Tim Ferriss On: Recovering From Anxiety and Compulsive Thinking, Rethinking Self-Optimization, and the Power of Saying "No."

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27:55This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. March includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress while also recognizing how much they carry every day. Between caring for others and managing unseen responsibilities, their emotional well-being can easily be overlooked. One tool that can be incredibly powerful for women and for everybody is therapy. Shout out to my wife, a big believer in therapy, both individually and for everybody she knows. And it's also something we do as a couple. My wife, as a scientist, is aware of the evidence for therapy and definitely puts it into practice in her own life.

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29:08With over 30 ,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally, and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Your emotional well-being matters, find support, and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash happier. That's betterhelp.com slash happier. The question I'm about to ask might bring us back to your unpublished essay about the dangers of self-help. But you mentioned the word optimizing. And in some ways, I kind of think of you as like the proto-optimizer, you know, four-hour work week.

29:53And I'm just curious where you are on self-optimization now. I would say that I still focus on certain areas to optimize.

30:09Tim Ferriss:I still pull certain lovers. And what I would say I have become much better at, and it takes practice, it's going to sound so rudimentary, is asking simply, what are you optimizing for? Before you optimize? Why are you optimizing? And it's easy, I would say, particularly if you are being shaped by social media, which seems to basically offer you the seven dead layer cardinal sins on a silver platter. You get to pick your poison. If you're being shaped by that, then you can end up optimizing without a direction necessarily or questioned. You haven't interrogated the direction. And that could be because you're following someone online who's a multi-billion dollar real estate developer slash serial entrepreneur slash fill in the blank.

31:10Tim Ferriss:And the chase for money is on. But that never really gets interrogated. I think the four-hour workweek does a good job of breaking down kind of work for work's sake and money for money's sake. But for me personally, for instance, It's like, okay, if I'm going to, quote unquote, optimize my health, well, we've got a problem right out of the gate. Optimize isn't well-defined. What does that mean? And health isn't well-defined. What the hell does that mean? So for me, I'll give you an example from the health perspective. If you read a book like Outlive by Dr. Peter Atiyah, great book, one of the few books, if people are asking me what I think about longevity and all the tech billionaires want to live forever and flying to Honduras for questionable genetic therapy and so on, what do I think of all this?

31:58Tim Ferriss:I would say start with Outlive. if you actually want to have the longest health span possible where you're functioning at a high level for the longest period of time, I would check out that book. And I don't want to paraphrase too heavily here, but in effect, you can figure out without a whole lot of fancy analysis, what is most likely to kill you based on what kills everybody in your family. In my case, it's probably not going to be cancer. Could be. Probably not. It is almost certainly going to be something cardiovascular or neurodegenerative disease. So for me, I have three relatives right now with rapidly progressing Alzheimer's disease, including those who do not have the genotype, if we look at say APOE status right there, APOE 3-3, whereas I'm APOE 3-4, so that's scary.

32:56Tim Ferriss:There are other factors to consider for Alzheimer's. I am doing things to try not to die from something that is hopefully preventable from the perspective of cardiac health, cardiovascular health, and then also trying to mitigate my risk of neurodegenerative disease. And that's why I'm in ketosis right now, for instance. And jury's out on some of this, but very plausibly, there are mechanisms by which going into ketosis on a fairly regular basis for a few weeks at a time, let's just say in my case, two or three times a year, may have neuroprotective effects, also anti-cancer effects. And people can listen to my interviews with Dominic D 'Agostino, who's a researcher out of Florida, or other people for the science behind this.

33:47Tim Ferriss:And it's also an intervention, and this comes back to your question about optimizing, that is very, very well studied in the sense that I have very high confidence that the downside risk is low and very manageable. Whereas if you're just mainlining GLP-1 agonists, amazing results that we've seen in the literature so far, but have we had anyone on these for 10, 20 years? No, at least not 20 years. Maybe some of the first monkeys shot into space, like me with the accelerated TMS and the DCS, has been on for that period of time. That doesn't mean don't use GLP-1 agonists, but understand that there are a lot of unknown unknowns.

34:28Tim Ferriss:With the ketogenic diet, it's like, look, the ketogenic diet and its modern incarnation using heavy cream or other types of fats was designed for epileptic children. And this goes back probably 100 years at this point, if not 100 years close to it. And humans have the metabolic machinery to go into ketosis and have had that machinery for millennia upon millennia upon millennia. That would be an example of something that passes the test for me of seemingly credible upside potential, even if we don't understand all the mechanisms. limited downside potential that I can offset with certain prescription drugs, let's just say, because I'm a cholesterol hyperabsorber.

