This is a iheart podcast guaranteed human, no gloss, no filter, just stories spoken without fear.
Person who is not generous cannot be an artist.
The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers.
Listen to my weekly podcast, The Pooja Bhatt Show, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come for the honesty, stay for the fire.
If you just get off of social media for two weeks, it will do the same amount of good for a lot of folks as 10 years of therapy.
What advice has made you the most money?
Don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only.
What's something that the top 1% obsess over that most people never even think about?
The absolute sacredness of Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.
Today's guest is someone that I've been waiting to re-interview for nine years.
I'm speaking about the one and only Tim Ferriss, one of the most influential thinkers in personal development and performance of all time.
Tim's the best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek host of The Tim Ferriss Show, with over a billion downloads.
If you're someone who wants to learn how to make better decisions, overcome fear and design a life that actually works for you, you won't want to miss this.
Please welcome to On Purpose, Tim Ferriss.
Let's dive in because there's so much to extrapolate today with you.
And I wanted to start off by asking you, like what's a thought that reappears in your mind often today, or what are you fascinated by today?
That kind of steals your attention and gets you excited because you've done so many things, you've accomplished so many things, you're so active in so many ways.
I wonder what fascinates you now.
I can tell you literally was getting some texts on the way here from a few people.
I've been interacting with a lot.
One is Tommy Wood, Dr Tommy Wood, who's a neuroscientist, also a phenomenal athlete.
Interesting combination.
So looking at and we'll probably get into this more deeply but different fuel sources for the brain and extending your cognitive runway.
So in life, if you, as I, for instance, have a lot of neurodegenerative disease in your family, whether that's Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or otherwise, What can you do now?
Assuming a lot of these conditions take decades to fully develop?
How can you intervene early?
So that's a question that's occupying my mind.
And have found, I think, some very, very compelling options that are not new to me.
But if you go through the scientific literature and you talk to people on the front lines, you do find some interesting options.
So we can talk about those.
I would say bioelectric medicine, which ties into this.
In other words, microchips and electricity over pills.
A lot of medications have off-target effects.
So you have a problem or you want to prevent a problem, you take a drug.
Very often it is not as specific as we would like.
There are side effects.
There's a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine that can be applied a million different ways.
We probably should talk about it, but I'll give you an example.
Here's a crazy example.
There's a technology called tms transcranial magnetic stimulation.
That has existed for decades and it's basically using a magnetic field to affect brain activity, so they put a paddle close to your head.
There are different ways to do.
It might be a cap with a few other things, and you can either excite or inhibit different parts of the brain.
Slightly more complicated, but let's just assume that's the case.
And a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, along with others, developed something called the SAINT protocol, which is an accelerated version.
So instead of taking, let's just say, TMS treatments that you would do once or twice or three times a week over five months, they compress it all into one week, five days.
And you're getting zapped 10 times a day on the hour, every hour, each of those five days.
And what they end up seeing.
In many instances and there's good published peer-reviewed studies people can look at 70 remission of treatment for resistant depression that is durable.
You start to see impacts on things like OCD, generalized anxiety disorder.
But one thing that I experimented with recently this is maybe four months ago because I have diagnosed pretty severe OCD, which I think can be a superpower, but can also be a super handicap.
Also, just look at my family.
Who knows how much of it is nature versus nurture, but generalized anxiety disorder, pretty high.
And that can be a helpful monkey on the back for getting a lot done, but there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage, right?
So I wanted to see if I could dial back both of those.
Would I lose my edge or would I actually improve my edge?
I just wouldn't be holding onto the blade of the knife, right?
And I went through this experimental protocol, which is one day.
So instead of taking a week off of work, One day where you preload, and there's science behind this, with something called D-cycloserine.
It's an antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis, among other things.
Put in a lozenge in your mouth, and then an hour later you start these stimulations.
You do one day. three minute stimulations on the hour.
And I have gone from basically like an eight or nine out of 10 severity with generalized anxiety to like a zero or a one.
For how long?
For four or five months now.
You cannot- From that one day?
From that one day.
It is incredible.
Does it help?
Does it hurt?
The dose does matter, right?
You can overdo it.
But this is a combination of pharmaceuticals to help with neuroplasticity and then brain stimulation.
So I've been looking very closely at bioelectric medicine.
I think this is...
And if I try not to do too much but pat myself on the back a little bit say, look at the four hour body and then the subsequent 10, 15 years a lot of that played out and ended up being very, very highly reinforced by science.
I.
I'm placing a lot of my bets attentionally and then on the more philosophical side, but intensely practical.
I don't think philosophy can be inert and kind of flaccid if you choose the wrong approach.
But ultimately, if you're trying to decide on values, you're not gonna do a randomized control trial on them, right?
You have to find your way.
And fortunately, people have been attempting to do this for millennia.
And I would say that in the last few years especially, There's a great book called Already Free, I think it is by Bruce Tift, that discusses kind of two complementary approaches, which are the, Let's just say, developmental achievement approaches that Western psychotherapy might take, or self-help broadly.
How do I improve myself?
How do I change my circumstances?
But then on the opposite side, a perhaps let's call it more Buddhist approach, although it's not unique to Buddhists or Buddhism alone, the acceptance piece right.
Recognizing what is, allowing what is.
And it's a balancing act to do both.
But I've been so, I would say, for decades, most of my life focused on the achievement piece.
And there's a lot to be said for it, a lot of upside.
But paying also attention to the approaches, the practices that cultivate the other side.
Because guess what?
None of us have as much control as we might like to think.
Especially once you add in other humans.
Sorry, guys.
That's an illusion.
So I would say those are a few of the things that are very, very present for me.
I love it.
You've just given us the contents page of our conversation.
It's brilliant.
This is what I enjoy the most.
Do you mind if we dive into some of those a bit?
Yeah, for sure.
And I also said this before we hit record.
It's like, I don't have anything to...
Pitch or sell.
I really am excited about some of these things that I'm exploring now.
So if I can give people very specific, concrete recommendations, then I'll be that in some way expand their thinking or help them.
Then I'm thrilled.
Yeah.
No, I'm really grateful for you to coming on.
Let's dive into cognitive fuel then to go first.
What do we currently do or what do we currently know that we use for cognitive fuel?
And then the new approaches that you're looking at, how are they so different?
As you said, they have less side effects we're talking about potentially.
In terms of fuel, first caveat.
Yeah.
Not a doctor, don't play one on the internet.
So talk to your physicians.
However, what I will say is it's helpful to think of the brain like you would think of The mind-body separation duality is a complete falsehood.
So everything is really, really tightly interrelated.
What I will say is that if we look at the extremes to inform the mean this is something I like to uses a heuristic right you can learn a lot by studying the extremes in athletics, in business, the best and the worst outcomes, and that tells you a lot about the middle.
But not the other way around, like if you study the average this, the ideal customer, the a, b or c in the middle, it doesn't actually help you solve the edge cases.
All right.
So If we look at, let's just say Alzheimer's, some people, some scientists, some doctors, refer to Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes.
Why?
Because the brain and there are many factors that go into this can end up in a state where it's very bad at utilizing glucose.
Insulin insensitivity, you're basically diabetic in your brain.
And I'm simplifying here.
But for instance and I've done this with relatives of mine with Alzheimer's you give them an exogenous ketone supplement of the right kind, give them a little shot and I'll do it with them so they're not freaked out.
Within 20 minutes.
Their sentences are longer.
Their rate of speech is faster in some instances.
There's something called the clock test, for instance, where you can look at the severity of Alzheimer's or other conditions by having someone attempt to draw a clock and they just can't do it.
And boom, like some type of stage magic, 30 minutes later they can draw a clock.
Crazy.
So what's going on?
Ketones are an alternate fuel source.
And if you ever fast, if you ever experiment with intermittent fasting, which we can also come back to.
Another thing that has my attention
If you cultivate your ability to use ketones, suddenly you have this very compelling alternate fuel source.
I'll give you a third one, though that is new to me, even though if I look back at my experience in life through sports, I'm like ah okay, that helps connect some dots.
Lactate.
If you ever have done a bunch of cycling or you go in the gym and you get that burn, all right.
Well, a big part of that is lactic acid or lactate.
Turns out the brain can really use that, not only as a fuel, but it's also a signaling.
It's a signal or a messenger that can produce all of these changes in the brain.
And there is, for instance, Tommy Wood introduced me to this, the Norwegian 4x4.
People can look this up.
Norwegian 4x4 is in effect doing its VO2 max training.
And we can explain what that is, but it's not really important right now.
Basically, four minutes of incredibly hard, let's say, stationary biking.
You're getting up to 85, 90% of your max heart rate.
In the last minute of those four, you don't think you're going to make it.
Basically, you're running away from wolves.
And then you take three to four minutes off. and you repeat that again, and you do four cycles.
So you're doing four minutes on.
Let's just call it four minutes off.
Four minutes on for four rounds.
If you do that, there's a study conducted Three times a week and I think it was for six months the effects on your brain, which includes some plausible volumetric changes, like certain structures in your brain, like the hippocampus, actually grow right.
One of the primary areas affected by Alzheimer's.
Those effects extend out for five years from six months of training three times a week.
What is going on?
Yeah, what is going on?
The VO2 max is just an indicator of the work that you're putting in.
Okay, well, why does that kind of work matter?
Because steady state aerobics, walking for long distances doesn't do it.
Yeah, and there are people, credible people, who focus on this, who think that lactate is the main driver.
So, for instance, this morning, before I came here, I was like, well...
I'd like to have a little bit of extra energy.
So I did a weight training workout where each of my sets with leg press or leg extension or whatever large muscle groups.
I just turned on a music track that lasts four to five minutes.
And I was like, all right, I can't stop for four to five minutes and it's going to be really painful.
And that's it.
Because I think that the cycling itself doesn't necessarily have any magic to it.
Like you could use rowing.
It's the intensity.
It's the lactic acid.
It's the actual concentration in the blood.
So those, I would say, are three interesting fuels to consider.
And I'm sure we'll come back to this.
But sometimes you don't have a problem-solving issue.
Sometimes you don't have a quandary in your life that you can think your way out of.
You have a fuel issue.
Yeah.
So, before you try to riddle yourself with journaling out of all of your issues, maybe you're just starving.
And that could mean you need food, could mean you need to improve your insulin sensitivity.
Maybe look at intermittent fasting, which completely blew my mind with how it changed my insulin sensitivity and biomarkers over the course of four weeks.
It really shocked me.
And or, and these are actually compatible looking at building up your ketogenic machinery, which you can do in a whole bunch of ways.
I love the point you're making about fuel.
And I was definitely someone I always felt like when I came to this work.
I had a really strong mind because of my previous work, but I hadn't really worked on my body.
And it was when I married my wife, who's a nutritionist and a dietician.
Good choice.
Yeah, yeah, very useful.
Extremely useful for many reasons.
But the body became a part of the conversation because she was so much about physical health as well as mental and emotional health.
And I think I was so in the mental, emotional sphere that I kind of disregarded the body to some degree.
Only to realize how much I was limiting myself based on this fuel point.
And even to speak to a very recent occurrence, probably a few years back, I was experiencing fatigue and low energy, although I was positive and living my purpose and felt meaning in my life and had beautiful relationships, but I was just tired.
And I remember getting my biomarkers done and everything and it turned out to be something really basic, but they were just like your vitamin D is at a 10.
It should be at a 60 to 100, like, you know, for the optimal, but you're at a 10.
Like, how did I not understand that something as small as this could be affecting my energy?
It wasn't just about meaning.
And I think you're so right.
People are journaling really hard.
