The Tim Ferriss Show - #826: Q&A with Tim — Supplements I’m Taking, Austin vs. SF, Training for Mental Performance, Current Go-To AI Tools, Recovering from Surgery, Intermittent Fasting, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, and welcome to a special episode of the Tim Ferriss show. I am Tim Ferriss. This episode is a solo Q&A session where I answer a bunch of questions across a lot of topics submitted by members of the private no book community. That's the book that I'm working on right now alongside Neil Strauss, 10-time New York Times bestselling author. It's all about how to say no. If you want to read some sample chapters of that, Tim.com. slash no book no. Okay. We cover a ton of ground in this Q&A, ranging from personal health protocols to professional frameworks and creative projects and much more. Topics include my current extensive supplement stack. I was not going to volunteer that, but someone asked, so I answered it and I'm not a doctor. Don't play one on the internet. Talk to your professionals. This is for informational and

Starting point is 00:00:49 entertainment purposes only why I changed my mind about intermittent fasting, my workflow for use AI tools, some examples of how I currently apply those in my life. My current thoughts on Austin versus San Francisco for builders and entrepreneurs, after spending a lot of time in both places, a detailed breakdown of how I would approach training for a mental sport like competitive chess, although I wish I could rope in some of my friends like Josh Waitskin. My complete step-by-step protocol for attempting to accelerate recovery from a recent elbow surgery in about two weeks out, have a nice big pending scar on my right elbow after some sports injuries beginning 20 years ago. So what did I do exactly to recover as quickly as possible using various technologies and devices like

Starting point is 00:01:35 the Mark Pro and BFR training and more. Behind the scenes, stories related to Coyote, the brand new game that's now in 8,000 retail locations and some current challenges, how I'm navigating that. And as always, much, much more. One quick note on Coyote, please check it out. And if you could leave a review, if you've bought the game, super helpful to, of course, getting the game in more places and everything else, also very, very fun for me. So it's currently 4.7, 4.8 stars, something like that on Amazon and Walmart, Target, and so on.

Starting point is 00:02:09 If you've played the game, please leave a review. I've read everyone so far. I just finished reading them today, and I'll be reading them again later this week. It would really mean a lot. So check it out. Coyotegame.com. I had a blast answering all the questions from the nobo. community, and I hope you find the tactics and strategies useful in your own life.

Starting point is 00:02:26 We're going to get right to that. First, just a few quick words from the partners and about the partners who help make this podcast possible. Traditional budgeting apps, they can be interesting. Yeah, they can be helpful. I've tried out a bunch, but they don't compare to the complete financial command center that you get with today's sponsor, Monarch Money. And a number of my friends have recommended them publicly have recommended it to me. And I had my entire team basically test. this app out and they're all still using it. Monarch is like your own personal CFO giving you full visibility and control so you can stop merely earning and start growing. For instance,

Starting point is 00:03:03 one person on my podcast team has tried four other budgeting apps, said linking his accounts, which includes banking, investments in crypto had never been easier. And Monarch had the cleanest, simplest, yet most complete UI he's ever seen. It made him want to track his finances. Monarch was named the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025, and it's the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts with more than 30,000 five-star reviews. So get control of your overall finances, the whole shebang with Monarch Money.com. Use code Tim at monarchmoney.com. Just type it into your browser for half off of your first year. That's 50% off of your first year at monarchmoney.com with code Tim.

Starting point is 00:03:45 Sleep is the key to it all. It is the foundation. you heard me talk about how today's sponsor Eight Sleep has improved my sleep with its pod cover. Well, they just launched their latest product, the Pod 5. I cannot wait to try it out. And here's why. The Pod 5 introduces Eight Sleep's latest product, the blanket, which uses the same technology as the pod's cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body. So if you're too hot, too cold, you can fix it. If you're a couple and one of you is hot, one of you is cold, you can fix it as well. It all fits right over your existing mattress like a fitted sheet. On average, members report the pod has helped them fall asleep 44% faster,

Starting point is 00:04:20 34% deeper sleep and given them up to one added hour of sleep each night. Also, the pod snoring detection, my friend Albert might be interested in this, an automatic elevating platform have reduced user snoring by 45%. So it does a lot. You'll also get a personalized report each morning, allowing you to track your sleep stages, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and more all without having any devices strapped on to you. So head over to eight sleep.

Starting point is 00:04:46 dot com slash tim and use code tim to get three hundred and fifty dollars off of your very own pod five ultra you can try it at home for 30 days and return if you don't like it so why not give it a shot sleep is everything again that's eight sleep dot com slash tim you can spell it out eight sleep dot com slash tim for three hundred and fifty dollars off shipping is available to many countries worldwide one more time eight sleep dot com slash tim optimal at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now we'll have seen an appropriate time.

Starting point is 00:05:21 What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endosclerity. Me, Tim Ferriss Show. Greetings from the East Coast, everybody. And I figure we just hop right into it. And I thought we would make this simple to start with by simply going through the questions that were submitted and trying to answer as many of those as possible.

Starting point is 00:05:52 And then we can go to some live questions if that works for you guys. I'm going to take a sip of my incredibly strong decaf coffee. All right. The first question is from Sasha. What's an obstacle or challenge that you're currently facing? How are you approaching it? This actually, I could combine with the second one as well,

Starting point is 00:06:10 which is Rashida. How is your recovery from elbow surgery? What procedure did you have done? you've seen the wonderful story of Henry Sugar. I had to look that up. It looks amazing. A Wes Anderson short film adaptation of a role doll short story, which I'm very excited to see. So thank you for putting that on my radar. That is on my to watch list for Netflix, particularly since I just finished listening to Charlie in the Chocolate Factory by the same author. So let's hop into Obstacle or Challenge. I'll give you a couple.

Starting point is 00:06:44 The first is actually a retail distribution and placement question. And that relates to Coyote, the game that's now in 8,000 or so retail locations. And as you might expect, there are some variables that can affect sell-through. And Coyote itself is one of the smallest games that Exploding Kittens has ever made. And it is their first game that is on a hang tag. So it's intended to be put on one of those metal wrongs. once it sticks out of the wall. But when you actually, and this was part one in terms of addressing it, trying to figure out why different stores or regions have varying levels of sell-through,

Starting point is 00:07:26 the first thing you have to do is gather information. Rather than just speculate at every turn, trying to gather as much information as possible. And this actually makes me think of Dale Carnegie and how to stop worrying and start living. Often, step number one is more information. Do you have enough information or even partial information upon which to base this fear slash goal slash fill in the blank so right now went to a discord server that hosts a lot of fans of exploding kittens games and also with the help of the EK team and separately have gone out to some of the families who play tested to ask them to go to local Walmart stores and target stores to send back photographs close up and then zoomed out of actual retail placement and so that

Starting point is 00:08:19 will then help to inform possible strategies for improving sell-through for all of those stores which produces a long list at this point and every item on that list is premature for instance and this is also where the scientific method comes in really handy in so much as not fooling yourself because can you even know for instance if the game is affecting sell-through retail is that knowable, right? Can you actually parse data in any compelling statistically significant way to say yes or no? If not, you can just ignore it, right? But that's an open question. Then you have box size. You have box placement. Can you increase just say adherence to

Starting point is 00:09:00 agreed upon placement? Or do we want to potentially boost the size of a box? Of course, there are cost considerations with that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one that I'm contending with, and then tying into what came up. As the second question, Rashida, how's your recovery from elbow surgery? What procedure did I have done? I had a repair for lateral epicondylitis, so I'm not sure if you can see that. I've got a nice incision right there where the entire elbow was opened up, and the lateral epicondyle, which is that nice little bump on the outside of the elbow, which is associated with tennis elbow, as opposed to the inside, the medial side, which is golfer's elbow. And this is an injury from 20 years ago, probably 20 plus years ago.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Actually, in New York City, where I had my elbow popped and bent the wrong direction in a jiu-jitsu practice by a black belt, which, in retrospect, was totally unnecessary. Blackbalt has no need to exert that kind of force. But every few years, it comes back and has bothered me, and then particularly after doing a lot of rock climbing last winter and getting to, for me, tougher climbs like 5-11 plus on big walls, much bigger walls than Texas can provide, the elbow effectively just became unusable. And it was in constant pain and got to the point where even picking up a glass of water was kind of excruciating. So that was, all tacked back where it should be sewn back together. But you can see, I mean, let's see,

