The Tim Ferriss Show - #266: Favorite Books, Supplements, Simple Technologies, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

Starting point is 00:00:33 one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D

Starting point is 00:01:00 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week,

Starting point is 00:01:38 which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast,

Starting point is 00:02:15 some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing,

Starting point is 00:02:39 special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you, calm. Why hello warlocks and drill elf princesses. If you know what that is, you get plus one. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types and interviews where I tease out the habits,

Starting point is 00:03:20 routines, et cetera, that you can use. This time around, I'm going to switch things up a little bit and answer a bunch of your questions. And these have been upvoted and suggested and starred and so on. And they come from subscribers to my five bullet Friday newsletter. So every Friday I send out a newsletter. It is five bullets of the coolest things that I have found or enjoyed that week. It's free. It's one of the most popular newsletters on the interwebs. You can check it out. It's free and free and free. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's it. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. And you get all sorts of exclusives like chapters on books that I'm working on and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you can check that out, but that's where I got these questions. So let's just jump right into it and I'll try to give a

Starting point is 00:04:08 bunch of tactical specifics that people can use. All right. Number one, this is from Bran Beckett. Question. I moved to a big city and know no one. How do you find great like-minded people? How did you find some of your friends? So there are a few different approaches here, and I would suggest checking out a post I did called how to build a world-class network in record time or something like that, which would seem appropriate to the question. But the first step that I took in Silicon Valley when I landed here with my shitty hand-me-down green minivan. And nobody in my network was look for organizations to volunteer for that feature speakers and so on, or members who you would like to get to know. And in Silicon Valley, I identified a few early on. Ty, the Indus entrepreneur, and at the time, the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 00:05:08 And what you realize very quickly is when you're volunteering, the majority of your fellow volunteers do the absolute minimum required, which means, for instance, if you notice that water jugs are empty for attendees, and it's not your job, so to speak, but you go out of your way to fill them up and so on. You can very quickly be the A plus student who gets noticed. And then over time, you'll be offered more responsibility. And within a matter of a few months, I went from lackey peon volunteer to helping to organize the speakers and the panels, which put me in contact with many people, including folks like the co-founder of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins. I think that's his last name, if I'm getting it right.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Ed Bird, who is referred to as Mr. Creatine, the founder of Cliff Bar, and Jack Canfield, among others, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, 100 plus million copies sold, who later then introduced me to my book agent and many other folks who made the four-hour workweek a reality. So that's number one, volunteer. Number two is go to conferences, be very strategic and engage with moderators and ask a handful of questions. But I will let you just search how to build a world-class network in my last name and it will come right up. All right. Number two. Ooh, how am I going to say this? Let's see. Wayne Tumatoroa. Hi, Tim. The blog, books, podcast, and TV series. What are you most proud of and why? I am most proud of,

Starting point is 00:06:45 if I had to be proud of anything, which I think is sometimes dangerous, but I would actually be proud of a blog post and a talk. And they're closely related. The blog post is some practical thoughts on suicide, which was the hardest thing I've ever chosen to write, certainly, and to hit publish on. And you can check it out at Tim.blog forward slash suicide. It is perhaps not the most uplifting thing in the world, but I think it is extremely important as a pattern interrupt and has caught some people who are right at the precipice where I have been myself. Similarly made the decision to get on the TED main stage and really just bludgeon people emotionally right at the beginning of my talk to discuss some very stigmatized and important topics such as depression, manic depression,

Starting point is 00:07:40 suicide, et cetera. So that can be found. Sorry for all the URLs, but I want to get through as many questions as possible. So tim.blog forward slash Ted, if you want to check it out, it's been watched more than 3 million times already. And it just came out a few months ago. Next question, Josh M R Allen. And just to revert back to the question I just answered, it's easy to talk about the highlights. It's harder to talk about the low lights. And I think that is critically important so that we don't put the people we idolize, whether they be on magazine covers or at the top of Hacker News or whatever it might be, on a pedestal that leads us to judge ourselves too harshly against some type of flawless platonic ideal, which does not exist in real life. There you have it. Josh M. R. Allen, how do you recognize and change a personal