35:14Tim Ferriss:And okay, great, we're going to do that. Intermittent fasting would be another one. During ketosis or outside of ketosis, the one thing that has most dramatically changed my blood tests with respect to specifically insulin sensitivity and avoiding prediabetes, which runs rampant in my family, intermittent fasting. In my case, that means I'm eating within an eight-hour window each day. It might be even a little shorter, like 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. And that's it. I just don't eat until 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. And for some folks, it's arguably better for you if you do like a 12 noon to 8 p.m. kind of eating window.

35:59Tim Ferriss:It's also called time-restricted feeding. There's a lot of good science for this, not just in animal models, but in humans. And the results I've seen from that are just absolutely incredible. And it's so simple because you don't actually need to change what you eat. You're just changing when you eat. So those would be two that people might think of as optimizing. And then I'm taking a handful of prescription drugs to offset the cardiovascular risk because it doesn't matter if I am eating an all-fat diet, an all-protein diet, a vegan diet, a fill-in-the-blank diet. There are certain biomarkers that are just trash.

36:44Tim Ferriss:They're so bad. And that seems to be just straight from the code, straight from DNA. And for that reason, And I'm like, ah, I'm no spring chicken anymore. You know what? I think I'll just bite the bullet and take some of these. And when, for instance, I talk with my doctors now, the first thing is, if you have a blood test and something is out of range, my recommendation would be before you get on 12 different drugs to deal with it. And if it's an emergency, it's an emergency. But if it's not an emergency, right? Like your triglycerides are high. All right. Well, it's probably not going to kill you in the next week.

37:21Tim Ferriss:my recommendation would be talk to your doctor replicate the test do the test again the next week maybe on a different day and see if you can replicate the error because for instance if you had a heavy weekend of drinking or a fatty meal the night before and then you do your blood test 8 a.m. the next morning fasted, well, you might look like you're on the road to having heart attack in two months, but actually it was just behavior and diet. So replicate, replicate. That would be number one. Don't base the outcome of the basketball match on one photograph. Try to get tested more frequently and pay attention to when you're getting tested.

38:08So if you're, for instance, coming back to the example I gave, if you're taking your test,

38:13Tim Ferriss:your blood test on Monday mornings, make sure your next test that you're comparing it to is also on Monday morning. If it's Wednesday morning, it might be completely different. By the way, if it's something like cortisol, testosterone, et cetera, these things have diurnal cycles. They really fluctuate throughout the day. So if you get a test at 8 AM, I've seen this with friends of mine, male friends who get a test at like 8 AM and I have to interrogate how they did things for them to Sherlock Holmes this, but they're concerned about their testosterone levels or the free testosterone. They take a test at 8am.

38:47It looks

38:47Tim Ferriss:great. They do another test three months later, six months later, they do it at 11am and it's 200 points lower. It looks crazy. And it's not crazy. They don't actually, in this case, this guy had no problem. He was about to get on all sorts of hormone replacement therapy and all this stuff that is pretty powerful. And I said, go back, do it at 8am again, two weeks, let's see what happens. Guess what? It was the same as the first test. So that's step number one. And then when I'm looking at possible interventions for me, again, I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, but the way I approach it and people get very little guidance on this.

39:28Tim Ferriss:Most doctors are overstretched, right? They get 11 minutes per patient. The easiest thing for them to do is say, look, this guy has a problem or this gal has a problem. If we throw these three drugs at it, it's probably going to fix it. My job, as far as I'm concerned, as far as my time allows, is to keep this person from dying. Okay, start these three drugs. But what I have tried to do, and I did this with my own particular cardiac situation, and I think Boston Health is the testing that I did to get a more granular understanding of things with a little higher resolution. But since I'm a cholesterol hyperabsorber, that informs the type of drug I might take.

40:08Tim Ferriss:It doesn't necessarily have to be something like a statin. And there were three or four drugs that I was suggested to take. And I said, what is the longest studied of these with the best side effect profile that is the most innocuous that I can start with? And we can do another test in two months. This is not an emergency. I'm not about to have a pulmonary embolism or heart attack, don't have any arteries blocked. What is it? And it was, in my case, not everybody, something called ezetimibe, otherwise known as Zetia. Very well studied, very well tolerated. I said, let me try this in case I am a hyper responder.