Starting point is 00:10:40 this is about a week and a half out, right? And it's like, I've got almost full extension. This is like 80, 90% of the way there. And then on this side, I still have a lot of pain in the anconius when I flex the arm towards my face for like brushing my teeth or something like that. But that's a week and a half. And so how did I approach that? Well, a big part of how I think about solving problems or challenges is sequencing. That won't surprise anybody who's read The Four Hour Chef, which is confusingly a book about accelerated learning. But sequencing is the magic sauce, I think, for a lot of things. So you're going to sort of deconstruct something, right, to break it down into its constituent pieces. So what does healing look like? In fact, when you break it down into its constituent

Starting point is 00:11:29 pieces, let's just say, those Lego pieces, then how do you select kind of the 20% for this 80-20 analysis to get the highest yield out of the few levers you decide to pull? Because you probably can't address all of them at the time that you have as a non-professional athlete or Major League Baseball pitcher, for instance. Then how do you sequence those things? How do you solve in the right order. And I'll actually be interviewing someone very soon. Pablo's Holman, who talks a lot about this. He is one of the world's most fascinating hackers. And a lot of problems can't be solved until you solve for energy expenditure in the context of a lot of what he discusses. And similarly, with healing, a large part of clearing the highway for productive work is decongestion.

Starting point is 00:12:18 So I was using a device called a Mark Pro device, M-A-R-C, which provides effectively stimulation through electrodes to pump the tissue for decongestion and lymphatic drainage. I was also doing lymphatic drainage massage, which is much lighter than you might expect and does not involve any type of incision. And then there were a number of peptides like MP 157, not medical advice for information purposes only that I was consuming to kind of hedge my bets. And that was based on a number of recommendations. And I've used that as far back as 15 years ago. So for surgical repair, somewhat interesting, lots of supplementation. So along the lines of, say, Keith Barr, who I had on the podcast from UC Davis, consuming particular types of collagen plus vitamin C plus a few other things prior to any type

Starting point is 00:13:20 of range of motion stretching or working or isometric strengthening, not of the extensers right that I had repaired. I'm not doing any isometrics on that just yet but for bicep and tricep. And then once the acute phase of congestion was somewhat addressed, right? It's still inflamed, but that's to be expected, given how much remodeling is going on in the elbow. Now I'm applying blood flow restriction, BFR training, and this was recommended to me, and it's been around quite a long time, but by Kelly Starrett, who's an amazing performance coach, PT, works with Delta Force and many others, and the BFR allows you to effectively not only flush the tissue but also maintain muscle mass on some level without the ability to say

Starting point is 00:14:14 concentrically or eccentrically handle much load and i think that bfr is very very interesting not just for rehab but for training while minimizing the likelihood for injury and by training i mean resistance training so those are a few of the tools in the toolkit of course sleep is mandatory so doing anything and everything necessary to get good amounts of restorative sleep, deep sleep is super critical. And off we go. So I am planning on resuming actual flexor, like grip strength training around week five. And for some people, the risk is that they don't do the rehab. The risk for someone like me is that I do too much too soon and blow the whole thing apart. So sitting still and just not fussing with it is my great challenge.

Starting point is 00:15:12 It's kind of continually a challenge in every context. Okay, let's hop back to the questions, and I'm happy to answer more questions about the surgery as we come along, and I might as well pick up one. Following a protocol, I am following a protocol with a PT. I have multiple PTs. So I'm not just DIYing this. I'm definitely relying on professionals for every step of this, even though I would like to think I'm pretty well versed, but frankly, the accountability and structure and the third-party expert observation and assessment is really critical. I just had my first follow-up assessment by the surgeon today, who has also had this

Starting point is 00:15:54 identical surgery performed on his own elbow as a former high-level tennis player. So I like to choose surgeons when possible, who are former athletes or current athletes. Call me biased, but I do try to look for those folks because they tend to understand the bizarre programming that I have in my own mind. All right, let's hop back to a question from Jake. Do I still think California is the place to go for builders or is Austin viable as a place for a mechanical engineer to find a job, build some momentum, and make a go at a startup. I know you're not in the space anymore, but I'm curious what trends you see in Austin versus, say, the Bay Area. So this is a very good question, and it's top of mind for me because one of my best friends just moved

Starting point is 00:16:43 from Austin back to San Francisco. And his reason for doing so was related, I would say, largely to the focus of his new startup that he hopes to launch for which he will probably need to find a technical co-founder. And it is in, broadly speaking, the AI space. And I will say that AI as yet another example of, I suppose I'm not sure it ever died entirely, I don't think it did, but is another kind of Lazarus resurrection for Silicon Valley. And if you want to build something that is sophisticated in the AI space, which I know is a broad umbrella, then I do think the top talent, the density of talent is highest in a place like San Francisco. So if you hope to build, not only build, but learn and hire, particularly if you're going to

Starting point is 00:17:42 play the venture-backed startup game, then you got to fish where the fish are. And from a talent perspective, that's going to have the highest density. Can you do it in Austin? Depends a lot on what you're building. There are some really interesting fintech companies. There are some very interesting hardware companies. There are headquarters for a lot of large companies, or at least large outposts, Oracle, Google, meta, et cetera, that exist in Austin.

Starting point is 00:18:11 So I think it really depends on specifically what you are trying to build. But what I would add to that is that perhaps you don't have to choose one. Maybe they are not mutually exclusive. So perhaps you just treat a month or two or three in Silicon Valley as your MBA that you get to pay for with respect to any type of domain expertise you're trying to develop or, frankly, networks and relationships. And then you take that and you port it back to Austin, potentially. these are all possibilities. So you could straddle both horses in a sense. That, I think, is my answer on California. I'm happy to answer more specifics on California and Austin, but there are reasons why people are willing to pay astronomical taxes in California. This is true of a lot of places with high taxes. Generally, they're pretty good reasons they can get away with it. All right. Let's go back to the questions I have here. Pete, how are you currently using AI for personal medical? advice and what's your typical workflow. I will say in advance of answering this that I am not a doctor nor do I play one on the internet. So I'm not providing medical advice. I'm simply for

Starting point is 00:19:25 educational and entertainment purposes only telling you what I do. I use a few different tools and I always cross-reference and I talk to professionals. So this is really important as a way to lead into this conversation because much like, you know, the person who is his or her own lawyer has a fool for a client. I think that could apply to PT. I think it could apply to medicine, certainly. And you really want to interrogate and cross-reference your own opinions with someone who's very experienced. But there are a couple of different tools I use. So one is the off-the-rack, chat GPT and so on. I also use something called. consensus.app. Consensus.app is specifically tuned for reviewing published scientific literature to

Starting point is 00:20:21 answer a given question. So, for instance, in my case, if I wanted to do a preliminary run at a few questions before speaking to a very in-demand, very busy surgeon, i.e., the person who just fixed my elbow, I would look at the literature around BFR. So I have two tabs open. on my computer right now related to blood flow restriction and accelerating or otherwise affecting positively or negatively surgical recovery in upper extremities in humans. But that will often give you nothing or something that is too narrow. So I will expand that to include animal models, which are imperfect but helpful. And so then I get a read on say consensus.com. And it will give you a conviction rating effectively. So it'll give you like a red, there's no evidence to support

Starting point is 00:21:14 X, a yellow results are mixed, or a green where there seems to be a compelling majority of evidence that has been published in support of X. So I use Consensus.comptus.com quite a bit. And then I will often ask the same question of, say, a chat GPT or a Claude or perplexity, fill in the blank, and then cross. reference those. So those are how I will then do a first pass on a question or topic of interest. After I have that, I will typically take the germane paragraph or two and copy and paste it. Send it, in this case, for instance, to the surgeon and say, what is your opinion of BFR for A, B or C? Here's what I found. So that he or she, referring to the expert in question,