Starting point is 00:08:32 irrational rationale? In other words, how do you tell if you're just being crazy? Well, this is timely because today I was trying to make a very nuanced, or at least from my perspective, complex investment decision. And I called a friend of mine who is a very good BS detector. And also, as he might put it himself, doesn't immediately go to math optimization. He wants to talk about the human element and underscore some of the maybe common sense aspects of a decision, whether that be sort of emotional resonance or regret or anxiety and so on, not just the fine tuning of some arithmetic in this case for investment. And he gave me his argument. And the next thing he said was very striking, I thought. And he works with some of the best investors in the world.

Starting point is 00:09:26 He said, okay, now that you've heard my suggestion, what assumptions of mine might be false? So he jumped right on his own assumptions and started putting them under a microscope. What assumptions of mine might be false? And you could take this tack with friends. So for instance, when I spent time with whether it's Naval Ravikant or Kevin Rose, many of my friends, I will ask them after giving them an argument of some type, hey man, if you had to pick that apart or challenge it, how would you? Because I don't want to go through life with fragile, collected illusions that are going to mislead me and cause me harm. Like if you had to pick this part, how would you?

Starting point is 00:10:12 And if you want to practice that yourself, one thing that you might look up is steel manning, which is an alternate to straw manning and argument where in fact, and Charles Darwin was actually an expert at this. And he did this in his writing where you create the strongest version of your opponent's argument or counter argument and present it so that you can then effectively present your own argument. So look up steel manning. And then there are books that can help you with avoiding cognitive biases. Think twice would be one. There are other books, for instance, Seeking Wisdom, which is about Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, and others, including Darwin, and Poor Charlie's Almanac, or reading some of the commencement speeches of Charlie Munger,

Starting point is 00:11:08 who is the right-hand man and investing partner of Warren Buffett, famed for his mental models, which are very much rudimentary in the sense that many of us have accumulated a toolkit as early back as high school, but not applied it regularly in what we perceive as the messiness of real life, real life. So there you have it. Those are a few options and you can, at the very least, look up cognitive biases on Wikipedia. And if they've taken down summaries, for whatever reason, you can go on the Wayback Machine and find it there. Next is Mike Mullins. Hi, Tim. What processes do you use to break a bad habit or convert a bad habit to a positive one? This could take hours in and of itself, but I'll try to keep it simple. I talk a lot about this in the 4-Hour

Starting point is 00:11:57 Body and the 4-Hour Chef. In the beginning of the 4-Hour Body, I talk about this a lot. There are a few chapters in particular. The Harajuku moment, I think, is extremely critical. Then in the 4-Hour Chef, I talk about tools like stick.com. You can take a look at the site and that'll cover a lot of the explanation at stick.com. There are a few elements that you need to pay attention to. There's certainly the how-to the instruction how could i walks you step through step uh towards say quitting smoking but you also need a sufficient why to and that's the incentive which is either a stick or a carrot and economics certainly or the study of human nature more broadly speaking is a study of incentives so check out out stick.com. Also look up agent named

Starting point is 00:12:46 BJ Fogg, F-O-G-G, formerly, maybe currently out of Stanford, who talks a lot about how to start with a small version of a behavioral change. So let's say rather than flossing your entire mouth, you start with flossing your front teeth and use that to lead into something more comprehensive. So I would say take a look at that, but certainly I've written quite a bit about this in For Our Body and For Our Chef. Retired man. Next one. I love the what I'm eating segments of Five Bullet Friday. Any simple chef secrets to change food from good to great? Yeah, I do have a couple of recommendations. There are a few.

