The Tim Ferriss Show - #333: Random Show — Fasting, Biohacking, and Tony Robbins

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Starting point is 00:02:40 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. Hello, boys and girls, mogwai and gremlins. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. If you're looking for perhaps some type of highbrow intellectual long-form conversation, you might want to go to tim.blog.com forward slash podcast for one of my other long-form interviews. Don't sell us short, dude. Come on. on hold on kevin i haven't introduced you yet but for those of you who enjoy the the random helter skelter is that a right word yeah i think it is nature well i'm gonna run with it of the random

Starting point is 00:03:41 show which we haven't had an episode of for a very, very long time. And it's a conversation between yours truly and my good friend, uh, Kevin Rose guest number one on the Tim Ferriss show. That's true. You were guest number one, the very first episode of the Tim Ferriss show. And actually that's in my LinkedIn bio. Now it's my claim to fame.

Starting point is 00:04:02 It's in your Google plus bio. That's right. And we have not done a random show for a long time but i'll let you do if you want to do an introduction of the random i don't think we even need to anymore i don't think we need to we don't even know what episode ron like for those that you have heard the random show before i think we've done probably if i had to guess i'd say maybe 25 episodes something Something like that. 25 to 50 episodes. So we're episode 27, let's call it. Episode 27. And Kevin, for people who don't know you, what's your story? What would you like people to know about you? What's the speaker bio version of Kevin Rose? I don't even know these days. No, seriously, I would say that I've been a

Starting point is 00:04:42 longtime internet entrepreneur. I probably am best known for creating the social news website Dig back in 2004. That grew to become a pretty big entity for a number of years. And then I was at Google as an investor, and now I'm at True Ventures as an investor. Tim, you and I probably co-invested in maybe a dozen or so angel deals. Yeah, at least. Facebook together. I think Twitter together.

Starting point is 00:05:10 Twitter together. Blue Bottle. Coffee together. Yeah, a bunch of them. Side note, you remember how ridiculed we all were when the consortium of techies and non-techies invested in Blue Bottle Coffee? Do you remember how much shit we got on the internet for that? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. They're like, why would Blue Bottle need to raise money? But it's done okay. It had a great exit here just about a month ago. It has done all right. It was a majority stake acquisition by Nestle for 700 million or so. So it worked out. Yeah. It worked out.

Starting point is 00:05:40 So you've done very well as an investor. You are obsessed with many things Japanese. You have a new obsession, it seems, every few weeks. And do you have anything new to add? Actually, you know what? I want to hear about the fast mimicking diet because this is something I thought I would have put money on you never sticking with the fast mimicking diet. And maybe you can explain for people what that means but you've actually now done a number of scheduled five-day yeah that's right that's five-day fmd so uh well i'll start back by saying that probably the reason why tim you and i are friends i met you when you were launching your first book um on your boat party that you did you rented out a warship in the San Francisco Bay.

Starting point is 00:06:25 And the SS Jeremiah, where they recorded a lot of the boiler room audio for the James Cameron movie, Titanic. Oh, crazy. In fact. That's awesome. But yeah, we hit it off because we both love all kinds of, this idea of lifelong learning,

Starting point is 00:06:43 I think has been a theme that you and I both enjoy. And, you know, I've certainly got really into biohacking in the last couple years. I've watched from afar, you poke and prod yourself and squirt all kinds of different juices out of your elbow. You know, this requires a little bit of explanation. So just, this is so gross. All right. But now I have to explain it. So I had a botched PRP injection, which is platelet-rich plasma injection in my right elbow.

Starting point is 00:07:15 And people can look up PRP. It actually has some fantastic applications, but there was a botched injection which pushed effectively subcutaneous bacteria into the elbow capsule itself. And it turned into this horrible infection that required abridgment and surgery and so on. But Kevin, being the good friend that he is, came to visit me in the ER when I was having the, I'm not sure if you would call it synovial fluid, the infection fluid. It was the pus drained out of your elbow. The pus drained out of my elbow with this gigantic syringe.

Starting point is 00:07:48 And being the mature adult that I am, I thought it would be funny to take this turkey-based or worth of elbow fluid out of the sharps container and squirt it at Kevin, who is in the room. I'm not proud of it, but I don't regret it either. So yes, you've seen me do a lot, uh,

Starting point is 00:08:09 and make a lot of, uh, short term decisions that haven't turned out very well in the world of bio hacking. It's always entertaining though. Got to say, had a lot of fun doing stupid shit together. Um,

Starting point is 00:08:22 but yeah, speaking of, of, well, probably not that dumb these days, but, uh, fasting. So I, speaking of, well, probably not that dumb these days, but fasting. So I got into fasting here probably about three years ago, two and a half, three years ago. I started the Fasting App Zero, which is a free fasting tracker. And so that has really kind of blown up and taken off. But then I started hearing about the research from Dr. Walter Longo. And so,

Starting point is 00:08:48 we actually, it was from a friend of mine, you know Mike Mazur, a mutual friend of ours. And Mike was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He went into chemotherapy treatment and he was one of the guys that said, I'm just not going to, you know, just take what they give me, but I'm going to go out and do my own research and see what else I can be doing to help fight this and beat this down. And one of the things that came up was this idea of doing these five-day FMDs. And the FMD stands for fasting mimetic diet. And the idea is that compliance of doing a standard five-day fast is relatively low because it's an extremely difficult thing to do. Tim, have you ever done standard five-day fast is relatively low because it's an extremely difficult thing to do. Tim, have you ever done a five-day water-only fast?

Starting point is 00:09:30 Yeah, I've done five, seven, and 10-day. Okay. So I've done a five-day water-only, and I will tell you, it is absolutely brutal. I don't know what your experience was, but I had a really difficult time sleeping. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, I believe it's a cholinergic effect that leads you to have rapid heartbeat quite often when you were trying to sleep. It's not pleasant. So you'll be exhausted and you'll lay down in bed and you're, you'll feel like you just ran a hundred meter sprint in terms of heartbeat. It's very, very unpleasant. It's kind of scary. And I get those. I'm also one of those people that get those. I get those little early heartbeats, you know, where you feel like your heart kind of skip a beat a little bit. They're completely benign. And I've had it

Starting point is 00:10:15 looked at and everything's fine. But I get those every once in a while. And those come more frequently when I'm in a fasted state. So long story short, Mike does his five-day fast. He beats back cancer. He's in full remission, which is awesome. But the idea with the five-day fast is that- Can I interrupt you one more time? Yeah. And I think this, I don't think Mike would mind this, but I remember you and I, when we were talking about this, and did he do five or three? I can't recall. I'm sorry, you're right. He did three. He did three, but just for those who are curious, so I've had conversations with Dominic D'Agostino

Starting point is 00:10:49 before on this podcast, very well-published researcher. And I was first introduced to the possibility that fasting prior to chemotherapy, I believe, and radiation, could be either, has the potential to increase the resilience of normal cells while increasing the susceptibility or weakness of cancer cells to facilitate this type of treatment, but also to decrease the side effects that are commonly experienced. And so Mike, to my understanding, would do, say, a three-day fast before a session. And while the other people in his cohort were laid out on the couch or in bed the next day, he'd be running a 10-mile training run. Right, which is just insane.

Starting point is 00:11:37 Which is nuts. Yeah. And so he originally, when he got turned on to this research by Dr. Longo, he showed me this YouTube video where they were giving rats chemotherapy. And the rats that were fasted were just like running around the cage. It looked like normal, healthy rats. And the ones that didn't fast were just, like you said, like on their side, all beat up and in a horrible state. And that's exactly what Mike experienced. And yeah, the idea is that on making the chemotherapy more effective is that you're depriving your cells of the cancer cells of some nutrients, certainly sugar, less glucose, and it makes them more susceptible to the chemotherapy treatment.

