a treat in one hand and a clicker in the other. And you hold the treat in front of your dog's face after they sit. And then you hold the treat out to the side, their eyes will travel with it. Wait until their eyes come back to your eyes and then you click the clicker and you give them the treat. And by doing that in various ways, you instill in them the habit of constantly checking in with you using eye contact and it makes everything

else come sit stay down infinitely easier so thinking about how to sequence those skills is very it's very fun uh training for safety first trick second it's also something I look very carefully at. So I will do timed stays. So like down stay, and I'll do like, she has to do it for five minutes. And then I'll give her like, you know, the beluga caviar of dog treats. But to do that, you also need a no reward marker. There are different ways to do this. So the reward marker would be click treat. No reward marker, like you can use, uh-oh, you can use different types of verbal cues to say, you screwed up, in other words. And always getting your dog, sorry, this is something I'm really into. So using sit for please is another thing that I think is very helpful for safety and is a prerequisite skill.

Anytime she wants anything, sit. And that's like, duh, okay, tell me something I don't know, but I'll give you a variation that you might not think of. Anytime I open a door, she sits first, I go out next, then she looks at me and I go, okay, and she comes to the door. This means your dog never jumps out of the car when you open a hatchback and gets hit by another car. Will never happen. If, well, I shouldn't say never. Never say never. But you've just decreased the likelihood infinitely.

So those are a few things that I've played around with. But I think the sequencing of skills is something that most dog training books do extremely poorly. There's one book that I'm hoping to acquire and just give away for free, quite frankly. It's really thin. It's called Command Performance. And it's a short compilation of like two pages per behavior put together by the whole dog journal. I'm sure it's based somewhere in Northern California with a name like that.

Maybe Portland. And I would start with that. I think it'll go a really long way. There are also some YouTube channels that I think are helpful. Kiko pup, K I K O pup is one that I found very helpful, but you run into the same issue that you run into with any type of coach. Like jujitsu is very problematic for this.

Everything is where the instructor walks in and they just kind of decide on the technique. Does your, and then they teach you that there's no sequence, there's no progression. And with dogs or humans, if you want the best result you need progression so this is me yeah long answer but thanks I have an online question there's a lot of talk and focus on human longevity what would you actually recommend people begin

doing as they approach their 40s and beyond for a minimum effective dose man if you're in your 40s, it's just too late. Pick out your casket at Costco. No, I jest. I'm always there myself. The preface has to be, I am not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. This is not medical advice, blah, blah, blah. Talk to qualified professionals.

But if I were to, or maybe I am already, if I were to pursue increasing lifespan, it would not be, it would not be at the expense of performance. Number one, I just enjoy performance too much. So it can't make me like a sexless listless depressed person, which a lot of things that extend lifespan do. Really, really extended caloric restriction. Like, yeah, have fun with that. You'll wish you were going to die sooner. So I'm not going to do that. But I do fasts to purge precancerous cells. Like by the time you're 40, almost everybody will have what you could consider precancerous or cancerous cells. What you don't want is uncontrolled growth of the cells.

And you can affect that by understanding the idiosyncrasies of cancer metabolism. But just to keep it simple, you want to experience ketosis and or fasting for semi-extended periods of time. To me, that means at least two to three days. This is all a work in progress, but it's based on good literature. So I would do, say, I do one three-day fast, meaning water, per month. Typically, I'll finish Thursday dinner and then fast to Sunday dinner. And I may combine that with, this is addressing cancer in part.

There are other mortality causes, of course. But I might use hyperbaric oxygen at like 2.5 atmospheres for 60 to 90 minutes, three times a week. That's straight from Dominic D'Agostino, who I had on the podcast, who's looked at the use of hyperbaric oxygen, not only ketogenic diet and fasting, but also exogenous ketones, like mixing up a powder and drinking it like Gatorade and how that can extend lifespan in rats and different species. Other things I would consider would, of the, if we're looking at pills, because everybody

asked me about this, I would say the medication that has the most support that I find compelling would be metformin right now. Glucophage. So you could look up metformin. There are side effects, but I do know a lot of MDs who are using it prophylactically to extend, to decrease the likelihood of dying from a few different things. Okay. Those would be first to mind. Excellent. Don't drive a car.