Starting point is 00:13:30 So number one is that if you look at professional chefs versus home chefs, they have an acute understanding of how to use acid in food. So if you need flavor to pop a little bit more, very often it just requires a little bit of say lemon juice or some type of acid. It could be a vinegar to really balance out or make some of the flavors pop. Salt can sometimes serve this function, but I have a bottle of unsweetened lemon juice in my refrigerator for this purpose exactly you can also use lemon zest lemon zest really works extremely well on a lot of dishes and of course

Starting point is 00:14:12 these are broad strokes folks so it's going to work a lot of the time not all the time get a microplane and that is fantastic for making it easy to put lemon zest on things. Caramelized onions. So allium, from the allium family, you have, say, shallots, you have onions. Caramelized onions fix just about anything. So very often, I'll just get some onions, chop them up, do a little bit of knife work, which is not very hard. And if you want instruction on knife skills, check out Jacques Papin. I think that's it. I have no idea if the pronunciation is right, but Jacques, like Jacques Cousteau, P-E-P-I-N. The dude is a master and he's incredibly good at teaching. So check out knife skills there, but chop up some onions and just as I'm prepping other things,

Starting point is 00:15:01 have it on say medium heat with some olive oil and let it caramelize over the next, say 15, 20, 25 minutes while I'm prepping other things. Caramelized onions go a really, really long way. A few of my favorite herbs and spices that I think are underutilized and generally unoffensive, ginger, cumin, or cumin, depending on how you want to say it. So ginger and cumin are really versatile. Turmeric also very, very versatile. There are others like tarragon, or dill, which can be really overpowering. Marjoram also, if you don't use them correctly or with the right type of protein. But ginger, cumin, and turmeric I find to be very, very flexible. Butter solves just about everything, so I'm not

Starting point is 00:15:51 going to bother talking about it. And last, I'll just say as a tool, if you want to experiment with sous vide, which much like sous chef, sous is under, so sous vide means under vacuum, you could look at a device made by a friend of mine, a whole group of friends called the Joule, J-O-U-L-E as in the measurement of energy, I believe, I'm no physicist. It's a simple, simple, simple little device that allows you to use other pots and pans you might have, or even a kitchen sink for that matter, to experiment with sous vide. And it enables you to cook, say, proteins perfectly all the way through every time, and then finish it on a stovetop or under a broiler. So you can check out the Juul,

Starting point is 00:16:37 which has been just a godsend. It's very, very easy to use. And the app that they have is just spectacular. J-O-U-L-E. All right, next one. Mickey Mayer. Hi, Tim Ferriss. What's your next book? You mentioned book deadlines a few times. Yeah, I just finished my new book. Literally, it is printing as we speak.

Starting point is 00:16:58 And you guys can check it out. It's called Tribe of Mentors. Subtitle, short life advice from the Best in the World. And it is the collected wisdom of about 130 people I was dying to reach out to and ask a lot of questions that had bubbled up to the top of my mind. I just turned 40, my first book had its 10th anniversary, a number of friends had either died or been diagnosed with terminal illnesses in the last 12 months. I had a lot of questions on my mind. And so I reached out to these folks for help navigating life and turned out better than I ever could have expected.

Starting point is 00:17:34 So thank you, universe and everybody for that. But you can check it out. Go to Tim.blog forward slash tribe or just on BNN or Amazon or wherever. You can just look up tribe of mentors and it's currently on sale now. All right. Next, Irene Hackett. This may hearken back to an earlier answer, but here's your question. Your latest TED talk is important. What specific self-talk keeps you from that precipice now? This could help others. The TED Talk I referred to earlier is about an exercise called fear setting and tells my personal story of battles with depression and also a really close call with suicide

Starting point is 00:18:22 in college. And as a side note, I didn't mention this in the TED talk, but I was always fearful of being diagnosed with a label of say, manic depression, because I didn't want it to absolve me of the responsibility of still trying to change and improve my behavior and so on. I didn't want to default to, say, pure self-medication as a way of avoiding certain changes to my thought patterns and behaviors and so on. Then I had my full genome sequenced, and there are only a few things that stood out. And one was on a scale of say, zero to 10, the genetic predictor for manic depression was at like an 11 or a 12. It was like spinal tap. And I was like, well, I guess I can only dodge this for so long. And it had the opposite effect rather than making me depressed about being depressed or predisposed

Starting point is 00:19:23 to being depressed and absolving myself of responsibility, I really didn't expect this. It lifted a huge burden because it made the point, I suppose, that I have programming. I mean, in my code base, I am hardwired in a sense, and I'm mixing a lot of technology metaphors here to experience manic depressive episodes, although I don't really get manic, so more depressive episodes. And that made me feel as though I was actually doing a pretty good job with the instructions that I am actualizing through my DNA. And I felt better about myself actually learning this, which was very unexpected, but I'm not directly answering your question.