Starting point is 00:12:15 So the chemotherapy is that much more effective. So, you know, obviously we can't say for certain whether that's what put him into remission, but he's really happy that it did work and he is in remission and the evidence looks pretty compelling in humans. And so they're also extending this whole protocol to healthy individuals as a way to potentially prevent cancer from even forming in the first place. So I was turned on to Dr. Walter Longo's new book, The Longevity Diet, and I had him on my podcast. Have you seen this book yet? I have seen that. Yeah, I haven't read it, but I have seen it. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. So there's a whole chapter on his FMD protocol and what you need to do to do these five-day fasts. And so I guess getting into what it actually is, so how it differs from a water-only fast is that you do have calories. So you have around 700 or so calories per day. Some people say that

Starting point is 00:13:06 sounds like a lot. Some people say it sounds like a little. It's actually not that much food. It's like a handful of small soups and some crackers. And the first day, it's not so bad. You're like, oh, I can do this, like some crackers and a little bit of soup. And then day two and day three, and you're like, oh my God, I'm dying, Right. But it's not nearly as bad as water only. Um, but the, the, the idea is that you eat just enough food to still get into this fasted state. So all of your inflammation markers, all the things that the different markers are looking at in your blood, they, they look just like you're, you're doing a water only fast, but with a minimal amount of food. So you have a little bit of not as much hunger and a little bit more energy. And so the compliance is much higher. Were you tracking when you do these, uh, FMDs,

Starting point is 00:13:52 have you tracked your ketone levels at all? Do you get into ketosis or does the small amount of carbohydrate and so on that you're consuming keep you out of ketosis? I get a mild, I would say I get around 0.5 or so millimolars. So it's like a very mild. Right on the edge. Right. Which is kind of brutal because you're kind of in the keto flu symptom area. And so you're not fully into ketosis. Well, this is really interesting because, so Atiyah, Peter Atiyah, who you've had on the show a few times, he's my doctor and I know you work with him as well. And we've kind of like played around with this protocol in that Atiyah has put together an FMD diet that is a lot

Starting point is 00:14:32 more ketogenic friendly. So a lot heavier on the fats and a lot less on the refined carbohydrates. So for example, when you're doing Longo's version of this diet, and he actually has a non-profit called Prolon. So you'd actually just order this kit. So I get a kit in the mail that has all the prepackaged food. If you're watching the video version of this, this is what it looks like here. I just happened to have one of them. This is like day five or yeah, day five. What do they do? What does the nonprofit do with the money that they get? Because it looks very... It goes back into research. It goes back into research. That's right. And Longo doesn't receive any of the money at all. He doesn't

Starting point is 00:15:05 take a salary. And so this is meant for people that want to create a little autophagy, a little cell death, generate new stem cells, which he has proven actually happens via this five-day method. And so the thing that hooked me, though, is I have had and elevated cholesterol on my whole father's side of the family. And that's turned into heart disease with my dad and him passing away from a heart attack. My grandpa passed away from a heart attack. My grandma on my dad's side passed away from a heart attack. So it's running deep. And it's a little bit scary. You know, now that I'm 40, I've got these pretty bad numbers. So much so that Atiyah has put

Starting point is 00:15:46 me on Crestor, which is, you know, knocking back the bad cholesterol with a statin. But obviously, I'd prefer not to be on a statin. Anyway, long story short, I decided to, because of his book, The Longevity Diet, I was reading through it. And he said that he was seeing people that did the five-day fast, they were improving their cholesterol numbers. Um, and they were getting more good cholesterol and less bad cholesterol. And so I was like, Oh, that sounds interesting. I might as well give this a shot, but to give it a proper shot, you're supposed to do. And I, and I talked to Longo about this, but three back to back five day fast of the, over three months and then once a quarter. Okay. So you do, there's like a loading phase of fasting where you do whatever,

Starting point is 00:16:27 the first week of each month for three months. That's right. It's the creation of fasting. Right, and then you do maintenance once a quarter thereafter. That's right. Okay. Yeah, so I did the first five-day fast three months ago, had my blood work drawn pre uh, drawn pre and post,

Starting point is 00:16:46 um, you know, small, minor improvements, second fast, same thing. And then by the third, we actually saw, um, a dramatic drop on a few different fronts, cholesterol wise. And Atiyah was like, when he called me up my, uh, cause we do these like little, you know, calls to go over my blood work. And he was like, Kevin, you're going to, you're going to live to 90. If you, if you keep this up, this is amazing. So he was shocked and he was blown away. And so, um, we're pretty happy with the results. We'll see how long they, they stick. Um, and this is no dietary changes. This is just, I mean, granted there's, there's a dietary change during those five days, but no, like long-term I'm still kind of sticking to the same diet that I've always been sticking to.

Starting point is 00:17:26 I like that you're so specific with 90. That's lower than I would have expected. So it must be all the meth that you're doing that's going to kill you. Yeah, I mean, I still do a dose of meth every now and then. But no, actually speaking of meth, dude, I just did some L-theanine for the first time today. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:42 Have you tried this with coffee? It is very interesting stuff, to be sure. Oh, my God, dude. I had never tried it before. I took a pill of it. I took 200 milligrams this morning, and I was out with a mutual friend, Tony Conroy. We met for coffee, and I gave him a pill, too. Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:17:57 And we were, like, cracked out for, like, three hours, man. Yeah, so this observing of the biohacking is a mutual arrangement that Kevin and I have. It's not just him watching me squirting fluid out of my elbow. I also observe things that you do now on the, on the FM lower carbohydrate, higher fat version. He actually has a protocol for that. Yeah, I'm sure he'd give you the PDF if you asked for it for the podcast notes. Have you tried it? I did. Yeah, I did that for the second one. And it was, I liked it. Actually, I just happened to buy a three-pack of the Prolong kit, so I wanted to go through them and use them because they're not cheap.

Starting point is 00:18:45 And so I just used that for the last one. But I like Atiyah's in that it's a little bit more work, obviously, because you're preparing your own food. But it's largely like his is different in that with Prolon, you get these little tiny snacks throughout the entire day. With his, it's one meal a day, and it's just a salad. It's like greens and three tablespoons or four tablespoons of olive oil and six olives and some sunflower seeds. It's not a whole lot, but it certainly gives you – it's not as refined. And so I saw my ketone levels go up on his versus – and I think I had certainly more energy on his versus the Prolon. Got it. Well, I'll ping Peter about that. It makes sense that you would, on multiple levels, that you would have higher ketone levels. And for people who are wondering

Starting point is 00:19:33 how one would measure ketone levels, I think you and I still use the same device, which is the Precision Extra, XTRA, by Abbott Labs, which does a sufficient job in measuring something called BHB, beta-hydroxybutyrate in the blood. For a number of different reasons, this is a much more precise and accurate, well, let's just call it precise, but consistently precise. Maybe it's accurate, maybe it isn't, method of measuring ketones or whether the degree to which you're in ketosis than pee sticks. Because as your body becomes, or if you are already very efficient at using ketone bodies, you could show a false negative. Where you pee on the stick, it tells you you're not in ketosis when in fact you are. So the blood is just more accurate. Well, I'm glad you're going to lift to 90. That makes me happy. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:27 I mean, it was a pretty cool experiment. And certainly for someone that has heart disease running in their family, I'm going to keep it up. I'm going to do another blood draw here next week to see where my levels are at and then try and do this quarterly. And hopefully if we can get it down to where I won't be using statins any longer, that'd be great. The last time we did a random show, it was a very, very long time ago, I believe. It was at least before you had a little monkey in your house. Yes. A reason, many reasons, of course, to stick around, but now a very compelling new reason.

Starting point is 00:21:06 So what is it, how would you describe, since certainly I have no kids that I'm aware of at this point. That's a good disclaimer there. Yeah, just, you know, that I don't have kids, asterisks that I know of. What have been the biggest changes that you've felt or observed in in yourself or otherwise how you view the world anything like that now that you have a kid and what and what is your kid's name i know you yeah uh zelda she's four months old and she's named after the video game because um one of the first things that my wife and i bonded on uh very early on in our relationship was our love for the game Zelda. And actually, the new Zelda game allows you to track your hours played. It actually shows it in the little settings menu. And so Daria has over 200 hours played of the latest Zelda. So

Starting point is 00:21:56 she's hardcore. She played it a lot during her pregnancy. She's a true believer. And when we were in Japan a long time ago, Daria was using some type of emulator. I don't know what device it was on exactly, but she was playing Zelda on all the trains when we were sitting down and chilling. That's one thing I do remember. Yeah, like the original. Yeah, Josh Cook was too. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:19 It's fun to play the original ones with those old school emulators. Um, but yeah, so in, in terms of her, I mean, it's, it's hard for, I think a guy in that when you first have your first child, it's, it's like, um, there's not a whole lot to do. There's just like a lot of crying. And so, you know, I tried to help out where I can, but it's really like, you know, on the hip of mom, she was for the first, you know, several weeks and just, there's a lot of getting used to new things. And then now it's just amazing, dude. You walk into a room and she lights up when she sees me for the first time. She smiles and giggles.

