I remember when I was little, I became obsessed with... efficiency, okay?
I became obsessed with taking the least amount of steps to get everything done.
And that's why I'm so excited. to talk to Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss is a household name in the self-help world and he has a long list of things that he does.
Why? Because, wow, that guy's productive.
This guy does it all, okay? He's an entrepreneur, he's an investor, he's an author, he's a podcaster, he's a lifestyle guru And much, much more.
He has set a Guinness World Record. He speaks like... a bunch of languages.
He does acro yoga. He does break dancing.
It's like, Okay, dude, slow down. You know, he's one of those.
It's like, oh, whoa, whoa, slow down. He's sort of the go-to guy for people looking for meaningful, practical, life-changing tips and hacks.
Because it's one thing to give a tip or a hack That's useful, but sort of impractical.
It takes a level of mastery to figure out or distinguish what is.
A truly... life-changing hack. So I'm very excited to dig in to that with him today.
He's written... Five number one New York Times bestselling books, including The 4-Hour Workweek, Tools of Titans, the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers. tribe of mentors, short life advice from the best in the world, and more.
He has a podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, focuses on what we can learn from people who are at the top of their game definitely go listen to that definitely go read the books I could go on for hours, but the last honorable mention is he founded the SciSafe Foundation. which is a foundation that focuses on cutting-edge technology and research.
He is... I think a really special person because I feel like he is able to discuss productivity in a way that feels...
Human, it's not hustle culture. It's not... oh, you gotta do the most, and it needs to be the most shiny thing, and it needs to be Instagrammable.
He's all about... finding the ways that you can optimize your performance and Not only for... but also for well-being and for fulfillment.
And so I'm really excited to be talking to him today.
We will link the SciSafe Foundation down below if you want to check it out.
Also, a quick disclaimer, we do discuss mental health struggles. depression, suicide.
If that's a sensitive topic for you, Maybe don't listen to this one, Tim Ferriss.
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Things people love. Your whole thing is. this is the most productive man in the world.
Lordy. God save us. Which is, I mean... What a stressful title.
Burden. But I have to... I'm curious if... this started in childhood for you?
Like, is this something that has followed you your whole life?
Or... Did that become a part of your life later?
I think a lot of it started early in the sense that from a really early age, I've always been a systems person.
So I got fired from my first job. I was a cleaner at an ice cream parlor called Snowflake, no longer exists, on Long Island.
And I figured out how to make the cleaning much more efficient But that left me with a lot of extra time on my shift.
And I just sat around reading magazines, which was not ideal for the boss, I suppose.
So I got fired. But that interest in finding... elegant solutions, looking for fewer moving pieces.
I think that started really early. It's just a fascination for me.
And that's part of figuring out how things work.
And my mom was very good at fostering that creativity.
So if I expressed any interest towards anything, marine biology, drumming, whatever it might be, then she would try point me in a more focused way in that direction.
And then learning is just figuring out how things work.
So fundamentally, I think that A lot of people have that interest.
I might have a little more OCD on board.
But... it's not automatically stressful.
I think productivity can be stressful. I think. practical productivity that allows you to have some endurance It should reduce stress.
But if you're trying to pack as much as you can into every minute, then of course you're going to be a complete head kick.
Do you remember your very first, like even before the ice cream shop, your very first sort of system.
I'm actually trying to think of mine too because I've always had that sort of brain. where I'm always trying to do things in the least amount of time.
Where it's like, how can I take the least amount of steps in my day, but that's sort of how my brain, that's how it started for me.
But being productive was like, I want to do a straight line and get everything I need to get done done on the way.
And by the way, productivity is just getting done what you want to get done.
That's all it is. And you can, you can make it, you can dress it up and put into tuxedo and say, well, it's about maximizing your per hour output or whatever.
You can find these other definitions, but really it's just... figuring out the straightest line from where you are to getting done what you want to get done.
I don't know if this counts as a system.
It seems like a very generous term for it, but I remember being very small.
Maybe it, three years old and I've never talked about this, that's for sure.
I don't lead with my vroom vroom, so there's this car.
It was like a little... kids car that I would put my knee on and then push kind of like a It's kind of like a skateboard almost.
Kind of like a skateboard is the way I used it for better speed.
And there was this one step... in the house that dropped down into this living room.
And I would, clear things out of the way so that I could get maximum speed to fly off this thing.
Which didn't always turn out super well.
But that's what I was going for. What I wanted at the time was just max speed...
And for me, this was like the Olympic ski long jump.
Of course. Right? But I'm on my vroom vroom.
So probably... If I had to strain to think of a first memory, that's the one.
That's so... good I mean do you feel like productivity is boiled down To speed in a way?
Like, do you think it's all about speed?
No, I actually think that that's where people screw up.
And I should say also, I'm not like the paragon of ultimate productivity in the sense that My trick, if anything, is... really basic.
And that is that effectiveness, meaning what you do is more important than efficiency, how you do it.
Another way to put it, whether you're trying to learn languages quickly or you're trying to build a business, like What you do is more important than how you do something.
Because you can follow the herd. You can... bend to the whim of the crowd.
You can end up imitating even people who are close and good at what they do. who happen to be in your peer group or cohort You're not thinking for yourself.
You end up getting really good at things that aren't actually that good.
They're not going to move the needle as much as other things.
So if you choose the right thing to do, then...
Even if you do a B minus job, that will be ultimately more impactful. than doing an A-plus job with something that is two levels down in importance.
And that can be applied. Everywhere. Everywhere.
Yeah, like, I'm curious... How... like how do you make that choice?
In someone's mind, how should they build the tier list of like, okay, what do I need to learn how to do?