40:46Tim Ferriss:Because sometimes you can be a hyper responder or a non-responder. But I was like, let me just try it out. And statistically, very unlikely that I would be, the doctor said. Nonetheless, tried it. two months later, retest, guess what? I'm a hyper responder. So I was able to use the minimum effective dose for medication and ultimately added one more thing. But how many decades of possible side effects did I just spare myself by doing basically like one and a half drugs instead of starting with four or five and doing that indefinitely from that point forward? When you're dealing with your doctors, to what extent do you consult AI?

41:27I have found personally that talking to a chatbot has been incredibly helpful. Now with the caveat that they hallucinate and they fuck things up all the time. And so I'm not taking it as gospel because your chatbot doesn't get bored of you and doesn't have an 11 minute window to talk to you. So you can really spend a lot of time. And then what I found is that I can then run what I've learned by my doctors. Is that an experience you've had? For sure.

41:57Tim Ferriss:And I do use AI and these LLMs a lot. What I would say is that if you're going to do something like that, my recommendation would be, and I'll give a shameless plug just because I'm involved with this company. I think they're doing great things, but you could use something like a chat GPT, but there's some tools that are designed for learning. Like there's one called Oboe, O-B-O-E dot com. Get some basic literacy, just the ABCs of basic medical terminology that would be helpful for understanding things like blood tests. It's like a hundred words, maybe 200 words, perhaps at the very, very tippity top.

42:39Tim Ferriss:If you want to be an overachiever, develop an understanding of the basic vocabulary so that you can also discuss these things in shorthand with your doctors. So once you develop basic medical literacy, you could also use that to learn how to read studies, learn how to read a scientific abstract and study. That would be one of the best investments you could ever make with your time. spend an afternoon doing that or two afternoons. Holy shit, the ROI on that is unbelievable. Like the number of medical problems averted, the number of medical procedures averted, the number of non-obvious solutions found that my basic literacy has helped to solve for is unbelievable.

43:27Tim Ferriss:It doesn't take very long. So I would use the tools to kind of do that first. Because that'll help you with prompts. The answers are only going to be as good as your prompts. Once you've done that, then I use AI all the time. And there's an expression which has been helpful for me. I can run pretty hot. I think that's chilled out a lot, but I can run pretty hot. I'm typically very impatient. I have been since I was like a toddler. And the expression is don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, right? But it goes further than that. Just because somebody doesn't reply to you doesn't mean it's a personal fraud.

44:02Tim Ferriss:just because someone does something stupid and they answer one of your questions out of the three you emailed them, you can be like, oh, you can get really wound up. But I would go further than that, which is don't attribute to malice or incompetence what can be explained by a busy schedule. People are busy. Everybody's busy. But what you can do is you can, after developing this basic literacy, you can go in and then you can ask questions that your doctors may not have time for. I am always checking for contraindications between medications and also supplements because doctors will miss these.

44:40Tim Ferriss:They will miss them. They might not miss the most obvious, but there are some that are not as obvious. For instance, there are sleep medications like trazodone, which really affect the serotonergic system. It's effectively, this is an overstatement, but it's effectively a failed antidepressant. So if you don't know that, and it's not technically exactly an SSRI like a Prozac, but there are some similarities, if you don't know that because you're quote-unquote taking a sleep medication and then you go out and take something that's contraindicated for this entire class of serotonin-specific antidepressants, you can get yourself into trouble.

45:19Tim Ferriss:So I will regularly check for contraindications. That's one thing I do. I have friends who've uploaded their whole genome to some of these LLMs and asked for insights, and they've identified some remarkable things. The risk in doing all of this is that you may uncover issues that if you are prone to anxiety, for a lot of reasons, I'm kind of inoculated against this with medical stuff because I've spent so much time in the medical and scientific worlds. But give you an example. Another thing that I do once a year or twice a year is a full body MRI. And there are companies that do this. I think Biograph is the highest level.

46:03Tim Ferriss:PreNuvo is also pretty good, but I've seen a couple of people have cancers missed, which isn't great. So if you get a full body MRI and you are over the age of 40, you're going to find something. You're probably going to find some type of internal cyst. You might find, if you had, as a friend of mine did, a small brain aneurysm. You're probably going to find something. And the question is, can you handle that? Can you handle either doing something about it, which is presumably why you're doing it in the first place, or can you deal with the overwhelming likelihood statistically that the doctor's going to say, yeah, we found X, Y, or Z.