Starting point is 00:23:06 And it kind of changes the way that I want to approach life in terms of what things are important and trying to make more time to be a good father. And so, uh, for someone like myself and that has so many varying interests in, and certainly can get sucked into new things pretty easily. I've been, um, trying to be a little bit more thoughtful about where I, where and when I spend my energy, um, so that I can kind of dial back, you know, so I've spent a good portion of this year trying to live a little bit more minimalist lifestyle. What are some of the steps that you've taken to do that? Well, one of the things that – Because I feel like you and I have had this conversation every year since we first met. But now you actually have a gigantic incentive to follow through.

Starting point is 00:23:43 It's funny. Every time Tim and I get together, it's just like, Oh man, I've got too many investments. I'm doing this. There's too many things going on and I got to spend my time here. And we're always like more or less complaining to each other.

Starting point is 00:23:54 Other than just like just taking on too many things. Um, even it's so ridiculous. Um, uh, so I, I just been trying to, um, implement a few rules. So one of the things I did starting

Starting point is 00:24:09 January 1st was to throw away or donate something every single day. And so I have forced myself to go in. And so for example, um, a few days ago I went in and I just like picked out all the clothes that I haven't touched in a year. And I took them down the street, like half a block away is a donation place. And I donated anything that I hadn't worn in a year. And it really thins out your closet. And I've been doing that. Was that easy for you to do?

Starting point is 00:24:37 Yes, absolutely. It was. There was no resistance. You were like, but that's the sweater that my auntie Janie gave me. No, I mean, who's the lady you had in your podcast that wrote that book? Marie Kondo. Technically, Marie Kondo is how they would say it in Japanese, but Marie Kondo. Marie Kondo, yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:57 She's awesome. So I listened to her audio book. And one of the things that she says in her audio book is that the way that you can depart with something is to realize that it has already taught you its lesson. And that lesson may be that it wasn't for you. So if you have it hanging in your closet and you look at it and you're like, oh, but someday I might. No, the lesson is that it spent its time with you. It wasn't for you and it should go to a good home or can be appreciated by someone else. And so my lesson is not to buy it again. And, and, and so I took that and I've applied that to

Starting point is 00:25:31 thinning out pretty much everything in my life. And so every single day, and I think that a lot of people, there's like this analysis paralysis thing where you think about cleaning out the garage or you think about doing this massive overhaul in your life and you're like, oh, you know, it's the weekend, I got to do do this and there's always something that jumps in front of it in terms of priorities for me it's like i find that if i just say okay one thing a day like at the end of the year i'm gonna i may not be to my goal but after five years i certainly will yeah you know it's not like i have that much stuff, but just really saying, do I need this in my life? And is it bringing joy to my life?

Starting point is 00:26:08 I think it's such a good forcing function to like get rid of a lot of stuff. And everything that you get rid of is actually less of a mental load on you. There was this old tea master that I met one time. And Tim and I have done some crazy travels all throughout China in tea lands. But there was this one guy I met. Oh, the stories we could tell. Yeah, seriously. We've done some crazy stuff in the middle of the Yunnan province.

Starting point is 00:26:33 Nothing sexual. That was our friend. We had a friend that did something. So long story short, the one thing that this team master showed me is he pulled out of his pocket one key. And he showed me the one key and he goes, Kevin, do you know what this is? And I was like, it's a key. And he's like, yeah, it's the key to my house. Like this is my one key.

Starting point is 00:27:03 He's like, I've worked my entire life to have one key because we can all have multiple keys, you know, meaning like the things that you purchase, whether you have a key to your boat or your spare garage or another, you know, a motorcycle or whatever it may be, there's things in your life that you accumulate and the least amount of burden and the most happiness you can get is like having less stuff to worry about. And so I find that to be really true. And so that's what I've been trying to focus on is, is just having less and being happy with a very handful of high quality things. I also want to mention that it's possible to read a book like Marie Kondo's book, which I can never remember the title of, because I want to say it's like the magic art of Japanese tidying up. Then it's like, no, it's something close. It's like the art

Starting point is 00:27:47 of the joy of magic cleaning up. I can never remember the exact phrasing. I don't know why. But in any case, that Cole following with her book leads some readers to think it's an all or nothing, take it or leave it approach. So you, on the other hand, have philosophically found bits and pieces of that book that are very useful to you, but are tactically actually doing the opposite of what she recommends, but it works for you. So she recommends doing this like once in a lifetime tidying Super Bowl, basically, where you block out two or three days of your life, and that's what you do. And then the rest is maintenance. It's kind of like the fast-mimicking diet of Japanese tidying, right? You have this loading phase. And I've had this book. I actually am looking at it on my bookshelf right now for like two years.

Starting point is 00:28:37 And I'm just like, man, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And then I'm like, two to three days, I look at my calendar. I'm like, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do it. And then I'm like, two to three days, I look at my calendar, I'm like, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm just not going to do it. So I like the idea, tactically, of one at a time, one per day. And also, what's helped me, because I have actually been, since I moved to Austin not too long ago, it's been a great opportunity after boxing everything up. It's like, okay, do I really want to unbox all this stuff or do i just want to donate right a lot of this because it might be from a one to ten scale of value a two to me or maybe a one maybe a three but i could

Starting point is 00:29:17 donate this very easily to goodwill or somewhere else to say a high school gym that needs equipment which is something i've done in the past. And it's an immediate 8, 9, or 10. It's just a better – it's a nice karmic chess move to donate. And you think of not what you're losing, but also what you're giving to someone else in that respect, which I find really helpful. So you're giving away one item per day.

Starting point is 00:29:51 The other thing too, I will tell you along those lines is that if there is a purchase that I want to make, that is not just what I would consider to be a necessity, like toilet paper or whatever it may be. And it's something that is luxury or not luxury, but in the sense of it's going to cost you over $100, and I don't necessarily need it, but I kind of want to try it. What I do is I save for later on Amazon. So you can add and say save for later, and set a reminder in your calendar app for a week or two weeks later, and almost 90% of of the time I end up not buying that thing. I still have one thing in there actually from you. It's that NAC supplement. Should I buy that? I still haven't decided yet. Well, NAC, so this is, I should say with all of this stuff that we're discussing, because it bears repeating, We are not doctors.

Starting point is 00:30:46 We don't play them on the internet. So everybody should assume that at least 50% of what we're saying is complete fucking nonsense, and we are just not sure which 50% it is. So work with a qualified professional before you start taking or stopping any type of medication or supplement. The NAC came to me initially because I was looking at it as a means to accelerate recovery between workouts. And my understanding, I might be getting this wrong, but is that it is a precursor to glutathione, which some people think of as this master antioxidant or upstream antioxidant that has a host of beneficial effects.

Starting point is 00:31:28 And what I noticed in taking the NAC is that I was over the period of a week to 10 days, perhaps seven, eight days into it, that I was more even keeled than was typical. I felt like the week had been very smooth and I hadn't changed anything else that I could identify. I'd been either meditating or not meditating for a series of weeks. There were a lot of constants. And when I went on to PubMed and began to look at N-acetylcysteine and search for other terms like depression or bipolar and so on, there were a number of search results that popped up that seemed to indicate to me that there was some promise in using NAC to mitigate the amplitude of the ups and downs

Starting point is 00:32:17 that could be associated with, say, bipolar. And that's the primary reason that for periods of time, and I cycle off of all of these things, I become very fascinated by NAC, which quite nicely does have potentially recovery benefits from an athletic standpoint. Although most of my athletic prowess has been focused on eating oatmeal cookies recently, so I can't really claim that I'm doing a lot of killer workouts. I got rhabdo from eating oatmeal cookies for you CrossFitters out there. That's for you. But the other would be something you and I are both familiar with, which is low-dose lithium orotate. Very, very low-dose lithium orotate, 5 milligrams, which you can find on Amazon and elsewhere.

Starting point is 00:33:03 And there's a great New York Times article, which people can find on Amazon and elsewhere. And there's a great New York Times article, which people can find very easily, that is titled along the lines of maybe we all just need a little bit of lithium. And it talks about the inverse correlation of groundwater concentrations of lithium with, I want to say, at least reported suicide, homicide, manic depression, and so on. So those two for me function in tandem or at least appeal to me for very similar reasons. So the NAC, should you use it or not, I think is a question of whether you feel you need it. And for me, at least currently, I get asked all the time, like, what are your top 10 supplements that you're using right now? Because people have this impression after reading The 4-Hour Body and so on that I'm just like, I walk around with a drip IV bag in my arm and have a thousand pills I'm taking four times a day.