They're trying to find their purpose.
They're trying to do this thing mentally.
And half the time it's like you're not giving yourself enough fuel to even be able to have that breakthrough.
Yeah, it doesn't matter how good you are at driving the race car if no one's done an oil change, no one's checked the tires, no one's put proper fuel in the tank, etc etc etc.
So I think that those levels are important to check, right?
Like you mentioned the vitamin D In a lot of my friends who have complained about anxiety or depression or fatigue.
They might do a micronutrient test and realize that they're deficient in trace minerals, very common, whether it's copper, selenium or other.
And I say OK here, try like, eat a handful of Brazil nuts once a day for a week and let me know how it goes.
And they're like, I have energy.
I'm like, well, yeah, OK, great.
Yeah.
Then you can check off the selenium.
So, which I think can be very reassuring for folks, right?
Because if they've been banging their head against the wall trying to quote unquote, figure out X, and they're just not making progress, it's not necessarily because your brain isn't working.
You're not smart enough.
Well, maybe it is because your brain isn't working, but But you can fix it holistically through looking at your mind and body as one thing.
Certainly through, say, meditation.
You can exert all sorts of interesting effects on your body Right.
Through the breath as this sort of interface, the autonomous autonomic nervous system.
So it stands to reason you can do the other.
Right.
It's bidirectional.
Like, if you want it, you can improve the mind by working on the body, and you can improve the body by working on the mind.
They go together.
Absolutely.
So that's that's a lot of what has my attention.
I mean.
There's a lot of nonsense floating around out there about vagus nerve stimulation, but if you talk to certain scientists like Dr Kevin Tracy, who wrote a great book I think it's a great book called The Great Nerve all about the vagus nerve, which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side of the neck with roughly 90 to 100000 fibers on either side.
He's got a great story in the book where he's discussing all of this research related to, in effect, activating something called the inflammatory reflex and preventing overwhelming cytokine storms for covid, for you name it, and you can stimulate the vagus nerve a bunch of different ways.
You could have an implant.
Uh, there's actually something called famotidine over the counter.
Talk to your doctor.
Don't just start taking this, but it's an antacid, I believe.
And that actually has some incredible effects related to that.
But he was on stage talking about this at one point and the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama's contingent happened to be at the same event.
And the Dalai Lama got up afterwards because Kevin was talking about the vagus nerve, right?
Just for simplicity, singular.
And the Dalai Lama asked a question after the presentation.
The translator translated and said you know, his holiness would like to know are there two of these that run down the neck?
And he said, yes, actually there are two.
And the dialogue kind of chuckled and there's a practice that they have that involves meditating on these two channels that run down the neck and then basically innervate the rest of the body, including the abdomen.
And it's like, hmm, that's interesting.
Yeah.
I find that East-West connection so fascinating and how the science is being able to prove these ancient techniques.
I remember when I was talking to someone else on the show.
It was that idea of them talking about circadian rhythms and looking at the sun first thing in the morning, et cetera, which of course you've talked about as well.
And I was talking about how in the monastery in India, it was always about sun salutations.
So Surya Namaskar is the Sanskrit version of sun salutations.
And that was the practice.
You woke up in the morning and you paid respects to the sun, which meant making eye contact with the sun and allowing the sun rays to enter.
And I'm like all of these techniques.
They didn't have the language that we have, but the technique existed far back then.
Talk to me about the, did you call it the bioelectric?
Bioelectric medicine.
Medicine, yeah.
Because you're talking about chips versus pills.
Yeah, chips or electricity versus pills.
So explain to me what you mean by chips.
Well, just microchips.
So actually using a device which could be in the case of I think it's Setpoint Medical, for instance, has an implant which is the size of a omega-3 capsule.
I think it's called Setpoint Medical.
They were on the cover of the New York Times for this and it just got approved.
It goes in the neck.
It's actually a very fast procedure and it applies stimulation to the vagus nerve, which runs right along the carotid arteries.
Basically,
And it is used for rheumatoid arthritis.
It gives some people incredible relief where they might have been incapacitated laying on a couch, can't get up, have to elevate their legs, can't walk more than a few steps.
They get this implant and then boom, like...
Two months later, they're running upstairs on a tour through Europe with their husband.
I mean, that's a real example.
It doesn't solve it.
It doesn't reverse it.
It just provides... That's a very good question.
I shouldn't speak to that because I don't know enough about rheumatoid arthritis and what it looks like in terms of development over long periods of time.
What I will say is that...
Broadly speaking, this is controversial, but it's not that controversial with a few scientists I interact with who look at this very closely.
I think a lot of our psychiatric disorders depression anxiety, etc etc etc.
Some of them you may be predisposed to those things genetically, but I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start with acute infection, much like long COVID or long Lyme disease.
There's some acute immune system insult, often an infection that leads to then chronic neuroinflammation.
When you address that neuroinflammation, A lot of the symptoms can abate, which is why there have been studies looking at just giving people who are depressed anti-inflammatories.
And I'm not saying, by the way, anyone listening or watching, that you should go gobble anti-inflammatories.
There are side effects.
Don't do that.
But maybe there are other ways to address excessive inflammation.
And it turns out vagus nerve stimulation could be one of those.
There are other approaches.
I can't recommend any current device out there.
I'm interacting with this Scandinavian researcher who's amazing.
I'm hoping that at least in the US, maybe in the next six months something will be available that people can grab.
I'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight being corroborated by science, because there's a really cool tie-in.
Breathing, do breath work.
There are different types of breath work that absolutely seem to have an effect on the inflammatory reflex.
And that's actually part of the reason why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice, especially if they do it twice a day, like 10 to 20 minutes per session.
After about two weeks.
It's so consistent, right?
It's like for the first week, they're like, I don't know if this is doing anything.
And then after like seven to 10 days, there seems to be something that happens.
And people are like, I'm so much calmer.
I'm so much this.
All right.
There are a million different ways you could explain it, but let's throw one out there.
That doesn't really.
I haven't really heard discussed that the rhythmic breathing that you entrain when you're doing that kind of sitting activates the vagus nerve.
If you use a stimulator, guess what?
You use it five minutes in the morning, say for the ear.
Five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night, because the effects last about 12 hours.
And it takes about two weeks for most people to notice everything settle.
Well, that's a strange coincidence.
And if you do box breathing or something like that for people who are maybe tuning in for like oh meditation, oh God, like if I have to sit and focus on my breath one more time, or
Imagine a candle or whatever it might be.
It's not necessarily for everybody.
I get it.
I mean, my monkey mind is on high octane fuel.
I get it.
But you could use an app that just helps you breathe or something, box breathing or whatever it might be.
Try that 10 minutes twice a day for two weeks.
See what happens.
I think most folks will be very pleasantly surprised on the ancient wisdom side.
Yeah.
I've always been interested, but skeptical, interested in, but skeptical of acupuncture.
Mm hmm.
Skeptical because, as with many modalities, practitioners sometimes oversell it.
Panacea for everything.
It's true of psychedelics, it's true of massage, it's true for PT, it's true for surgery.
It's like
I can fix all your problems.
Probably not.
However, there are a few aspects.
And I went to two universities in China.
I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin in this case.
I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine.
Acupuncture on animals, how does that work, right?
As far as we know, maybe there's not a whole lot of placebo effect with dogs, let's just say.
So being able to use acupuncture in place of, say, anesthesia with animals, that's pretty weird.
That's interesting.
The other one...
That seems pretty compelling.
There are several, but the other one is pregnancy.
Using acupuncture for fertility.
So what on earth is going on?
If that is actually a thing.
Yeah yeah, for the time being, let's say, maybe it is.
And i, i know a few traditional chinese medicine practitioners and they have walls of photos of babies and i'm like that's interesting.
Now you can't, you can't underestimate the power of the mind and the placebo effect which, by the way, people are like oh, it's just placebo effect.
Placebo effect is the craziest thing in the world.
But let's leave that alone for the moment.
One of the ways that you would stimulate, can stimulate some of the fibers in the vagus nerve is with placement on the ear and you're applying electric current on something called the Simba concha.
Right here the placement really matters.
It's very, very specific.
And then you need another probe to ground or complete the circuit effectively.
That would be the five minutes of stimulation.
You can also do it the neck, but the neck's quite uncomfortable.
The placement of those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners put the needles.
No way.
Right.
Right.
But the overlap is interesting, right?
Like that's very interesting.
And it's also you have to wonder.
It's like man.
How many thousands of years of trial and error did that take to figure out?
And how did they figure it out too?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's wild.
And I should say as one voice of sanity.
There's also a lot of stuff that has existed for a very long time.
That is probably nonsense.
Right.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But suffice to say to answer your question bioelectric medicine is using electricity or electronics in place of drugs.
To avoid the side effects, that being the primary.
To avoid the side effects, to help establish homeostasis perhaps as opposed to overall blocking something or overall stimulating something, you know smashing some receptor.
But then
Oh, by the way, it also has an affinity, all these other receptors that we don't really want to mess with, but we can avoid it.
And there is a place for drugs.
Look, I take prescription medication, right?
It's like there is a place for it.
But it's in at least the U.S. where it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through.
You can advertise on television directly.
To patients selling drugs.
It's outrageous.
The pharmaceutical industrial complex is a very real thing and the incentives are very perverse in a lot of cases.
So we are over prescribed, over medicated, without question.
Yeah, it blew my mind when I moved to this country and saw those ads.
I couldn't believe they were real.
I was like, this has to be an SNL skit.
It's so bad.
Or like it has to be some sort of comedic.
I couldn't believe it because you don't have that in the UK.
You just, you'd never see that.
Yeah.
And so when I moved here, I was like wow, it's literally telling me that this might kill me, like might kill you, is is a legitimate, you know like very, very fast, word per minute fine print.
Yeah it's it's, it's unbelievable.
No, i appreciate that.
How did you cope with a reckless father like me?
Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors actors musicians, technicians and beyond.
You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music.
I have gone through this.
Reached the pinnacle, stung by the snake and I've fallen down again.
Yeah.
I am not writing actively anymore.
And when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me.
I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave.
Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater.
The show must go on.
Listen to my weekly podcast, The Pooja Bhatt Show, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come for the honesty, stay for the fire.
A lot of what you spoke about.
You talked about, you know, doing the lactate and it was like six months to unlock.
You talked about the of the four four four, four like four on four off, four on four off three times a week, six months.
And then you spoke about the idea of, you know, two weeks of meditation twice a day, to feel the benefits.
What I find more and more fascinating, even in myself and, what to speak, of our community and the audience that tunes into shows like this, is we know that everyone struggles with that initial discomfort.
Like you said, you have to do it for two weeks to start feeling the benefits and noticing that calm or letting things settle.
You have to do something for six months.
What have you found to be the best startup strategy to a new habit, to unlock its potential, when it may take two weeks to unlock its benefit?
This might sound like a simplistic answer, but it's telling people that.
Do you know what I mean?
Because in many cases, it's like, hey, study a language and you'll learn the language.
But you're setting someone up for failure in that example.
And I use that just because most people are like, oh, God.
So much PTSD about learning languages, right?
But if you tell them like hey, here's what the graph looks like, as you're going to have this type of experience,
And then, once you add this new grammatical construction like you're going to have a bit of a trough of sorrow.
Don't worry about it, right?
You're going to plateau, but you're not actually plateauing.
Your mind is adjusting to involve this additional complexity.
And then you kind of explain what like the stock chart of your brain is going to look like.
Then people don't freak out and the abandonment rate is going to be less.
And so I think with something like meditation saying you may see benefits sooner, but experience seems to indicate that a switch is flipped around two weeks.
