Black Holes, Denny’s Fist Fights & Japanese Handjob Culture - Rabbit Hole #4 - #1118

27:29And then like suddenly debt doesn't, I'm like, whatever, man. It's like, I'm, this is so cool. And just like, I don't know, one, you know, I'm tickled by these thoughts. I find it like endlessly, I get the dopamine hits I get from them. So to me, it's just, it's usually a positive. I don't like reading about like the rise and fall of empires. You know, there's other parts of the book that I'm like, that's not a nice thought. Because a lot of these empires, at their peak, they were really sure, or even on the way up or even on the early way down, they were just, this is it. We finally are here in the modern times and we figured it out.

28:01And like those empires of the past, like they made mistakes that we won't make and every single one, they're at a catastrophic fall. I don't like that. Yeah, well, I was joking with Chris when we did an episode recently that as every, I think we spoke about this as well, that as every empire falls, nobody announces that the empire has fallen. So it's obviously up for debate, but most mainstream historians will say that Rome fell in about 476 AD. And it's almost because it's quite poetic because you have Romulus saw the rise of the Roman Empire. He was the first Roman Emperor. And then young Romulus was disposed, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

28:38But the next day, there was no big announcement that the Roman Empire had fallen. So much so, you obviously have the split of the Roman Empire. I think in the 700s AD, Charlemagne is announced as the official Roman emperor. So 300 years later, it was still going on. Voltaire said, the empire that calls itself holy Roman Empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. He said that in 1700 AD. So the actual, when it came to everybody deciding the Roman Empire had fallen, but it was officially announced, I think by Francis II, it was the mid 1700s. So I joke that the most powerful empire today, when it falls, there'll be people that still think it's gone.

29:20Which is obviously - People in 3000 will be like, well, of course the US empire collapsed in 1994 AD. And we'll be like, what? It's like a punch drunk boxer that can't admit that he's failing. But dude, your career's over. It's time to go. Me and Chris can confirm that there was no moment that - It's certainly our lifetimes that the BBC announced the British empire had fallen. It's like, when did it happen? It happened, but when did it happen? Speaking of stuff that you learned in school, have you seen the Retro Codex? Have you seen this? Really, really cool website. So it's a website that teaches you things that you learned in school that are now disproven.

29:58So you can go in and look at what year you graduated high school, and it'll tell you what you learned in school and have now been disproven. Jared, can you pull this up for me? So I put this in as 2000s, which would be for me and George. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Lightning has struck several places multiple times. Empire State Building is struck approximately 25 times a year. Wearing red near a bull will cause it to charge. Bulls may not be able to distinguish the color red from other colors. What triggers the bull is movement and physical provocation, not color. The red cape is to conceal bloodstains.

30:32Goldfish have a three-second memory. Goldfish retain memories for weeks, months, and possibly years. George Washington had wooden teeth. He did wear dentures, but they were made of other materials such as tin, gold, and lead. Human teeth from enslaved individuals. It's a bit gnarly. You need to wait 20 to 30 minutes after you eat to swim, or you'll get stomach cramps and drown. There's no clinical evidence for that. There's another one. Go a bit further down for me. Oh, I see. Oh, if you roll your eyes, it'll get stuck. You have taught in school

30:55Tim Ferriss:and folk wisdom checked on the top left. I was like, I don't recall getting... If you roll your eyes, they'll be stuck that way. If you pee in the pool, everyone will know because it'll turn water green. Hot water washing hands is not better than cold water. Yeah, right there. Interesting. I'm learning a few things. Water temperature has not been found to impact the antibacterial efficacy of hand washing. I didn't even know that. After a person dies, their hair or fingernails can keep growing. Who thinks Earth is the only planet with water? I don't know about that. But in the 2000s, might you have thought that?

31:24Because Pluto being a planet would have been true when we went to high school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, true. Brown sugar is healthier than white sugar. Yeah, I just thought it's nice to find. And then obviously all of this stuff with the food pyramid, that's got turned literally upside down. So some of these will end up being overturned too, but yeah. Oh, for sure. I think when I was thinking about, you know, the way kids are educated, I think that schools do something that I think in some cases, at least they traditionally, that is maybe the right thing to do, which is you teach the wrong story, the simple wrong story first, just to like let the concepts, and then later you start to build the nuance and you realize that.