46:45Tim Ferriss:hey, you don't need to do anything about it. We'll just keep an eye on it. Are you going to be able to handle that without becoming a stress case who's combing through LLMs and WebMD all day, making yourself crazy? Anyway, I'll stop there. But yes, I use these tools all the time. If you're going to use one tool, use another tool to fact check it. So if you get something from ChatGPT, absolutely have that thing cross-examined by Claude or another tool. do not trust these tools with their first answers. Just on the pan scan thing, the full body MRI, the ultimate, this is a bit of an aside, but I have figured out the ultimate health hack, which is marry a doctor because she can't get out of here.

47:30Tim Ferriss:And I ask her a lot of questions, but she is really against these pan scans for the very reason that you just stated, which is you will find something and it may stress you out, or it may put you in the market for a procedure you don't need. Yeah. So it's interesting that the differing POVs on this. One of my favorite quotes is be suspicious of what you want. That's a Rumi quote going way back. It's like you, we think that we want all of the health information we can possibly get, but you should be a little skeptical and suspicious of that. If you've never dealt with a huge amount of health information at high resolution.

48:08Tim Ferriss:So yeah, it's a very personal thing. In my case, you know, psychologically, this particular type of data overwhelm, I'm pretty good with. So I asked before about where you are with optimizing now, and you said you're more surgical now in how you optimize, and you listed a bunch of areas, including how you eat. You did put out a podcast in August of 2025 talking about some of your rethinking of optimizing. I'd just be curious, like, where are you at with that now? I think that optimizing is the how, broadly speaking, how you do something. Much more important than how you do something is the few somethings that you choose in the first place to do.

48:52Tim Ferriss:This applies to learning quickly. This applies to making a lot of money. This applies to getting in great shape. What you do, in a sense, matters a lot more than how you do anything. You can get very, very, very good, very optimized, very efficient at doing something unimportant that does not make it important. It just makes you very good at doing something that you probably shouldn't be doing in the first place. modern productivity porn is indiscriminate in how it applies optimizing to everything and everything, right? And there's some very funny morning routines that are these YouTube videos that are like four or five hours long, right?

49:32Tim Ferriss:Of people going through their day. There's a point at which your morning routine just turns into like a five-hour warm-up for life each day. That's obviously a really extreme example, but for me, if you were to have a nanny cam hidden in a little stuffed bear in my house, my office, this Airbnb where I am right now, and you watched me on any given day, you'd just be like, what is this guy doing? I mean, it's like a poorly programmed Roomba. Is this Blair Witch Project? It doesn't seem to be doing much work. What is he doing? And Part of the reason I can get away with that is that I think I am very good at measuring twice and cutting once.

50:21Tim Ferriss:In this context, what that means is I'm spending a lot of time looking at doing 80-20 analysis, asking myself, you know, what can I do that is not easily replicated by someone else that I find easier to do than other people, which is kind of a shortcut to finding things that you're good at, that you will also have the endurance for because it's easier for you or you're obsessed with it. Okay, what am I obsessed with? What am I doing in my off hours? Okay, let me try to find a Venn diagram of that and then focus on those things. I'll test it for a very short period of time to see if, number one, I can sustain it.

51:00Tim Ferriss:If I am actually as good as I thought I would be, I need to be the best in the world, but better than average. Then over time, as I'm throwing a lot against the wall And then I'm looking back and saying, okay, I tried these three things or I made these four investments. I had these assumptions at the time. Did they pan out? Why or why not? And then course correcting, they're actually very, very, very, very few things you have to get right. in my opinion to have an incredible life you don't need to be great at a lot of things is my perspective it's like look i remember talking to jerry seinfeld and uh one of his conclusions was you know if you lift weights and do transcendental meditation that'll solve pretty much all your problems it's just and i'm paraphrasing but it wasn't too far from that It's like, if you lift weights and do TM, it will solve most of your problems.

51:54Tim Ferriss:I like that because I think there's a whole hell of a lot of truth to it, that distilling down. And it makes life seem much more manageable. If people feel like they have to win the super ultra decathlon of life, where instead of 10 sports, there are 150 sports you have to be good at. Who's going to actually surmount that and cope with it? Well, nobody. So for me, it's like, look, if I had to just pull a rabbit out of a hat right now to pick a few, I'd be like, read nonviolent communication. Like, figure out how to talk to people without sounding overly defensive or aggressive. Like life, unless we're going to be a monk of some type or a nun.