So commit to two and a half weeks and do less than you think is necessary.
Do less than you think you can do.
And this applies to any new habit as far as I'm concerned.
If you think you can do 20 minutes, but that's pushing it into redline territory.
Do less than you think you can do, because that is going to contribute to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm.
Don't bleed the stone.
There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic and yada yada, yada rugged individual stuff that we find in many parts of the world.
This is not a place to show how much you can do if you're trying to adopt a new behavior.
So with the meditation, I think it is undervalued how setting expectations can be the missing ingredient.
Yeah.
It's just like hey, if I were trying to sell one of my friends, which I do often I would just say look much like ketosis or a ketogenic diet.
It's pass fail.
It's binary.
You can't do it 50%.
The good news is you're going to know after two and a half weeks in the case of meditation, whether this works for you at all or not.
And if it works, it could be pretty dramatic.
But if you give up after a week, the whole thing's wasted.
So just commit to it and a half.
And if you need to do a bet with a friend or something to set stakes and incentivize yourself.
So you'll be embarrassed if you stop like guess what.
That's useful too.
And I talked a lot about that in the four hour chef like how do you actually set up incentives so that it's harder to quit?
These are very.
You know.
Have your friend take some photos of you and your tighty whities and unflattering light.
Yeah.
And that'll get released into the wild if you don't do it for two and a half weeks.
Or it's like a hundred dollar bet and your buddy, your friend, is going to donate that to your most hated political candidate in your name if you don't do it for two and a half weeks.
Okay, great.
You're more likely to do it.
Everyone needs reasons.
Yeah.
So... So good.
I think that's the biggest one, honestly, is just setting expectations.
And in the case of the Norwegian 4x4...
This is a quirk of science and interpretation of science.
So they did do the six months and the effects seem to extend out to five years.
But that doesn't mean that you need six months.
Right, right, right.
That was just the study design.
Yes.
So who knows?
I would imagine that it's not all or nothing that is cumulative.
And that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood about today.
I said, well, like, what do we know and what do we not know?
Because that was the study design.
And that's, I'm sure, since been replicated and people are modeling that.
But is it possible that instead of say 4x4, so 16 minutes of this PO2 max training?
Is it possible that less time would work as long as you hit certain peak levels of lactate?
Could a 10-minute, could a 5-minute session of weight training work if you hit a certain minimum threshold?
Yeah.
Question mark.
Who knows?
Has anyone done three months in the region protocol and looked at the effects?
Yes or no?
Maybe, maybe not.
This is the kind of stuff that I also fund through my foundation.
I get so tired of kind of chewing on my fingernails wondering about these things that I just fund a lot of science.
But there may be a smaller minimum effective dose for that stuff.
We'll see.
Yeah fascinating, it's the business of science.
Yeah, absolutely trying not to fool yourself, setting things up so it's very hard for you to fool yourself or to bias.
Yeah,
So I like that.
Yeah.
Underset expectations and do less than you think.
That's a great one.
Do less than you think is a brilliant, brilliant method.
And I think we're so scared of saying that to our friends or people we love because we know everyone wants instant change.
And so because people want instant change, we want to say, do this today and it will calm you down.
And we know that isn't true because it's going to take a practice and a discipline.
It might.
But Yeah, I mean, there are some very fast returns and then other things seem to take more time.
I interviewed years ago someone named John Crystal, who I believe is the chair of psychiatry at Yale, or he was at the time.
And he did a lot of, along with his colleagues, a lot of the seminal work on ketamine as an antidepressant in humans.
And I think it was...
0.5 milligrams per kilogram over X period of time.
And it showed these amazing effects.
But now the 05 milligrams per kilogram has become this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners, including some scientists who are like.
This is the protocol.
And it's like, well, is it?
It's one protocol.
Yeah.
That was tested in that way.
But it doesn't mean that is the end all be all.
I would say also just on the ketamine front, very risky compound, high likelihood of addiction.
Listen to that episode or just do some real deep dive before you ever consider having certainly any ketamine at home. whether that's through Johnson & Johnson, Esketamine, Spravato, or through a clinic.
My recommendation is do not have lozenges or anything like that at home.
If you're going to do, if you're going to pursue that for different applications, i think it's very interesting for suicidality.
It's one of the few things that i've seen.
If someone is acutely at risk of hurting themselves, in some cases with an infusion or an injection, A few hours later they go from I'm going to kill myself today to I don't know what I was so upset about.
That's crazy.
That big?
Yeah.
I've seen that multiple times, and so have other clinicians.
That's one of the few interventions I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario.
That's pretty interesting.
So, and I guess I'll stop there for the moment.
I love it, man.
This is what I wanted.
I was like, you're one of the few guests.
You're one of the few people you can truly do this with.
Where I'm just like, Tim, I just want to know what you're fascinated by right now.
Let my brain go crazy.
But that's what I love about you.
That's what I love about talking to you, or learning from you over the years, is that you're just so deeply curious about so many things happening at the same time.
And they're just...
And they're all just interesting and new and they help you be more curious and ask questions and you know, and I appreciate that because I'm like well otherwise, what's the point?
Like, why are we doing this, you know?
Yeah, people can see why I need to deal with the double-edged sword of OCD.
It's great when you're looking at science, but if you're looking at some mistake you made yesterday and you're thinking about that for four days straight, maybe not so helpful.
How did you make that?
Was there ever a turn you needed to make?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's why I did the antibiotic plus accelerated TMS.
Oh, yeah.
What helped you make that turn? a few things, right?
I think there's a degree of pain that especially over long periods of time, you want relief from.
And for some of us, that is just the looping, ruminative mind that is turning on itself.
So whether that's Could be any number of things, right?
Could be.
And in terms of OCD, like my mom's, makes me look like a cakewalk with her OCD, but I'm not flipping light switches.
I'm not washing my hands, which is not denigrate any of that stuff.
It's like people have different ways of it manifesting.
For me, it's all internal.
Yes.
It's all internal.
What if this?
I should have said that loop loop loop loop loop, imagining outcomes, et cetera, perseverating on some conversation that I wish had gone a different way.
And it's exhausting.
It's really exhausting.
And rest in peace, Nolan Williams unfortunately passed away.
But I was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because he pioneered at Stanford also.
He was a real polymath. a lot of very compelling research related to Ibogaine.
So Ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from...
Iboga taberneth, which is a psychedelic plant.
In this case the Bwiti tribe and others are using the root bark for these very long, super intense Mount Everest of psychedelic-like experiences.
It is not to be trifled with.
There are some very significant cardiac risks for certain people.
You can die taking this, unlike most psychedelics.
And he was the first to really put under a fine scientific lens some of the neuroanatomical changes, specifically in veterans.
And so Ibogaine is.
It's a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans.
And specifically in cases of traumatic brain injury.
That's strange.
This is not really something you see.
It's not something that people had observed with other drugs, including other psychedelics.
And it seems to relate to something called glial derived neurotrophic factor.
But suffice to say, I connected with him about that.
And then it turned out this guy's not a one trick pony.
He also is one of the world leaders in non-invasive brain stimulation and accelerated TMS.
And I started looking at the literature and the results and I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.
I mean, this reads like science fiction, number one.
Number two, it seems unbelievable, like a total scam.
But I know it's not a scam.
These are very, very top-tier scientists.
And when I realized that it could be applied to... Well, a few things.
Backstory.
I always had self-described as someone who struggled with depression.
When I actually was able to address it most successfully.
I realized that the depression was born of fatigue, which came from anxiety which interrupted my sleep.
So the domino to tip was actually the anxiety piece.
Much like, kind of like, this is not the greatest comparison, but like the VO2 max.
It's like that's the output you can point to.
But the catalyst was actually the anxiety.
And I was like, well, YOLO, let's try it.
The safety profile looks really appealing.
The actual stimulation is, relatively speaking, pretty low power.
It's been around for decades.
It seems like mostly upside potential.
There are some risks involved people should be aware of and people can search accelerated tms and so on to find this but, all in all, attractive for someone who's experiencing, in my case, the amount of chronic mental anguish.
That's what kicked it off.
Yeah, How accessible is that now?
So TMS itself, let's just say conventional TMS, is actually quite accessible.
Much like ketamine clinics, there are fly-by-night operations.
Right.
So... caveat emptor, you got to do your homework.
But TMS is very widely accessible and often reimbursed by insurance.
Accelerated TMS, as far as I know, is not reimbursable by insurance at the moment.
So it is available at certain clinics.
There's one that I've used called Acacia Clinic or Acacia Clinics in Sunnyvale, California.
But it's expensive.
It's expensive.
It's expensive for the five day.
My hope and also part of the reason why I volunteered, to be like one of the first 60 monkeys shot into space with the D-cycloserine, this very low-dose antibiotic, and the one day is that if you compress the five days into one day, suddenly the cost should be much, much lower.
Yeah, of course.
Dramatically lower.
And it's much more accessible because not that many people can take a week off of work, completely off of work, because your brain will be exhausted absolutely when you have this treatment.
I remember going in for my first day of stimulations.
Got like nine hours of sleep.
I was feeling like a million bucks.
I could do jumping jacks all day, Had my first eight-minute stimulation and I felt like I just pulled three all-nighters studying for a test.
I was so mentally tired.
So if you do it, do not have any delusions of cranking out 50 minutes of work in between these stimulations.
Ain't gonna happen.
But the one day, man, it could be the future for a lot of people.
And that is not widely available, but people can do some digging.
There are clinics, not a lot of them.
The two main hardware companies... are Brainsway.
That's one, which I've used.
I've used both because I'm in my whole shtick.
And it's real.
It's part of the mission for me is being the guinea pig and taking the notes so that not everyone has to right.
Just in case there's collateral damage, which sometimes there is.
Brainsway has some very, very sophisticated hardware, and then MagVenture is another one that has very well-developed hardware.
As far as I know, those are kind of the two frontrunners.
The other that I mentioned, which focuses specifically on the one day Ampa Health.
I have not tested so I can't speak to that directly.
There seem to be credible people involved, but I haven't really done the due diligence.
Yeah, good to know.
Good to know.
I have so many friends and family members asking and wanting to discover.
So very, very useful insight.
Tim, I wanted to switch to some of the philosophical aspects you mentioned earlier, like the things that you're fascinated by right now.
And I was thinking about, even as a society, how we Seem to kind of oscillate between this work-life balance to then hustle culture.
And it seems that that just takes over the conversation for that period in time.
So rewind back probably five to 10 years and hustle culture was the thing.
Yeah. work-life balance has kind of made its comeback now.
And then you could look back 25 years and we were talking about work-life balance when it first kind of probably entered the zeitgeist and it was preceded by this hustle, intensity culture, or whatever it was called then.
And you're kind of talking about this idea of this achievement mindset that you had and has been useful.
And then now, looking at this acceptance mindset that you know, you're almost looking at the value of both.
And I think that's even this whole conversation.
We're talking about the value of both, or this and this or, you know, the connection between old and new, and being curious.
And I find that with work-life balance and hustle culture or achievement let's call it achievement, because hustle culture just sounds like working hard without maybe any direction.
But achievement culture and acceptance culture, which feel like together.
They're so synergistic, yet we tend to just go between one or the other in different phases of our life.
Where are you at with making sense of that for yourself and thinking about it for others?
Well, I'll say something that might surprise people.
So the first thing, as the guy who wrote a book called The 4-Hour Workweek, I have no problem with 80-hour workweeks if there are good reasons behind it.
So I'll just let that settle for a second.