Starting point is 00:33:59 Well, I've certainly seen you in that mode. No, you have seen me in that mode. But my mode right now is to really ensure that I am using supplements as supplements and that I'm not using them to absolve me of the responsibility to eat proper food, for instance. And it's like, look, if you're drinking a lot and you're like compulsively watching porn and not exercising and and mainlining pixie sticks for your diet. And you're like, wow, I'm depressed. Maybe I should take 15 different supplements. It's like, no, you need to fucking fix the rest of your life.

Starting point is 00:34:33 Right, right, right. And then see what your baseline is because you're creating so much static and noise and garbage inputs that you don't even know what your baseline is. It's so disguised with sort of the trauma and confusion of your inputs that you don't even know what your baseline is. It's so disguised with sort of the trauma and confusion of your inputs that you need to- Do you track your baseline? Like, do you log what you consume and what you take? I log, you know, my baseline, this is gonna sound so primitive, and it is,

Starting point is 00:34:58 but my baseline is really, how do I feel when I wake up? You know, do I wanna stay in bed because I don't wanna to face the day? Am I anxious? Are those my first thoughts coming out of bed? Assuming that I'm not checking my phone, right? Because it's really my starting state out of the gate of sleep to wakefulness.

Starting point is 00:35:19 And then at night, how much trouble do I have sleeping? If any, or do I fall asleep easily? How deep is my sleep? And so for deepness of sleep, you could certainly use something like an aura ring or an accelerometer. I mean, there are different means by which you could try to assess the quality of your sleep. But for me, really looking at how consistently I feel good waking up and how long it takes me to get up to, say, first or second gear. Because it historically has taken me a long time to go from park to second or third gear. Some people wake up, you might be one of these people, and they're like,

Starting point is 00:35:56 fuck it, world, here I am, I'm ready to party. That's not me. It's like I have a real slow build. I think I'm in between you and that. I'm definitely not ready to party the second I wake up. I am after coffee. I have a cup of coffee'm definitely not ready to party the second I wake up. I'm after coffee. I have a cup of coffee. I'm ready to party. So I feel that way if, for instance, I'm in ketosis past about two millimolars.

Starting point is 00:36:10 I need less sleep. So let's call it six versus eight hours. And when I wake up, I'm awake versus feeling groggy for an hour to hour and a half, which can be remedied somewhat by the psychological advantage of exercising in the morning, which is one thing I've been scheduling to do more of per Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL commander and all-around intense accomplished guy. People can find him, tim.blog forward slash Jocko, first ever public interview. So I'm thrilled to have unleashed the giant white gorilla on the internet. And baseline, though, to return to your question, is really something I try to keep as simple as possible.

Starting point is 00:36:55 Do I and have I measured all those other things? Yes. with your body or with a business or any number of other things, it's really easy to become addicted to measuring things that don't matter very much. Or we're still measuring things that will distract you from the things that do matter. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:21 Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah. I've, I've tried to kind of pare it down to just the stuff I really care about. I just sent you a link in our video chat to my dashboard for the things I measure every day. Cool. I do waking glucose, bedtime glucose. I do whether I meditated that day or not. I do how many hours I fasted the night prior. I do how many drinks I've had. And then I do what type of workout, whether I had tea or what I ate for that day as a way to hold myself accountable and just like look over the last few days at a glance and see if I've been behaving or not. So I find that just the act of writing it down makes me behave a little bit better.

Starting point is 00:38:14 It does. Okay. That was going to be my question is how does that actually impact your behavior? Yeah. You know, this is a fascinating question. I did an experiment here about three weeks ago with a group of five friends. And I asked them all, I created this spreadsheet that we all logged into every single day. And what you do is you record the number of drinks you had the night before. And I was thinking about turning this into an app, although I'm not going to do it, but I was interested in trying to create social pressure to drink less, not to drink more, but to drink less. And the thing that I found that was really interesting is that if you drink over two drinks in a night, people have some shame in reporting that. And so

Starting point is 00:39:02 they will misreport. And so, you know, if you went out and you had like four or five drinks, it's like, oh, I don't want to be the guy that had four drinks. The one asshole in the spreadsheet. Right, exactly. So I changed it then so the spreadsheet would only say two plus. And so that's the max you could go. And then people were a lot more open to being like, yeah, I had two plus last night. They were a lot more at ease. But it still created a little bit of social pressure and personal pressure. If you looked at your list and you're like, Ooh, there's been four nights of two plus there. I should probably do a

Starting point is 00:39:33 night without drinking. Right? So my idea was to create an app that would allow you just to say up to two plus and see all of your friends in the same arena. And then kind of hopefully encourage you to be able to drink socially, but not take it too far. Yeah, this brings up all sorts of really fascinating and frustrating methodological questions in terms of designing this type of reporting, right? Because I was thinking to myself, as you were saying this, well, if you had a larger group, say a group of 200 people, you would have, one would expect you would have more people in that group reporting drinking two, three, four drinks on any given night. So the shame factor would be decreased.

Starting point is 00:40:13 But if you decrease the shame factor, that also decrease the incentive to actually behave, right? Because you can blend into this perceived acceptability of being like, well, there are 10 other people out of 200 who had four drinks last night. That's totally fine. Well, the question is like, how well do you know the people? One, so how tight are they and your like kind of social connections and your peer group? And then also, I think that there is when I like Brendan Mulligan, I'll call him out because he's a friend of ours. He works at Google. He like never drinks. Like he's like one drink, one drink, you know, like one drink every four

Starting point is 00:40:49 days or whatever. And seeing him hit those streaks of like zero drinks, zero drinks, that was also a pretty powerful thing. And I'm saying, I need to be more like Brendan. I need to dial it back. So it goes both ways. Yeah, that's true. I suppose if you're seeing friends of yours doing well who have demanding jobs, demanding relationships, you can't use that as your excuse when you have the data right in front of you showing that they're actually behaving. So you historically have been a non-trivial drinker, let's call it, like a minor league all-star of booze consumption. I used to drink a lot more, to be honest. You can see my spreadsheet here. So what has helped you most to decrease the amount that you drink? Well, I think there is fear.

Starting point is 00:41:39 I've seen a bunch of studies. There was one that was just published here a couple weeks ago that said the number one, the largest study ever around dementia and alcohol abuse. And they're very closely linked, which is really frightening. And I think just wanting to live longer for my daughter has been another one, back to the point that you had earlier about what has changed. And just getting older. Hangovers happen at two and a half drinks these days right and so it's like why why roll the dice and so for me it's um it's finding uh to to to get your question around what have i done differently there's a couple things um

Starting point is 00:42:19 one i've kind of set aside time to learn at night, which I think is really important. And you really can't drink and learn at the same time. So, um, or remember what you attempt to learn. Right. Exactly. And the second thing that has been huge for me though, has been the sauna. The sauna has been massive because it is like four drinks or three drinks just by going and doing a 30 minute high intense heat sauna session. And you come home and you sleep like a baby. And if you don't have a sauna, that can also be substituted with a really hot bath. And just finding ways to...

Starting point is 00:42:59 It's always been about, I'm with my wife, I'm sitting down, and we're going to crack open a bottle of wine and I'll have a couple glasses of wine. It's never been like, hey, let's go party. Those days are long gone, like a decade plus gone. No, don't look at it like that. A decade plus? No, listen. If we're out traveling together, Tim, we're going to have fun, right? Okay.

Starting point is 00:43:17 So the only times you and I hang is when we're traveling together. So you can't put that on me. That's true. All right, all right. Fair enough. We're in different cities now. I will say for those people who are like wait they can see each other we are doing a very intimate video chat on skype that you you will be able to see on my youtube channel just youtube.com forward slash tim ferris two r's two s's and kevin is dressed for success

Starting point is 00:43:39 i will note he is i just had a park meeting this morning, so we dressed up a little bit. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. So I gave you that look. Traveling's a bit of an exception. Now, how do you prevent yourself? You have traveled a lot in some cases historically. Now, that may change with your daughter, but how do you prevent that from becoming the excuse to drink that happens frequently. Does that make sense? Because this happens in all sorts of capacities, right? Where people will say, oh, you're traveling, you should eat pizza every night, right? I hear that. And I'm like, if I followed that rule, I'll be Jabba the Hutt because I end up traveling so much. If I allowed myself that out, it would become a real problem. Yeah, yeah. Traveling is difficult, especially when it's in kind of a social setting. If you combine traveling with social, I'll be going to TED in a couple weeks, and I know that there's just going to be a lot of parties and a lot of events and a lot of drinking.