Starting point is 00:20:12 What specific self-talk? I'm going to expand that to exercises. Number one is fear setting. And people can learn about it in the TED Talk, tim.blog.com forward slash TED, where I run through it. But if you go to that page, there's also a text version and an explanation of fear setting pulled from my previous book, Tools of Titans.

Starting point is 00:20:40 So you can check that out. That is going to be the most comprehensive and I do that all the time. Another question which helps prevent overwhelm, which I think is at times a, not prerequisite, but an antecedent to depression. So if you end up feeling as though there are too many inputs or balls to juggle, that can lead to overwhelm, which can lead to feeling helpless, which can lead to harsh self-judgment, which can lead to depression, if that makes sense. So what would this look like if this were easy is a question that I constantly ask myself. And

Starting point is 00:21:16 it's a question that I explore a lot in Tribe of Mentors, this new book that I just finished, which I mentioned earlier and then the last piece i would say and there's a lot more to this because it's not just self-talk and in fact we get ourselves into trouble when we try to rely in isolation on our own self-talk to address depression i think that it's very difficult when you're caught in those circular thought loops to disengage from that. So community, exercise, getting into your body to get out of your own brain, and spending time with other people who can, for instance, and this comes back to an earlier question, who can test your assumptions and show you how all is not lost when you're saying always and never

Starting point is 00:22:06 these absolutes in fact do not apply and this too shall pass etc often requires other people but i'll give you one more question that i apply in my own head in these circumstances and that is so what and i actually learned this from richa chada who is a an indian actress who uses this herself so if you have a given fear you ask so what and this is best done for me at least in journaling you write down the consequence or whatever is the answer to so what and then you ask again so what so what so what when you do that that four or five times, which is not entirely dissimilar from how, say, Ricardo Semler, famous Brazilian-born entrepreneur, uses why, or Ray Dalio, same story, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, asking, say, four or five whys to get to the root cause or the root belief. When you ask, so what, so what, so what, and you answer it each time earnestly, you realize at the end, I'm actually fine. So what? Nothing.

Starting point is 00:23:11 Everything is just going to be totally fine and it's manageable or reversible at the very least in many, many, in fact, most cases. All right. Next question. Hope that helps. Matches Malone. Question your your top three to five books read this year all right it's more of a statement than a question but i'll take it as a question a few that come to mind i i've alluded to earlier i would say poor charlie's almanac by charles munger although seeking wisdom in many cases by p Bevelin, is a little more easily digested, I believe. So that's one. And that's actually a book that I've revisited.

Starting point is 00:23:49 So I'm counting books that I've revisited. The next would be closely related. And both of these really drill on mental models and rules for making decisions and avoiding common slips and cognitive biases. Principles by Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Capital. Check out the cover blurbs, one from Bill Gates, one from Tony Robbins, if you want to know the type of people who listen very carefully to his advice. And his investment returns are just crazy. So there you have it. I find investors

Starting point is 00:24:23 and poker players very interesting to study for thinking systems and mental models that apply everywhere uh the third i'll mention is completely unlike the others uh in most respects and it's the prophet by khalil gibran i don't know if that's how you pronounce his name but that's how i'll pronounce it g-i-bB-R-A-N. This is for a lot of people going to be really woo-woo, semi-religious, mystical nonsense speak. But it's beautifully illustrated. I recommend getting the illustrated version. And I read it a few pages at a time in a sauna every night over the course of one or two weeks. And it may or may not have been after reading a lot about different psychedelics,