And I'll add something that normally I wouldn't add to that, which is like read the serenity prayer, the actual serenity prayer acceptance across the board for everything is effectively becoming a cow standing in the rain right.
That's just complacency, passivity.
And then completely unrestrained achievement is just a greyhound running around a track chasing a rabbit.
And those dogs can't run very long.
But they can sprint.
So number one if you can't control or affect something, that probably lands in the acceptance bucket right.
Which is why I have not had social media on my phone for three or four years.
Doomscrolling, not helpful for a million different reasons.
I know people probably agree with this at face value.
Nonetheless, like let's look at behavior, right?
Like show me what you do, not what you say kind of situation.
It's like my friends, even some of my most accomplished achiever friends these are like mega stars within business.
I know one guy in particular, such a smart guy, so good.
He's got a wonderful family.
And he took X off his phone a few years ago.
And it's like he went through 20 years of therapy, right?
It was like a month later, like...
Everything's better.
And then I'm in a group thread with him.
And a few months ago he started sending links to things on X And I was like uh-oh, you're back on the sauce.
When did that happen?
And he's like, oh, I got dragged back in the cesspool.
It's the worst.
It's like he's been, it just came out of POW camp.
Like he's a mess.
I mean, if you're listening, sorry, not a mess, but it's just like it's not an improvement.
It's a worsening of psychological state.
Right.
So that stuff, it's like if you can't act on it or if you're not going to act on it, that has to go in the acceptance bucket or in the ignore button on the selective ignorance bucket.
Then on the achievement side for me.
I would say that as a way of kind of setting the table.
One of my friends, Josh Waitzkin my second ever podcast, by the way.
He was the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher.
He's considered a chess prodigy.
He hates that.
It doesn't really describe him well either, because he's become world class, very like top 1, in a couple of different disciplines.
It's very systematic, but one of his guiding tenets, maxims, is avoid the simmering six.
And that just means you're either off, like you could be taking a nap under a set of bleachers or something, or you're on, like you are the great hound right, you are completely focused and you're in sixth gear.
He's like avoid everything in between.
Yeah, so avoiding the simmering sex.
And I, and a lot of people, I think, are at risk of the gravitational pull of the default, which is the simmering sex getting interrupted by text messages and emails and responding to everyone else's manufactured emergency messages.
And so on.
That's the simmering sex.
And that will just murder you psycho emotionally.
So for me, I try to really oscillate between restfulness or sprint.
The fact of the matter is as much as I would like to think otherwise.
Like I'm a working dog, right?
I'm like.
I'm like a border collie, right if?
If idle hands are the devil's workshop, then you know, by extension, it's like you leave a border collie trapped in an apartment long enough, it's going to chew the cows, the couch to pieces, turn into an erotic mess.
It's like a lot of people are like that.
I'm like that it's good for me to have a mission, a project.
Yeah, me too.
Um yeah, it's just, and I don't think anyone needs to apologize for that.
Yeah, uh.
So, for instance, like with this, I have an 850 page draft of a book and it's like alright well, what am I gonna do with that beast?
Um, I'll probably do a retreat where all I do is eat sleep exercise, write.
That's it.
And it will be full on as many hours a day as I can handle every day for a few weeks.
It's not going to be the four hour work week, but it's with an end point, with a very precise purpose that I feel good about, that I feel aligned with and that's fine.
And then after that I will probably bookend it by booking something like three to seven days with a handful of close friends doing something to just park it in zero.
And I recognize that exact sequence of events will not apply to everybody.
But But if you just use the mantra of avoid the simmering six, I think you can get a lot of mileage out of it.
Yeah.
I like that too.
I think you're spot on.
I think that's probably where I've netted out too, because I think that simmering six is the distraction and is where all the stress and the tension comes from, where you're trying to balance both at all times perfectly or get distracted by i'm trying to spend time with my family, but i'm still on my phone yeah, or i'm at work and i'm trying to make sure everything's okay at home right, and you're never going to win that way, ever.
And you have to have these really clear.
I was, i was invited.
Yesterday was sunday and i was invited to a work thing.
Like last minute on a saturday night, and like years ago, i would have said yes immediately because i thought it was extremely valuable and i needed to be there, and if i wasn't there then i'd miss out on opportunities.
And it was I was saying to my wife and I had to say it to her only to make myself feel better about myself.
I was like I'm so proud.
I said no because I've like really promised myself that my weekends are off time.
And that wasn't the case in the beginning.
And I'm glad it wasn't the case because I was sprinting and...
I needed that extra work and that was important and I don't feel bad about it.
It was the right thing to do.
But at this point this was the right thing to do, to be able to say well no, I really want a Sunday off.
I don't want to run to a work thing in the middle of the day, which would probably take four hours.
And I don't need to.
It's not an emergency.
I'm not solving anything.
Yeah.
Uh, and and yeah, that on an.
What do you think is the biggest?
Obviously, the simmering six is the obvious answer.
But what do you think is the biggest thing people come up against when they're trying to do on and off?
Like what's the hardest part of that?
Your friend, for example, who quit X, felt the benefit, saw the growth and then gets pulled back in.
I think he had too much time on his hands.
Right.
Okay.
He's sort of post-economic and border collie.
Yeah.
Working to live and just having a job that you can tolerate that you're good at, great.
Like I actually think that's fine.
But if, on the other hand, let's just say you're an entrepreneur and you're kind of floating around, like maybe you have a few cool things you're pursuing, but there's no hell yes, kind of along the lines of Derek Sivers, you're gonna be tempted to wander.
And that's how you end up sitting on the toilet looking at Instagram and you're like I can't feel my legs.
Oh, I've been here 45 minutes.
Like that's how that happens.
And I've been there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it means you don't have a big enough yes.
Yes, yes.
You need a bigger yes.
Yes.
And I would say that the avoid the simmering six though, is unhelpful in so much as it's telling you what not to do.
But that doesn't really give you a whole lot of direction.
So another way to frame it is actually quoting a friend of mine, Chris Saka.
Phenomenal, incredible guy, just like one of the best investors I've ever met.
His story's nuts.
And his question is, effectively, are you living offense or defense?
So if you're responding to everyone else's agenda for your time and email, defense.
If, for instance, I don't know when this happened, maybe you've experienced this, but I guess people feel so stressed out and short on time that a lot of very busy friends of mine are now catching up on Sundays.
Sundays is like their catch up on email day.
So I'll get texts that are like about business stuff.
And my response has to be for sanity, because if I engage with that, I'm playing defense and breaking my own rules and boundaries.
So I'm just like, Hey, bud, exclamation point.
Sorry, don't do business on weekends.
Like text me again on Monday, Tuesday, whatever.
And Dr Seuss has this amazing, Ted Geisel has this amazing quote those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter.
Right.
It's like if somebody gets pissed off about that.
Yeah.
Guess what?
Let them opt out.
And with all my friends, they're like, love that.
Cool.
Talk to you next week.
They're fine.
So I would say aim for offense, not defense.
Offense means you're deciding on what you want to do and you're applying a certain amount of time or energy towards that before you're reactive.
You know Jim Collins, the author of Good to Grace and Built to Last and these iconic books.
He tracks his creative hours.
And I think for every 365-day period, he's got to have 1,000 and something.
And he tracks it daily.
And if he's running behind on the count, he's like, oh, something's got to change.
I don't take it to that level, but I try to make before I manage in a sense.
I really try to reserve time.
The hours after I wake up for creative work to the extent that I can.
I actually think I do my best creative work incredibly late at night, but that is socially incompatible with any type of partner.
So I've had to switch things around a little bit.
Have you, wow, have you really?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's impressive.
I mean, for our work week, for our body, for our chef, all written between like 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.
I would do research during the day, but the actual synthesis, writing et cetera was all done very, very late at night.
So how have you managed to change yourself to a morning person?
I don't think I am a morning person.
I would say that there are a few things.
So one is recognizing relationships are the meat of life.
If you're vegan or something, it's the sustenance of life.
I wrote this blog post, just went up like five days ago.
I spent so long putting it together, called the self-help trap, like what I've learned after 20 plus years of quote unquote, optimizing myself, talking about some of this, but basically reorienting Maslow's hierarchy of needs which, by the way, Abraham himself never made a pyramid.
And he added an update to that.
People are accustomed to thinking about self-actualization at the top.
He actually added self-transcendence later.
And it was always something that was moving and shifting.
But I have recognized for myself, for quality of life, for the experience of time dilation, just getting more life out of your years, right.
Not just adding more years to your life.
We could talk a lot about that. relationships close friends family it sounds so self-evident but how many people do we know maybe you look in the mirror and you see them who at the end of a year if you ask them did you spend as much time as you would have liked this last year with your 10 most important relationships almost everybody's gonna say no hmm So really taking that on as a challenge means if I'm sacrificing 20% of my output because I'm forcing myself to pretend to cosplay as a morning person, that's fine.
Yeah.
Now one could make the argument and it's not totally off base that well, that's convenient for Tim to say, because you know he's had decades of putting things out that have luckily done well enough.
But I don't. think that does hold some water, but it doesn't, it doesn't really hold all the water.
That's.
That's not, I don't think, a real expression, but the point is I have through sprinting right.
But not ending up at the simmering six over many decades, right.
Or like the simmering seven or eight, which is even worse.
You're running hot.
I have burned out so many times that coming back to the meditation, right?
Do less than you think you can do.
If I dial back, let's say I lose quote unquote lose 20% and I don't burn out.
Well, that's like playing sports and not getting injured, right?
If you get injured and you're out for two months.
Yeah.
And then you have three months of rehab.
Mm-hmm.
You didn't save any time by being intense.
Totally.
You lost time.
Yeah.
So I feel like also not being a morning person like some folks.
I have so many friends that are just like I wake up, I'm on fire.
So jealous.
Now, playing with your fuel source can help this, actually.
But...
I feel like if, even if I have less energy, what that means is I just have to be very smart and selective about what I apply myself to.
So it makes me more selective with projects, more focused on what I'm trying to do.
So I'm like, all right, friend X gets four hours of lightning in a bottle every morning.
I probably get maybe 90 minutes, depending on how much caffeine I've had.
So I need to make those 90 minutes count.
And that's actually a helpful forcing function for me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I think, going back to what you were saying about doom scrolling and screen time I've had I mean this sounds again so basic, but but it is the stuff we all struggle with.
Like I had to really make a commitment that if I was on a screen, that I was only on one screen at a time.
Because what I would find was sometimes my wife and I would sit down to watch a show in the evening And I'm like there's very little TV that gets my attention enough to really commit.
And I'm not someone who's generally loves using their time to do that.
Yeah.
But at the end of a long day of work and it's been busy and we've had dinner together, we've connected and you just kind of want to zone out.
I don't have the energy.
I'm more the other way.
I have lots of energy in the morning.
In the evening, I can hang out with friends or family, but I don't do creative work in the evening.
I never have.
And so mine's the opposite where I have less energy at that time.
And so kind of switching off is kind of nice, but switching off and feeling like I wasted my off time is not a fun feeling.
Like I don't enjoy that feeling.
So we'd watch a show and I wasn't committed, and then I'd be on my phone, or I'd kind of be on my laptop too.
And now I haven't achieved anything at work.
I haven't doom scrolled well enough and the screen is boring me.
And now I'm feeling like I'm wasting days.
Like in the evening.
I'm like adding all these hours up and going God.
I wasted like three hours in front of the TV and I didn't do anything.
Mm-hmm.
And all of a sudden, A, there was a show selection problem.
So we sorted that out where I was like, okay, let's find something we actually care about watching.
But the other part was just okay.