Starting point is 00:22:06 knows you're not being a lazy son of a bitch and just throwing something at them that you haven't even thrown into google or an llm so i'll i'll make sure that i indicate i've done a bunch of lifting on my own first here's my tentative conclusion do you have anything at all you could add even a sense or two would really be really appreciated and by the way you don't need to have fancy people on your SMS to do that i mean reddit is a great place to do this again not medical advice, but there are some very smart people on subredits and various other places. So those would be a few of the ways that I currently use it. And I might use it to, for instance, take something that has been mentioned to me. A genetic screening company reached out to me after one of my recent

Starting point is 00:22:51 podcasts. And one of my former podcast guests is a scientific advisor to them, credible scientific advisor, and they indicated that the APO-3-4, which I have, which predisposes me somewhat, well, 2.5 times more than APO-33, at least based on current understanding to Alzheimer's disease, they said, well, there are probably 30 to 40 other factors that you would want to weigh pretty heavily. And so I would use something among the suite of AI tools to explore that for myself and ask for some type of waiting, not only to get a better understanding, of what they're suggesting, but to fact-check it, right, before I go too far down any road of exploring someone who is offering a product for free, because generally, things that are

Starting point is 00:23:39 offered to you for free are the most expensive things you will ever receive. Not always, but very, very often. All right. So that is that question. Kevin, what supplements are you currently taking is PAGS or AGs still in the mix. I'll explain what that is for people who don't know the reference. And then I'll combine that with a question from Steve, do you still take magnesium L3 and 8 and an additional question around supplements? So right now I'm using a ton of stuff because of the surgery and surgical recovery. But I'll answer the PAG ag quickly. I am still taking the ag component of that, which would be alpha lipoc acid, which can be helpful for liver health. So as I'm consuming, for instance, ketone mono esters, there's some evidence

Starting point is 00:24:30 to suggest that chronic use could have a negative effect on liver function. So I'm taking alpha apoc acid acidin or NAC. And then the two Gs refer to green tea extract and garlic, alison extract. I still find value in those. Polycosanol is the only thing, the PFPag, that I would put on the question mark chopping block if I were to update the four-hour body. That's the only thing in the entire book when I'm like, evidence was split. I made the decision to include it. I would want to go back and revisit. Coming back to other supplements, Let me give you my kind of roll call for, let's just say today. So today I'm taking a number of prescription medications for, it's really preemptively

Starting point is 00:25:22 avoiding issues that are common in my family. So I'm taking something called Euloric Fuboxostat for managing uric acid levels to avoid future problems with gout, for instance. I'm taking something called Nexlizet. Do not just copy paste this type. of stuff for your own use. Please, God, don't do that. But this is very personal, requires lots of good medical supervision. But Nexlizet, which is a combination of azetamide, and Bempidoic acid, or various lipid profile variables or biomarkers that I care about, since most of the males in my family

Starting point is 00:26:04 on both sides tend to die of some type of vascular or cardio complication. So I'm taking those. I'm also taking Fomodidine, otherwise known as Pepsid, for possible anticoivid applications. You should look up the research on that. It's actually pretty fascinating. It may also be a mild vagal tone improver or vagus nerve stimulator, which appears to be through indirect means, but it's pretty interesting. Again, talk to your fucking doctors. Do not just copy me on this, but it is pretty fascinating. Then I'm taking the BBC 157, which may or may not

Starting point is 00:26:44 be orally available, but since it was recommended to me by a top performance coach, and I want the placebo effect to work for me, I have not bothered to look that one up because I'm quite certain that downside risk is nil, but the GI track might render that completely inert. Who knows? back in the day, like 15 years ago, I was injecting that locally, which I really don't recommend either unless you have professional supervision. So I'm taking that. I mentioned an acetyl cysteine, which I'm taking in the morning, typically taking that between meals. And then throughout the day, I'm taking the supplementation, which I mentioned, which is the collagen, often with weight protein and vitamin C, prior to any type of straining or training or stretching of the elbow.

Starting point is 00:27:31 which is my top priority at the moment. I am also taking maca root extract, which I found to be beneficial for a host of different things, and almost acts like a mild androgen, like a mild anabolic, and seems to have some pretty interesting results. Based on some reports on reproductive health, I still need my twins to work if I want kids, which I do.

Starting point is 00:27:56 So keeping those happy and healthy, hopefully. Then as we move through the day, I'm not taking much in the middle of the day, and then at night right now, because keep in mind only at surgery week and a half ago, I have 100% off of any opioids. I really minimized my use of that, but the elbow still hurts. It hurts at night. So I'm taking a combination of THC and CBN to help with pain, which it does, in my case, quite dramatically. Then I'm taking a few other prescription meds. I'm not. going to get into because people love taking prescription meds for sleep i'm probably going to modify that i'm looking very closely at i believe it's the dora class dora class of sleep medications because there may be some there appears to be some evidence to support that it could help prevent or clear amyloid plaque buildup and tau associated with alzheimer's so if i can get a two for one help me sleep and also perhaps mitigate some risk with the neurodegenerative disease, then I am interested in taking a closer look.

Starting point is 00:29:02 So there's that, and I'm taking the Mag 3anate, and then I am also taking two other things. I take it back. For my first meal of the day, which is around 2 or 3 p.m., because I'm intermittent fasting right now, I'm taking fish oil, good old fish oil, cure encapsulations, the 1-O-N-E has been tested, by Kevin Rose and Rhonda Patrick as being quite pure. So I'm taking that. And I am also taking

Starting point is 00:29:30 A-R-R-E-D-S-2, which is a supplement that is produced by Bowshin Lome, based on clinical research, into helping to improve some types of ocular degeneration, meaning visual problems. So it shouldn't technically work in my particular version of presbyopia, which is the sort of stiffening of the lens, shouldn't technically help. But I do know of a few patients who claim that after six weeks they saw some type of dramatic reversal, even when it shouldn't have by the letter of the book help them out. So since the downside is very low, I would say for me, that's a pretty easy possible upside, limited downside. It contains quite a bit of zinc. So you just have to be careful not to overdose on zinc if you're also taking a multivitamin and so on. Okay, talk to your

Starting point is 00:30:26 doctor since I am not one. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. But the tools then were absolutely atrocious, and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start run and grow your business without the struggle. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout

Starting point is 00:31:10 to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the e-commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rathis, Brooklyn, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions. Established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? So sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash tim, all lowercase. go to shopify.com slash tim to start selling today with shopify one more time shopify dot com

Starting point is 00:31:49 slash tim to answer a question that just popped up here real quick in the past you've mentioned the desire to start family would california texas be states you would consider raising children in or other factors that might influence you to consider somewhere else yeah i could consider many other places entirely and california possibly texas i just don't know from a political, legal, regulatory perspective, how family-friendly. It might sound funny to say. Some people are going to get that. Some people won't.

Starting point is 00:32:19 But I'm not sure that I would want to raise a family in an environment also where access to immersive nature is as challenging as it is in Texas, which is almost entirely privately owned as a state. So California, possibly, there are many, many places that are more rural, perhaps, but within striking distance of a decent airport all throughout the country. So I'm not wedded to Texas, California, or either coast, for that matter. So this is a question from Cindy. What are some recent examples of saying no to good things that allowed you to have hell yes moments? Bonus few of examples of when you should have said no but didn't and the consequences. Fortunately,

Starting point is 00:32:59 I don't have any examples that hopped to mind of when I should have said no and faced the consequences, although I could pull from my life with many of those. If and when the no book gets published, which is currently an 800-page draft, there will be many, many such examples. But recent examples of saying no to good things that allowed you to have hell yes moments, the one that jumps to mind is I was invited to speak at a great event in Europe, and they were going to to pay me a substantial sum of money, and I had always been tempted to go to this event. And I said, know so that I could go to Montana and spend a week in the woods with a number of my closest friends learning outdoor survival skills with a fantastic teacher who's going to end up