Starting point is 00:44:39 So I think that's one of the things that I need to work on is that I have a hard time dealing with like large groups of people that I don't know. And as a social lubricant, alcohol is amazing, right? So it's like, what else can we do? And I think that someone was telling me this, that, um, you know, you never really strengthen that muscle, like if you're leaning on the crutch of alcohol. So you're never going to become more comfortable with new humans and new interactions and new ways of like kind of breaking the ice if you always just go to the booze, right? So I think of it as like, okay, this is my workout I'm going into. And the other thing I do is I, so I got a couple little hacks. One is to show up a little bit late. So then you skip a drink, right? And it's funny how if you skip a drink or two and you get there and people are already a little hammered, how unattractive and unappealing drinking then becomes. Because you look at it and everyone's like, hey, it's good to see you. And it's like a little bit sloppy. And you look at that and you're like, okay, they're relaxed.

Starting point is 00:45:40 They're not going to remember what I said anyway. Not that hammered, but you know what i mean they're in a relaxed state so i can be a little bit more jokey and be myself and not have to worry about being hammered and so i think that that's a big piece of it um you know when i'm at home you're gonna laugh at this but on amazon i went and i bought these um speaking of buying more things and probably i'm gonna throw away in a year um i bought these measuring cups that measure out exactly one glass of wine and so what i do there is like you know a bottle of wine we all know is like kind of like a half bottle of wine it's like kind of two and a half maybe you know it's it's up there and it's very easy like like dario will just like have a little

Starting point is 00:46:22 bit less than me and i'll say okay well i'll just wait until it gets halfway and then I'll stop, you know, to try and, but you're actually drinking more than you think. So. Yeah. Plus with a wine glass, I mean, if you have a large wine glass, you can drink like a third of a bottle or close to a half a bottle very easily. Right, exactly. So what I do now is I bought this measuring glass off of Amazon. I fill that perfectly, pour it in, get my second glass, fill it perfectly, and pour it in. And so that's all of my alcohol for the night. It stops me at two drinks. And I really take my time with it then. I have dinner. I slowly sip it. I look at it. I go sit down, might watch a little John Oliver or something, and then just continue to sip on it.

Starting point is 00:47:02 And so that's my way of locking in. I know no more past that. It prevents any hangovers. You know, my doctor says it's pretty good for you to have a glass or two a night. So, um, and then also, dude, don't laugh at me. It is good for you. Okay. Yeah, I'll go with this. No, but then it's also just taking nights off altogether. I think that's the other big piece of it. Yeah. Yeah good for you man i love it now you you mentioned one other thing well actually a couple of other points because i've been also cutting back on alcohol quite a bit i still enjoy alcohol not gonna lie like i do have booze on occasion i love your drunk like uh oh the drunk dials yeah yeah you know i those are those are fun so for those who don't know occasionally i do these drunk dial episodes

Starting point is 00:47:51 where i will it's the laziest podcast format thought up i think to date perhaps which is i have listeners fill out a google form with their contact info. And I set a time, like a two-hour window where I will call people via Skype and drink, start drinking at call one and drink all the way through to say call 10 and get progressively more inebriated as I answer questions. So that is fun. I did one about a week ago. It was a good time. And then I thought, you know, I should do another episode today. And I was like, I just don't want to do two nights of sipping tequila on Skype. And a few things that have also helped me. Number one is, and this is not an excuse

Starting point is 00:48:37 everyone's going to be comfortable using, but if I go to a party and they're like, hey man, you're not drinking. What the fuck? Like, I'll be like, yeah, I'm on a bunch of weird drugs. Like, I just actually I'm not really supposed to take out. I'm not supposed to drink alcohol right now, which.

Starting point is 00:48:50 Oh, that stops the conversation right there. That's brilliant. Yeah. Well, it stops the push. Right. Right. And then it also starts another conversation, which is, well, what kind of weird shit are you on? And if you at any given point, I think it's fair to say that I could answer in the affirmative

Starting point is 00:49:06 to are you on any weird shit, like I'm almost always doing something odd. I might not be a lot of stuff, but I'm probably trying something new. And that stops people cold if they're like, Oh, wow, I mean, it could be Tylenol. Like if you're taking acetaminophen in any capacity, people may not realize this, but some absurd percentage of emergency room visits and liver failures are associated with high-dose acetaminophen, which is not that much. It's something like two or three times the label-allowable amount over 24 hours. It's really a potent and potentially dangerous drug. So that's one. It's like, hey, I'm actually on this.

Starting point is 00:49:45 I'm on a, B and C or I'm on a bunch of weird stuff at the moment and I'm just not supposed to drink works really well. And second, this is actually advice that Richard Branson gave on this podcast is having club soda with a dash of cranberry juice or something like that. And just using that as your default go-to. And one thing that I do, which is going to sound really odd, and it is odd, but I have a superstition about, say, cheersing, clinking

Starting point is 00:50:19 glasses when I don't have any alcohol in my glass. Oh, interesting. So this is your tell. This is something, well, it's kind of a tell, but what I'll do is I will sometimes also go up to the bar and I'll say, just give me a tiny splash, like the equivalent amount that would be in a thimble or something like that. And then I'll cut myself off at that. And that's the amount that I allow myself. That's another approach that I take to cut back on the booze. You mentioned though, that you've been trying to learn at night and that the booze is not conducive to learning at night. What are you trying to learn at night with types of things? And what's the format? Are you reading a hundred pages a night or what does

Starting point is 00:51:00 it look like? Honestly, have you heard of this Coursera course called Learning How to Learn? I have not. Who teaches it? Oh oh so it's done by a couple professors and i'm actually in the middle of that right now um it was another kind of biohacker recommended to me yeah apparently it's the number one watched course on coursera right now and it's just been fascinating how they dig into the science of learning and like how um in this focused or diffused mode and how to really go in and concentrate on something and when the optimal time is to learn. And it's all the science around learning. Oh, sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. Oh, I'm just getting started with it.

Starting point is 00:51:37 So that's what I've been diving into and spending my nights watching those videos. But it talks about the importance of actually getting away from your material. So like getting really focused and setting a timer for 25 minutes maximum, going really in depth on the course material and then backing away and kind of going into this more relaxed mode. They were talking about how, was it Benjamin Franklin? I can't remember who it was that used to hold a pair of keys in their hand. And then kind of, and Salvador Dali did this as well, actually. Hold a pair of keys in your hand, you kind of just go into this relaxed state, thinking about what you want to learn and to where you almost fall asleep. And when you drop the keys out of your hand and it wakes you up,

Starting point is 00:52:17 that's when you kind of go back and then you realize you were successful at getting that relaxed and you'll retain and become more creative. And I don't know, it's just fascinating stuff. And so I'm just getting started with the course. It's free. Very cool. Yeah, the intervals and the duration of intervals for learning along with break periods is something that I've experimented a lot with as it relates to language learning, because it's so measurable. You can look at, say, your recall of foreign vocabulary, assuming you're controlling for a few different variables, right? So adjectives are generally going to be harder than nouns, for instance. But if you are controlling for that, you can look at what your retention is, say, 48 hours later for 100 words you attempted to learn in one session versus two sessions versus three sessions with different types of breaks. And I did that when I was looking at a few different languages, specifically over 2004, 2005, actually, I've never shown you these notes. I have text to edit

Starting point is 00:53:15 documents with all of my notes on language learning for about a year, year long period, looking at all of this type of stuff. And there were some very clear patterns, such as focusing on the material right before bed, with no interruption. So much like how it's recommended by many names, both you and I know, that you meditate first thing in the morning, before you brush your teeth teeth before you check your phone before anything else when you have this tabula rasa blank state of sorts uh focusing on material that you want to consolidate in memory and recall later right before bed uh at least in my experience dramatically improves recall and then this is actually very important not just doing that but when you wake up before doing anything else which for me would override meditation, doing a recall exercise of some type.