I'm going to leave my phone in another room where I just can't get it.
I don't work at this time, so the laptop can't be near me.
And I have to do this old school thing of like sitting in a theater in my own house, like saying okay, I'm at the movies now.
Like?
What does it feel like to go to the movies and watch a movie, which we all used to do, and go to the theater without any other distraction?
And actually enjoy or experience it.
And it's been huge for unlocking presence and enjoyment and entertainment, even from a stillness point of view.
For sure.
Because I feel like we're not even doing rest properly, which is why we can't work properly.
Oh, God.
Well, I was just going to say, I mean, I am very plugged in to technology and digital, right?
I mean, my main business per se is actually angel investing, which I've done since 2008.
Like that's actually the larger piece of my business, professional life from like an economic perspective.
So I'm constantly involved with tech.
I lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years.
And the people who created these tools.
A lot of them.
I mean the Social Dilemma people can check out, treat it like smoking.
Like it is incredibly bad for you, even in moderate doses.
So what I would suggest to folks and I mentioned all of that being plugged into tech simply because if I were Amish and I'm like I don't have any social apps on my phone, people are like well, Tim can do it, but that's nonsense.
Because he's an edge case.
Like, no, no, no.
A lot of what I do is predicated on knowing what is happening.
Yeah, same.
And I still have no social media apps on my phone.
Yeah, that's impressive.
And what I would say to folks is, even if the counter argument is, well, I need it for my business.
Okay, fine. you can still access through a laptop.
And guess what?
You can still record videos.
You just have to batch upload them later or schedule them in advance.
You just can't be self interrupting with these apps on your phone.
Yeah.
If that is within the realm of possibility, try for two weeks.
And my feeling is, if you can't do that, if your entire livelihood does not depend on it, you're addicted.
Just like an alcoholic.
Just like a smoker.
It means you have a problem.
Right.
And I would say look, I can, I can talk about meditation and bioelectric medicine and this and that and the other thing.
If you just get off of social media for two weeks, just like my friend, I think it will basically do the same amount of good for a lot of folks as 10 years of therapy.
Hmm.
Also have feelings on caffeine.
I think that's also true for cutting down on caffeine.
Talk to me about that.
People are like, I'm anxious.
I'm like, how much coffee do you drink?
Like three to five cups.
I'm like, that's liquid anxiety.
Of course you're anxious.
So coming back to the fuel thing, it's like maybe it's not a problem solving problem.
Yeah.
Maybe it's just a biological problem.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And caffeine is not a fuel, right?
It's forcing you to use your fuel faster.
And look guys, I understand actually how chemistry works and the denosine and so on, but let's keep it simple, right?
It's not adding fuel to the system.
It is burning fuel faster.
Also has some pretty profound effects on glucose levels too.
Yeah.
If you ever wear a CGM and you have a bunch of coffee, it's like, oh wow, I'm suddenly way out of range.
So when people have a caffeine crash, it's not necessarily because the caffeine is wearing off, because you still have trouble sleeping at night.
It's because your glucose spikes and then crashes.
Uh-oh, we're back to the fuel problem again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The fuel problems.
All roads lead to fuel.
Lead to fuel.
We're looking for the four-hour fuel book now.
Got to chip away at this thousand-page monster first.
Yeah.
How did you cope with a reckless father like me?
Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors actors musicians, technicians and beyond.
You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music.
I have gone through this.
Reached the pinnacle, stung by the snake, and I've fallen down again.
Yeah.
I am not writing actively anymore.
And when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me.
I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave.
Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater.
The show must go on.
Listen to my weekly podcast, The Pooja Bhatt Show, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come for the honesty.
Stay for the fire.
Tell me about the acceptance piece.
What's been the hardest thing to wrap your head around with acceptance, the idea of acceptance?
Well, I'll give two examples.
The first is that personally doing any type of meditation that involves observing rather than suppressing or fixing.
So if you have frustration coming up Restlessness aversion, just labeling it and allowing it to be like a mother consoling a crying child.
That's hard.
It's hard.
But I think it's a valuable practice.
So that's something that I've explored.
There are lots of good apps out there.
I'm involved with The Way, and I used it prior to getting involved with Henry Shookman.
But there are many good options, right?
There's Calm, there's Headspace, there's lots of different options.
But I would say that specifically exploring something that cultivates your ability to observe things that you would call uncomfortable or negative, without trying to change them, is valuable.
All right.
The second in terms of acceptance is relational acceptance.
Humans are crazy, man.
Like, every human's nuts.
Like, irrationality is just table stakes.
Like we're not, Which is why any of the efficient market theory stuff where it's like we're all rational agents acting in our own best interest.
I'm like, have you met... Have you actually walked out, economist, and met humans?
Like...
What are you talking about?
So in relationships, I'll give a resource.
There's a audio book.
There's no print version called Fierce Intimacy by Terry Real.
Who is an amazing therapist.
You should have him on the show.
That guy's incredible and very opinionated.
He's not one of those therapists who just echoes questions back and forth.
You're like, Terry, what do you think?
He's like, what do you think?
He doesn't do that.
He's like let me tell you, you're being an idiot for these reasons and you need to grow up because of these reasons.
He's not exactly like Dr. Phil or anything, but he's very, very good at what he does.
And fierce intimacy along with his other materials.
And he's not the only person.
The Gottmans are pretty interesting as well.
But Terry real specifically has a number of principles that undergird his entire approach.
And one of them is when it comes to relationships. objective reality doesn't exist.
So for instance, right?
He gives this example.
I'm going to butcher it.
It's very funny when he tells it.
He's like, all right, let's say husband and wife are out to dinner.
Waiter comes over, takes the order, walks away.
And the husband says to the wife, honey, you don't need to yell.
And she's like, I wasn't yelling.
And he's like, yes, you were.
And you see where this is going, right?
And let's just suppose, and he gives this example.
The husband says, well, honey, you know, I thought this might come up.
So I actually hired professional audiologists and brought in recorders and, based on the decibel level, let me show you.
In fact, based on any conventional definition, you were yelling.
Like, is that going to help?
No.
Of course not.
It's going to be a disaster.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, in terms of interacting with the significant other, as this context is describing, accepting that, for each of us, our interpretation of reality, our experience of reality is real,
And if you try to fix it or win the situation by arguing over objective reality, it is just a dead end.
And that is what we all do.
Yeah, it's what we all do.
That's literally all we ever do.
I think, I think none are, not to get too gendered, but let's call a spade a spade, guys.
Like, men are particularly bad in terms of habitually doing this.
Women do it too.
But in effect, accepting...
For instance, someone's upset and trying to be curious and this is going to sound like some hand wavy kumbaya stuff, but it's like trying to be curious before you react.
That is the key piece.
It also ties into all the productivity.
Everything is so related.
It's just like, do you have the space to think, or are you just reacting to that text on a Sunday?
You need the space.
And there are a lot of ways to cultivate it.
One is meditation, sure, but it's not the only tool in the toolkit, right?
If you're, by the way, if you've had three cups of coffee and your sympathetic system is in overdrive, what are you going to do?
You're going to bite someone's head off.
Yeah.
Right?
So that's another lever you can pull.
Okay.
Fuel.
Are you depleted?
Okay.
Well, let's fix that.
And then on the relational piece, you got to practice in the messy reality of relationships or just doesn't count.
You can read all the relationship books in the world.
You got to practice it.
And historically I did not, to put it mildly, grew up in a household that modeled conflict resolution very well.
Lots of yelling and screaming.
It was.
I didn't if I learned anything.
It was all of the most counterproductive ways to handle conflict.
And I carried that into my relationships.
Surprise, surprise, didn't produce miracles of positivity.
But in the last, I'd say, 10 years had become much, much better.
Oh, Terry Real, a debt of gratitude, and one of my exes who introduced me to Terry, Terry's work, and my friend Kevin Rose, for that matter.
Not to say Terry is the end-all, be-all.
Just resonated with me.
Just like different people have different parenting styles, some people love...
Dr. Becky Kennedy, I tend to resonate with her stuff, but other people resonate with other things.
But for me, when it comes to to return to your question acceptance Man, oh man, does that matter a lot in relationships.
And there are many different iterations of it.
So those would be two, right?
There's the how do I sit with uncomfortable feelings without the necessity of fixing them or suppressing them?
Which, by the way, ties into workaholism and hustle culture and social media use.
Compulsive social media use.
You're like, I'm bored.
I don't like it.
I need to do X, right?
Now, some people might get a little pedantic and say, bored isn't a feeling.
You get the idea.
It's an experience you don't like.
That highlighting and that connectivity that you just put together.
But the main piece on how the objective reality is what we always debate is fascinating because it's the simmering six of relationships.
Like.
It's the distraction, it's the focal focal point that steals everything away, because that's all we ever think is.
The thing to solve is objective reality when, if you accept that that's how that person felt in that moment yeah, regardless of whatever, objectively you experienced, you think objectively, you experienced.
And that's really hard to do because we're so wired to be like but this is the truth.
And in relationships, there's almost very little truth.
If perhaps like me sounds.
Like you, you grew up in a household where conflict haymakers were modeled really well, but resolution was not modeled well.
Mm-hmm.
I think his name is Marshall Rosenberg.
Might be getting the name wrong, but nonviolent communication.
Read the book.
Yes, it is schlocky in the sense that there's a format and it can feel a little repetitive.
But guess what?
In the beginning, if you're coming from an upbringing that didn't teach you anything helpful on the conflict resolution side.
You need a format, you need a template.
And it's incredibly, incredibly helpful if only for there.
There's a whole process to it.
People can just look it up.
I'm sure Chachi PD or anything else will give you a good overview.
But at the end, make a request.
Don't just bitch and moan about how you feel, what your partner did.
Have a request.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Don't just tell them what not to do.
That's actually not helpful.
And I really had this driven home.
Part of the reason I like exploring all these weird different nooks and crannies is you realize how much you can copy and paste to other places.
Yeah.
So a friend of mine, Jason Niemer, he's the co-creator of something called Acro Yoga.
You know, we're in Southern California.
It's everywhere.
So you go to a park and you see like people with other people on their feet and they're doing all sorts of cool stuff.
And in those circumstances, it's basically partner acrobatics.
So they can be pretty chill.
If somebody is say like standing on your hands, saying don't push your heel down, is very unhelpful and actually kind of dangerous.
So instead of that, you say more toe, more toe, right?
You always want to give them direction for what to do, not what not to do.
And it applies to conflict resolution as well.
So the nonviolent communication and also sometimes you can talk about the objective reality, but you can't do that when one or more people are dysregulated.
Yes.
You just can't.
It's not going to work.
And that also counts for yourself.
So sometimes, right, I'm in a great relationship right now.
My relationships have never been better.
Like the last few years, every one of my relationships.
They are as good as they have ever been better.
If I am feeling dysregulated, maybe I had too much coffee, maybe whatever it might be.
Not to throw coffee under the bus, but it is the world's most consumed stimulant.
Too little sleep.
A bunch of bullshit going on on the business side.
Somebody dropped a ball, whatever.
And my partner wants to talk to me about something.
If I'm not resourced, I'll just say, babe, I'm happy to talk about this.
Let's do it at dinner.
I am really unresourced right now.
I'm just not in a place to have a good conversation about this.
And I'm pretty pissed off about a few things.
It has nothing to do with you.
And she's like, okay, cool.
So you also, on either side, need to be able to agree that that's an option.
Yeah, yeah.
And the productivity with that.
Sometimes I find like...
I'll say to my wife, like, I've got a crazy week coming up.