Starting point is 00:33:47 on the podcast in the next couple of months. And I would take that trade, especially having experienced it now, a hundred times out of a hundred. And being gone off the grid, I mean, entirely off the grid. Like phone left many, many miles away in my bag has costs. There are always costs, but I would, for those who have not seen it, it's an oldie, but I think it's as relevant, probably more relevant now with every passing year than when I published it, the art of letting bad things happen. It's a blog post that was published a long time ago, but this is very much how I live my life. So the art of letting bad things happen. And I'm sure that you can find it if you just Google that. All right, this is from JC. My question, thinking back to before you started,

Starting point is 00:34:37 SciSafe Foundation. That's my foundation that funds a lot of different things, mostly related to mental health therapeutics and science that would form the basis of those therapeutics. What's the one piece of advice you'd give your younger self on how to best prepare beyond just the money to be a truly effective and focused philanthropist. I'll give a few pieces of advice. The first would be, and I wrote about this quite a long time ago in a blog post called Karmic capitalist, something like that. But effectively, I would have told myself, don't wait. You don't have to wait until you have a ton of money. And that's because a lot of these problems are compounding. So if you can intervene earlier, less money can be worth just as much, if not more, than a lot of money,

Starting point is 00:35:20 10, 15 years later. So I would say don't wait, number one. I would say number two, don't do it out of some type of burdensome guilt. A lot of people, I think, give back to try to cleanse their conscience of some type of guilt or other issue that's generally been imposed on them by some dejure social narrative. I don't think that's clean fuel. And it's not very very, good fuel for the long haul if you're planning on trying to do a lot of good or any good so I would say that and then last I would say treat it like for-profit investing or at least be very clear about distinguishing between and having separate budgets for feel-good philanthropy does like I'm doing this because it feels

Starting point is 00:36:09 good disaster recovery is kind of a good example of that for a lot of reasons or do good which might be like mitigating future disaster scenarios and wildfires and so on, right, as an example. And just being very clear on what is kind of objectively impact driven, that doesn't mean it needs to affect a million people. It could affect 10 people in a small pilot trial. And a lot of the science I've funded is incredibly early stage where you can do more with less money because it's, at least in the world of, say, psychedelic therapies, it wasn't

Starting point is 00:36:44 de-risked. It was still stigmatized when I was involved, which opened up a lot of interesting opportunities. in the same way that Uber was turned down by 300 plus investors when I was getting involved with it in the very beginning. And that actually proved to be very advantageous because when things aren't popular, they're not as highly valued. And there's a lot more room to maneuver. So I don't know if that is a satisfying answer, but I would say, don't wait, treat it like for-profit investing. So if you wouldn't invest in it as a potential company, and you have to make certain allowances for this strained metaphor to work, but it's actually very, very analogous

Starting point is 00:37:24 to how I approach angel investing, which includes the kind of real-world MBA approach of focusing on learning and relationships, so skills and relationships, even if the project fails. So I'm still applying that same heuristic to my nonprofit work, not just the for-profit angel investing that I do. Rose, here's a question from you. Recent thing I've changed my mind about, honestly, the value of intermittent fasting. I was very skeptical of intermittent fasting because based on conversations with owners of Dexa facilities and so on, there seem to be a pattern of a lot of people trying intermittent fasting, where you're limiting your feeding to say an eight-hour window between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. That's generally what I'm looking at. I try to squeeze it in and limit it to

Starting point is 00:38:13 like two or three p.m. to, let's call it 9 p.m. And I was very skeptical because there seemed to be a number of inherent problems. Number one, people were losing, based on data from owners of Dexia facilities, a lot of lean muscle tissue when they were going on these sort of experimental phases of intermittent fasting. And there were a lot of open questions that I didn't have great answers for. For instance, and this is a question that is also one that was submitted from, and I'm going to butcher this, and I apologize, but Ludek, there's a little upside-down carrot on your E, so I don't know how to pronounce that, but how do you actually pull off getting all the protein you need within just an eight-hour window? This is a good question, and I have, in the process of seeing a number of my relatives disintegrate, physically and mentally, in large measure, I think due to metabolic dysfunction, insulin and sensitivity, incredibly screwed up glucose metabolism, overtacks to pancreases, etc. I began doing intermittent fasting after, let's call it two to four weeks. I want to say it was three to four weeks of strict ketogenic diet. And about two months after that had the best blood work that I have seen for myself in more than a decade. That includes incredibly high testosterone and other things.

Starting point is 00:39:42 So it's not just can you starve yourself into living a very long and miserable life. There were other metrics, performance metrics, including workout journal and strength improvement and muscle mass improvement. So I think there are a couple of key elements, and I'm not the first person to say this, but there are a few key elements that form a productive cocktail. for intermittent fasting. One is you have to do resistance training. You must do resistance training. And my experience is you can absorb a lot more protein than you would expect in single settings. So there is this sort of myth that has been propagated just by repetition

Starting point is 00:40:28 along the lines of you can't absorb more than 30 grams of protein in a single sitting. I don't think that's true. And I don't think the literature supports that at all. And in fact, as you get older, there is some published literature to suggest that as one gets older, this is humans, that you absorb more protein, let's just say over the course of the day, more effectively in fewer settings. So I'm having, in my eight-hour window, basically two larger meals to my like 2 or 3 p.m. like today, right? So those might be wondering, nothing super fancy, right? I had a bunch of doctor's appointments and surgeon checkups and so on today. And I just went to Chipotle, had a huge braetable. I mean, that thing was gigantic. So with barbacoa. So, well, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:41:17 a thousand plus calories right there. Then come back and, you know, it's 5.40 p.m. right now. I'm going to eat after this and have another, like, proper meal. But I will almost certainly have one or two protein shakes. And if I hadn't been running around the city all day today, I would have already had one of those protein shakes, which would have added, let's just call it, 30 grams of fast acting protein. If I could just wave a magic wand and have everything that I wanted, yeah, sure, I'd be eating cottage cheese or maybe myceler casein or something that's more slowly digested. But way is just easy. I want to get the collagen and that other stuff anyway. And when you add all that up, it's a decent chunk of protein.

Starting point is 00:41:59 and you don't need to force feed yourself, but what I have tracked meticulously is body weight, body composition, and a good proxy for a lot of that is just strength. Are you gaining strength, or are you maintaining strength, or are you losing strength? So intermittent fasting would certainly be, if you were to ask me, if you could only add one chapter to the four-hour body, what would it be about? It would be about intermittent fasting. And then if I had to add a second, chapter, which isn't really something I changed my mind on, but it would be on Vegas nerve stimulation, probably. And I encourage you to listen to my Dr. Kevin Tracy episode that came out not too long ago. In how many ways could you finish the sentence? Actually, I still have

Starting point is 00:42:46 all of my dot, dot, dot, all of my Dungeons and Dragons hardcover and modules and dice from when I was a kid. Now it would certainly be one. And all my books on marine biology that I started accumulating when I was age six or something like that. Do I have any bucket list multi-day hikes or treks to complete? That's David. I wouldn't say there are any specifics, but I try to do two or three of those a year. So I already have another one, actually two more on the books, one in Mexico and one in Japan, but they don't need to be that far-flung, right? We were in Montana, which is beyond gorgeous. So I would say no individual hikes or routes come to mind,

Starting point is 00:43:33 but definitely plenty. I think Glacier National Park would be high on my list of dream locations. All right. It's from Tim. If you had to pick one specific moment, it felt like disaster at the time, but later became the most Catholic gift. What was it?

Starting point is 00:43:49 And what chain of events turned it into that gift? Some of you will know this, but I'll say it anyway because it's the most standout example. That is when the four-hour chef, this book on Accelerated Learning, really, really underperformed when it was published. And I put my heart and soul. There's so much blood, sweat, and tears that went into that, literally.