Starting point is 00:25:08 perhaps authored by Terrence McKenna, but that probably puts it in the proper context for why I found it so insightful. A lot of it, I think, is a little too highfalutin, but the latter half in particular, I found very insightful and helped me to work through a number of different emotional questions that I had on my mind. And next question is DeVille. Why is worldly success apparently so important to you as evidenced by it being a primary focus of your podcast? Okay, so apparently is an important modifier here. So I'm glad that you included it. Why is worldly success apparently so important to you as evidenced by it being primary focus of your podcast? We would need to define worldly success. I assume you mean business building, entrepreneurship, etc. And there are a few ways that I could attempt to answer this.

Starting point is 00:26:08 The first would just be to observe that I have a very large audience comprised of entrepreneurs, self-described CEOs, founders, et cetera. And these are the tools and tactics and stories that I feel best service them and help them where they are at the moment or where their priorities might be in either initially building, growing, or say selling a business, for instance. I should also simply point out that there are other interviews I've done with say Tara Brock and many others in fact that focus on the more I'm not going to say esoteric but perhaps spiritual which is a word I don't like I'll put it in quotation marks aspects of life and that is all well and good, but people generally don't come to me for that.

Starting point is 00:27:13 And the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I think that's my dog, Molly doing self-defense. Thank you, Molly. Uh, my Maslow's hierarchy of needs is helpful for putting this in context because, uh, I feel like most of my audience is, uh, well-educated with a decent household income, and I'm helping them with business building and things along those lines. But I'm also pushing a little higher up and talking more about the things that would be of interest to those who are reading things like Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which, by the way, is the single book that pops up most often, uh, across all of my podcast guests and the a hundred plus people in tribe of mentors who have not been on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:27:53 So there you have that. Uh, I also would say that the question implies some mutual exclusivity in other worlds for an insult that worldly success is focused onto the exclusion of something else. But I think that if that is what you meant or meant to imply that that's a false dichotomy, you can very much have both. And just because you do very well in the private sector or make a lot of money does not by definition mean that you lack the other things or don't place an importance on them any importance on them uh okay uh next question is ian philpot what recent apps slash technologies have made your life easier uh there are many if we look at technologies as or technologies, any type of

Starting point is 00:28:47 tool that helps you to solve a problem in any respect. I like the momentum extension for Chrome, which can help mitigate procrastination. That's really, really easy one. I like egg timer, another browser based tool that allows you to set a timer, you can just search ed timer, online timer. I am doing a bunch with WeWork and exploring having an office and set hours for doing certain things and location. So thank you, Tim Urban, the writer of Wait But Why, for the inspiration there. If you're looking for something a little more expensive, I'm not sure you would be, but if you're allowing something a little more expensive, a Miele dishwasher with a

Starting point is 00:29:36 rack on the top for cleaning silverware is just incredible, not cheap. And last but not least i would mention a protein and they have since become a sponsor of the podcast but that's not why i mentioned them i'm looking at it right now across the room is a scent protein a s c e n t protein which is a native protein and doesn't for me at least cause any of the gastrointestinal distress that whey protein sometimes can. It is very, very minimally processed. Next question, Miko Irola. If your podcast format allowed only one question, a la rapid fire question with lengthy answer, what would the question be? I think it would have to be, can you please tell us about a dark period that you experienced or one of the darker periods you've experienced, how you came out of it and what you learned from it? I think that question

Starting point is 00:30:36 gets all of the ingredients for something that people will retain. You get a real story, you get real world details, and you learn how they solve a problem. Very often, I think podcasts, interviews, and so on can focus on how people seize opportunity, find opportunity, create opportunity. But at the end of the day, I think that's the easy part. It's not finding an opportunity that's the challenge. It's overcoming the roadblocks and opponents and competition and self sabotage quite frankly that you're going to face if you choose something with a high degree of uncertainty which entrepreneurship certainly entails so can you please tell us about one of the darker periods of your life and how you came out of it and what you learn from it I think is a