So just in advance, I'm just letting you know that this week I may not have the same space and stillness that I usually have, or presence that I usually have to deal with something, because I can preempt how I'm going to feel, dip based on you know and luckily, you know, I have a partner that understands that where I'm like hey, I'm traveling this week, I'm only literally back home for like three hours, then I'm back out and it's like just people being aware of what your week even looks like, because we kind of walk around thinking our partner should know Well, what does this sound like?
This sounds a lot like what we were talking about with.
How do you get someone to do the two weeks of meditation?
Setting expectations.
You can have almost anything that you want in life if you manage expectations early.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And I think we assume that we know our schedule and that our partner should somehow know that we have a busy week this week because we're coming home laughing and puffing or we're like
You know, whatever it is, we're on our phone and we're like, oh God, I gotta you know it's.
It's almost like we're trying to send all these cues without just spelling it out and just saying hey, this is what my week looks like.
And what does yours look like?
And I try and do that a lot as well.
It's fascinating.
You said that we've been asking these questions about life and relationships and philosophy for like thousands of years.
Forever.
Yeah, forever, but at least documented thousands of years at this point.
And I feel like we are still somewhat asking some of the same questions.
We were mentioning this earlier and I know you actually have a website that allows people to ask these questions.
I want to ask, what are the questions that are worth answering?
Because I feel like we ask a lot of questions and now, with AI, we're asking more questions than ever before.
Which, by the way, I think is better than the answer generation that we grew up in, which was having the answer, was smart.
When we both know that asking the right question is smarter, which hopefully AI can help us get better at, because we will have to get better at asking questions.
But what are the questions that are worth asking?
Because I just feel like we're distracted by a set of questions that are not valuable.
The questions that I keep returning to, a lot of them I've borrowed from different sources, right?
And I pointed out, you know, the book right behind me, Letters from a Stoic, Seneca the Younger.
That's the Penguin's classic edition.
I've probably given away 100 copies of that book.
Stoicism and Buddhism also, a lot of parallels, a lot of overlap.
One would be and this is actually borrowed from politics.
Someone who co-ran the war room for Bill Clinton put this in one of their books.
I was on a road trip and I just grabbed it from his bookstore.
But the question stuck with me, which I think they got from Newt Gingrich and it's like they also are diametrically opposed to Newt politically but they were like he was ruthlessly efficient and effective at gaining control of the house.
Blah blah, blah.
And the question was, are you hunting antelope or field mice?
And the story behind it is effectively like if you're a lion, sure you can keep yourself alive by hunting field mice and just eating like 100 a day.
Or you could put in the energy and the focus to kill an antelope.
And then that lasts you a day or two or three or whatever the number might be.
And that's a metaphor for, in effect, coming back to what we're talking about, like are you doing a bunch of little micro projects, putting out fires, living on defense, juggling 10 different kind of cool projects instead of one big?
Yes,
If so, you're eating field mice.
And it's like, that's no way for a lion to live.
You can survive.
That's not really living.
Like you need to hunt antelope.
So to encapsulate all of that into one question, so are you hunting antelope or are you hunting field mice?
Do you ever hear people who just say, well, Tim, Jay, I don't want to be a lion.
You know, you guys like being lions.
You want to be lions.
You want to go chase antelope.
Like, I don't want to be a lion.
I just want to chase field mice.
Yeah.
Like, you know, what do you say to that?
Because I always find it interesting.
I feel like again, mentally as a society we go between, you know type A winners this this, this versus hey, I just want to have my lot in life and be happy.
I'm glad you actually you're asking about this because I think lion, okay, king of the jungle. etc.
It implies almost that the person using the metaphor might want to be an apex predator, king of the hill, whatever.
That's An unfortunate side effect maybe, of the picture that it paints.
But the point is coming back to people falling apart when they have too much free time, right?
This is a huge reason why most retirements fail and people have their health go off a cliff as soon as they retire in many cases.
It's about knowing what your big thing is.
Having a focus.
That's just what we need as humans, plain and simple.
Psycho-emotionally, philosophically, humans are in the meaning-making business.
You can't do that with triaging email.
You cannot fool yourself into thinking that that is deeply meaningful.
There's a part of you that will know it is not.
And you will suffer accordingly.
So that's how I would answer it.
I'm glad you went there because I think sometimes achievement mentality gets mixed with meaning making, in that people assume that oh you just, and there are some people who just want to win right.
And that's not even to do with meaning.
So you could go kill a big antelope and still not win because you didn't have meaning as a human.
Well, let me give, I'll give a, it's not even a counterexample.
It's a compatible example.
Let's just say it's a kindergarten teacher and her North Star is like I want to put as much time as possible into whatever makes the lives of these kids better.
That's it.
So is managing the bake sale for the PTA adding to that, if those aren't the parents of your students?
No, it's not.
Therefore, it's a no.
Is responding to email from friends or texts from friends or asking you to go out to have drinks on a wednesday night, going to contribute to that.
No, it's actually gonna be kind of productive.
No right, you can still have fun.
I'm not saying don't have fun, but you can have a north star.
By the way, it doesn't have to be one thing forever.
That can be very intimidating, like what is my purpose in life?
What is my?
What is my?
It doesn't have to be this permanent thing.
For me, it generally isn't.
For me, it's like, I mean, I do have overarching things that guide my behaviors, values, but...
I will just go completely immersive into fill in the blank, bioelectric medicine for six months.
That's it.
That's all I care about.
How do I translate that into something usable in the real world?
Or you know, for like supporting science related to psychedelic assisted therapies and starting 2015, like for a long time, that was it.
And if you were like, well, I want you to do policy work or this, that related to it.
I'm like, nope.
That's not my power zone.
I am focused on science.
Okay.
And it's supporting the science, not capitalizing on it.
So I had a rule like no investing in for-profit companies related to psychedelics.
Not that that makes someone, we need those.
But I was like, for me, that's a hard boundary.
Okay, great.
I feel like I've kind of done what I set out to do in that world.
So I've largely stopped.
I'm out.
I passed the baton, let other people do it.
So it doesn't have to be forever.
It doesn't have to be some grand giant thing.
It could be teaching your kids.
Yeah, it's focus.
It's central.
It could be, for instance, for me now, if I consider doing adding I mean, I'm a promiscuous activity adder.
I love hobbies and I'm just all over the place.
And now that really focused on my current relationship.
That's going incredibly well, thankfully right.
Fingers crossed.
Fingers crossed.
And I borrowed this from a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett, who's an amazing performance coach and PT.
But at one point he told me, because he also does tons of activities, he said he's only adding new activities that consume time, physical activities that he can do with his wife or kids.
That's it.
No solo activities.
It's like, wow, what a great forcing function.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
So with my partner, that's it.
It's like, what can we do together?
Okay.
And you can change your mind six months later.
Yeah.
It's like, okay, for now, that's it.
Yeah.
Only adding new time-consuming hobbies if I can do them with her.
Absolutely.
That's a great question.
That, I think, counts as a big yes.
Yes, yes.
That's a great question.
I'm glad to be unpacked earlier.
Yes, that's one.
Another one which I think about, and have been thinking more and more about, is what if I could only fix this?
Only fix this is even tricky with achiever types.
What if I could only subtract instead of add?
I'm sure this is true just about everywhere with humans.
You have some type of medical issue or you're trying to achieve x.
You want to add things.
What new software can i use?
What new magic supplement can i take?
Add add add add, add Right.
What books can I read?
Well, what if you turn all that around and you're like, what if I could only achieve whatever the goal is or solve the problem by stopping reading certain categories of thing?
Example given getting rid of your social media, right?
What if this is not medical advice, just informational example.
But I am incredibly.
I think intermittent fasting and fast mimicking diets are incredibly undervalued, incredibly undervalued.
So.
Cutting food out could be better than figuring out the right food.
I could do that to try to get my metabolic health under control, but I could also do intermittent fasting, which is portable, proven right.
Humans have been going periods without food for a very, very long time, since before.
We were humans, so to speak, homo sapiens.
And the changes that you see with something like and just to define what I'm talking about specifically, in my case, intermittent fasting would be 16 hours of fasting, eight hour feeding window.
And generally within that eight hour feeding window, I'm having two big meals.
That's it.
And Mark Mattson is a scientist, M-A-T-T-S-O-N, who's done a lot on this.
But you want to have at least 16 hours so that you deplete your liver of glycogen and then your body develops the machinery to turn on ketones more effectively, right?
But you do that, I mean my entire family has insulin insensitivity.
We have a lot of wonky genetics for this stuff.
And if you're getting regular testing, don't just do fasting glucose.
Get your insulin measured and also do an oral glucose tolerance test.
There's a lot more you should test, but at least hit those three.
And after four to six weeks of intermittent fasting...
Number one, all of my energy dips that I used to remedy with caffeine, gone.
Like completely gone.
Like just sustained energy gone.
And when I woke up, I was awake.
All right.
One of the benefits of ketones.
And my lab work, the oral glucose tolerance test, my doctors were like, A++.
Four to six weeks.
That's nothing.
That is nothing.
It's also, well, we can come to, if we want to talk about asceticism and just like the actual...
I think, values that are a little more esoteric, like fasting and stuff abstaining.
I think there's a lot to it.
Cue Seneca, he's got a lot on that.
But what if you could only subtract?
And you could do that also by looking at what you're spending your time on.
Like do an 80-20 analysis, but identify the peak energy drainers in terms of activities people, et cetera.
Okay, what if you could only remove, you can't add more stuff?
Yeah, that's a great question.
Right?
Great question.
So how do you develop a system to block or say no to these things.
Totally.
Okay.
Subtraction, subtraction, subtraction.
Great question.
As a flip, I would say on the default, very helpful.
Similarly, you could ask whatever your common practice is or whatever rule you have in place, like what if I did the opposite for 48 hours or a week?
This what if I did the opposite, I think is very powerful.
Give me an example of something that you could flip that way.
My first job out of college was as a technical sales guy at a mass data storage company.
So we're selling...
At the time, I mean, it's laughable now, but, you know, petabytes.
Oh, my God.
These network storage systems to movie studios and National Geologic Survey and so on.
All of the experienced sales guys got in the office whenever they got in the office.
It's called nine.
And then from nine to five, they're sending emails and making cold calls, right?
Trying to reach CTOs and CEOs mostly.
Yeah.
And I was having terrible results doing this.
And most of them were having terrible results.
But that's how they did it.
So what do I know?
I'm fresh out of college, so I was just copying them.
And at some point, I'm like, this sucks.
And I was one of the lowest paid people in the company.
I'm like...
I'm living in a very expensive part of the country.
This is in the Bay Area.
I'm eating a jack-in-the-box, for God's sake, through the drive-thru.
If I'm going to make more money with commissions, I need to solve this.
So I was like, all right, what if I did the opposite?
What's the opposite?
Don't make any calls between nine to five.
Okay.
And I started making calls between seven and nine and then from five to seven.
And what I figured out very quickly is that part of the reason the results were so bad between nine to five is CTOs and CEOs are busy.
Of course they are.
So they have gatekeepers.
They have bulletproof vests in the form of people who say no.
And those people are usually gone before nine and they're gone after five.
And so I had multiple experiences of calling pretty large companies, And literally the person who answered the phone like a receptionist was the president or CEO of the company.
That's crazy.
Within the span of I want to say two or three months, two very large competitors who had New York and LA offices.
I outsold all of our largest competitor, which I think was publicly traded even then, outsold their entire offices combined.
By doing what?
Just by doing the opposite.
Yeah.
Because if it's not working... Yeah, if it's not working, try the opposite.
And if that doesn't work, okay, try something else.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean with the podcast, for instance.