32:00But that's kind of like Thanksgiving. I think it's, I think it's, I learned early on that Thanksgiving was this like wonderful thing and the pilgrims came and the Indians at the time, the Indians were like, and everyone was happy and they had this nice feast and, or, you know, just like Columbus discovered the new world. But I'm like, no, he didn't. But like, and just like keep it, let the basic story seep in. And then later you can be like, actually, like this is like an allegory kind of for that, that represents like a much larger, more complicated, much nastier story often. And I think sometimes right now what they're doing is they're, you know, out of kind of, I don't know, you know, kind of political reasons or whatever.

32:39They're teaching kind of very, very like, you know, kind of a hardcore first story to really young kids right away. They're front-loading the gnarly version. Yeah, exactly. And maybe going too far even in that direction. When, like, I think, I mean, this is a whole other can of worms, but I think that maybe I want to. But the disguise. But like, I know, I think that I do think American children should be taught first all these great things about America. They should learn that they're in this great country that has complicated, that has not been perfect, but they've done a lot of great things.

33:16And it's this wonderful thing and patriotism and be really proud. And then later, later, then you can learn a lot more nuance. Or it's the same reason that I think you shouldn't be teaching your kid, you know, that like you think your dad's a good person. but actually you know he cheated when in his 20s like you know that he like did you know he got fired like you don't do that you start with the dad's great of course then later in life and the kid's an adult you start i don't this is partisan controversy anymore you start to then say uh you know dad uh you know dad can say to you you know yeah i'm not perfect i did this and this but like yeah you don't need to front load kids are kids and like it's a very different kind of person to

33:49Tim Ferriss:teach well also because i mean i remember talking to a very close friend of mine who's got a bunch kids. Wonderful guy, very successful in what he does. And I asked him what his parenting advice would be. And his first rule was, you need to teach your kids to be optimists because action flows from optimism and agency flows from optimism, right? And so what you're describing sort of creates a picture that you don't want to aspire to engage with and seems antithetical to that. You know, second, third, fourth graders just hammered climate change, climate change, your future is destroyed. Like, why?

34:24Who thinks this is a good idea?

34:26Tim Ferriss:Little, little kids. Well, and then the older generations are like, oh my God, these younger generations are so apathetic. I'm like, yeah, you're getting waterboarded with existential threat all day. Yeah, you would be too. I guess it makes sense that the younger you are, the more neuroplastic you are, right? And even like statements like that are quite reflexive. So if you go on, if I go on the news tomorrow and say, it's going to be a sunny day, I have no impact on whether it's going to be a sunny day. But a reflexive system is if I go on the news tomorrow and say, there's going to be a bank run, I have an impact on whether there's going to be a bank run.

34:59And if you go in thinking America is a terrible country, that's going to be quite a reflexive thing for your entire youth. I mean, it's quite funny listening to an, not that you were complaining to him, but an American talk about the lack of patriotism in their country. Suck with two Brits next to the city. Yeah. It's kind of like Chris talking to me about how he's frustrated with the size of his forearms right now. You know what I mean? I'm like, okay, I understand. But yeah, I think it's interesting for America to be going through that when you're still by far the tallest midget in the room.

35:27Right. Totally. And by the way, there's so much British history to be proud of. Oh, don't get me started. This negative lens. Don't get me started, Tim. I declare, I said this to Chris previously, we are the most insecure in terms of internal reputation versus external. So if you travel anywhere else in the world, apart from a few places, they often love the UK. But internally, they often criticize themselves the most. I'll never forget a friend of mine, his sister came home one day and she said, you know what? She goes, Britain is the racist country on earth. And he paused for a second and he just said, compared to where?

36:07She couldn't answer. Is that lying about capitalism? It's the worst system apart from all of the other ones. it's just a crazy distortion lens and it's so self-defeating and it's like this crazy yeah jack butch has got this great line he says unlearning is a hundred times harder than learning and if you're laying down those myelin sheets and some kids who's five years old six seven i don't know when you start to understand what climate is and what power structures look like but yeah you're probably best starting off with generalized optimism and getting into specific pessimism or specific scrutiny as opposed to generalize high school maybe you know like maybe elementary school is just it's just yeah most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance which is why for the last five years i've started pretty much every morning with element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't this orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet salty orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't.