Starting point is 00:54:10 I tend to use flashcards to determine which have stuck and which have not. So those that have not, since I'm looking at language, I would give myself like a quarter of a second. It couldn't be delayed because in speech, you're not going to have the luxury of sitting there paused for long periods of time. It would go back into the rotation for review again throughout that day and later that night. But that has proven really, really helpful. How about exercise? One of the things they mentioned in this course is this idea of doing cardiovascular exercise. I believe it's post learning something new. And apparently this science was saying that it just sticks, um, that much more. I don't have any numbers in front of me, but it was, it was something along,

Starting point is 00:54:55 have you heard anything about that? Uh, so I, I have in terms of, uh, spacing or I'm sorry, the timing of exercise, uh, I, I have less clarity, but there's an entire book called Spark that talks about the, among other things, the role of exercise in education and learning. And would point to things like BDNF, the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which can be elicited through different types of exercise. And part of me thinks that when one says, because these are the easiest to study, or very often the easiest to study, cardiovascular exercise, this is where it comes down to trying to become literate with reading scientific studies or understanding how things typically work. So as a couple of baselines, scientific studies usually use volunteer populations known as students. And those students have 45 minute class blocks or 60 minute class blocks. So to keep those students busy,

Starting point is 00:56:00 people are very often disincentivized from using shorter duration, say, high-intensity training or something like that, weightlifting, for instance, resistance training. And if you want to, as an experimenter, design something that requires as little monitoring as possible, it's like, all right, stick them on a stationary bike, right? If you have people doing burpees or deadlifts, like you actually need to pay attention, right? You need to pay attention if people are lifting weights and so on. There are more safety concerns. So I think that, and just to point out perhaps the obvious, that weightlifting is actually one of the most cardiovascular activities

Starting point is 00:56:39 you could possibly engage in. But I won't digress into that. You can look at a book called Body by Science for all the details and why that is the case. But it would make sense to me that exercise could certainly play a role in increasing cognitive function. But one of the questions that I ask myself all the time, when, and this is a good question for people to ask themselves when they see a headline that makes a scientific claim is what else could explain this like what else might explain this so if you're looking at cardiovascular exercise right after

Starting point is 00:57:12 some type of cramming with material you could make the argument that perhaps it's not the exercise at all it's the fact that they're going into a semi-mindless or meditative repetitive period where they're able to let their subconscious somehow work on the material, right? Right. Well, that's exactly what this course teaches is how to get into those periods. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. So I have certainly seemed to observe that exercise in some capacity for me, it's generally some type of resistance training, uh, does have a positive effect on, on learning. So yet another reason

Starting point is 00:57:53 to get off your ass, which is something I need to do more of. I've, I've digressed. I've fallen off the train a little bit, Kevin Rose, I'll be honest. Uh, but I shall get back on the train. Uh, yeah. So fortunately, you know, once you have a recipe that works, you have the confidence that you can get back on. That's the good news, right? With, say, the fast-mimicking diet, not that you should use that for body composition, but fast-mimicking diet or intermittent fasting,

Starting point is 00:58:19 which a lot of people use your app Zero for, or a slow-carb diet, plus a handful of things like kettlebell swings i just know this is why i'm not stressed out about being off the rails i kind of make make fun of myself about it uh because it's like look if if i just follow the prescription like follow the algorithm for three to four weeks there's no magic involved yeah it will work and i will have less like muffin top to grab when i'm in the sauna which will make which will make me happy muffin top in the sauna is the worst you just look down you see that little

Starting point is 00:58:51 layer just a little boop yeah well you also have like the the glistening cinnabon effect because you're sweating it's it's a really unattractive look yeah it's not a good look uh good um one thing i did want to talk about which i think would be fun to chat about because we've both done it um real quick is the uh is tony robbins yeah yeah let's talk about it for sure so you recently had i've done two different tony robbins events uh ubw unleashed power within which was my first event and then more recently in december of this last year date with destiny which is a longer event oh you did that i didn't know you did Date with Destiny as well. I did. I did. So I've done two events. And some people have had a bit of exposure to

Starting point is 00:59:32 Date with Destiny through the I Am Not Your Guru documentary, which was co-produced, in fact, by someone who's been on this podcast, Brian Koppelman, really accomplished filmmaker. But what was your experience like first Tony Robbins event? Yeah, I mean, it was kind of crazy. I've, thanks to you, got, you know, hooked up with him and, and went down and got a chance to meet him and hang out with him. I, you know, I think that Tony is this this kind of, he's proven himself now that he's been doing this for so long. He's been doing it for 40 plus years. But I think that in the back of my mind, I remember when I was a little kid, the audio tape version, infomercial version of Tony. So there's always this stigma in my mind that was like, oh, is he trying to sell me something? What's going on here?

Starting point is 01:00:22 And I also watched his documentary and I was like, wow, this guy is clearly brilliant. He takes this stuff very seriously and he's truly breaking through to people and helping people change their lives. And so he was like, hey, I want to be in the Bay Area. You should come down. I was like, okay, that sounds awesome. Just took a buddy of mine that has a lot of anxiety and he showed up going named, but he wanted to go. And he was like, Kevin, let's do this. and he was like, Kevin, let's do this. And I was like, okay, let's do it. Um, so went down for the three day event and I thought it was great. I got to tell you, it's, you walk into it and I was in an arena where there was, you know, 12,000 people. And so there is a lot of people there and, um, everybody

Starting point is 01:01:01 is coming there for a different reason. Right? So I was sitting across from a guy that had lost his legs, um, and was, uh, previously a drug addict. And I think he had some infection, his legs or something. He had to have them both amputated. Um, I was sitting next to someone that, uh, she was running her own social media business and just wanted to like, uh, you know, get better with her business and improve, um, her, her finances. And, um, she was getting through a relationship that she had just ended. And, you know, so everyone had something to kind of come in and bring to the table. Of course, we all do. If we're honest with ourselves, everyone has someone there, something they're

Starting point is 01:01:31 trying to work on. And so, you know, I went in there and day one was awesome. I mean, Tony got out there and he spoke for like, I don't know, 12 hours. We were there. Yeah. He's a complete mutant. it's it's unbelievable i don't even know when he pees yeah i have no idea when he uses the bathroom or drinks water yeah just yeah it's just a machine the guy's a machine um but uh you know i walked over the coals um with him and he he was like bring out some fresh coals for kevin and of course they put like fresh you walk you actually walk over coals at the end of the night. You've done this, right?

Starting point is 01:02:06 I have, yeah. Did he bring out fresh coals for you? I can't recall if he brought out fresh coals for me. I think that might have been the VIP treatment that you received. It was a lot of fun. And I think that the biggest takeaway for me was really a couple of things. One was definitely this thing called the Wheel of Life. Did you have to do that?

Starting point is 01:02:28 Where you fill out your wheel? I'm sure I did. I'm sure I did. And I should also point out that for the attendees of these events, and I have a little bit more to say about this, but the exercises that really, and there are very tactical prescriptive exercises,

Starting point is 01:02:47 but that the exercises that change someone else's trajectory and give them extremely concrete next steps that have an impact are very often completely different exercises from those that affect the person right next to you. It's, it's really something to behold. But tell us about the Wheel of Life. Yeah. So the Wheel of Life was interesting in that basically he gives you these areas of your life and you're to rank them from zero to 10 on how far along and how kind of just happy you are with those areas. So for example, a physical body, right? So for me, I was like, I gotta give myself a four in this arena.

Starting point is 01:03:28 I could be doing a lot better. And then there's emotions and meaning. Another one is relationships. Another one is time. Another one is your career and your mission in life. And then there's finances. And then the last one is how you contribute, like how you give back,

Starting point is 01:03:44 how you celebrate and contribute. And so you go from kind of zero to ten and you rank these out and you'll see my wheel doesn't actually look like a wheel. It's like kind of lopsided. But that's by design. By the time you look at this, it gives you a clear view of like, okay, I really need to step out how I contribute and give back. And so that allowed me to go really deep in my own personal life and say, what does it mean to contribute and give back for me? And like, you know, you and I have both done things in terms of like going out and, you know, Charity Water, Tony Hawk Foundation and giving away money, but just supporting a cause and writing a check.