52:39Tim Ferriss:And even then, probably, there's some crazy internal politics at the hamlet in China. If you know the abbot, you're going to have to deal with that abbot. so work on your communication take that very seriously as like the connective tissue for everything don't invest in things you don't understand it's like when in doubt read a few books on like low-cost index funds and the s &p 500 like go look at the graph over the last 5 10 15 20 years you might have some hard dips here and there but if you're trying to get fancy and invest in like individual AI stocks, like, wow, maybe you'll pick Amazon and Google out of all the trash there is right now.

53:19But most of us won't.

53:21Tim Ferriss:I don't think I can do it. Lift weights. Try to do some zone two training where it's like you could speak in single sentences, but you don't really want to do that for like 30 to 60 minutes a few times a week. And then like don't eat processed crap. Michael Pollan rules, right? If your grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredients, don't eat it. Try that. I think you'll do pretty well. Hard to argue with any of that.

53:50Coming up, Tim talks about why we need to say no more often and the tools you need in order to get better at saying no, doing a digital detox, defanging your careers, and a new game he designed.

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57:03One of your current projects is called The No Book. And the book, as Tim has pointed out, may come out in 10 years because he's working on it slowly. But he has released a couple of chapters online, and I've read at least one of them. And it's really interesting. So before I say too much, maybe you could describe what is The No Book and why are you writing it if only slowly.

57:27Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I have an 800-page draft right now, so it's going to need to get whittled down a little bit. But The Notebook started something like, boy, six years ago, where I noticed a lot of people in my audience, my listeners, my readers, struggling with focus and saying no. Because fundamentally, the road to where you want to be in life is Wizard of Oz, golden brick road is saying yes to a few things. A few things. There are just a few things you have to get right. That's the yes road. And it's very few things. The guardrails for that are no. You have to say no the entire way. I was writing this book.

58:11Tim Ferriss:I reached out to a bunch of my friends. These are very accomplished friends in this case, to ask them for their recommendations. I thought they would help me write this thing. And they were like, oh my God, are you kidding me? This is the biggest pain in my life. Please send me an early copy when you can. So my friends were, there were a few who were actually very helpful, but the vast majority were like, oh my God, I thought that life was going to get easier. It has only gotten harder with respect to saying no. It just became this massive project. So I put it on the back burner. And then a friend of mine, Neil Strauss, some people might recognize that name.

58:44Tim Ferriss:He's written something like 10 New York Times bestsellers. and he's terrible at saying no, it turns out. And he was busting my balls about not writing this book and he kept harassing me about finishing it. And he was actually kind of creating a kerfuffle over a group dinner after a few drinks. And I was just like, Neil, if you want to read this book so badly, why don't you just help me finish writing it? And I thought that put it to bed. And then the next day when we all sobered up, he was like, you know, if you're serious, why don't we talk about it. At the same time, I was noticing with social media, certainly with AI, it's going to get a thousand times worse.

59:21Tim Ferriss:First of all, the external forces that want to distract you are almost unbeatable. It's incredible how sophisticated they are. Secondly, the way that enables self-interruption and distraction is something that humanity has never seen before. there is this incredible pain in terms of paradox of choice right what should i do who should i listen to what should i watch what should i pay attention to that is fracturing the psyches of people and this by the way does not discriminate geographically does not discriminate economically it's like up and down the chain left right front center everywhere the problems just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

1:00:06Tim Ferriss:So I wrote this book with Neil basically as the student. And what's fun about it, I think it's my most entertaining and hilarious book in a way because I'm giving Neil these assignments and then he'll try them, but it'll be like passive aggressive and he'll screw one up or he'll actually not do 50 % of the assignment and then I'll follow up and he'll have all this guilt. But we have real examples of emails he tried to send, text messages he's trying to send. He's trying everything in the book and learning as he goes. And I would say there are a few people who have proofread the whole thing, and they'd proofread it like a year ago.

1:00:51Tim Ferriss:They've come back, and these are fans of my stuff who've read my other books, and they're like, this book has had a huge impact on my life and they still give me examples. So to then answer the question of, well, what exactly is the book talking about? The book is talking about how to say no in a world of compulsive yes. But what's important to note about this is it's not enough to just have a couple of index cards or templates for doing exercise, for saying no. If that would have worked, it would have worked already. Sure, I can give examples, and I give tons of examples of lines that are helpful for saying no, like Martha Beck, who was Oprah Winfrey's life coach and was an amazing woman in her own right for a lot of reasons.