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37:41That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Well, think about now the UK, it looks like, I don't know whether this is actually going to happen. The UK is proposing a social media ban for under 16s, the same as Australia's had. And I haven't seen much of the fallout of this. I steered clear of X for the last couple of days, but I really struggled to see how this is a bad thing. To steal my on the other side, before you even get onto the 16 year old, is also a way you have to use identification now to use social media for anybody over the age as well. Is that a bad idea? It's an interesting discussion.

38:17I'm okay with it. Everyone's got a concern about digital safety. I understand that.

38:22Tim Ferriss:Why have you abstained for the last few days from X? Busy. Okay. It wasn't a choice. I was like, what was the catalyzing of that? It wasn't a choice. It was literally just busy. Yeah. Touching grass. Yeah, trying to. I'm pathetic, mate. Get a lot. Just really trying to. I was looking at photos of grass on X, actually. It was better. It was too busy doom scrolling on TikTok was the actual thing. Yeah, fewer bugs. But the Australia thing. You're right. What? You're such a fucking techno-optimist. Carry on, carry on. What? Carry on, go on, go on. No, don't interrupt. Don't interrupt. Stop interrupting my interruption.

38:57Winston Churchill once said to Randolph Churchill, his son, at dinner, the best thing ever, which is like, can you stop interrupting my interruption? go on you go you go for it i just don't understand what the what the counter argument is i don't understand what it's such anchoring bias because we develop the technology before we put the guardrails around it and i think if you were to invent it today having known the impact of social media if it had been worked inside of a faraday cage lab for a long time to look at what the impacts are it would be like releasing cigarettes into the world knowing the impact of them i mean I imagine that kids were able to smoke 70 years ago or something.

39:36I don't know whether there was ever an age restriction on smoking. I imagine the same would be for alcohol, and you start to tick this up over time. The UK has introduced that lagging law for vapes now. So I think anybody born after 2010 will never be able to smoke, and the age just keeps tracking up. So if you were born 2006 or earlier, you're allowed to, and you're never going to be able to smoke. That's just their attempt at, you didn't learn to do it in the first instance, therefore you're never going to need to do it in the future. But yeah, I mean, I'm in support of this. I'm interested to hear what criticisms pushback against it are, but I don't see any reason why it's a bad idea to put a ban on.

40:20The smart ones that want to start a business and really need to learn the internet are going to be able to get around it. They can still be entrepreneurial. And the ones that don't, I don't think they're going to miss out on much. What do you guys think?

40:31Tim Ferriss:In terms of age verification and identification. Is there an issue stopping kids under 16 from going on social media? Would you be in support of it? I would be in support of curtailing or forbidding it for sure. 100%. 100%. Yeah, I mean, spending time with Jonathan Haidt and so on. I just think the evidence is so compelling. Yeah, I would. I would for sure. I wonder how much of an impact he's had. He has had. Just Jonathan Haidt as a guy. He's had an impact with his small team on a, with state by state legislation changes. They've been very effective for a, for a small crack team of researchers and people working on policy.

41:08I mean, my last book was about political polarization and wokeness and all of this. And he was, you know, the chapters ranged from kind of like evolutionary psychology to his, you know, political history to kind of modern current stuff. And I had different kind of gurus for each chapter that were different thinkers that I would like, you know, be sourcing from. And he's the only one who was one of those people in every chapter. yeah um he's kind of a you know i i don't agree with everything he says um he's a he's a giant um and this is before any of the antics you ever met him first yeah yeah he's an actual giant no no he's very tall oh he is yeah oh i don't know he's tall compared to us but he's not that

41:49Tim Ferriss:but he yeah for people you mentioned anxious generation yeah happiness right just mine last name yeah h-a-i-d-t and happiness hypothesis is one of my favorite books of all time he's also are just such a sweet, sincere guy also. I think if you're going to talk about stuff like that, the potential for you to be right-coded, if you want to be effective, you need to signal a lot of placid, peaceful, empathetic, understanding, both sidesy energy. Because if you even begin to lean right and center, it immediately looks like sort of totally... So my friend and I argue about this because I have a friend who's very conservative.