Starting point is 01:04:28 I don't know how you feel about this, but for me, it doesn't really mean that I'm giving back. I don't really feel like I'm contributing. Yes, I'm giving cash, but I'm not actually taking part in that process. I'm not actually really helping out. Anyone can write a check. So what does it mean for me to contribute? And the thing, the realization that I came to, and actually, there's some really powerful moments in this conference where they turn out the lights, and they make you revisit certain times in your childhood and all these things. And I felt myself kind of tearing up, because one of the things I realized is that I was not giving back and

Starting point is 01:05:01 contributing in a meaningful way. And the thing that I came to and that I realized is that my mother was verbally abused by my father for many, many, many years. And, you know, definitely abusive behavior, never physically harmed her. But, you know, I would say that the mental harm was is bad or if not worse than than some of the physical harm. And and I realized that I want to actually lean in and help out women that have been abused and that are currently in abusive relationships. And so a goal of mine over the next couple of years

Starting point is 01:05:34 is finding the best possible way to contribute back to that, not just in forms of another check, but actually how I can get involved and whether it means helping them build their products and build a better website or mobile apps or any way that I can enable and use my technology skills to help with their business, I think would be something that would mean a lot to me. So that was a great experience to have. And I wouldn't have that if it wasn't for Tony. And that was just one of many things I got out of the weekend. So I would say that, you know, he's a badass. It was pretty awesome. Yeah, he's a real master of his craft. And what I would say to folks

Starting point is 01:06:11 who have a certain image of Tony is that when you go to an event like this, I think the right way to approach it is to be skeptical, but not cynical and open to trying all of the exercises he suggests. And that there are going to be components that may not agree with you in the sense that there's a lot of jumping around. There's a lot of music. There's a lot of noise for lack of a better word and a lot of those elements made me uncomfortable they're not things that i would seek out oh my god i could not see you dancing and jumping around right right yeah it's just not my thing but the filter that i used going into it or the lens through which i was looking at it was it was made easier because one of my very

Starting point is 01:07:05 close friends I've known since college who's had multiple company exits is extremely, extremely accomplished. And he goes to Unleash the Power Within every year as a reset. He's been 11 times, maybe 12 now. He's been to Date with Destiny six times. And this guy is not a seminar junkie. He's not someone who avoids the work and goes to listen to a motivational speech so that he can feel better on a sugar high for two days and not take any next

Starting point is 01:07:32 steps. Like this is not that guy. He is an operator. So the fact that he had been so many times really led me to want to stick with the entire event. And I'm not going to lie. I had hard points. And then I mentioned this to lie, I had hard points. And then I mentioned this to you, and it may not be the exercise that had a large impact on you, but the Dickens process that I ended up along with Tony, including in Tools of Titans, one of my more recent books, because it had such a big impact, made the entire event and easy, like 10 to a hundred X return for me. That was the last day too. That's right. So just that 30 to 60 minute exercise led me to dramatically improve my relationship with my father to take responsibility for certain things

Starting point is 01:08:18 that I had been telling myself were unchangeable to really buckle down and step into discomfort to make some meaningful changes and it and those are changes uh at least the power within i want to say i went to now it's got to be three to five years ago uh those changes the ripple effects of those changes that i made then are still very tangible now. And then Date With Destiny, very similar. But to go into it expecting that if you step into it and accept some level of discomfort and commit to trying everything, this is just my view, that at least 50% you're going to end up discarding. Probably 20% you're going to find really uncomfortable and you're going to dislike actively. And then like 10 to 25%, you're going to go, holy shit, I can't believe how powerful that just was. And it's not a lot of hand wavy,

Starting point is 01:09:18 woo woo ambiguity. These exercises are really, really, really specific. So you don't have to accept Tony as your one and only savior. You don't have to believe that he is flawless because he is not. He's just like everyone else. He's a imperfect creature trying to do the best with the gifts and talents he's developed. Uh, but the guy knows his shit and he actually,

Starting point is 01:09:39 he actually really cares. And as I've gotten to know him over the last few years, more and more so I've become more impressed with him, not less impressed. And that is at least if one were thinking of, let's say, attending one of these events. And I have zero vested interest in sending anyone to these events other than they've had a material impact on my life. And that's why I was happy to see that you were going to attend, uh, that they go in with an open mind, expecting that much like if you read any type of book, you're not expecting every line to be a life changing piece of gold. You're hoping that net net, it's going to be worth the time that you invested. Yeah. Right? And that's been my takeaway,

Starting point is 01:10:26 that it's absolutely been worth the time invested. Yeah, 100% agree. And I think that, like you, going into this was certainly a really uncomfortable thing for me in terms of when they first start the music and people come out on stage and they start dancing. And you can tell the people that have been there before, because they immediately like jump out of their seats and

Starting point is 01:10:48 like start like kind of rocking out and throwing their hands in the air. And I'm thinking to myself, I hate dancing. I hate dancing. I've never liked dancing with anyone, my wife or anyone. I always feel so awkward when I'm doing it. You know, like I'm like a geek that likes to like sit in front of my computer at night. And so it's like, then I thought something another friend had told me that had gone and said, Hey, Kevin, like you just have to go with it. Like if you want to get anything out of it, you have to realize that he's doing this by design to put you into a certain state, right? He wants to get to get you into an optimal state and an optimal that can mean like, like one, one example of one thing that we did is we took something that was very serious to us, like a limiting belief that you had held so seriously, and you say it out loud in a very joking and laughing way. And everybody, like 12,000 people are all doing it at the same time, and you're laughing and saying it.

Starting point is 01:11:42 And it's kind of like breaking it down in your in your mind and letting you know that you don't have to take it so seriously and you can joke about it and have fun with it because it's been forever since since um you know you've probably ever done that in your life like you when was the last time you were able to take something that you held so seriously and so guarded and and and have a good time with it and so he knows how to set up these little traps for you that that trick you into reframing things in your mind. And it really does change your long-term perspective on things.

Starting point is 01:12:12 And yeah, dude, I'm a fan. I would definitely go back again. I did the three-day event, the Unleash the Power Within, the same one as you. But yeah, I had fun with it. So thanks for helping out with that. Yeah, man, my pleasure. I would suggest also that as a point of social proof, and of course, Tony is fully aware

Starting point is 01:12:31 of the sort of gravitas this would bring. But there are people, for instance, Mark Benioff of Salesforce, which I think has more than $10 billion in annual revenue now, who will point blank say that Salesforce would probably not exist were it not for Tony Robbins, and still attends some of these events. He was right behind me at Date with Destiny. He's a big guy. He and Tony are very similar in size. And then you have Paul Twitter Jones. You have some of the most sophisticated traders and financial minds who have worked with Tony for 10 to 20 years. And that's on an ongoing coaching basis because he does have very discreet, very tactical exercises and tools that help you to find blind spots and fully leverage the things that you're good at and so on. So it's not easy, it's not comfortable, but certainly I've been very benefited by the time that I've spent considering these things. And I'm biased because

Starting point is 01:13:41 in high school, I read Unlimited Power by Tony, which had an impact. I then, when I got out of college and had my first job, and I was commuting in my piece of shit minivan, the green machine, which was just a complete disaster of a car. But I was trapped on 101 in the Bay Area, for people who know, just bumper to bumper in rush hour to and from Mountain View to San Jose to work. And I would listen to this used set. I couldn't afford the full set, a new copy. So I had Personal Power 2 and cassette tape and listened to that, which helped get me to the point where I started my first company. And so Tony's made these appearances at very opportune moments in my life. And, you know, he's, he's not, he, like I said, I don't go to him for all things. I don't think that Tony has the answer to everything, but with particular types of

Starting point is 01:14:37 self-imposed narratives and handicaps that you have built yourself or walls around certain types of thinking or certain types of emotions that perhaps served you very well in the past, but no longer serve you. He is exceptionally good at helping you work through all of that. Yeah. I just love that this whole genre, like the self-help genre is becoming like, it's not as frowned upon as it used to be. Like, I don't know if you remember, but probably, you know, 20 years ago, if you went to that area of the bookstore, you were like, oh, look at who's in the self-help section. There must be something wrong with them. And now, seriously, that used to be the case.

Starting point is 01:15:18 And now it's gone and he's probably at the center of it. But it's become this idea of not self-help. It's really, it's just like this idea that we're all on a journey of lifelong learning and we all are done BSing ourselves and there's not a single person that has all of life figured out. So why don't we all actively, openly work on this together? And I think it's awesome. Yeah. And I should also say that at one point, as an example, I was interviewed on the BBC, and they wanted to talk about the self-help genre. And I knew it was going to be a setup, right? I knew that they wanted me to defend self-help, and they wanted to attack self-help,

Starting point is 01:15:58 right? And I knew this going in, that this is what it was going to be. Or I figured it out about an hour beforehand when I got some notes, and I was like, oh, I see where this is what it was going to be. Or I figured it out about an hour beforehand when I got some notes and I was like, oh, I see where this is going. So they bring me out. This is a television show. And they say, good evening, Mr. Ferris. We just wanted to talk about da-da-da-da, bio-bio, blah-blah-blah. What is your general opinion of the self-help genre?