Starting point is 00:31:25 solid question that gets a lot two more questions all right Derek Miller is the next one aha this is a good one what advice would you give a 24 year old male struggling to control his sex drive well let's see number one maybe get rid of broadband turn off your Wi-Fi so you can not compulsively visit porn sites but I want to actually dissect the question because my answer may not make sense if I myopically look at this and assume that it's an issue of sex drive. So if you have an issue with controlling X, so in this case, 24 year old male struggling to control his sex drive. If I want to give the sort of hand wave dismissal answer, I would say enjoy it

Starting point is 00:32:22 because it's not going to get better but i would say that if you look at say overeating someone could ask the same question or a similar question and say what advice would you give to a 24 year old who's struggling to control his appetite and there could be biological causes so certainly get some blood work done and see if you have out of control testosterone or luteinizing hormone or FSH or something like that. But across the board, we could just be asking, how should I control poor impulse control? And I think that is generally going to be the answer, right? So if someone is obese, for instance, or just 20 pounds overweight, they might have some biological determinant that's causing them to overeat so maybe their hypothalamus is all screwed up maybe

Starting point is 00:33:12 they have some weird leptin or ghrelin levels who knows but more often than not it's just their environment is set up to defeat them so they have say junk food all over the house, or B, they haven't set up systems and rules to prevent themselves, incentives we already talked about to prevent them from overeating. So across the board, I would say the most useful tool that I have found for impulse control or emotional reactivity, where you get steered by your emotions as opposed to the other way around is looking at stoicism and something called cbt which is cognitive behavioral therapy and there's actually a great book on this which i recommend called it's a bit of a mouthful so don't mind the title but the philosophy of cognitive behavioral therapy, subtitle, Stoic Philosophy as Rational

Starting point is 00:34:06 and Cognitive Psychotherapy. It's written by Donald J. Robertson. So you can just look up Donald Robertson. And the cover has, it looks like a bust of Marcus Aurelius in the middle with two chairs, one on either side. But fantastic book. And I would suggest people check it out and if you want a an overview of stoicism which is used by top nfl teams right now a lot of the ceos i know of the fastest growing companies in silicon valley because it makes them better competitors uh you can check out tau of seneca it's a free introduction to all of this stuff that I put out there, which has no trick, no nothing. It's just something I think is valuable and should be out in the world. So you can check that out at Tim.blog forward slash Seneca.

Starting point is 00:34:54 As far as controlling the sex drive goes, you could also check out an experiment I did called NobNom, which is a 30-, no booze, no masturbating experiment. Uh, and you can get a group together and, um, hold each other accountable with money to lose. Potentially you could put together a betting pool that works very well for losing weight or stopping compulsive masturbation among other things. All right. Last question. This is Jasmine worth Jasmine worth. Hi Tim. If you were only able to take five supplements for longevity and well-being, what would they be? Thanks for all you do. Thanks for reading and submitting the question. All right. Longevity and well-being. I'm going to preface this answer with a disclaimer. I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. So talk to your medical

Starting point is 00:35:45 professional before consuming any supplement or medication or stopping any medication or supplement, et cetera. Okay. Also use your common sense. Don't do anything stupid, please. Internet. It's a tall, tall order for the internet. I know. But let me tell you a few things that I find interesting, and a few that I thought would be very compelling that I've chosen not to use. I think berberine is potentially very interesting for longevity, also interesting for attenuating insulin or glucose responses after meals, for instance, much like alpha-poic acid that is one and i should note that i cycle on and off of any supplement that i take because i assume that there are negative feedback

Starting point is 00:36:32 loops in other words if something has an effect say it's at it's an agonist for something then it's probably an antagonist for something else or if you're taking say supplemental testosterone it's going to affect your hpta uh in other words your your your hormonal axis and then your body will stop producing as much testosterone because you're getting it from elsewhere the body is very smart that way about homeostasis okay so berberine is one resveratrol i was interested in for a period of time found in wine, although in no concentration, really valuable for life extension purposes. And a lot of people have paid attention to resveratrol. When I took resveratrol for a period of time, I found, and many people have found this, that it caused joint pain, specifically in my elbows. So I decided that was not a good harbinger of things to come,