Is it like... the most important is what's going to be used the most often?
Or like, you know, like what does that look like?
Yeah, there are a number of different ways to approach it.
An easy way to remember at least how I tend to approach it is with this framework, which was in the first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, DEAL, which is Define, Eliminate, Automate, and then liberate.
We can run through this real quick. So define... or definition is the most important.
That's just really clearly defining what you are trying to accomplish.
And there are different tools you can use for that.
But definition is number one. Where is your target?
Where is the center of that target? Can you quantify any of it? doesn't need to be quantified.
But that is helpful. The second piece, which is Most neglected is elimination.
How much can you stop doing? How much can you remove?
How many steps? can you put to the side even temporarily?
Right. So that you're majoring in the major things and not in the minor things.
There are very few critical things and there are a lot of trivial things.
Mm hmm. And in the quest for quote unquote productivity, people tend to try to do a lot. and or do more and more.
I think that is often a fool's errand. When you're young, I should say, when I was young, you have to throw a lot against the wall in the beginning to just figure out what you're good at. and what you like and what gives you energy instead of drains energy.
And it's going to be different for different people.
So you have definition, then elimination, getting rid of as much as possible. then automation, and you can use tools for that, you can use systems for that, Figuring out rules and kind of policies to defend yourself from your lesser self.
Right? And then... you have liberation, which is taking advantage of different resources once you've liberated them, like time.
Because you have money, which is renewable, so you can afford to spend that. and then you can regain it later in some ways.
Time is a different thing. Attention is a different thing. also somewhat of a different thing.
So figuring out how to use these currencies best once you...
Once you liberate more of them. And that sounds super abstract, but you can apply that to...
Any skill you want to learn, you could apply that to building a business.
And what you define and then what you eliminate is going to be super personal.
So for instance, I get asked all the time about writing books.
Should I write a book? How do I make my book a best seller?
That's usually where people start. How do I make my book a bestseller?
I think I want to write a book. I'm like, do you now?
Okay. Oh, God. Another one of my worst nightmares.
Now, like, why do you want to write a book?
And asking five whys basically means it's an exercise a lot of people use.
Well, I really want to share this teaching with the world this day and the other day.
Okay. Why? Because I'm sick of my job and I would love to do speaking engagements.
Okay. Interesting. Why? Because I want to make an extra...
$250,000 a year and that would solve my problems. okay why do you believe that and then you start drilling down and maybe at the end of the day you realize actually when we do the math you're fucking fine.
You don't need to write a book. And even if you were to want to get to that dollar amount, this is not the most effective way to do it, going through that type of process, which again, is just asking better questions. you can then pick the target.
And the point I want to make here is like picking the target. or picking the game you want to play is more important than winning. the game, whatever game, because if you're not aware like beyond shelter and food and whatever.
We're all playing different games. We're opting into different games.
Maybe I'm playing... The podcast game or the book game or the angel investing game or fill in the blank.
Mm hmm. And step number one is to figure out what games you're playing now.
And then to be really deliberate about what you choose.
To play it picking the right game is more important than being good at whatever game you happen to land in.
And you can figure it out pretty quickly.
I do feel like a lot of people... choose the game for the wrong reason.
Like it's so, easy to see a sparkly game and be like, I'm going to go do that one instead of Yeah, going and doing what you're maybe naturally good at naturally going to succeed at maybe like it's a new way of thinking for me to be like what is the end goal?
And if it's like a financial end goal, You just need to get there.
So it's like what you do to get there doesn't need to be this sparkly thing, I guess.
You know what I mean? Yeah, it does need to be sparkly.
And part of what strikes me as very interesting about you is I think you've been very good at taking steps back to look at what game you're playing. in a way that is very beyond your years.
And that's been impressive to me. So I think you're very good at this.
I don't know why, but you seem to be good at pausing and stepping back.
Maybe it's just because you're... you flame out and burn out and you're like, I need to take a step back.
Yeah. It could be part of it. Well, I think it actually is because I almost feel like I'm a very intuitive person.
So everything I do is very intuitive. And I can feel immediately when I'm playing the wrong game. that it's not working.
And it's not even like I can... do it anymore.
Like, my brain shuts off and I go full... depression immediately if I'm playing the wrong game.
Yeah. It's sort of like my body telling me it's miraculous in a way.
Like, it's something I'm, like... I'm sort of perplexed by even though it happens to me.
Yeah. Well, if I could, and this is just speculation on my part, but I would say that.
Well, the first part isn't speculation. The first part is language is relatively new. spreadsheets and pro and con lists on the scale of human evolution. pretty brand new.
Yeah. And then we have millions of years of evolution and other means of knowing or evaluating our environment and things happening in our environment. that we have trained ourselves, I think by and large, to mute or ignore, right?
We've come to overvalue the the highly analytical explicit numbers on a spreadsheet approach to thing. uh... to two things and problem solving whereas It seems like part of what you're doing is just using all these other means of sensing that are harder to put words into.
Totally. And I have, since I was very young, uh had challenges with depressive episodes i think i've become much smarter about how I approach those and they become less and less frequent we could talk about why that's the case me too far less frequent and In some cases, though, like depression can – and I'll make this personal because I don't want to – project all over you but I just say sometimes when I've been like oh I'm feeling depressed It's like, no, you're getting a signal and your energy has dropped.
Yeah. that's not automatically the same as this constellation of symptoms that we would call psychiatric depression yep completely and those signals are easy to mix up But oftentimes it's like, no, this is, this is an energy out activity and your body is making you pay attention to that as opposed to an energy inactivity, which is how I choose a lot of what I do.