1:01:41Tim Ferriss:She turned me down for something, and I include these real no's because I kept my favorite declines and rejections over 10 years. And so I share a bunch of them. And she said to me, I really wish I could, but I can't do the life Tetris. Do the life Tetris. And I was like, wow, that is so good. You're not explaining, you're not defending, you're not giving a bunch of stuff that someone can try to negotiate around. It's just like, hey, I really wish I could. I just can't do to life Tetris. And so I give examples like that, but that is not enough. Once you start really digging into why people have trouble saying no, it's not only because they lack templates.

1:02:23Tim Ferriss:It's because of certain core beliefs, which are thoughts we take to be true, to kind of quote Byron Katie, and philosophies they have that they're not even aware of that make it almost impossible to say no. And that could relate to FOMO. It could be related to a very scarcity-minded, limited number of opportunities, a belief that you can't generate opportunities yourself. You have to wait for things to come as inbound. And I hit these very early on. And actually, I think they're in the sample chapters that people can get. If people go to tim.blog.com. no book. So tim.blog is the actual URL slash no book, one word.

1:03:03Tim Ferriss:I think it's like 30 or 40 pages of the book that will get into this. But a lot of folks will say, I'm too nice for that. Okay, we unpack that because there's a lot there, right? Must be nice for Tim or fill in the blank, because they're already successful. I don't have that luxury, right? Okay, well, let's actually double click on that and start to interrogate some of these beliefs and on and on and on. So saying no in a durable way, like really developing a toolkit, which as far as I'm concerned is a self-preservation necessity now. When I first started it six years ago, I was like, if people really want to get 10x results in their life and continue to apply the things from the four-hour work, like 80, 20, etc., they really need to have a reliable toolkit for saying no.

1:03:54Tim Ferriss:But now, looking at social media, AI, social media-enabled AI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what it's going to do to inboxes, messaging, etc., with personalization, spam, you fill in the blank, that are indistinguishable from humans. This is like knowing how to breathe, as far as I'm concerned. You have to have a toolkit like this, or you're going to be roadkill, I think that sounds probably very dramatic, but it's like I'm sitting at Silicon Valley right now for my first trip here for a few weeks in duration in like eight years. I'm telling you guys, the stuff that's coming is going to be amazing.

1:04:28Tim Ferriss:It's going to be incredible. It's also just going to be catastrophic for a lot of minds that are unprepared with the proper toolkits. So saying no is important. Agreed. And it's a huge struggle for me. You have a beautiful phrase in your book, promiscuous over commitment. And I am really, really guilty of that. There's another nice phrase. You say the book will help you build a benevolent phalanx, a protective wall of troops to guard your goals. We don't have time to talk about all of the tools in there, but is there a tool in particular you think that would be very, very powerful for people? Yes, absolutely.

1:05:07Tim Ferriss:A lot of folks have perhaps heard the apocryphal story of, and I think I give proper credit in the book. And this is one of the chapters that people can get. So there's plenty of value that people get from the free stuff, but I mean, I'm not even selling it yet. So maybe I'll give away more. One of the culprits, one of the biggest causal factors for why people have trouble saying no is they don't have big enough yeses to defend. And for instance, if you had a brand new child, if you had, or someone you loved, God forbid, had a serious cancer diagnosis, if you had a tiger by the tail and knew that you were working on a business, I'm using an extreme example on purpose that could be worth billions of dollars, you would not have trouble saying no to things.

1:06:01Tim Ferriss:So then we go back to the other end of the spectrum and it's like, well, if you don't have really clearly defined big yeses that get you excited, that have the potential for huge payoff, not necessarily financially, and you're kind of searching around your inbox for things to answer, right? When people send you an invite to a dinner or they want to have coffee to pick your brain or it could be anything, a costume party you don't want to go to. That's a real example from Neil, actually.

1:06:37Tim Ferriss:And you're going to say yes, because what's scarier than having lots of little promiscuous overcommitments? It's a big void. So the apocryphal story that I was hinting at is the story of the professor who comes in, and I want to say this was from originally Stephen Covey, or maybe Stephen Covey adapted it. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, I believe, was the book. It might have been in his teaching and not in the books themselves, but the story is along these lines. A professor goes in and he puts out on the desk in front of the students a large mason jar, a handful of big rocks, three or four, a bunch of gravel, and then a bunch of sand.

1:07:23Tim Ferriss:And he challenges the students, asks them first how they would fit as much as possible into the mason jar. And they try different approaches. So if you put in the sand first, then you get a little bit of gravel in, can't fit the rocks. Well, ditto, if you put the gravel in first, then you put in the sand. Maybe you fit one rock. Okay. And ultimately, the lesson is you have to put in the big rocks first, then the gravel fits around that, and then you can fit in the sand. In the version that I tell, I make a modification to that and I say, no matter what they do, there's still sand left over on the table.