42:31and he's very smart. He changes my mind about things sometimes. Sometimes he's over the top, but the people he can't stand the most are kind of Jonathan Haidt, Coleman Hughes, these people who agree with, who are, you know, I argue to him, these people are fighting the causes you care about, but they're doing it way more effectively than you would because they're actually reaching center-left people. And if you start immediately being like, you know, super tribal and super right-coded, you'll never reach any of them. and he just sees them as such, he calls them media kiss-ups. You know, these people just, they still want to be, you know, they always need to make sure that the polite society approves of them.

43:09And I totally disagree with him because I think that John Haidt has an unbelievable impact against those kind of over-the-top left causes that he really doesn't like. Way more effective.

43:19Tim Ferriss:Yeah, and I don't even view it, it's not a partisan issue, right? I mean, I would just, because Jonathan's so terrible at asking for money, I would say as someone who plays with scientific funding and stuff like that, if people are looking for ways to kind of bend the arc of history and undo some of the wrongs and ills of social media and so on, I think funding some of what Jonathan is up to with very small sums of money has a hugely disproportionate impact. Just coming back to what has he done with his small team, I just wanted to throw that out there. The ripple effects of being able to genuinely push the needle with changing policy with kids and social media is one of the biggest impacts you could make, I think, on the planet right now.

44:00You won't even know the effects of it, but 30 years from now, I mean, yeah. Sam, what have you brought from home? You've got a bag that's locked.

44:07Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I brought, just to dumb this conversation down a little bit, I brought a bunch of show-and-tell items. Adult show-and-tell. I like it. Fire up the autism engine.

44:18Tim Ferriss:So let's see. I'll start with - You have a little engine that's here. I'll start with this. So this is called Bite. Okay. And the subtitle is pretty simple. It's 124 bits, but it's bits as in little pieces of what look like candy. Mouthwash bits. And this was recommended to me by Dr. Tommy Wood. He's a neuroscientist, also a beast of an athlete, but a very credible scientist, very well published. And he and I were having a conversation about different approaches for neuroprotection, hopefully mitigating the risk of neurodegenerative disease and oral health is a really big one and yes you can brush your teeth yes you can use like a water pick or something like that but xylitol is really really compelling as an intervention so you could choose xylitol gum you could do this that and the other thing but i found ultimately everything i read so compelling that i started using these which he recommended and these are really simple you just well you're going to need water if you chew on it so you basically for travel but also at home rather than having mouthwash you take one of these i'll show what they look like i mean literally just looks like a little piece of candy or like an aspirin and we have water here well i'm gonna spit it out you can't swallow it so or you probably shouldn't swallow it so you just you chew on it take like a couple tablespoons water in your mouth swish it around for 30 60 seconds then spit it out and that's it and you just do that better than normal mouthwash because of the xylitol content along with a couple of other things so for sort of antibacterial effects and i know people i'm not going to mention this person by name but md phd who had cavities started using xylitol twice a day and went back to the doctor or the dentist rather no cavities it's like it's pretty interesting that's n of one of course i don't know what's out there in the literature with respect to that but found it interesting enough and it's so lightweight as an intervention that i was like okay i will i will start doing that and anything that you can kind of just like have on your desk and just like pop one in and you know while you're it's you'll do a lot more yeah i mean my compliance with this also with the amount of travel that i do is it tastes good is really yeah yeah yeah just tastes like kind of like candy a friend of mine wanted me to get into organ meat and i'm like i'm not i'm not gonna grind organ meat into my smoothie i'm sorry he does this that sounds gross and then he got me these these pills uh desiccated liver i need to it's just ancestral supplements yes it's something like that and it's it's like i take five or six and whatever a day and i just because it's on my desk and i just see it there i pop it in and i do it every day now now i have one this is so i understand when people are designing their workspace that you're supposed to keep it relatively undistracted like if you're going to be in creative flow mode maybe you do want some newspaper cuttings and like some cool art on the wall but for the most part we're trying to lock in and not get distracted you saw right Having an environment that pushes you toward behaviors that you want to do.