Which comes back to like, okay, well, how do you choose the target?
I'll give people just a, if it's helpful for folks.
How I choose, say, the few big yeses. Yes, I was about to ask this.
Because in a world of infinite distraction and... a million shiny objects and phones that force feed you temptation at all times and i remember i interviewed uh Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at one point, he sadly passed away a few years ago, but he said one of the key skills is being able to distinguish between Let me get this right.
An opportunity to be seized or a temptation to be resisted.
And I think that skill is going to be increasingly important.
It's going to become very obvious this year with AI and many of the tools that are going to be used to inflict fire hose of temptation on everyone, including the two of us.
Oh, yeah. So how do I try to sift through that?
Part of it is if you have a list of let's just say five things you might want to do.
And I'm in a transition period for myself right now where I'm thinking about new things.
10th anniversary of my podcast is coming up. in April.
So I'm like, oh yeah, let me use this as an opportunity to pause and think about what next chapters might look like.
And There are a few ways that I look at my list of possible candidates and start to filter.
Number one is how do I succeed even if I fail?
Or can I succeed even if I fail with these?
What I mean by that is, If I try this project and by any external measurement, it fails. whether that's books sold, views, subscribers, revenue, whatever, if it fails –
Will I develop skills and relationships or deepen relationships and develop skills that will transfer to other things.
Yes. If so, that's not a failure. Like you can still have a very meaningful partial win, even if externally it's a total failure.
If any of those candidates don't check that box, they're out.
That happens. has to be a prereq because then you snowball your way into long-term success.
It has never failed me. I've never seen that fail when it's done really methodically over time.
You need endurance for that, which comes to the next point, which is like energy in energy out.
Mm hmm. By the way, if you're not really excited about something's not quite the right word.
And I know you've talked about this, you know, passion and, and, These words are kind of clumsy labels that we try to apply to what I think fundamentally is like energy in, energy out.
If language learning for me is energy in and somebody else wants to compete in that, let's just say money...
Money was big in the language learning game, which it isn't.
And they're like, okay, I want to do that because five other people I respect are doing it.
This exploding opportunity like AI or Web3 a couple of years ago.
Okay, fine. We're going to chase that. Yeah.
If it's energy out for you and it's energy in for me, I'm going to win.
Yep. There's just no way around it. Assuming I have like the basic skills.
So choose a game you can win. So there's the, will this help me snowball into success long-term?
Will the skills and relationships... transfer potentially to other things or persist after this, even if it fails or succeeds.
Then beyond that, it's doing an 80-20 analysis of what you're trying to do in your life with whether it's finance, personal stuff.
It's like, all right, let's rank order. your life and break it down in some way.
You could do this a million different ways, but it's like, all right, finances... physical health, mental health, like which levers are you trying to pull?
Okay. if you've checked the the first two boxes then you check on the third like is this addressing say if you rank each of those on one to five Anything that's a three or less you probably should deal with.
Okay. Then you choose the overlap and that's what you go for.
And you can fuck, sorry, am I allowed to curse?
Oh my God, yes. So you can fuck that up every which way from Sunday.
I'm from Long Island, so I curse a lot. If you go through that process and you choose the right target.
Mm hmm. You can have off days. You can have off weeks.
You can – have multiple days in a row where you think to yourself what In the hell did I get done today?
I don't think anything. I was looking at my computer a lot, but I don't think I actually did anything.
But as long as you have the right target and you get a little bit done... week by week, I mean, you really can produce some some miracles from the outside looking in, but it's that front loading. that thought process in the beginning that really makes the difference.
Because if people looked at me from day to day, Week to week basis and I've had some journalists or various folks pitch me on like shadowing me for a day or a week And I'm like, no way, because it's going to look terrible.
Like I'm going to look so – quote unquote unproductive because there's a lot of empty space.
There's a lot of kind of feeling lost. or being unsure of next steps.
And there are ways to improve that. I'm not totally terrible.
But as long as I've taken my time in the beginning to do... that type of deconstruction of things and assessment of things.
If I have the right target, Those off days don't matter.
Every time I'm having an off day or even an off week... Well, actually, in the beginning, when I first started working and...
When I'd have these off periods, I would feel... horrific i'd be like this is i'm wasting my time i'm not getting anything done And now I lean into it because I've realized that those periods are very productive because you're You're doing work in your subconscious.
I feel like sometimes the... the off day, the off week. can be productive.
Do you agree with that to an extent? Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, busyness is often laziness in disguise.
In the sense that you're not willing to sit with those spaces anymore.
So you choose something that's easy. You choose something that's sexy.
You choose something that's shiny. Because it's right in front of you and it's easy to do.
And then guess what? Then you end up with... five kind of cool things that you're not particularly good at that drain you And that is your schedule.
And that target that you chose so carefully in the beginning just disappears.
Although usually if you go through the trouble of choosing it, it doesn't disappear quite as easily.
Yeah. And those empty spaces are... I like to accomplish and have some end product. to show for myself at the end of the day or the week as much as the next person.
And that is important for positive reinforcement.
But if you look at the best scientists I've ever interacted with, a lot of the best creatives.
Mm-hmm. There's a lot of negative space and they actually deliberately create that for themselves.
Yep. And my feeling is, and this isn't across the board, there are always exceptions.
Like if you feel like you are rushing, you are rushing almost certainly in the wrong direction.
If you feel like you're rushing around the wrong direction, because if you've chosen something that you're somehow... uniquely or close to uniquely well positioned to do, right?
Because it's energy in. You're building these skills and relationships since it's energy and you're going to have some endurance.
Mm-hmm. Et cetera, et cetera. You don't need to rush.