1:08:05Tim Ferriss:And I think the lesson is if you're looking at this in terms of commitments, the big rocks are those kind of life-changing yeses, the few things you need to protect on that golden road to get really where you want to be. Then the gravel, to me, are like the smaller but critical things you need to do. Got to follow your taxes, got to do A, B, or C. And then the sand is all that extraneous stuff, mostly distractions. You can fit some of it, but if you schedule all that stuff first, it's going to crowd out the gravel, or it's certainly at the very least going to crowd out all the big yeses. So in the sample chapters, I just walk people through how I do this past year review and how I actually pick the big yeses.

1:08:52Tim Ferriss:Because the book on no is equally a book on to answer the question, how the hell in a world of infinite options, in a world of temptation around every corner, do you pick a few things to focus on that are really high leverage? How do you do it? That seems like a simple question, but it's actually a very hard question to answer. So I would say that if you're having trouble saying no, underneath that probably is the fact that you don't have a big enough yeses that are worth defending. And then there's a lot that leads from that? How do you commit to a yes and ensure against reneging or something else?

1:09:40Tim Ferriss:This is intended to be, hopefully like all of my books, a very practical book. So what happens when you screw up? There's an entire chapter on how to renegotiate commitments after you have already overcommitted. Because guess what? If you have that tendency, you're going to overcommit. You're going to look at your calendar for the next few weeks or month and say, good Lord, I'm screwed. And then what do you do? You're going to have to have some very potentially uncomfortable conversations. So we're learning to renegotiate commitments is also an art form that is going to be included in it. But fundamentally, it's big yes is worth defending, I would say, is another one.

1:10:24Tim Ferriss:And sure, there are lots of things that you can do that you can do today. You don't have to look at any of these chapters. I have not had social media on my phone in three years. Why? Because I feel like you are bringing a butter knife to a gunfight if you have these tools on your phone. And if it's too scary to unplug for three years, you don't have to commit to that. I didn't in the beginning. It's like, do a one or two week social media fast. at least on your phone. So I can still access social media if I need a hit of the heroin. I can still access social media through my laptop, but it adds enough friction that I'm not going to end up looking at Instagram while I'm on the toilet and wondering why I can't feel my legs 40 minutes later, right?

1:11:16Tim Ferriss:It's going to avoid that type of thing. Or the compulsive sort of dopamine scratching whenever you have free 30 seconds jumping into social media. This is not good for your ability to focus. It's not good for your ability to single task. It's not good for your mental health when you always have that escape. I mean, look, I'm telling people things they probably agree with, but perhaps haven't implemented, right? So you can do something like that. You can use an app like Freedom. There's an app called Freedom that you can use to block certain things for certain periods of time. I mean, there are these technical tools that you can use, but at the very base you can't use more window dressing technical tricks to fix like fundamental problems with goal selection big yeses worth defending and core beliefs if i say no to this person there something bad is going to happen and they're not going to like me they'll stop inviting me to things.

1:12:17Like if you have these and that is going to what, right?

1:12:20Tim Ferriss:You have to ask, and then what? And then what? I'm going to end up alone. Okay. Well, these are sort of Rubicons. You need to get comfortable crossing in the sense that my experience is, this is also Neil's experience. He had tons of fears as did I in the beginning stages. It's like when you start to stand up for the things that are important in your life, I think this is a Dr. Seuss quote, but it's like the people who mind don't matter and the people who matter don't mind. You actually do a lot of pruning in your life that you should do anyway. And it's a forcing function for that. It's so interesting.

1:12:57It really is about courage in the end. It is.

1:13:00Tim Ferriss:And you can train that. You can train that. It's not something you are born with or without. That is something through actually understanding what your fears represent and what's underneath them. It could be from childhood. It doesn't necessarily have to be. But when you start to actually examine them, there's an exercise people could do today. Also, they can find a TED Talk on this called fear setting. you start to do fear setting around these fears you defang them and guess what suddenly you have this thing that others might call courage but what it is is it's clarity it's clarity around the actual downside which is limited versus the upside of protecting these big yeses over a year two or three and i will say not to continue to beat this dead horse but with all of the noise that is here, but that is coming with AI, it's going to be 10, 100, 1 ,000 times worse within two years.