Starting point is 00:37:27 and I stopped taking resveratrol. Other people find metformin and rapamycin very interesting. If you want to learn more about rapamycin, R-A-P-A-M-Y-C-I-N, which is a very strong prescription medication that you should not take without doctor supervision, then you can search Life Extension Odyssey, maybe? Life Extension Easter Island and my name. And there's an entire episode where we talked to two scientists, three actually, but two who are very well known for metformin specifically and rapamycin specifically.

Starting point is 00:38:11 Metformin is very interesting to me. It's used by type two diabetics quite a bit. I'm not currently taking it. Also something you should not take without medical supervision, but has some promise. Fasting is not a supplement, but it's the absence of all supplements. I do find fasting very interesting. And Dom D'Agostino, so Dominic D'Agostino and I have talked a lot about this on the podcast and has some very fascinating implications and applications for both performance and longevity. Well-being, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the following, which is also something that is typically prescribed with medical supervision, and that is lithium. So lithium is a monotherapy for, say, bipolar depression, might be prescribed at 1500 milligrams, and it might be, say, lithium carbonate, I believe. There are people who believe, and there's some good writing in the New York Times, for instance, and I think the article is,

Starting point is 00:39:10 maybe we all just need a little bit of lithium, something like that. If you search New York Times, maybe we just need lithium, you will find an article that discusses groundwater concentrations of lithium and inverse correlation to, I believe it was suicide, homicide, manic depression, and so on. And based on that and the recommendation of a doctor that I work with, note, even I work with qualified MDs on all of this, I began taking five milligrams of lithium orotate on a daily basis. And it appears to take the edge off and mitigate to some extent anxiety and potential spiraling towards the edge of the precipice as was put earlier with respect to depression. So could be psychosomatic, but that's 99% of life, isn't it? So for the time being,

Starting point is 00:40:07 I will continue taking it, but I do much like everything else cycle, uh, both on and off of these things. So Jasmine, hopefully that helps. Uh, I do take things that you might not think of as a supplement. For instance, apple cider vinegar, I'll typically have a tablespoon of that in water, both in the morning and before bed, which might be considered an old wives tale for boosting immune function. But for whatever reason, seems to work for me. And when combined with honey also helps with sleep for thousands of people who have tried it. And you can look up Seth Roberts, honey and apple cider vinegar, abbreviated ACV. If you

Starting point is 00:40:47 want to try a very simple remedy for potentially helping with insomnia and so on. All right, folks. So that is the Q and a for today. Uh, thank you to everybody who subscribes to five bullet Friday, who submitted questions. And if you'd like to submit your own and check out what all the buzz is about, then you can check out Five Bullet Friday at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. And that is it. So thanks for listening, everybody. And until next time, be safe, test your cognitive biases and have fun. Talk to you soon. provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets

Starting point is 00:41:54 and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one.

Starting point is 00:42:29 And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom myself for many of my businesses, and many of the icons on this podcast have actually used LegalZoom. For instance, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, CEO of Automatic, which is now worth more than a billion dollars, first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a billion dollars, first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted to help with their businesses, whether that's setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a nonprofit, or finding simple cease and desist letter templates. Man, do I use a lot of those. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started,

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Starting point is 00:44:02 which is taken Silicon Valley by Storm. I use it pretty much every day, either that or the Chaga, which is decaf, a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me,

Starting point is 00:44:40 I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their products sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine.

Starting point is 00:45:02 So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy, So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something. You can try sample pack, which is great also right now by going to foursigmatic.com forward slash Tim. That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com forward slash Tim and use the code Tim, T-I-M,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #266: Favorite Books, Supplements, Simple Technologies, and More

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #266: Favorite Books, Supplements, Simple Technologies, and More

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.