Yeah. Right? Because... the window of opportunity isn't going to close really quickly.
If, however, and I've seen this with... A lot of folks.
You're chasing some specter of a... fast disappearing opportunity because Whatever the latest thing is is what you're sprinting towards right? you're going to have to rush or you're going to feel like you have to rush. chances are ten people can do it just as well if not better or maybe there are a hundred people or a thousand people and and you've chosen the wrong game.
That is a bad game. And so for me, an indicator That I'm probably... running in the wrong direction with my hair on fire is if I feel rushed.
Mm-hmm. I probably should take some time to think about what target I'm aiming for.
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When did writing a book become a target for you and why?
After college, my senior thesis almost killed me.
It really was a brutal experience. And I went to Princeton where... senior thesis is a requirement and it's a huge part of your four-year departmental or I should say your departmental average is a huge piece of it.
So it's very high pressure. I don't know how long mine was, 170 pages or something.
I mean, by far and away the longest thing I'd ever written.
Yeah. And it just absolutely crushed me.
I didn't know how to handle something of that scope.
It was very complicated. And after I was done with it, which took way longer than I expected.
I made this vow to myself that I would never write anything longer than an email ever again.
I was like, I'm done. I get it. I'm done.
I'm done. And the way the first book came about is actually how I'm thinking about exploring my next chapter. chapters a bit, is teaching a class.
So I had this professor at Princeton. I've been really...
Part lucky, part by design, but a lot of luck in terms of having some teachers who've had huge impact on me.
And Ed Shao, Z-S-C-H-A-U. was teaching this class called High Tech Entrepreneurship.
And it was based on the Harvard case study method where they would use these real case studies of, say...
Business X has this problem or this goal.
What should they do? Here are all the facts.
Pause. And then the students have to figure out what they would do.
And then the second half is, here's what the company did.
And then he would bring in the CEOs or the former CEOs of these companies to explore their decisions.
It's a great class. It's a great class. Yeah, it's great.
So... I started giving these lectures, and I think I guest lectured... in this class from 2003 to 2013 or something, and every class asked for feedback from students.
What did you like? Favorite piece? How could it improve?
Da-da-da-da. because I always ask for that kind of feedback.
I do this all the time, by the way, with everything.
And sometimes Princeton kids can be snobby pricks.
And this is one guy put in... I don't understand why you're teaching this class to like 30 students.
Why don't you just write a book and be done with it?
And it was not intended to be a serious recommendation.
It was just a dickish response. Yeah. But that stuck in my head, and I was like, eh, I don't want to write a book.
And then I reached out to a friend. This is years later.
And around 2004, who was an author. And I basically showed him my notes from the class.
And I was like... you know, I've been thinking about what I'm gonna do next.
I don't think I wanna write a book, but what do you think of this?
And he replied with, you should definitely do it.
And I had some conversations. I got turned down by a bunch of folks, ended up finding a guy who was a superstar editor. who had just become an agent.
So he was new to that game, the agenting game. i was new to the writing game we ended up really hitting it off and We signed.
The book got turned down by 27, 29, somewhere in that range.
Publishers got turned down by everybody. and then somebody bought it and then i had to write it that's how it happened but it was not It was not as though I had this burning desire to write a book.
Interesting. It was one of these things, and I think... things that I have done that have been most successful per se have been the things that I just cannot get out of my head.
Like I have to I have to do them, which is what I say to people when they're like, maybe I'll write a book.
I'm like, you should only write a book if like you have to write a book.
Yes, it's almost like it has to like haunt you.
It has to haunt you. And you almost have to like resent it.
Like in a weird way where you're like, Like leave me alone.
I don't want to do that. It's almost like it starts like that. sometimes not always but I've noticed with me too like even with YouTube it was like I had to do it.
Yeah. It's the same thing. Yeah. But I was like, oh, it's not going to do well.
Like I don't, eat whatever yeah you just you feel you know the muse keeps like tapping you on the forehead long enough you're like ah for fuck's sake yeah fine What would be your advice, I guess, to somebody who is so obsessed with... productivity and like you know in in success and this isn't that but they're miserable Yeah, that's a big question.
A lot of things are fundamentally... driven by a desire to improve our lives but we can get distracted by these like secondary metrics So I'll give you a very simple example.
Investing. So you're saving a certain amount of money.
And you have that money to invest. Why are you investing?
Well, I'm investing to grow my money. Okay, you're investing to grow your money.
Why do you want to grow your money? Well, because then I'll have this money and I'll have retirement and then... Okay.
Why do you want retirement? Well, because I want security.
Okay. What is security? What is that feeling that you're going for?
Well, it's ultimately for a lot of people, feeling more peace of mind on a day to day basis.
But what do they do? If they decide to put it in the latest shitcoin, crypto, whatever. that is bouncing all over the place and they're stressed out of their minds and I'm like if if you get distracted by the secondary metric of like compounded annual growth rate, you're going to make bad decisions.
You have to keep the fundamental underlying driver in mind, right?
So I would say that for people who are miserable in the quest for productivity, often it's because They forget about the layer one.
Now I'm using crypto terms, but... Meaning the fundamental layer.
They forget about the fundamental layer. layer driver, like the primary driver they should pay attention to.
And they're getting distracted by metrics that are higher up. that are vanity metrics or they're just distracting metrics.
Mm-hmm. Right? And not to beat this drum too hard, but it's like, Modern tech platforms are not designed to maximize your well-being.
Just to be very clear. Oh, no, they're not.
And... We can come back to that. But I will say that for people who are miserable with productivity, I would say...
Generally, it's because they probably have a target that is energy out.