Like everybody, almost everybody, even still today, offers advertisers net 30 terms, net 60 terms.
Mm-hmm.
For people who don't know what that means.
That means that you run the ad they don't pay for it for 30 to 60 days.
And that can create a lot of complexity because you need someone to chase them down.
There are going to be people who relate.
There are lots of invoices and accounts payable, accounts receivable.
There's all sorts of shenanigans that goes on.
And I was like, all right, well, what's the opposite?
Pre-payment, that's it.
Everybody prepays.
What does that look like?
Okay.
And another maxim, I guess, of mine is like, try the ideal thing first.
You can always do the standard later or you can do the complicated thing later.
But like, what would my dream be?
My dream would be people pay in advance and was able to make it work.
And I was like, wow, well, glad we tried that first.
And there are a lot of examples like that.
These are great questions.
And everyone can find them at?
Tim.blog is the website.
There are literally thousands of pages of free stuff.
If you go to timblog, slash 17, however you want to spell it, the number or spell it out, there's a PDF with like 17 of these questions.
Amazing.
And I use them all the time.
I still use them all the time.
When you say all the time.
Do you have a regimen of how often you use them or just whenever it feels right?
It's more when they feel right.
So I would say, most frequently it's like if I'm starting to cry my teeth or just wake up and I've got the like.
Type of groan.
It's like, eh, probably time to break out the toolkit.
Something is not, something's chafing.
Or on the flip side, for instance, I have one or two startups that I'm going to be getting involved with.
And they're going to be very exciting, big commit projects.
And it's like, okay, these are going to be very fast moving, very competitive.
Let me test a whole bunch of assumptions about these industries because I'm advising typically to be helpful.
And I will pull these questions out.
Yeah.
Like what does everyone say you need to do?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is there anything to support that?
Or, like science, is it just that somebody did that first and then everybody else copied, and they're like well, that's just how it works.
Yeah.
Which is usually the case.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, what is doing the opposite look like?
What might that look like?
And 80% of it's going to get thrown out, but you don't need 100%.
You just need one or two little levers.
So I use it for the good stuff too.
Yeah, no, I love that.
I love having a core base of questions to come back to, rather than just reminders or reflections.
Or questions are just great because you can usually tell straight away that you've been chasing too many field mice.
Exactly.
And what I like about that is it's.
You know, I've tried for myself over time to make these questions like tighter and tighter and tighter, because when I'm running around, even if I'm not journaling, if I'm just sitting on a train ride or a plane and I'm thinking to myself man, why am I so stressed out?
Yeah.
Uh, people might be familiar with some of them from the four hour work week and I didn't create them like 80, 20 analysis, et cetera.
Yeah.
Calendar reviews, past year reviews, all that stuff for your setting.
But you can just sit there and look out the window and ponder some of these questions.
And then you're like, Hmm.
Yeah.
Too many field mice.
Yeah.
Too many field mice.
I'm always slightly hungry.
Why?
Right.
Existentially, there's some malaise.
Why?
I'm eating field mice.
Yeah, it's when we were walking over to the studio and we were talking on the way and I was saying yeah, like I feel like this is finally a year where I know what to say, no to what to say, right.
It's that I didn't ask in that way.
And I love that language for it, because it was that I was.
I spent years over committing myself, not undercommitting not, you know all that kind of, all the versions of it.
Like you just said, like, do the ideal, do the opposite, figure it out.
And then you start going, okay, no, I've finally found a flow through asking these questions.
And guess what?
The flow will be disrupted again by something else.
And so those questions will become valuable again.
Yeah, you're never, it's not set it and forget it.
Exactly, yeah.
It's like meditating or weightlifting or whatever.
I guess it's a practice, so you come back to it.
How did you cope with a reckless father like me?
Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors actors musicians, technicians and beyond.
You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music.
I have gone through this.
Reached the pinnacle, stung by the snake and I've fallen down again.
Yeah.
I am not writing actively anymore.
And when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me.
I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave.
Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater.
The show must go on.
Listen to my weekly podcast, The Pooja Bhatt Show, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come for the honesty.
Day for the fire.
I also find like if you just get good at one, if you can figure out the process of doing one thing well, that process usually helps you do multiple things well.
Oh, it's all the same.
Right?
As far as I can tell.
Don't you feel that way like yeah, for sure, it's easy to lose sight of that right?
It's like i was uh, just in new mexico doing a short meditation retreat, which i find helpful, nothing like what you've done, but you know sure sure, a little check-in with some teachers.
Yeah, and one of the meditation teachers, valerie at mountain cloud in san francisco, used to be a very high level, world-class flute player.
She and I were comparing notes on, in her case flute, and then I used to compete in archery and we were comparing notes and I realized, holy shit, I totally I was having some challenges with meditation.
I was having a really hard time with this retreat.
I was just really frustrated a lot of the time.
And I thought to myself, oh, wow.
Her discussing flute made me think of archery.
And there are all of these things from archery that I can just copy and paste directly into meditation.
And then literally right after that, the next three sets, totally different world.
And I was like wow, how funny it is that even at this point, After making a career of drawing parallels between fields, I had sat there and I'm like I need to get better at meditating and hadn't even looked in other areas of my life to copy and paste.
Literally.
Yeah.
Dummy.
God, come on, Ferris.
No, I feel like that all the time.
I was.
I was uh, this recently I got I mean, not that I I'm not even sure if I'm going to do it for real, but it was like I got sent an audition for an acting gig and it was interesting.
The role was interesting.
And I was like, oh, this is a bit of flattering.
This is a bit of fun.
Like, let's see.
And then like all the like fear came in. around like, what if I do it and I fail?
And like, what if I send an audition tape and I look like a fool?
And what if someone like sees this and then thinks all my other stuff isn't you know whatever, all the stuff that?
And I was like, wait a minute, like why am I?
And I was like oh, of course I'm scared because I haven't got a coach and I haven't done any classes to see if I even enjoy it or like it.
And I haven't even done the scales version of, like you know, making different faces, or and then, and then I got a coach and it was like, within hours I was like oh, I could do this.
I could give it a go if I wanted to.
Like I could give an audition, not saying I could get the role.
I could do the audition with a little bit of confidence because now I had a system and I had tools.
And the coach would talk about how like he was.
Like you know, if you're doing theater, you got to be able to like be big.
And he goes, so I always try and get everyone to be a 10.
And so you start at a 10 and then for TV, you roll that emotion back down.
I'm so introverted.
This is like my nightmare.
I remember doing a little bit of TV way back in the day.
And they're like, okay, just more energy, more energy.
And they did, they kept telling me more energy.
And I'm just like, bro, Maybe this isn't for me.
But for me, it was the technique.
It was like really helpful to go.
He's like acted as a 10.
And then for TV, you'd roll it back into a two.
And I was like, what a cool like technique.
And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense.
And I was actually going to ask you, have you read the book, The Zen of Archery?
Yeah, I have.
Yeah, yeah, I thought so.
I was like, I've got some favorite stories from that book.
It's a great book.
I'll throw out another one, because I was talking about music and it ties into a lot of what we're talking about.
One of my favorite short books.
I can't remember who recommended this to me.
Might have been Seth Godin.
It's called The Art of Possibility by...
I want to say Benjamin Zander, blanking on his wife's name, which is embarrassing, but Zander Z-A-N-D-E-R.
It's a conductor, very high-level orchestral conductor, and it is a wonderful book.
It ties into everything that we're talking about.
For folks who want, I think it's like 150 pages or something, Really, really exceptional book.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's cool.
I love it.
Tim, you've been so fun to talk to as always.
Yeah, my pleasure, man.
You're such a fascinating individual truly, and I'm so grateful that you've always been to Human Guinea Pig, because it's fun being in your mind and talking to you just about things you're exploring, because I think it brings back a zest for life, naturally.
It's contagious.
It creates this curiosity in everyone.
And at the same time, I think we've talked about so many practical things that people can actually apply in their lives.
I wanted to end with two segments.
One of them is a bunch of questions that we just got from our audience that we love, that I wanted to throw at you.
You want me to keep my answers short or what do you want?
No, these ones you can flow a bit.
Just riff.
Yeah, you can riff a bit.
These are questions, kind of what you were saying, questions that you ask repeatedly.
There are certain questions that we found our audience loves knowing the answer to from different people.
And so we throw them out to you.
So this one is what makes a good friend?
What makes a good friend?
That is a damn good question.
I would say it's someone who says what they mean, means what they say, who's reliable.
You know, someone you can share your joys and sorrows with over time.
I mean, that's about it.
I would say that over time, this applies across the board.
Intelligence in quotation marks because what does that even mean has become less and less important to me.
Like trustworthiness and reliability come way before that now.
Not to say my friends are stupid.
Like my friends tend to be.
You know they tend to be pretty smart, but I'm not sorting first by that.
I love everyone who's made it now is wondering, wait a minute.
That makes sense.
What's the difference between being efficient and cutting corners?
What comes to mind for me is cutting corners implies aiming for short-term gain but long-term side effects or consequences.
Cutting corners implies you're not doing something you should do.
And I would expand that further just to say that I do not focus on efficiency as much as people think.
Efficiency, and I'm borrowing from Peter Drucker here also the effective executive.
Everybody should read that.
Holy cow, what a great book.
But Peter Drucker paraphrasing effectiveness is doing the right things, and then efficiency is doing things right.
The way I would reframe that is like what you do like.
Picking your big yes matters a lot more than how you get there.
It's kind of like if you're starting in Kansas and you're intending to go to California, but your car pointed towards New York.
It's like You could be Mario Andretti.
Doesn't matter.
You're going the wrong direction.
So the what matters a lot more.
What advice has made you the most money?
These are good questions.
I like these.
It's hard to attribute to one person.
I wish I could, but it's from a couple of different folks.
Well, I'll actually give a nod to some folks who have informed the thinking.
Aiming to be a category of one.
So don't aim to be the best, although I think that's fine once you do what I'm about to describe.
Aim to be the only.
Hmm.
Right.
And we were chatting a bit before we started recording about how the podcast landscape has changed.
And it would be very hard to start my show now.
Absolutely.
Right.
You would need to be more probably narrowly focused and differentiated in a bunch of different ways.
So for that, there's a great essay you can find online.
At KK.org, Kevin Kelly wrote 1,000 true fans.
I think it was true 10 years ago and it is going to become ultra, ultra true as AI starts to gobble everything.
1,000 true fans, you got to read it.
The Law of Category is a chapter from the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
I think I put it, I think I excerpted it in Tools of Titans or Tribe of Mentors, because that chapter had a huge impact.
Blue Ocean Strategy also, those are all related.
So the advice to basically aim to be the only, definitely one.
Another one would be and this relates to, I guess, the angel investing and so on is to and Marc Andreessen, very famous entrepreneur and technologist and investor, but also the late Scott Adams controversial guy, but certainly was very good at what he did with Dilbert had similar echoes of this.
Basically talking about two things.
The first is that trying to become top 1 and this relates to the first point like Michael Jordan in basketball, very hard.
Yeah.
Yo-Yo Ma, very hard.
Almost everybody's going to get cut.
But if you can be top, say, 25% in two fields that are rarely combined, right?
Software development, although AI is going to kill that.
But software and let's just say debate or a law degree.
Oh, that's interesting.
So I tend to think about combining top 25% of fields that are rarely combined.
And then the last one would be choosing projects based on acquiring skills and either building or deepening relationships that transcend that project.
Because a lot of my projects fail by any external metric.
But if I'm building friendships with very interesting people who are smart and I'm developing skills that are kind of transferable over time, you just win.