Starting point is 00:44:09 And I'm super proud of that book, but because it was published through Amazon Publishing, it was the first mega title that was used to announce the existence for the launch of Amazon publishing, where they went head-to-head against their publisher partners, in effect for scouting author talent and putting out their own titles, it was boycotted by everybody. And I expected Barnes & Noble. I did not foresee Costco and all these other big box retailers and indies, of course, and that smashed the book on the New York Times. It's still hit number four,

Starting point is 00:44:43 but it should have been number one. And during the launch of the four-hour chef, as with the launch of anything I do. I'm always looking for a channel that I can learn a lot about that is undervalued and quickly growing. And at the time, in 2012, that was podcasts. So I fell in love with podcasts. And then when I was completely demolished and my ego is shattered to pieces by the four-hour chef performing so poorly relative to my other books, even though still, I went to one of the top restaurants in Austin and the matrony came out after the meal and said the exec chef just wanted to say huge thanks to you because the first cookbook he ever bought was the four-hour chef. This is one of the top restaurants in Austin, which is a major food town. So there are these examples that are

Starting point is 00:45:30 really incredibly rewarding, and there are a lot of them actually. But if it had not been for that burnout, I would not have decided to take a cold turkey break from books and launch my own podcast as a test. As a test with a graceful exit, I think I committed to six to ten episodes. And here we are more than a decade and 800 episodes later. Cindy would love to hear how it feels to be in a season of life when you inspire people towards high performance and learning over 15 years. Now with Coyote, you're bringing absolute delight and laughter to people's lives. It feels great because frankly, what the hell are we doing here on the spinning rock? We're on a one-way trip as far as we can tell. Productivity is important and having a sense of purpose and meaning. These are important, but they are,

Starting point is 00:46:15 I would argue, and maybe this is just the voice of someone who's non-religious speaking, but it's somewhat arbitrary. You're picking a story that works for you, much like Seth Godin has said, money is a story past a certain point, so pick one that you can live with. It's like, yes. All of those things are true and important, but they're pretty subjective. And the more you study history, the more you realize the idea of leaving your legacy by putting an extra 10 hours a week in your Microsoft teams or whatever is probably not going to matter in the grand scheme of things if you just listen to the fall of civilizations podcast and you're like oh wow yeah the assyrians used to be a really big deal oh yeah babylonians too like how many sumerians do you know as nivalrovka

Starting point is 00:47:00 would ask like none right so the more you let go of this heavy rock of being preoccupied with legacy the more you realize also when you do a past year review as i always do and when you do a past your review and you look back over the year at your peak emotional experiences, your peak positive experiences, a lot of them are just hanging out with friends or family, doing something engaging, sitting around a fire, going fishing, going on a hike, none of which tend to cost that much money, or they could be replaced with something very similar that doesn't cost a lot of money. So I feel like that realization is very freeing and nourishing and is something you can cultivate very quickly, but for, I mean, millions of people who have been type A for too long,

Starting point is 00:47:48 including yours truly, you're used to sixth gear. And you don't know what any of the other gears feel like unless you burn out and then you're in park. So you know park, when you blow up, your wheels go flying off, and you know six gear. But showing people that's like, hey, you actually have five other gears is something I had to learn. I had to sound like an old bastard, but you know the hard way for just like lots of self-inflicted wounds and it feels really great to have something that costs 10 bucks you know takes 10 minutes to play that you can reliably inject into like a family evening or something like that where i don't know if you guys have seen one of the more recent videos that i put up on instagram that a family put up with like four or five kids just

Starting point is 00:48:39 going completely fucking bananas, you know, having so much fun. They're all interacting, no screens, and it feels great. Yeah, it feels really, really, really fantastic, which is part of the reason why I keep talking about it, because I'm just like, guys, like, if you take yourself and your work too seriously for too long, like the really serious stuff isn't going to get done. You need recovery, and fun is a great way to recover. This is from Nicholas. What interesting ideas from people of the past do you think could be important?

Starting point is 00:49:09 in the future. For instance, Charles Babbage's work on computing machines would later be picked up as a reference for the first computers in the U.S. lots of machine learning research from around the 50s was later useful once hardware caught up. I don't have a great computer science example to respond with, but I will say that I have done a lot of reading, a very old research related to extended human fasting. And for a lot of reasons, in the U.S., with the IRB-approved, and like ethics board approvals and so on, it's incredibly hard to do extended fasting in humans. I don't know when and why exactly that happened, but there was a point where it just stopped. And I guess it was just deemed cruel and unusual punishment or something.

Starting point is 00:49:56 And that's a shame because I do feel like fasting is the oldest cure. If you look at pretty much any mammal, and this probably applies to creatures well out there. of mammals. If they're sick, if they're injured, what do they do? They fast. That is the instinct. That is the evolved instinct. And I really look forward to and may end up if I have to funding that type of science. I literally have a printout in my hotel room that's about 40 pages written up in English describing the findings of a Soviet psychiatrist who is the executive director of this center that fasted thousands of patients with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders for 30 plus days. Some of the mechanisms they propose are wrong. We know that now,

Starting point is 00:50:50 but in a culture, in a modern world where most people, and that includes all of us probably on this Zoom, are incentivized to add things, right? We're also sold in a, and look, I think capitalism is kind of the best of the worst systems that we have. So I'm obviously a avid participant in capitalism. But when you are constantly sold things, people want you to buy more stuff, not less stuff, right? And therefore, I think even in, or perhaps especially in medicine, there are a lot of incentives,

Starting point is 00:51:27 and unfortunately a lot of kind of large incumbent regulatory capture players who perpetuate an ecosystem that rely on, on kind of recurring revenue through taking medicine forever. But I think the subtractive approach is more interesting. In part, it's more interesting to me because it's less discussed

Starting point is 00:51:45 and more neglected. And there are compliance issues. How do you actually get people to fast? Which is where the fast mimicking diet, say some of the research of Walter Longo and something coming out tomorrow on the podcast with Dominic D'Agostino,

Starting point is 00:51:59 Sardine fasting. You should check that out. It's pretty wild. And also, medications that might, in some way provide you with the cellular repair and self-cleaning, the autophagy and mitophagy and things like this that are associated with fasting? So could you do that with some combination of medications like rapamycin and others? Could you do it exogenous ketones or the ketogenic

Starting point is 00:52:26 diet? What are alternatives that are nonetheless overlapping with fasting? So long answer to a short question. But I would say fasting was, there's a lot of research being done and then it just kind of disappeared. And then what you're left with is private clinics that have some shit to sell you who are doing their own self-funded, quote-unquote, studies that are ultimately being used to drive more people to sign up for their programs or become vegan or whatever the agenda happens to be. That's a real example. All right. Let's see. Rose, most magical experiences in New Mexico, would have been a Zen meditation retreat at Henry Shookman's Center

Starting point is 00:53:07 in Santa Fe. Just incredibly beautiful and I think magical is the right word for it. Small group, six to eight people. Mountain Cloud Zen Center. It's a mountain cloud Zen Center for anyone who wants to look it up. It is gorgeous.

Starting point is 00:53:22 Okay, there's a question on two meta skills that would be disproportionately valuable in the AI era, honestly. And this is going to sound like I'm trying to prop up the book. I told you he didn't perform the way I wanted it to. but the four-hour chef has got it all. I think the only insurance you have

Starting point is 00:53:35 is being hyper-adaptable and a world-class learner. I don't think there's any other answer I can confidently provide. Even the people at the top of the game who are at the absolute apex of the AI world who are working on these products

Starting point is 00:53:51 every day, all day, don't know what it's going to look like in 18 months. They really don't. If they've had a few glasses and wine and they're being honest, they're like, yeah, impossible, predict. Look at the rate of change.

Starting point is 00:54:01 Okay, there were a couple of things. of questions. I'm going to hop back to the written questions now based on the cockpunch I've mentioned because there are a couple of questions about cockpunch stuff. That's also Jack and a bunch of others who asked about this. So the cockpunch side of things is fascinating, right? Because the NFT world is on some level, I would say, on life support, right? So it's very hard to predict what's going to happen with NFTs. But with respect to the actual, world building that I did and Varlata, particularly the last few chapters that were published on the podcast with Tyrolian. I have a very, very clear vision for what I think an incredible

Starting point is 00:54:48 film would look like, whether that's animated or live action or some blend or AI produced for that matter. And I have a very, very clear storyline. So what I'm trying to do right now on the East coast is corner a number of my friends who spend all their time on these tools. That's what they get paid to do all day long so that I can put together a movie trailer. And that's just mostly for my fun. I really want to do it because I think it'd be incredibly exciting and fun to do, at least the way I see it in my head, which is like a comic book penciler or director, I guess. I very naturally, because of my obsession with comics for so long and wanting to be a comic penciler, think in terms of cuts and angles and framing and everything.