Instead of energy in. Yep. Or they have not taken the time to define a target, which is even worse.
Mm-hmm. And secondly, it's the belief that productivity means more is more.
Right. And for me... I'll add one more thing to that.
But for me, I'm always looking for if you look at any of my books, right?
One of the commonalities is searching for something that is called the minimum effective dose.
Okay. You want to get a suntan going out in Australia, laying on the beach as pale as someone like me for like, Three hours straight, probably not the right way to start, right?
Like you want the minimum effective dose if you're using medication. right with especially with things that are a little dicey like tylenol acetaminophen um which can have incredible liver toxicity if you take too much.
And it's not that much at all. You're looking for the least you can take to produce the desired effect.
Yep. That's how I think about productivity.
I'm trying to do – and there was a very famous – I'm blanking on his name. track athlete who had many athletes with world records and he said the goal is to do The least necessary, not the most possible.
And that is a fun puzzle for me to try to solve.
And I use the word elegance very deliberately.
I mentioned it earlier. the fewest pieces in the least dose to get what I want.
Because when you aim for that, you get fewer side effects, just like with drugs.
And... The last thing I would say is a lot of folks who are striving to be hyperproductive and they're really stressed out.
Because they have chosen a really crowded... what you might call Red Ocean.
Yeah. A brutally competitive, fast-changing...
Totally. Aim to be a category of one. Choose an uncrowded game or create a new game for yourself where you can be the one and the only.
Ideally. And part of the reason I'm looking for what my new experiments might be is that when I started, for instance, the podcast in 2000, There were already podcasts, so there was a proof of concept, but it was not mainstream in any capacity.
And it was very uncrowded. There was a lot of room to be differentiated.
It is very hard now. I feel that. Super hard.
It's so hard. It's very challenging. Yeah.
And and it's it's not just because it's crowded.
It's because within that crowd, there are a lot of really good people.
Yes. Incredibly good. Totally. And for me, that's like... to use the casino analogy, I've been playing single deck blackjack, and then they're like, we're actually going to play with three decks.
It's like, Ooh, that makes counting cards a lot harder.
Yep. And then they're like, you know what, Mr. Ferris, stay exactly where you are.
And they move the tables. And now the roulette table. now the roulette is in front of me and I'm like I don't want to play this game.
Yeah. Not from a purely competitive perspective because like...
You have to be careful about competition, I think.
It can make you very unhappy. For me to feel energy in, I want to feel like I am doing something that I am – uniquely suited to do.
Right? So I'd say that if I were going to be a productivity doctor and diagnose the most likely causes of that Misery would be the few things I just mentioned. we're in a real like hustle culture of it all to use the Yeah.
Lifestyle. I know I used that in the beginning.
Back to that. I mean people like the hustle culture of it all where it's like all about Like looking productive, like, you know, that's what it's all about.
I think it can get very... Dangerous. very unhealthy.
I'm also curious, sort of speaking of social media, like, I feel like one of my greatest challenges when it comes to focus is... social media addiction.
Yeah. Because a lot of us now have to use social media in one way or another for our job, like whether you have a bakery or you are, you know, you're the bakery and you're like, whatever it is, it's like...
If I didn't post on social media, I would delete the apps to not be addicted anymore.
But I can't. Let me push back on that. This might be helpful.
Because I'm so addicted to my phone. Let's push back.
I don't have any social media apps on my phone.
I'm not saying that is... if your goal is to grow your following.
Right. Because... the platforms and the algorithms dictate what you will be rewarded for as an obedient little little puppy begging at the heels of whatever platform you happen to be on.
Yeah. That sounds a little harsh, but you get the idea.
Oh, I know it's real. Like the rules of the games, like how... confident can you feel in your choice of game when the rules of the game constantly change?
No wonder you're stressed out. Of course.
Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And what I would say though is like, I'm making up this example, but some of the top contemporary artists in the world, visual artists, are they posting every day?
No. I guess probably not a lot of them.
So I would say you might be right. You can't stop.
But that seems like a hypothesis worth testing, where you could say, okay, I'm going to do...
Two weeks, no social. Now, to do that, though, you have to decide how you're going to evaluate whether... you need to or don't need to.
For that, you would need other metrics. So this is where I think it gets challenging for folks if they, for instance, have sponsored posts on social platforms.
And that is their metric, as an example, or in stories or whatever it might be. then yes, you are captive to the platform.
But if you have other products, if you have coffee.
Yep. You can assess your progress, what you need to do or don't need to do by something other than the metrics the platform gives you.
And this is just a long way of saying you can test it.
You can test all of these things. They are not permanent decisions.
Right. Right. Absolutely. So. I know. And I'll add one thing to that, which is sometimes the pain isn't acute enough.
So I listened to your episode from 2021.
Mm-hmm. Rock bottom. But you said something which I've thought a lot myself.
If something is mediocre or a little bit painful and you can tolerate it for a long time, That is oftentimes a more precarious situation. than really acute devastating pain because the latter forces you often to do something.
Yes. Sometimes you need to manufacture that though.
Yes. So for instance, right now you're like, Like, I'd love to, but I can't.
I can't. I'm not sure. It's like, okay, let's say you continue doing exactly what you're doing. what does your life look like?
Mental health, physical health, friendships, finances, this, this, this.
If you look out three years. All right. Five years.
Okay. Ten years. Sometimes it's fine, but usually if someone is like, I don't know.
I'm not sure. It's like pebble in the shoe.
That right now is a little irritating, but on a hundred mile march, like you're going to tear your feet to pieces.
And so I do that type of telescoping out a lot.
I'm like, okay. If I continue to do this as I am...