Maybe number three. Yeah. Quick question. How did you manage to conquer your insomnia? And what's the delta from 4-hour body to now? Mental interventions, physical ones. And especially when it comes to mental ones, how did you figure out or how could one figure out what is keeping them awake at night or what makes their sleep quality poor?

Good question. So insomnia, what has helped me the most? There are a few things. I would say they're the obvious ones, but sometimes the obvious are important. Let me address the variable question first. So there are controlled studies where you're looking for a certain p-value and you're looking for a certain power and you care a lot about isolating variables. If you care about results first and foremost, you can still identify what the primary

movers are, but I'll do it after the fact. What I mean by that is right now I have extreme elbow tendonitis. I actually have fixed most of it, but that's a whole separate conversation. And I did it by throwing maybe six variables at it at a time. And I do six at a time. And then if it helped, I could then, because I cared first and foremost about training, I could remove variables and see what the impact, reversal of effects, etc. was. So generally, I'm throwing quite a bit at the problem and then removing variables once I have a winning combination. For me, with insomnia, it was replacing coffee with tea. You can go with pretty high powered tea, or you can start with decaf tea and actually take a, like a vibrant caffeine pill, cut it into quarters. So now you have, let's just say hypothetically 25 milligrams a quarter, and you

can start decreasing your caffeine intake as a known quantity as opposed to a cup of coffee. Because it's highly, highly variant. So you can have decaf plus 100 milligrams first day. And then you do that for three days. Next, you go to 75 milligrams, 50, 25. So that's one of the more effective ways to decaf yourself. That was one. Then limiting caffeine consumption passed about 5 PM, but everybody's

heard that stuff too, that I found tremendously impactful that I did test in isolation would be one, some type of meditation in the morning. So 20 minutes, let's say you could start with 10, use an app like headspace, which has been very popular with a lot of my fans. Meditation in the morning depends a lot on your cause of insomnia. For me, it was the monkey mind. It was just the machinery. I couldn't get the cogs and the wheels to stop moving. I was still in problem-solving mode. Meditation in the morning, reading fiction before bed to take you into a storytelling or story consuming as opposed to problem solving mode, using flux or something like flux to change the light emitted from your laptop or screen. And last, I will, how should I do this? A friend of mine found

microdosing with psychedelics to be very helpful in a sub-hallucinogenic level with perhaps psilocybin or something along those lines. I did a podcast with James Fadiman and talked a lot about this.

God forbid you think I'm suggesting that. I would never. Highly irresponsible. But, you know, I don't make the news. I just report the news. We're going to do another online question. You were known to be an aggressive marketer for the four-hour work week.

How does 2016 Tim react to 2007 Tim's pitch and asks you know uh it's a good question uh 2007 Tim 2007 Tim was I think he was tolerable and for the for the for the probably pushed a little too hard. What he didn't know, and he couldn't have known, is what really busy actually means at a high level. So I would, for instance, like shoot off an email to someone to try to get them to look at a 10-minute excerpt of the book that I took ages to put together. And it's like, this will only take 10 minutes. And then they would reply with like, I don't have the time. And I'm like,

how can I, you know, I didn't say this, but in my head, I was like, how can you not have 10 minutes? That's ridiculous. You know, and get very offended. And now I get it. Like now I get, I get 1500 email a day. I get probably a hundred unsolicited books sent to me a week. A week. I took a photograph of it at one point. I took a stack. And I'm just like, if I don't get back to you, here's one reason of probably 100 why. And so now I have much more empathy and compassion for that kind of thing.