Starting point is 00:55:33 It's part of the reason why I put up that giant coffee table book, which is a collector's edition of Sin City by Frank Miller, because you get to see underneath the finished inking, a lot of the pencil marks and the rubber cement, all the whiteout, and so on. You get to see the process that's hidden underneath. So that, for me, is kind of the next step. It's like hopefully creating a movie trailer. If that gives me the kind of quickening and that wellspring of energy that makes me feel like I've grabbed a productive third rail of chi or something, now I'll be like, okay, let's see how other people will respond to it and show a couple of friends. And if they're like, if I get that

Starting point is 00:56:15 response, then I'll probably push a little harder. But as I mentioned earlier, I do have a couple of other things on the plate, including that 800-page book. So you can only do so many things in parallel. But that's one that I think over a weekend or like two or three days, if the tools are good enough and I have people sitting right next to me who are good enough with the cutting edge of, say, animation slash video production using AI tools, I feel like it should be, at least to my muggle mind, pretty straightforward. But I don't know how good these models are at following literal, explicit directions, right? Like this for a half second, this for a quarter second,

Starting point is 00:56:57 this for, I don't think they're actually going to cooperate. I think they're going to be like petulant little two-year-olds and make a mess of things and throw their construction blocks all over the floor. Then I'll have to clean it all up. So I think it'll be harder than I would like, but we'll get there. So that I think is next up. So Guido, I don't have any thoughts on the Johnny Depp and Ridley Scott's Hyde comic collaboration.

Starting point is 00:57:18 Honestly, it's the first time I'm hearing of it. So I will need to check that out to see what I can pick up from creative process. All right. We talked about Mag 3 and 8. I answered that. All right, designing small experiments. What's one experiment you've run in the past year that gave you outsized returns, personally, professionally, and what made it work?

Starting point is 00:57:37 I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but it would have been coyote for sure, just as a creative unlock and like an energy tap, like sort of fracking your psyche for increased energy. What made it work was finding someone I would pay to spend time with anyway. And that's Alon Lee. And certainly there are many other people on the team for Exploding Kiddins who made the entire Coyote Project incredibly worthwhile. So many amazing folks on that team.

Starting point is 00:58:06 But fundamentally it was my first contact and conversation with Alon where I was like, okay, this guy is so hilarious, so smart, so technical, which a lot of people do not realize. and just so gifted in so many things as a polymath, I would just pay to hang out with this guy. I think that's what made it work. Let me answer another quick question on the Varlada movie.

Starting point is 00:58:32 Do I see the film as something that can belong to the emergent long fiction model or would that shift the project into a different creative framework? I think it would be a different creative framework. And for me, I just have such a clear vision on what this entire story looks like. I think it would be fucking nuts.

Starting point is 00:58:44 If someone was like, Tim, you're the benevolent dictator of Hollywood, and you can just tell everybody what to do. Like, I would cast Tom Hardy, and I would cast someone who's like a younger version of Timothy Shalameh, and that would be the father and son pair, and I would, Sasha, did you raise your hand?

Starting point is 00:59:03 Yeah, you know, I mean, it's actually not a bad fit. And then I see exactly how this thing would unfold. It would be a fucking incredibly exciting, fun film. I have the utmost confidence, alas, I do not have the ability to force people with, you know, $100 million of budget just to do what I want. So we'll see. I don't think I'm willing to bet the farm on it, which is why I want to play with these AI tools first. Like, let's do a proof of concept at a very low cost and see if it gets a couple of people to hold their breath or go, holy fucking shit.

Starting point is 00:59:36 Like, can I make someone speechless with it for like a couple seconds? Or just make them lose their composure in an interesting way. That's going to be my test. I'm going to butcher this name. I apologize. Hilke. All right. I'm getting back into competitive chess after having been away from it for many years. If you treated it like a mental sport, how would you train recovery, focus, and stamina? Expensive ketone esters are sadly out of my budget. Yeah, they add up. All right. So I would treat chess as a mental sport. It's also a physical sport, depending on how long the games last.

Starting point is 01:00:10 And I wish I had my friend Josh Waitskin here with me right now to take a stab at this. but I think you can treat it like a sport, just like e-sports. You can't play esports 24 hours a day. You're going to run out of sufficient levels of certain neurotransmitters and glycogen and all that, just like a Tour de France athlete. So there are biological limiters, like rate limiting steps. Okay. So how would I think about it?

Starting point is 01:00:33 First, I would just make a huge list of options. And as a competitive chess player, I would basically go through and document on a piece of paper. Maybe you do this first, but your failure modes, right? When have you made mistakes? When have you lost games that you feel like you should have won? What were the causes? Was it not enough sleep?

Starting point is 01:00:54 Was it too long of the game? Was it emotional dysregulation because someone was playing dirty or otherwise fucking around with you? And that definitely happens in chess. What was it? So what are your top 10, top 20 kind of like failure modes or failure stories?

Starting point is 01:01:11 So you could dissect that. But in my case, I would say a few things. One is getting your glucose metabolism and glucose energy management as stable as possible. And I think I really feel like intermittent fasting on a 16-8 format, so eight hours of eating between, let's just call it, for simplicity, like 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. is a great way. It takes about a week of being pissy and grumpy to acclimate, but after about a week to 10 days, everything stabilizes, and you end up having a lot more energy consistently. You just do not have the ups and downs. Be careful with too much coffee also, which spikes insulin, even if it doesn't spike your glucose levels, although it very often will also spike your glucose levels with the

Starting point is 01:02:04 release of glycogen. So just be aware of moderating your caffeine intake because part of the reason I, at least, crash after too much caffeine, like 30 to 45 minutes later, it's not that the caffeine itself by itself is fast metabolized. And I am a caffeine fast metabolizer. It is the effect on insulin and glucose. And I and many others have tracked this. Then there's all sorts of stuff you can play around with. So, for instance, even if exogenous ketones are out of your budget, MCT oil may not be. Definitely be close to a bathroom when you first start experimenting with MCT oil. But MCT oil, whether it's oil or powdered, make sure you check the expiration date. Do not consume out-of-date oil. Don't play that game. It's not going to be good for you.

Starting point is 01:02:53 But MCT oil does have some very interesting case studies and I think also clinical trials that you can look at in terms of cognitive enhancement, typically done in older subpopulations. But I do think that's interesting, right? It's certainly a lot cheaper than a ketone monoester. There are other ketones that are less expensive than the ketone monoester, like keto start made by Dom Daghistino, which is a electrolyte and ketone salt combination.

Starting point is 01:03:23 But forget about exogenous ketones for a second. You could also play with a ketogenic diet. That can be done inexpensively. If you have macadamia nuts, sardines, and some oil, you're pretty much set and some salad greens. The ketogenic diet doesn't need to be expensive. If that's too much of a pain in the ass, as I mentioned, I feel like stabilizing your glucose metabolism is like priority number one. We were talking about sequencing and putting kind of problems in order. You will end up throwing a lot of band-aids on the problem if you don't have that checked off first.

Starting point is 01:03:53 You'll be consuming all sorts of smart drugs and caffeine and nicotine and blah, blah, blah, which is like pissing in the wind. haven't fixed kind of the underlying system first. So I would probably suggest speak with your medical professional, yada, yada, yada, right? But that that's an easy kind of on-ramp to addressing that. And then there's all sorts of stuff that can help, but there's no free lunch, right? So I'm sure that medafinil is used by some competitive chess players. I don't know what the doping protocols are. I don't know what is banned, if anything, for competitive chess. I don't know if they test, but I'm sure people are using things like modafinol, which is anti-narcolepsy drug that was very popular among Olympic sprinters before it was banned. It was like, wow, what a coincidence.