What are the costs of inaction? Because I think often folks will look at – and this is a lot of the 4-Hour Workweek, honestly.
It's like – breaking down risk and thinking about risk differently.
Yes. let's just say the risk of taking two weeks without doing any social posts yourself.
Mm-hmm. And we think about the risks of that action.
That's a new thing. Mm hmm. but we don't compare it to something.
Because when something is, we say, ah, it's risky.
The follow up we should always ask is compared to what?
Yeah. Compared to what? And in this case, the compared to what is doing the same thing for the next two, three, five years.
And when you sit down and you evaluate that and you telescope out, sometimes you're like, oh shit, like doing no social for two weeks is extremely low risk.
Yeah. Because the potential payoff is so high.
So why not? the past two weeks for some reason I've been horrific with it.
Oh, it's been terrible and I feel terrible.
Like I do. I feel bad. I'm anxious. I'm like dissociated a little bit.
Yeah. weirdly for some reason when I'm on social media too much I have like negative existential crises over and over. it makes me weirdly existential in a bad way.
We're in no way evolved to... thrive in these secondary digital environments.
No. You know, how long has it taken even a small percentage of the population to get accustomed to lactose?
I mean, these tools are brand new. Yeah.
And I'll tell you a quick anecdote, which is...
I've spent, I travel a lot. I mean, I really enjoy traveling and spent some time in Ethiopia.
Yeah. in the north, in the Tikarai area.
And I was going from spot to spot and had this driver.
It was a group. And by and large, people seemed really happy. in the rural areas and then we we came across this one village where people seemed pretty surly and I was like that's weird Why is that?
And he goes, oh, it's because they got satellite TV.
I was like, what? What do you mean? And he goes, well...
Now they can watch the Kardashians and they can watch all these people with fancy cars and fancy lives.
Wow. And now they've concluded their lives suck.
I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist.
Wow. And if you take that and you basically... put 5 million horsepower into it, you have social media.
Yeah. And I don't think social media is all bad, but there's enough... It's very...
In my experience, it's increasingly difficult, especially with the kind of TikTokification. and competition that we've seen across platforms. to selectively engage with social media and just peel out the positive.
It is very hard because you're no longer limited to accounts that you follow.
You get served anything that will captivate your attention, which can then be monetized.
Yeah, I feel like that switch is when it got harder to have boundaries with it.
I mean, I don't have TikTok, which is nice.
But I do kind of sometimes have a little FOMO.
Actually, I didn't for a long time. And then recently...
I was like, this is such a, this is the platform.
And I'm not there. And it's not that I was like, oh, I miss watching it, but it was like, I want to be present there.
And I had this feeling that I hadn't had in a long time.
And I was like, Why am I feeling that? So that's something I'm analyzing right now.
Why am I feeling that? That's where something like the Five Wise, it doesn't have to be exactly five, but it's just like sit down with a cup of coffee and journal and just...
No, I'm actually going to do that. Just do that.
It takes 10 minutes. I'm curious. It's amazing how much you can get out of like 10 to 15 minutes of structured journaling.
It's so, it can be so fast. So like the Five Whys or Morning Pages.
I'm a huge fan of Morning Pages by Julia Cameron who wrote The Artist's Way.
It's just like you wake up three pages of writing out whatever is in your monkey mind.
Bitch and moan, complain. It's not writing.
You're not going to show anybody. Just get it out of your head so you can move on with your day.
Yep. Trap it on paper. And it's the simplest thing ever.
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Use as directed. What do you think about going cold turkey on something?
Like, for example... social media, how do you decide whether cold turkey makes sense?
I do cold turkey stuff all the time. I know.
And you kind of have to. I don't do moderation well.
And I don't think – I shouldn't say that.
It's not like I'm abusing everything that I use or do.
But – keep it simple. Simple usually means instead of like titrating off of social media or saying, well, instead of using it for 30 minutes in the morning, I'm going to use it for 10 minutes in the morning.
Mm-hmm. What in God's name makes you think that you could possibly do that?
You are so outgunned. You're so outfunded.
You're so out-researched. These platforms are not going to lose. like you're bringing a knife to a gunfight.
It's not going to work. it's going to be very challenging to make work at the very least.
It's like, do the easy thing first. And the easy thing is cold turkey, in my opinion.
Yeah. Do the simple thing first. Yeah. There's another exercise.
I had a TED talk a handful of years ago on this topic called fear setting.
Mm hmm. where you're just as you would with goals, to have a goal that you have some chance of accomplishing.
You can do the same thing with your fears.
So if you're like, I can't do this. No, but no, if I do that, then I'll become irrelevant.
If I do this, then people will forget about me.
If I do this, then if I don't do that, etc., etc.
You need to take those... cloudy nebulous spheres and put them on paper in some structured way.
And I'll just tell people how to do it. Go old school.
Piece of paper, pen, and you're going to have...
Three or four columns. And the first column is like all the things that could go wrong.
Yep. At the very top, it's like what you're considering doing or not doing.
Yep. Stopping social media for two weeks.
All right. Write down all the things that could go wrong. and get as specific as possible.
In the second column, you write down what you could do to minimize like to reduce the likelihood of each of those things happening Okay.
And then in the last column, you just write down what you could do to recover even temporarily if that thing happens.
Like how could you... reverse the damage or minimize the damage.
That's page one. Page two is the cost of inaction.
You're like, okay, if... if I don't do this thing and I telescope out like one, three, five years, what does my life look like?
You're making explicit something that is implicit, that if you choose not to do this thing, you're making a choice in another direction.
What are the costs associated and the risks associated with that?