So it's like, if somebody doesn't get back to me for months, never attribute, this is another quote I find very useful, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, but I would add to that. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence or busyness. You know, don't take, try not to take it personally. Assume it's not personal. Give, you know, give yourself the benefit of the doubt because you're going to be the one who takes the imaginary shrapnel and carries it around with you like acid in a vessel for weeks on end if you hold grudges

so I think you did a pretty good job but it could definitely be a little overbearing at points but I don't know if that's something I would change I'm too maybe superstitious to think that would be I'm pretty happy with how things worked out. So I'm not sure I would have changed anything. Yeah. But, uh, I would have told him to be a little nicer to his joints, very aggressive with joints and have suffered a lot of pain and surgery as a result of that. That's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, Tim. I have a question around the

experiments and projects that you lead and do your on your own. I'm wondering about vision. So you may not have a five-year plan, but what is the vision towards what you orient towards on your day-to-day basis in terms of like moment by moment, who are you becoming? And I'm wondering what would that look like for you? What's that vision? Yeah, the vision for me is a tricky one, unless I take it really literally. And it's like in the Dances with Wolves, like sweat lodge kind of sense, which that's also maybe a conversation that requires some level of other substances. But in terms of who I would like other substances, but the, uh, in

terms of who I would like to be, I mean, I saw this, it's so cheesy and I have a better answer, but I'll put it out there anyway. Cause I do think about it with Molly is like, I saw this billboard at one point. I said, be the person your dog thinks you are. And I was just like, that's actually really good advice. Like that's actually really, really profound advice if you kind of think about it. But the vision I think would be, let me try to back into this. So the, why build the podcast?

Like, why? I mean, why put out more books? Why do these various things? Why focus again on editorial? Like, I'm backing out of the startups, focusing more on the creation and the interviewing and research. And I feel like that is my Archimedes lever for larger change. And to give a precise example, I've spent a lot of time around lawmakers and politicians. I can't play that game.

I have too many skeletons outside of my closet, too many in my closet. I use way too many drugs. And I'm not good at lying, which is sort of a prerequisite for that form of theater, at least part of the time. But what I've realized is if I have a very well-educated, very well-heeled in some cases influential audience I Can help steer that ship From afar kind of like a football coach calling commands without actually having to have my hands on the wheel. I can influence it and I've used that already to affect certain things like the legality of shark fin importation in a couple of states

in the US, in the process of funding research into using, for instance, psilocybin to address treatment-resistant depression at Johns Hopkins. And those are experiments that will ultimately lead me to probably change or attempt to change laws and policy. Because you can be a chess piece on the board. You can be the best piece on the board, which is better than being a pawn. That's kind of where we all start, I think. Then you can be a chess player. Then you can get very good. Then you can be the person who designs the game in the first place. And ultimately, in that sort of cascade, that's the most powerful position.

Yeah. And then you change the game. Yeah. Then you change the game. So I think that on a greatest impact for the greatest number of people, I don't want to lose the one-to-one, which is why the podcast and providing people with things they can start now immediately start using tomorrow or today is important to me. That's the micro that can affect the macro. But directly affecting the chessboard

is something I want to do. But I'm playing a long game with that. Because to do it right, I have to approach it very, very methodically. For me personally, I think that I want to be more, and I am much better, but to reflect more on what, to be happy with what I have and to constantly reflect on how fortunate I am in so many ways, because if I don't do that, nothing I get will ever make me

happy, content, fulfilled. And I'm really good at achieving. Like I can knock down walls. I'm really good at it, but that is only one side. It's only one piece of the whole equation. And on top of that, I would say, and this is a twofer, is being, practicing and immersing myself, recognizing that I'm a social animal. Humans are social animals. So spending a lot of time in groups. That means mixed groups, meaning mixed gender. It also means, and this is very out of favor as a topic of conversation, like small groups of men for me and spending periods of time in that environment. It's just, I find it inexplicably in a way therapeutic. And I think that if you look at our evolutionary biology, look at tribal societies,

my most recent podcast with Sebastian Junger gets into this quite a bit. We're in such a sensitive political climate. I'm not telling you to run around and touch everybody, but there's no physical contact. It's extremely, I think, problematic for us as organisms to live the way we currently live. So I think I need that. And part and parcel of that is developing greater compassion and empathy or just rediscovering that. So long answer.