Starting point is 01:04:36 You're like all of the finalists for the gold medal run are diagnosed narcoleptics. Wow, what a coincidence because then they could, you know, sort of legally use modafinil as a stimulant. I am sure there are many, many other things. I would look at archery, so I'm sure just as people use it for music auditions, things like beta blockers. I'm not recommending you use any of these drugs. By the way, I'm just saying these are things that are probably in the mix. I'm sure people are using nicotine. And Andrew Huberman's talked a lot about this. Peter T.O. also has talked a lot about nicotine. A lot of my friends are now hooked on nicotine. And I would just say it is very addictive. It's kind of like in my mind, sort of second in place to heroin. So just know what you're

Starting point is 01:05:20 signing up for. And then there are the old school smart drug. like hydrogen or the rassetam's. A little known fact, hydrogen, I believe, was created by Albert Hoffman, who also created LSD. Fascinating drug, like I was super genius.

Starting point is 01:05:38 And so on and so forth. I imagine there are also people who are microdosing. I could see there being advantages to that. If you overshoot, you're going to be in a world of trouble, and it's not going to be very pleasant, but I'm sure there are people

Starting point is 01:05:51 who are microdosing using something like 50 to 100 milligrams of drugs, dried solosomy mushrooms plus caffeine at the right time, plus ketones at the right time. That's a pretty interesting stool of a cocktail. But fundamentally, I would say glucose management and just like an endurance cyclist, depending on the duration of the event, how are you going to fuel? How are you allowed to fuel? If you're not allowed to fuel, I don't know the rules, but if you're not allowed to fuel across multiple hours, then some version of ketosis is probably going to be very helpful. And I'm going to stop there. But this could be applied to just about

Starting point is 01:06:29 anything, including podcasting, by the way. Kate, are you working on any unexpected projects that people wouldn't instantly associate with you? You know, behind the scenes, I have been working on all sorts of stuff that I haven't talked about that much related to trying to incentivize humans to unfuck the planet a bit and hopefully head off some of the problems that are coming our way at high speed over the horizon with technology. So I've been very involved going back at least five years, but in fusion, looking at different types of different nuclear options for clean energy. I want to give credit where credit is due, since I'm reading his book right now, but

Starting point is 01:07:19 Pablo Holman talks about this, and he said, basically, people conflated nuclear weapons with nuclear reactors, and the wrong one got banned. So fusion is a place that I'm spending a bunch of time. I'm looking at ways of addressing emissions in various ways, like algae feed additives to reduce methane production from cows. It sounds funny, maybe, but actually a pretty big lever, meat alternatives for scalable protein, even though I'm an avid meat consumer and one of the largest investors in Maui-Nui-Venison, which is the most nutritious red meat you can purchase on the planet, arguably. And yet, depending on how things swing, I really do think that having scalable, easy-to-harvest, space-efficient protein is going to be increasingly

Starting point is 01:08:10 important. So those are a few of the things that kind of behind the scenes I'm involved with that I haven't talked too much about. I don't want to sound like some self-congratulatory eco-warier who's just patting himself on the back because he has too much time. You know, like there's so many of those people. I just don't want to be one of them. So I don't talk too much about that stuff, but I do think it's really fucking important. David, what's one country you wished you visited earlier or can't believe you haven't been to yet? One country, now this is going to be controversial, depending on who you ask, as far as country status. But I would say Taiwan. Taiwan is just one of my favorite places on earth. I went there for the first time around

Starting point is 01:08:51 99, I guess, 1999, and fell in love with it, was there for two or three summers, and then had no opportunity or didn't make the time to go back until a few months ago. And I just love Taiwan, in part because Taiwan really preserved a lot of the culture that was demolished during the Cultural Revolution in mainland China. People are very friendly, very polite, the food is fantastic, tons of natural beauty. It is a speck of an island, it is very small, which on the plus side means that you can explore a whole hell of a lot of it very, very easily. There's incredible nature and waterfalls and rivers and rainforests.

Starting point is 01:09:39 within less than an hour drive of Taipei, I just love that place. So if that's on your wish list, I would suggest visiting sooner rather than later. And I'm sure there are tons of other places that I haven't spent time. I haven't spent time in all sorts of countries that are interesting to me for a bunch of different reasons, like Estonia, these smaller countries, Lithuania, that all punch above their weight class in certain ways, like Lithuanian basketball, go look up Lithuanian basketball history. It's completely bananas. Look up Lithuania, basketball, and the Grateful Dead,

Starting point is 01:10:15 if you want an amazing story. True fact, check it out. And there's just a bunch of little tiny countries sprinkled around that I have never had the opportunity to visit that I would like to check out. So, who knows? I would say it's tough because there are so many other places I have visited, which are confirmed, awesome for Tim.

Starting point is 01:10:35 And they're just guaranteed bets. It's like how many speculative kind of missions do I want to go on versus just doubling down on the things I know are going to be absolutely fantastic, you know, the Japan's and the Italy's and so on, right? Argentina, even though they can't seem to, like, every three or four years, they just light their whole country on fire, but I do love Argentina. Too bad about that whole crypto thing with me like, come on. What a mess. They just can't help themselves. So I would say those are a couple that come to mind. This is a comment. slash question from Gihil, who couldn't make this because she's on a plane, but I'll just read

Starting point is 01:11:12 the kind of relevant part here, the most relevant for the group. Saying no is important, but I believe there are a moment in life when not yet, in quotation marks, is wiser than no, especially in the early stages of growth before reaching any kind of summit. I think we need a phase of openness, a time to welcome an experiment rather than reject. What do you think about that? Yeah, I agree with that. I think in part, and this is certainly in the four-hour work week is, well, you need to figure out what you're good at, what you're good at. And part of that is, like, what do you find easier to do than other people? Or is there anything that other people really dislike doing that you happen to love doing, or at least tolerate doing? Right. And then,

Starting point is 01:11:51 kind of what do other people seem interested in, right? What are other people going to value? But at the very top of that is, what are you good at? And to figure that out, you do have to throw a lot against them all. And I think that engineering for more serendipity rather than less is a good idea, because your ability to predict that is going to be terrible, generally speaking. But I would say that for every example of someone who has radical openness, there's also somebody who figured out. They tend to be people who figured it out reasonably early. Either something they absolutely wanted to do, and that was it. Like Frank Miller, I think Frank Miller when he was like age five, he's one of the top comic book artists and writers of all time.

Starting point is 01:12:33 at Sin City, Batman, Year 1, the list is super long, 300, et cetera. And he decided when he was five years old, that's what he was going to do. Or you take like a Michael Phelps or whatever. But that tends to correspond to someone finding something that they are good at or that gives them effectively an unending supply of energy, right, which then provides you with the fuel to get really good. right so those are kind of the two things that I would look for if you're throwing a lot against the wall but once you figure that out even partially I think that going through a period of having a closed

Starting point is 01:13:11 door policy which is just like there's my summit in the future and anything I guess me closer is yes and anything gets me off to the side or causes me to divert as a no I think is a good practice and again coming back to the discussion around Austin and San Francisco like they don't need to be mutually exclusive you can alternate and it doesn't need to be one forever it doesn't need to be one for a year, it could be one for a month. And certainly, if I'm going to focus on, say, you know, a movie script or a book or coyote, right, why did I shelve the notebook? Because I wanted to single task on coyote and the game and maximizing everything about it, right? In the early stages, the development and the playtesting and the tweaking and the iterating

Starting point is 01:13:55 and all of that. And then now more the retail distribution, optimization and things like that. So until I feel like I have seen that to escape velocity, or at least taking it as far as I can within a reason, I'm not going to say yes to things that cause me to sort of deviate off of that. Congratulations on Coyote. Are you already thinking about another game to make the most of the skills and knowledge you've gained? Not yet. I'm tempted to because that's like the fun brainstorming fantasy land side of things that is always the most fun for me. But I recognize that that is going to pull Tim the beast of burden away from the young. that he needs to push around in a wheel.