And I would say... one time out of 10 you're like you know what that is risky i shouldn't do that nine times out of ten you're like this is fine I'm risking like a three out of ten temporary setback that I could reverse for like a 9 out of 10 durable benefit, obvious.
Like, the choice is obvious. What happens, though, when... your intuition or so you think.
See, that's the thing about intuition is that You don't know what it is.
It's so hard to know when you get a feeling.
Is this intuition? Is this anxiety? Is this... delusion you know like what is this yeah how does one balance their intuition with being sort of analytical and rational in a way.
Can you give any examples of where intuition has really served you? point you in the right direction and maybe an example of where It didn't serve you, right?
Or maybe intuition, because sometimes intuition is used as a guise.
Yeah. for like justifying doing what you want to do or what is comfortable.
See, that's the truth. That's the truth.
Because when I think about it, Anytime I've used intuition and it's steered me in the wrong direction...
Friends, boyfriends, that's most of the time.
Yeah. I knew deep down it wasn't my intuition. but I convinced myself that it was.
Whereas like, I'd say intuition serving me Right?
Has been... more career wise, you know, like being like, okay, you know what, working with this company doesn't feel right and I don't know why.
Because on paper, it looks good. But to me, it feels bad.
Okay. So that's a great example. Yeah. And so here are my thoughts because the intuition. especially we're sitting here in LA, right?
Intuition comes up a lot. Yes. At every bar.
It's Friday tonight. We're all going to hear it.
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of intuition chat tonight.
Yeah. So a few things I would say. First, if you rely on what you would call intuition a lot. practice using some frameworks, right?
And this is sort of just a meta comment and then I'll come into the specifics.
If, on the other hand, you're very head-centric, as I have been for most of my life, I would say, then... practice tuning into what you might call your intuition, like your body feel.
Like if you're used to constantly thinking in terms of frameworks and pro and con lists and this and that other thing.
How do you feel? Like with this company, with this person.
When you're on the phone, are you constricted?
When you get off, are you drained? Are you checking the time because you want to get off the call?
Like pay attention to that stuff. Not as much the content.
Because content doesn't matter if you feel like your system is giving you yellow or red.
Yeah. And then I would say intuition to me is most interesting. when it contradicts what you've arrived at in your head.
That's when I pay attention. When I'm like, God, all these friends or these advisors are telling me to do this thing on paper.
Like, oh, this looks great. great and there's part of me that's just like, ugh.
Yep. I would wait. That doesn't feel good.
Yeah. That should be – and I've become, I think, very good at this.
That's an automatic no. Yeah. It's like there's something in this pre-language – evolved sensing that is telling me, fuck no.
And when I have overridden that, It's never worked out.
There's always some problem later. I'm like, damn it, I knew it.
It's the worst. You know, he did this deal and you can't do a good deal with a bad person or, An untrustworthy person.
Yep. So I find intuition most valuable when it is actually... subverting what you think you want.
Absolutely. But it's always such an unsettling feeling.
Like I had that about about college for me.
I was like, this is just not right. This is not right.
I can't do it right now. And I got so depressed because I was like, this is my dream is to go to a good college. for what reason I hadn't asked myself why, that's for sure.
And then my body rejected it. Yeah, I went into full depressive episode and then I knew like this is just wrong.
Speaking of that, we are both... depressive people.
Okay. How has that impacted you? I don't know.
Everyone's different. You mentioned earlier that the more wise that you get, the easier it is to sort of get through those moments and not fully crumble under them.
But, Well, there's a bit more to that story.
So depression runs in my family, manic depression as well.
I don't have the manic episodes. And I'd say historically I've had – it's really hard to pin down a number, but I would say – four to six extended depressive episodes a year on average since I was adolescent.
Per year? Okay, yeah. Oh, yeah. And they could last... anywhere from let's say two weeks to like two months, right?
There have been years when it's basically been mostly depressive episodes.
Since 2012, 2013... that frequency is probably down to like one every two years.
Wow. And they're typically pretty short.
They're typically one to two weeks. And I would attribute that to a few things.
And to really... provide I guess a harrowing example of how bad that can be I mean, in college, I had a date on the calendar to kill myself and came very, very close and through a host of very lucky coincidences. ended up getting snapped out of it because my mom called me because i had reserved this book at the library i was taking a year off of school It was related to suicide.
The reminder on a postcard got sent home to my parents' house.
I forgot to change the mailing address. and she got it, freaked out, called me, and that sort of snap me out of my own self-imposed delusion in a way because you put on these very dark classes when you're in the States.
Oh, I know. where it seems very personal.
You're the only person. You're uniquely flawed.
Nobody else has this problem. And objectively you realize, at least in my case, like your life is pretty good.
So I'm fucked because this is never going to get better. and it's permanent, therefore which is often some type of final exit.
If that had happened now, all digital notifications, I wouldn't be here.
I had it all planned out. I had the whole thing figured out.
And that didn't happen, thankfully. And... then I would say some of the contributing elements that have helped are... different therapeutic modalities, like for instance, IFS, internal family systems, created by a guy named Richard Schwartz.
What is that? So internal family systems is... a therapy technique that as its basis uses a type of role playing that allows you to interact with different parts of yourself.
So you might have defenders who are trying to protect you in certain ways by... provoking certain behaviors or beliefs.
And they have names for these different parts of yourself.
And if people want to hear an example, I interviewed Dick Schwartz on the Tim Ferriss show, and I was a little hesitant to do this, so we agreed that I might not publish it, but it's a live session.
He takes me through it. And it's a structured way of having you interact with these parts have conversations with them Identify when they came up like how old are they what how what age are you when this kind of player entered the stage and And I've seen tremendous effects from IFS by itself.