1:14:00Tim Ferriss:If you can single task on important things for not even four hours a day, two hours a day without interruption, you are going to be from the perspective of, let's just say, an attention economy in the top 1 % of performers. It's never been easier and it's never been harder in a way. I'm going to lose you in nine minutes. So I do want to make sure I quickly ask you about Coyote, another of your projects. This is a game that you've designed. Can you, what is it and why? Yeah, so Coyote, it's a tiny little card game that I designed with some of my friends at Exploding Kittens, which people might recognize.

1:14:41Tim Ferriss:They have a lot of very, very popular games. And it's a fun family game. It's something like, if you could imagine, charades meets hot potato meets brain teaser, something that I hope at some point I'd actually like to do a clinical study on this but it makes you just a little bit smarter than the people who play it is a casual card game you can learn a few minutes each game lasts about 10 minutes and the reason I created it I always wanted to make a game number one and this is actually a good illustration of some of the stuff that is in the book that'll come out in 100 years, but people can apply it today, which is I choose projects based on which projects will allow me to win even if they fail.

1:15:27Tim Ferriss:What does that mean? I assume that any project could fail for reasons totally outside of my control. It's happened before, it'll happen again, happens to people every day. So how am I then choosing things to commit to? Well, generally I'm doing all these two-week experiments on various things like the diet and this, that, and the other thing. With projects, it's kind of like a six-month commitment. I'm looking at a six to 12-month project where I really go all in. By the way, that makes it easier to say no to things when you're doing a sprint as opposed to a very slow walking marathon. So I'm committing to something that I think will be six to 12 months.

1:16:04Tim Ferriss:And I am optimizing for what I will learn, the density of learning, and also the relationships that I'll deepen or develop. So it could be with new people, it could be with people I already know. With the belief that those relationships and those skills or knowledge will transcend that project, even if the public hates it, even if, in my case, for instance, China tariffs for a game that sold for$9 or$10 coming from China, that just kills the economics. Not that this was ever a money-making thing for me, but it's like there are things that came up that made this suddenly much harder from a kind of business perspective.

1:16:48Tim Ferriss:And thank God I checked those other boxes because fortunately it's got like 9.7 or 9.8 stars on Amazon and it's available everywhere. It's doing really well. But what I really care about is like Alon Lee, who's the co-founder and CEO of Exploding Kittens, has become a super close friend. He was a good friend beforehand. We're even closer now. This guy is one of the most amazing polymaths I've ever met in my life. Awesome, hilarious guy. And I have learned so much about mass retail, the Walmarts, Targets, and so on. I've learned so much about how you have to play the politics and the Game of Thrones with that.

1:17:24Tim Ferriss:I've learned about overseas manufacturing. I've learned about You name it, right? I've learned so much. And those are the reasons for me picking this. And if you look at, for instance, there's a blog post people can find for free, angel investing, like investing in early stage companies, which is like 90 % of my net worth, which I started well before I could quote unquote afford it. There's a blog post called Creating a Real World MBA, which explains kind of how I approached it, which was the same way I approached this. learning and relationships that I think will transcend that project and snowball over time so that it's very hard to lose long term.

1:18:04Tim Ferriss:But coming back to the game itself, if you've got kids in between the ages of, let's say, it says 10 on the box, but really it's kind of like age eight. If your kids are pretty smart, like age 15, this is kind of a no brainer. Like the game works really, really well. Adults also really like it. So it's not just for kids, but if you've got some kids around or adults who don't care being a little goofy, then I think it's a really simple, fun game that hopefully does something cognitive for folks as well. That was kind of the goal. Coyote game, you can find it everywhere. It is always an enormous pleasure to talk to you, Tim.

1:18:43And I know you say no to most shit. So thank you for saying yes to this.

1:18:48Tim Ferriss:yeah i love what you do man i love what you do one of my very close friends who's a professor at a very well-respected university had pains in his body this just horrible pervasive pain in joints in his body for years and years started using 10 happier meditating every day and it was like boom within four weeks pains went away crazy i have some theories on that. I think it's actually might be synchronized breathing and vagus nerve stimulation, but that's a separate conversation. And I just think you put a lot of, you're very thoughtful and you do a lot of good in the world and I just enjoy hanging out.

1:19:26Tim Ferriss:So it's always a pleasure to connect. Thank you. I really appreciate that immensely.

1:19:36Thanks again to Tim Ferriss. Always love talking to that guy. Before I leave you, just want to remind you to sign up for my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris, my new meditation app. You can sign up over at danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Lots of amazing stuff going on over there. I'm really proud of my team for all the work they're doing over there. And finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Basile. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

1:20:09Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.