Starting point is 01:16:21 Something along those lines. And in effect, I said, I think 99.9% of it is just horseshit. And I said, it pains me sometimes to be associated with the label self-help for X, Y, and Z reasons. And then they didn't have a leg to stand on, right? Because I'd taken their side of the argument, which was kind of hilarious. And then I said, but at the same time, I think the label self-help has, in many cases, an unfairly negative connotation. Because A, if you look at almost any type of reading, whether it's a novel where people want to escape or it's nonfiction where they're hoping to learn more about, let's just call it Andrew Carnegie or you name the figure, there is some motive behind that that they hope to help them, whether it's a shift of emotion, the gathering of knowledge

Starting point is 01:17:12 that can impress people at a dinner party or otherwise. And that if I were to look at who I would say potentially emulate in the world of self-help, it would probably be someone like, this is the name you brought up earlier, Ben Franklin, right? Who most certainly wrote extensively about what we would consider today self-help, but he's not lumped into the category of, say, potential. And these people do exist, certainly charlatans who are just selling a bill of goods that doesn't deliver, right? There are plenty of people who have not walked the walk and talk extensively about their expertise

Starting point is 01:17:52 and make recommendations and prescriptions. There are people all over the world in every possible discipline who do this, and a lot of them tend to concentrate in this section of the bookstore called self-help unfortunately but it's it's that alone isn't enough to disqualify something and certainly if we look at these the popularity of tutorials on youtube for instance of in any possible subject matter if you look at the popularity of the Creative Lives and the Courseras and so on, everyone now has access to expertise that even 10 years ago would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to access if they had the ability at all. You look at, say, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, many of these schools that are putting their courses online, in some cases for free access. And I know people who have taught themselves to code in this way. All of that is self-help, right? So it's important, I think, that people not disqualify exploring certain realms because

Starting point is 01:18:58 of a label that really represents a concept which may or may not apply to what it is you're examining. Yeah, I mean, there's going to be scammers in every genre, too. Yeah. I love how Joe Rogan, I don't know if you've seen these posts that he's done recently, but he does videos of these martial artists. Oh, the legit as fuck? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:14 Where they can throw people with their mind? Yeah, yeah. Does he make? Yeah, Joe Rogan puts up these fake martial arts videos. I mean, they're not fake. They're videos of people who actually believe that what's happening is happening. Right. I mean, they're not fake. They're videos of people who that everything within a certain category is nonsense. And it doesn't mean you should spend your entire life filtering for the 1%, but also there are

Starting point is 01:19:51 ways that you can assess the validity of different paths. And quite frankly, I would recommend for those people who haven't, well, I'll give you two recommendations. So one is you can look at the back of the four-hour body if you already have it, there's an appendix, which is effectively how to spot bad science. And it will help you to not trick yourself and also to get better at avoiding being tricked. So that's one recommendation. And not to seem like I'm selling my own book, the excerpts for that appendix are from a book called Bad Science by a doctor named Ben Goldacre, which is absolutely fantastic. So if you just want to be literate and better able, scientifically literate, or better able to separate the signal from the noise with the deluge of information that we are assaulted by every day, I would highly recommend that you check out one or both of those resources. You know, I was going to ask you, Tools of Titans.

Starting point is 01:20:52 I mean, obviously, in your books, there have been tons of book recommendations. Yeah. And there was that one kid. Do you remember the kid that took all and he'd created, he took out all the books out of your recommendations and ranked them? Yeah, he ranked them or just organized them as thumbnails yeah i do remember that yeah so the idea was that what is the most recommended book inside tools of titans across the board by all the people that were that were in that book and kind of stack ranking them based on the votes um do you have that list anywhere do you have a list of like the most recommended books by all of your guests? Yeah, I do, actually. And I'll pull it up right now because I put it on the blog for everybody.

Starting point is 01:21:29 That's a great way. Yeah, I put it up. Yeah, that's a great way to cut through all the crap, you know? Yeah, I put it up on the blog. And if you give me a second, I will find where it is. This might take a second. So I'm looking at Tribe of Mentors, the most recent. But the...

Starting point is 01:21:47 Where would I find this? If you go onto Tim.blog and search like Tools of Titans books. We can put a link in the show notes, right? We'll put a link in the show notes. So if you want a link, this will be the smarter way to do it. If you want to see a page where the most commonly recommended books from tools of titans and from tribe of mentors combined you're looking at about 500 different world-class performers of all different disciplines ranging from top professional athletes to chess prodigies to former generals uh certainly 12 plus billionaires then you will get to see rank ordered in terms of frequency, which books are most recommended. So I will put those in the show notes and you guys can find that

Starting point is 01:22:30 at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. If you want to see, you know, of these people who are the best at what they do, which books across disciplines do they recommend most often? A few of them just off the bat for people who are curious. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger. Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin. And certainly Atlas Shrugged, even though it's a controversial book, but Ayn Rand comes up a lot in terms of developing a sense of personal agency. I think that has popped up quite a lot

Starting point is 01:23:05 and many more, but I'll give you the full list because there are some that pop up quite frequently that you won't recognize at all. And those are to me, oftentimes the really fun ones to explore. Awesome. Yeah. I've got a bunch of audible credits waiting to be spent, so I'll do that. Awesome, man. Well, I think that this is a solid catch-up. Yeah, thanks for having me on, and it was fun to chat. And where can people learn more about Kevin Rose? Find you on the interwebs? Certainly, my podcast is available at kevinrose.com, and then also, if you want to check out my free meditation app, it's 100% free, a little

Starting point is 01:23:48 bit more traditional meditation. It's called Oak and you can do that at OakMeditation.com Nice and succinct. No social? I don't, you know, Twitter at KevinRose but I don't know that I use it that much anymore. I'm more a newsletter

Starting point is 01:24:03 guy. If you go to my website, if you sign up for my newsletter I do a once a month newsletter and that's't know that I use it that much anymore. I'm more a newsletter guy. If you go to my website, if you sign up for my newsletter, I do a once a month newsletter and that's, that's kind of what I use. It's a good newsletter. I subscribe to it, which I can't say for many. And yeah,

Starting point is 01:24:13 Twitter's Twitter's turned into a bit of a nasty neighborhood, uh, on most days. You just feel like you're minding your business, whistling, walking down the street and then you have people throwing potted plants at your head. And then Facebook's a whole shit show.

Starting point is 01:24:24 So it's like, that's the worst kind of show. What to do? Go back to the tried and true. Instagram or email. Yeah. All right, my man. Well, thanks so much for taking the time

Starting point is 01:24:36 and hope to see you soon. Come visit Austin. I will. Got a barrel sauna waiting for you. Awesome. All right, man. See ya. See ya. See ya to everybody listening or watching on the YouTubes.

Starting point is 01:24:48 Uh, you can find links to everything that we've talked about in the show notes, Tim dot blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, be safe. Do not take meth for fun. Uh, follow professional advice with anything medically related and,

Starting point is 01:25:04 uh, live the examined life. Just because it is self-help doesn't mean it can't help you. So I'll leave with that. 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

Starting point is 01:25:27 that provides a little morsel of fun for 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 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

Starting point is 01:25:57 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. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings.

Starting point is 01:26:42 I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at the gym. Take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on

Starting point is 01:27:08 demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what

Starting point is 01:27:40 you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time, and that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head.

Starting point is 01:28:00 I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was, and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E, Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started. with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out.

Starting point is 01:28:52 Go to onepeloton.com and use the code Tim to get started. This episode of the Tim Ferriss show is brought to you by LinkedIn. More specifically, I'm referring to LinkedIn's job recruitment platform, which is a great way to find and hire the quality talent that you need in your organization. You already know, of course, LinkedIn as the world's largest professional network. And in fact, 70% of the US workforce is already on LinkedIn, and 22 million professionals view and apply to jobs on LinkedIn every week. Given those numbers, it's not surprising at all that there have been hundreds of thousands of businesses that have posted to LinkedIn jobs over the past year alone. And because LinkedIn considers skills, experiences, location, and much more,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #333: Random Show — Fasting, Biohacking, and Tony Robbins

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #333: Random Show — Fasting, Biohacking, and Tony Robbins

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