Starting point is 01:14:33 So I haven't thought about it, to be honest. I'm disallowing myself. I'm forbidding myself from thinking about it until I do as much as possible with Coyote. Cindy, love the 4-Hour Chef and still use it regularly. Thank you. All right, this is Hugo. Do you prefer doing a podcast with big headphones

Starting point is 01:14:49 versus in-air AirPods? Why? I do, and that is because these AirPods, which I'm holding up, run out of battery and also sometimes have connectivity issues and so on via Bluetooth. So I prefer to have a hard connection, which is what I'm using right now,

Starting point is 01:15:05 an Audio Technica headset with this as backup audio at highest fidelity via quick time. Two is one and one is none, so good to have backup. Life Olson, what do you think the uncrowded channel is right now? Is it still in person? I do think in person is still reliably uncrowded. I think a lot of legacy technologies are uncrowded

Starting point is 01:15:27 as newer things get shiny and are made shiny and sold is very sexy. So email possibly older platforms. It's something I've been looking at very closely. Like could we, for instance, use Pinterest and Quora and other sites or platforms that are not currently, like the youngest, hottest girl at the dance, like whatever latest short form social media thing has happened to show up?

Starting point is 01:15:55 What are some tried and true proven platforms that just aren't getting the airtime of the latest and greatest. Not saying that is the answer, it's just an open question for me that I'm looking at pretty closely. Stephanie, Monopoly Deal, great game, and Coyote, biased. I think it's also a great game. Are my go-to card games with family and friends, so much fun. Thank you for that.

Starting point is 01:16:17 Okay, Rashida, you're recommending Dr. Mindy Peltz, the resetter podcast. She wrote Eat Like a Girl and Fast Like Her Girl, all about fasting. That's interesting to me, also because women tend to have a harder time with fasting and particularly depending on your if you have sort of family planning imminently that'd be good to speak to my proper medical professionals about but that is interesting I mean because there are some appear to be some pretty heavily gendered differences in how men and women respond to fasting or adapt to a ketogenic diet for that matter so

Starting point is 01:16:50 that's a great recommendation I'll check it out Kevin Rose's a zero fasting app yes for fasting Right one? I do know Robert Rodriguez, great studio and in Texas. So yes, at some point. Robert has been, to his credit, busting my balls about being a lazy-ass M-Fer about not biting the bullet with doing something in film. So I appreciate Robert for pointing out the obvious,

Starting point is 01:17:15 which is like he can do 12 projects at once, and I've yet to even do a short film. So I appreciate that. And yes, he's right in my backyard and a friend and just an awesome human being. I have looked into fast neutron reactors, David, thank you for asking. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff in that area. Also, just, frankly, building more legacy designs with, you know, watercoling and so on.

Starting point is 01:17:37 I mean, just putting more reactors in play. If you want a really great wake-up call, you can just type into chat GPT. What is the status of nuclear power in China versus the U.S.? And somebody asked about the Bugatti of ketones that I mentioned. on the random show, and if I would be willing to disclose, I'm not willing to disclose yet because there is the possibility

Starting point is 01:18:03 that chronic use of an alcohol-bonded mono-ester could negatively affect liver function, and I want to do the homework on that. There seem to be some ways to mitigate that. So, number one, just don't become a ketone addict and take them all day. Secondly, maybe consuming with MCT oil, has some beneficial effect.

Starting point is 01:18:26 Certainly, some of the supplements I mentioned, NAC, ALA, et cetera. I mean, they're all suite of other things you might take for liver support. Might also mitigate some of the risk, but I want to do more homework because I realize what will happen if I recommend this particular thing is that a lot of people are going to buy it,

Starting point is 01:18:45 and that'll be the last time they ever listened to me. And if they don't hear my findings later, which are like, hey, guys, remember that thing? like cut back only take this much per day or stop taking it they may not hear that disclaimer after the fact so i'm trying to do more heavy lifting on my side in terms of due diligence i have not watched the four seasons i'm assuming that's not related to the hotel okay it would have been some of the best locations for when you've taken your extended family places yeah anything that is built for family outings honestly makes it so much easier so if

Starting point is 01:19:22 There's something with outdoor activities for the youngsters, some hiking, a pond, then I think there's a lot to be done. For instance, there's a beautiful place in upstate New York called Mohonk Mountain House. It's absolutely stunning. It's been around. It's basically like dirty dancing in upstate New York. It's been around for like 100 years. Nobody puts a baby in a corner.

Starting point is 01:19:43 You know, it's a fantastic spot. And you have activities for anyone and everyone. And they can accommodate people in wheelchairs and so on. So for an extended family outing, that would be very high up. Taking my family, and of course, location would vary on person, but taking my family on a, basically a family tree trip and going to different countries where we can trace our bloodline. Bloodlines, honestly.

Starting point is 01:20:10 I mean, what a mutt. I mean, I'm a, as European a mud as you can possibly imagine. But picking kind of the top percentages on Ancestry.com or something like that and going on a trip like that. was really fun the list could go on and on but for an extended family i would say choose a place that's a custom dealing with extended families any no book meetups at some point yes i would plan on some notebook meetups for sure once this thing is done and people can actually get together and compare notes i would say almost certainly we could do them ahead of time as well if you guys

Starting point is 01:20:46 want to meet up i mean there's nothing kind of preventing that just i would say let me know how i and my team can facilitate them. Hopefully that was interesting. I appreciate all the questions and participation. Thanks, everybody. And I hope you had a wonderful Labor Day extended weekend for those of you who are in the right country for that. Even if not, I hope you enjoyed your last weekend.

Starting point is 01:21:08 And I am going to leave it at that. But always appreciate you guys. Thanks for all the engagement and the questions and the thoughtful follow-ups and everything else. So have a wonderful night. Take care, guys. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading,

Starting point is 01:21:53 books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Sleep is the key to it all. It is the foundation. Many of you heard me talk about how today's sponsor Eight Sleep has improved my sleep with its pod cover. Well, they just

Starting point is 01:22:39 launched their latest product, the Pod 5. I cannot wait to try it out. And here's why. The Pod 5 introduces Eight Sleep's latest product, the blanket, which uses the same technology as the pod's cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body. So if you're too hot, too cold, you can fix it. If you're a couple and one of you is hot, one of you is cold, you can fix it as well. It all fits right over your existing mattress like a fitted sheet. On average, members report the pod has helped them fall asleep 44% faster, 34% deeper sleep and given them up to one added hour of sleep each night.

Starting point is 01:23:11 Also, the pod snoring detection, my friend Albert might be interested in this, An automatic elevating platform have reduced users snoring by 45%. So it does a lot. You'll also get a personalized report each morning, allowing you to track your sleep stages, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and more, all without having any devices strapped on to you. So head over to 8Sleep.com slash Tim and use Code Tim to get $350 off of your very own Pod5 Ultra.

Starting point is 01:23:38 You can try it at home for 30 days and return if you don't like it. So why not? Give it a shot. Sleep is everything. Again, that's 8Sleep.com slash Tim. We can spell it out, 8Sleep.com slash Tim for $350 off. Shipping is available to many countries worldwide. One more time, 8Sleep.com slash Tim.

Starting point is 01:23:57 Traditional budgeting apps, they can be interesting. Yeah, they can be helpful. I've tried out a bunch, but they don't compare to the complete financial command center that you get with today's sponsor, Monarch Money. And a number of my friends have recommended them publicly, have recommended it to me, and I had my entire team basically test this app out and they're all still using it. Monarch is like your own personal CFO giving you full visibility and control so you can stop merely earning and start growing.

Starting point is 01:24:25 For instance, one person on my podcast team has tried four other budgeting apps said linking his accounts, which includes banking, investments in crypto, had never been easier. And Monarch had the cleanest, simplest, yet most complete UI he's ever seen. It made him want to track his finances. Monarch was named the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025, and it's the top recommended personal finance app by users and experts with more than 30,000 five-star reviews. So get control of your overall finances, the whole shebang with Monarch Money.com. Use code Tim at monarchmoney.com.

Starting point is 01:24:58 Just type it into your browser for half off of your first year. That's 50% off of your first year at monarchmoney.com with code Tim. Thank you.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #826: Q&A with Tim — Supplements I’m Taking, Austin vs. SF, Training for Mental Performance, Current Go-To AI Tools, Recovering from Surgery, Intermittent Fasting, and More

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