It's very hard not to win.
That's great advice.
That's huge.
There's so much in there.
Huge advice.
Thank you.
This one.
What's something that the top 1% obsess over that most people never even think about?
I mean, this is going to sound self-serving because my 850 page book is about this, saying no.
The absolute sacredness of focus.
They're all I mean.
Some people are better at this than others, but in their own way they are very, very militant about that.
Yeah. in a way that's very different from, say, the top 40%.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
Like the top 1 to 5, even if they don't realize it, have set up systems, or they have employees or they have, you know, no available email address or whatever, or unusual ways to calendar.
Even if they don't realize it, they're very, very good at firewalling their attention.
What's the allure of yes?
Like what is the allure?
Is it people pleasing?
Is it distraction?
Is it busyness?
Like what have you found to be the allure?
All good answers, right.
So i think there's fomo, because everything in modern marketing is intended to foster fear of missing out, but if you only have one good idea or one good chance, you're screwed.
Yeah you, you need to develop and you only do this through experimentation and time on the field The confidence in your ability to generate or capitalize on opportunities.
Right?
This is incredibly important.
And I mentioned angel investing a bit.
For people who don't know, that just means investing, in my case, in companies very, very early right.
So when it's two people and an idea on a napkin, investing in those people.
If you don't have the ability to say no, you run out of money.
You're dead.
Game over.
That's the end of your angel on this day, right?
Because most of them are going to go to zero.
And I would say that that seems like something that doesn't apply everywhere else.
But guess what?
You can make more money later.
As far as we know, you can't create more time later.
Back to Seneca.
Yeah.
On the shortness of life.
And people are really burning time in ways they will realize are pretty terrifying.
But FOMO is a piece of it.
People pleasing is another, which generally is short term, nice, long term mean.
You always end up paying the piper with that one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like, you're going to have to have an uncomfortable conversation.
Yeah.
Do you want to have two years of pain before that or do you want to just do that now?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then I would say field mice.
Right?
If you don't have an antelope and someone else is like, hey, come help me with my antelope.
Yeah.
Hey, why don't you come to my party about my antelope?
You're like antelope sexy.
Yeah, all right, sure i'll say it's your party.
Sure i'll come to your, you know, bat mitzvah magic show.
Sure i'll do this, sure i'll do that.
Yeah, you know yeah, and all of a sudden, before you know it, your calendar's full of field mice.
Yeah yeah, those are some of the pieces you can spend quite a lot of time on on that, diagnosing it, but those are a few of the big ones.
Absolutely great answers.
What's the emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself?
The emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself in a vacuum, without the acceptance piece, is that you always think you're broken.
And that is too high a cost for anyone to pay.
It's an expanded discussion in the self-help trap blog post that I wrote.
By the way, I think it's probably now within 24 hours.
I knew it was gonna be my most popular blog post of the last 10 years, probably.
It's wild.
I didn't know if it would resonate, but holy shit.
So the cost to constantly improve yourself?
Almost by definition, you have to constantly be looking for ways to fix yourself, which means you're looking for ways you're broken.
And that means you're always in the red.
There's always one more problem.
And so the feeling of peace eludes you.
By one more workshop, one more book, one more retreat, one more psychedelic, whatever it is, you're always going to be one step behind.
If that's the only lens through which you're looking at things.
The achievement, self-improvement side.
Yeah.
If you have the acceptance side, then you can start to balance out the wobble board.
So I would say that's what comes to mind.
Yeah, it's almost like the old idea of climbing the mountain and pausing to look at the view and then climb some more and looking at the view.
You'd never go on a hike and not stop and look at the view.
It's a ridiculous idea.
You'd never just go, I'm only going to look at the view when I get to the top.
And then there is no top because you just keep discovering a new top.
Yeah.
It's like no, we got to a flat piece of land and then I stopped and we had a little you know sandwiches and had some lunch and looked at the view and had a bit of peace and appreciated how far we'd come.
And furthermore, I'll just add to this, the hyper individualism of most self-help.
Yeah.
I think is very problematic.
I want to prevent it from becoming a TED Talk, but Pema Chodron has a really great poem, who Henry Shookman introduced me to actually.
And I won't be able to recite it because it's pretty long, but it effectively.
It's from When Things Fall Apart.
And it talks about ascending the mountaintop. just as you were describing.
The problem with that is that you leave your alcoholic sister, your schizophrenic friend behind.
And then when you get to the top, you realize, oh, it just descends.
And actually the mountain descends back into the messiness of human relationships.
So that's, if you want to be on the playing field, Yeah, that's powerful.
I think it really.
Another question, like a question that I'm asking myself right now, which is not one of those 17, is what if almost everything you did or project you added had to improve your relational life somehow?
That's the criteria.
Yeah.
Because that's your antelope right now.
The first thing you had to do was one that was going to improve your relationships some way.
By the way, it doesn't need to be a big thing.
Sure, it could be having that long overdue hard conversation with your parents, but that's a heavy lift.
It could also be saying hi to your significant other in the morning and kissing him or her on the cheek before you jump on your phone.
Right?
It doesn't have to be a big thing.
Totally.
Yeah.
Our last one of these, if someone feels behind in life, what would you tell them?
I'd say a few things.
I'd say, number one, it's never too late.
I've seen so many examples of people doing amazing stuff starting in their 50s, 60s, 70s.
Jim Collins actually has a new book.
I don't know if it's out yet, but What to Make of a Life profiles?
Something like 30 people, and these are incredible examples of success, and a lot of them did their most important work in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
So it's not too late, number one.
And number two, I'd recommend, I'm giving so many book recommendations.
People are just like, oh God.
We'll make a list from this podcast.
So 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman.
Oh, I love that.
I think it's a phenomenal book.
And there's a chapter in that book specifically.
You can find it online called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.
And people should check this out.
And this is not, some people are like, oh, Tim's become so nihilistic.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
This isn't nihilism.
But you can make your problems seem less life or death by zooming out.
And Oliver does this very well.
And a friend of mine, Ed Cook, he was a world-class memory competitor for a long time.
He trained I think it was Jonah Lehrer a writer, to become national memory champion in the US in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein.
I mean, the guy's a stud.
And Ed Cook will do the same thing, even though I don't even think he knows who Oliver Berkman is, which is like imagine zooming out to like above his house.
If he's really stressed out like zoom above his house, then zoom out to like above the city, then the country, then out to seeing the planet, then zoom out even further, looking at the solar system.
And there's something to it that almost always takes some of the pressure out of the tires.
Wow.
Absolutely.
And it's like okay at the end of the day, and I don't think this is bad news, but like we are a bunch of monkeys on a spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos, right?
So maybe the fact that somebody sent a really pissy email to you like ah like, in the grand scheme of things,
Yeah, yeah.
Like, okay.
And I need that for myself too.
I'm not like wagging a finger at people.
I'm like, look, I can get wound up about that.
I'm really good in crisis and with giant like projects and problems.
It's the dumbest shit in the world.
Like somebody cuts me off at the buffet line and like an airplane lounge or something.
And I'm just like...
Really?
That's what you're going to get wound up about?
For like two days?
Like for the next eight hour flight, you're going to think about that guy?
What's wrong with you?
So trust me, it's like I'm drinking the medicine too.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, no, I can relate to both.
And it's both.
It's like there's times in life where thinking what you do matters is everything.
And then there's times in life that embracing your own insignificance.
Yeah.
Is the only way to function.
Yeah, there's a great Bertrand Russell quote.
It's along the lines of the sure sign of impending nervous breakdown is taking one's work incredibly seriously.
Ah, yeah.
Something like that.
I'm butchering it, but it's very close.
Yeah.
I like that.
And the dose makes the poison, right?
Like you have to believe in what you're doing.
Yeah.
And at the same time, kind of recognize like we're all in the moment show here.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
As the Buddha would say, you have to hold the bird in your hand, but not too tightly.
If you hold it too tightly, you suffocate it.
And if you don't hold it at all, then you can't help it.
And so it's hard.
It's hard.
And you're always going to go in between.
Yeah, you got to crush a few birds first and let a few go to figure it out.
Exactly.
Yeah, sadly.
Sadly.
All right, Tim, we end every episode with a final five.
These have to be answered in one sentence maximum.
So these are short.
So Tim, these are your final five.
Question number one, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Don't believe everything you think.
Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
You need money to make money.
Question number three, what did you used to value that you don't value anymore?
Achievement without acceptance.
What did you never value before but that you do deeply value now?
Emotional experience.
Really?
Yeah, I mean, I thought emotions were just limbic system liabilities for a long time.
What changed your mind on that?
Well, a few things.
I mean, I realized you just can't get around it.
Like, who are we kidding, right?
Like, we're just no, but i think it's a really good conversation that's, that's one right, you just can't get around it.
So, coming back to the serenity bro, it's like yeah, good luck with that, ferris.
Uh, and even if you could become spock, you're going to interact with people who are not spock.
So we're right back at square one.
Yeah, and that's one.
And secondly, there's quite a long story behind this that i won't get into, but You can if you want.
Yeah, I would just say, to experience the full richness of being human, you have to embrace being human.
And a very large part of that is emotional.
Yeah, well said.
Fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show.
If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
I'd say smile and say hi first.
And I'm borrowing that from Gabby Reese, an amazing woman who I interviewed alongside Laird Hamilton a long time ago.
But yeah, go first was hers.
Smile and say hi first, it changes everything.
It actually does.
It actually changes everything.
If you walked into a room and brought the energy you hope to get out of it, it's like yeah, there's another.
This isn't, this isn't as poetic, but there's another one that somebody told me at one point.
I'm like, oh god, that's good.
They said, if you walk out one day and you be an asshole, that person's an asshole.
If you walk outside and everyone's an asshole, you're the asshole.
It's true.
It's true.
I know plenty of those.
Go get some ketones or macadamia nuts or a cold shower.
I love it.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
I hope everyone checks out tim.blog forward slash 17 for the 17 questions.
And people can actually read your new book kind of to get, you want to talk about that?
Yeah, sure.
People can get, if they go to tim.blog, that is a URL, kind of confusing, but just type tim.blog in.
You can get, I think, I want to say 175 to 200 pages of my various books to read.
Plenty of actionable, tons of actionable stuff.
It's not just buttering you up for the book.
You don't ever have to buy the books.
I mean, there's more in the books, obviously, but if you go to Tim.blog, you'll find 175 plus pages.
Then for the no book, which is the code name for the book about saying no definitely my funniest book so far because I did it with Neil Strauss, who acted as my student.
And he was so bad, so comically bad at saying no.
There's a lot of funny exchanges, real text messages and experiments and stuff.
But you can find, I want to say, 50, 75 pages of that at Tim.blog slash notebook.
And yeah, so all that stuff, all that stuff is free.
People can check it out.
Well, thank you.
Well, everyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you tag me and Tim on Instagram X TikTok, wherever you're viewing the show or seeing clips.
I want to know what resonated with you, what you're practicing, with what you're trying, what you're exploring.
I love seeing how what we discuss here turns into reality.
So let us know what you're taking action on.
And Tim, thank you so much.
I hope you'll come back.
My pleasure, man.
We won't take nine years again.
You're very good at what you do, man.
It's fun to watch and it's fun to experience also.
It's easy with someone like you.
This is like a dream.
This is like my favorite kind of episode.
You're the best.
Thank you, man.
Yeah, thanks.
Thank you so much for listening to this conversation.
If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.
No gloss, no filter, just stories spoken without fear.
A person who is not generous cannot be an artist.
The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers.
Come for the honesty.
Stay for the fire.