I apologize, guys. But if I had to reflect on it for me personally, that would be... Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. It's good. We'll had to reflect on it for me personally, that would be. Thank you. We'll do one online question and then one more in-person question. So for the online question, you've experimented with interview structure of your podcast a few times, sharing a bottle of wine with Astro Teller. What has worked the best? I've tried many things in interview formats. I've also tried non-interview formats for the podcast. And what part of what is great about treating things as an experiment and being very vocal

about the fact that you're doing that is that you get like hall passes to do all sorts of zany harebrained shit, which is great. So, uh, I've done the wine, uh, no big surprise. There's a point where like, there's a tipping point where it's like, you've wine makes you funnier and then you just feel like you're getting funnier, but you're no longer funny. There's definitely a point where the whole scale flips on that. But format wise, what I found to work very well with my guests is at least an hour and a half up to three hours. Once you get to three, most people just start running out of gas. I break the interview generally in my mind into thirds. First third would be developing rapport, offering vulnerabilities of my own. So if you hear me

offering stories of my own in the beginning, it's not because I want it to be the Tim Ferriss show, even though it literally is. I don't want it to be just me talking. I'm offering vulnerable pieces so that they will reciprocate. And that's something I learned from Neil Strauss. It worked really well. So I'm trying to crack the ice. First third is basically getting through some of their bio or not getting through. It's interesting stuff, covering some of their bio, current projects and breaking the ice and also getting through some of their soundbites. A second third would be audience questions oftentimes or questions informed by the and breaking the ice, and also getting through some of their sound bites. Second third would be audience questions oftentimes, or questions informed by the audience. And then the tail end of that second third is whatever they want to pitch or talk about or promote if they have something. Then rapid fire questions and sort of my usual set.

And then the close. And I find that structure works very well for me. In my experience, it takes at least an hour, sometimes more, unless you know the person already, to get through their usual shtick. And if you do a lot of media, as I do, I'm just guilty of this as anyone else, we talked about preserving your decision-making creativity hit points. One of the ways you do that is you figure out which stories and answers work really well and you just use those over and over again. But I want to get original material.

So you have to burn through that and it takes about an hour, hour and a half. And that's the general format. There's a lot of prep that goes into that, of course. Other formats that work very well that I hadn't seen any other podcast try, but again, asking the question, what would this look like if it were easy? I was like, man, it's really hard to schedule with these people. These are really, really busy people. It's super hard to schedule. What if I just had the questions submitted and voted on Reddit or Facebook or somewhere, and then took the top 10, emailed them, bought them a mic, ATR 2100 is my favorite kind of all-purpose mic, USB,

on Amazon Prime, shipped it to them. It's just like, you know what? Record whenever you want. We don't have to schedule a time. Just repeat the question, the person who asked it, and then give the answer. And some of those have turned out spectacularly well. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings killed it so good. Sam Harris killed it just so, so good. Some of them are better than others, of course. But there are quite a few formats that work well. I do like the wine, but I've realized you've got to segue into the wine halfway through, or you're going to be really sloppy for the end.

So I think the Matt Mullenweg episode that I did, where we started with tea and then segue to tequila for the second half, that was a good format. We didn't get too off the rails. It worked out well. In the many podcasts and books that you've written, you've done a tremendous amount of individual experiments and so have your guests. But my question is like, okay, let's get back to your tribe here that you want. Let's say if you have a bunch of adult followers and you want to make your own tribe, what

would you basically have them do, whether it's for their own betterment or for your own personal experimentation. Meaning what would I have them do for the greater good or what would I have them do to solidify their own tribe? Oh, I mean, actually, let's just say you have an adult bootcamp, you know, like a group of people, however, let's just say, I don't know, 20 people or something like that for 30 days. And I'm kind of wondering, like, would you run an experiment, uh, or would you, if I wanted them to be as tight as possible after the fact, if I wanted them to be as tight, tightly bonded, actually, that's part of the question, you know, I guess what, what would your goal be? Because I mean, like I said,