Then you can layer in other tools that are sometimes very advantageous.
In the case of IFS, IFS has been adapted in part to a protocol used with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.
So post-traumatic stress disorder, in this case, treatment resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. where at least with the phase two trials, I think the average was something like 16.8 years or 17 years Which meant these patients had not found a solution yet. to address their PTSD symptoms for an average of let's call it 17 years.
And they do two or three sessions with MDMA assisted psychotherapy. the IFS parts work, parts work is another term you'll sometimes hear. and I think I'm going to get the numbers slightly wrong, but they're not that much off something like 58 percent or sixty percent were asymptomatic or They no longer met the criteria for PTSD after two or three sessions, plus integration work and prep.
And at the, I want to say, six or 12-month follow-up point, that number had gone up significantly. to something like 68%, which is very rare in psychiatry.
So for me personally, also, psychedelic assist therapies have been a... critical component.
They're not a panacea. There are risks. But I can honestly say that in combination with good therapists and supervision, that I think these things have... not just saved my life but allow me to re-envision and re-author the beliefs that govern my life And that's a big deal.
Certainly a big deal for me. I think people are too cavalier with these compounds now.
Yeah. You can't walk down the street in LA without somebody offering you a matcha latte with magic mushrooms in it or something.
And they're like, Oh, you know, I'm really healthy now.
I no longer drink. I just use ketamine five Yeah.
And you're like, well, time out, time out.
Oh my god, that's everyone I'm going to see in like eight hours tonight.
It's Friday. So I do think that people are taking these things in ways that are going to be very problematic later.
Yeah. But in the right circumstances with the right supervision.
I think these tools are incredibly powerful for... if you look at, say, the research of someone like Gould Dolan, this... incredible researcher who I think is currently at Hopkins.
And her belief is, and she's testing this as a hypothesis, of course, is that Some psychedelics reopen critical windows where you can... you can effectively, and these are my words, not hers, but... recontextualize experiences.
This is certainly how a lot of subjects would explain the PTSD and MDMA, where they can revisit this traumatic experience, whether it's war, sexual abuse, whatever it might be, and recontextualize it as an adult,
So that it in a way kind of overwrites the disabling stories.
Yeah. And that's hard to measure. So a lot of scientists are looking for mechanistic ways to explain these changes. it's very difficult to do.
The content from my perspective matters a lot because you look at the durability.
For most psychiatric medications that may be used for, say, maintenance, suppression of symptoms... or addressing any number of things like depression.
You take these drugs and they're three to five times a week or every day.
And if you get off of them, you have to be very careful because there are withdrawal symptoms and there are lots of contraindications.
And I should say these conventional frontline drugs are really critical and very effective for a lot of people.
Yeah. They also don't work for a lot of people.
Yep. And when you say take someone through... a trial where they have one or two high dose psilocybin experiences for say treatment resistant depression or major depressive disorder and they report 12 months later that they have not had any return of symptoms.
You can't explain that by the presence of the drug because the drug – of psilocybin is so short, psilocybin being what is considered the active ingredient sort of constituent element in magic mushrooms, philosophy mushrooms of different types.
What I find so deeply interesting about psychedelics is that, and I'm going to borrow from a very famous psychotherapist, named Stanislav Grof.
And I'm paraphrasing here, but it's close enough. that what the telescope did for astronomy and what the microscope did for biology psychedelics will do for the mind.
In terms of, I think, probably overturning or at least augmenting very longstanding beliefs about the brain, and mind, many of the effects we're seeing are just... so far outside of the normal purview of psychiatry. that it's hard for me to offhand pick something I find more interesting.
And because our conception, our beliefs and conception of reality are, if we're talking about base layers, right?
It's like, that's layer one and everything else is built on that.
So if you start to, if you can learn more about that, and if you can use these not just to help individual people, in clinical trials but also to get a better understanding of how we create reality because let's not be let's not make any mistake.
We are constantly creating reality. as we go there's a book called the case against reality by a scientist named donald hoffman which which i think makes this very compelling but Like if I were a mantis shrimp or a sparrow, this room would not look the same.
Clearly. So as we learn more about sort of the user interface as we experience it i think i think we'll have some very very compelling in terms of not just treating psychiatric issues, conditions or we might consider dysfunctions, but also to help with broader mental flourishing.
Totally. So I think that's what we're seeing with psychedelics right now.
So that's the long story long, I suppose.
To end it off, what's your piece of advice for the listener?
It could be something... broad it could be something niche in random you could go full indie with this piece of advice Like, hit it however you want.
Yeah, the piece that comes to mind is not from me.
It's actually something I heard first from... someone named bj miller so the doctor bj miller is a He's a physician who has done a lot of work in hospice care.
He's helped thousands of people to die where he's shepherded them through that experience.
And he also was... the victim of a terrible accident when he was in college.
He was electrocuted, lost three of his limbs, I want to say.
And... Nonetheless, as... incredible sense of humor, very smart guy.
And... I asked him what he would put on a billboard. metaphorically speaking.
And his answer was, don't believe everything that you think.
And that's where he got that. And he said, I think it was a bumper sticker in Berkeley.
So that's okay. That's so real. But don't believe everything that you think.
Yeah. A lot of what we think has not been stress tested.
A lot of what we think, the things we take to be our beliefs, are not our beliefs.
They're our parents' beliefs or expectations or... the product of difficult experiences or maybe fantastic experiences that have distorted things and those things have not been re-examined yeah and they're just it's a gold mine waiting for you i love that so don't believe everything that you think amen Thank you so much.
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