for their own betterment or for your own experimentation. Yeah. If I had an adult bootcamp with 20 people, I would have equal, this might come off the wrong way, but either equal numbers of men and women or just men. And I would find someone who's in my position, who's female to lead the equivalent for women, because I would like to think I have empathy, but I don't have enough empathy to understand what it's like to be a woman empathy, but I don't have enough empathy to understand what it's like to be a woman. I just, I'm not a woman. Last I checked. So, uh, it could be split in which case there'd be like together activities, but also sort of gender specific, not gender specific. They'd just be, they'd be doing this exact same thing. They would just be,

uh, in different groups. Um, and the activities. so I wouldn't have a goal, it wouldn't be like Fight Club, Operation Mayhem at the end or anything. I wouldn't have a single thing for them to do afterwards. Potentially, actually I take that back, there would be a lot of hardship and suffering. No, I'm serious. There's too little, there's too little productive suffering in the U S right now. And it's like, Oh, you got 27th place. Here's a gold star. No, that does not help anyone. It really doesn't.

So, uh, getting good at failing and overcoming it and coming back from it. That's the real world. Like, that's what I want to train people to be able to handle. Right. Cause if they're used to like fighting each other in those big bloat sumo suits and they're like, I'm awesome. And they go out and then get like round kicked in the head by UFC fighters. What the fuck has happened? Yeah. They won't be able to recover from it. So I would have probably some element of fasting because most people are not familiar with the true sensation of being hungry. I wasn't for decades. Like really hungry. Not like, oh my God, I'm grumpy. I haven't, I'm hangry.

I haven't had cashews in four hours. No, like really hungry. Like you haven't eaten in three days hungry. And there'd be an element of fasting. There'd be an element of physical discomfort or pain. I'd probably have people doing outdoor activities like building debris huts or something like that. No screens whatsoever.

No alarm clocks. So for the first few days, people would come in decaf, they would be titrating off of caffeine and they would wake up whenever they woke up like for the first time maybe getting the actual rest that they need ten years and I would spend a lot of the time and this is straight from Sebastian Junger I think he was talking about what he would do in ninth or tenth grade I would have people working on projects, like small projects that were very difficult. And we would rotate in terms of who was leading a given group. So let's just say, they'd be small groups, maybe four, like five groups of four. Everybody would have an opportunity

to sort of lead a project. And it would not be totally democratic at all. I could be like, okay, like you guys, like people who are like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Okay. Ones raise your hand. Okay. You're the dictators. That's it. Everybody has to do exactly what you said.

This is not like a flat organization. No, like you are like the platoon leader. That's it. Or maybe not the best analogy. You're the dictator. And every exercise would be intended to put people out of their comfort zone, physically, emotionally, psychologically, mentally, so that when they come out the other end, they are better at, this is probably the only part that I might teach because we do postmortems on all of these, would be the ability

to learn quickly and the ability to teach other people and my goal all along in a way has been to create like a benevolent army of people who are expert learners like incredibly high level top one percent meta learners who can learn to be better at anything i've done who can then teach people in turn to be better than they are that That seems like the right trend. So I think that's, I've actually fantasized about this, like adult boot camp thing. Haven't we all? I fantasize about it a lot, but it would just be like camp pain. It would just be like, it's not, but I mean, you look at the success for like Tough Mudder,

Spartan Race is actually a good doc coming out soon. I really enjoyed it. I know the guy who produced it called The Rise of the Sufferfests. I think there's part of us that really subconsciously yearns to be tested. Like nobody's really tested these days in a holistic way, like a really painful way.

There's no rite of passage. But I think we, we like we're programmed to need that, to want that. So yeah, I think, I think the camp might get pretty low reviews given the amount of pain involved, or I just have like a religious following of masochists. I don't know. But yeah, I do, I do fantasize about it, but yeah, the goal would be master meta learners who have a high pain tolerance, who have expanded their sphere of comfortable action, and are really good at helping other people to do the same thing.

Well, Tim, thank you very much for coming and speaking to us. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday

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