47:14Sean Puri has a basketball on his desk and he thinks better when he's tossing. I played ball sports as a kid. It's the same. My best ideas almost always come when I've got a tennis ball in my hands or some sort of, and I'm just able to throw. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it just distracts the front of my brain a little bit. The other one is that ohm lamp that me and you have got. So this is a lamp around about this big and there's a little stone on the top of it. and the stone is an FDA quality HRV sensor. You just pick it up, hold it in your hand and the light goes up and down and the sounds and it's using an algorithm to maximize your heart rate variability.

47:49So it's resonance breathing that you can do in three minute chunks. But the best thing is you can turn off all of the settings on it and it vibrates. It's like haptic, vibrates in your hand. Pick it up and hold it and you can watch a movie. I went and checked because I talked about it on my newsletter this week. I've done 160 hours of resonance breathing in six months. Just this year, I've done 160 hours because I just grab it next to my, I've got one in my office, one here, one there. Grab it and I just breathe in time with this vibrating thing. So if you're watching something with - Just like subconscious.

48:18And you're just tracking it up and down and it's adjusting based on what your heart rate is doing. It's linked in with the wifi. So it's link it once, never think about it again. The algorithm is cutting edge. And all you do is you just grab this stone and hold it and breathe with it and it vibrates. And there's one on my desk. so if i'm about to sit on a call where i need to be quiet for ages i'll just grab it and have it i mean i don't hold it too close but you know what i mean uh yeah i have hundreds of fidget toys like of all different kinds and i get like i put i have a certain like dish on my desk that's that these are the ones that are in the rotation right now and i have all the whole archive where'd you get your fidget toys oh my god well for instagram ads is deadly for me it's figured me out yeah um specs this there's a spaks.com i think um is just that they have amazing like like soft silicone covered magnets and like stretchy things and uh i have silly putty and i've got mechanical toys and uh you know it's it's an important thing for me that's why if i don't have those i'll bite my nails that's why these uh toothpick things or an equivalent but the newtonic nootropics are just a bit of an oral fixation if you're working away writing something your business partner josh uh because he's a real caffeine fiend like ex muay thai fighter now Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dude, like kind of hardcore guy, just started stacking them on a morning and got onto a call.

49:36I think it was with you and he had six in his mouth because he'd never taken any of the old ones out. He just kept adding them in. So he looked like a camel that was chewing on a bit of straw and he had all of these things poking out the front of his mouth. Yeah. I find that if you've ever been, I don't know if you're like me, but if I'm sitting at my desk and a friend calls me and we're talking and then I get really like animated, he says something, I'm like, yes, and want to make this point 100 i'm up and i'm walking pacing right and i'll even if i'm driving and i get home and i'm in a good phone call i'll just keep looping around because it's something about the movement um and then so i think well why am i sitting at my desk when i'm writing like it's probably something about my mind really lights up like it wants to physically move it's all tied together so like you know i'll just do a standing desk with one of those rockers or a treadmill you know they have these like little rockers and it's just kind of like i don't know it just keeps you moving but i don't know i just feel like yeah if i'm physically engaged have you ever played with

50:28Tim Ferriss:dictation any ai dictation or anything as a way of brainstorming while walking i've been doing that recently i've done it for brainstorming like outlines of posts talking through it yeah um but even better for me if there's someone on the other end especially someone i like respect so this is my assistant alicia who's been working with me for 10 years she knows exactly what i'm working on and And she's like, you know, really tapped in, obviously. So I will just sometimes say, I'm stuck. And we will do a call and she will basically say nothing. But her being there and me, she will give feedback at the end sometimes.

50:59But that's not, she knows the game is he's going to talk to me now. And he's going to crack his own thing by the end of this conversation. So you don't record them or you do? I usually, what I'll do is while I'm talking to her, I'll say a line. I'm like, yes. And I'll write it down. I'm like, where the hell was that when I was thinking alone? I think I wasn't talking to someone. So my weirdest new habit that I've done is I've tried to essentially give up all thought by the brain.

51:23Tim Ferriss:So let me explain. Lots of nitrous.

51:32So most people, or my former self, existed in the kind of simmering six. So the middle kind of ambient rumination, rumination, rumination. and the the big trend at the minute is the whole like retard maxing to stop thinking which i think a bit ridiculous i think what you actually want is a barbell so you want sometimes you do the retard maxing mode and then sometimes you're doing the einstein maxing mode but that bit in the middle disappears so for me i stopped thinking in my brain i only about what i mean by thinking by the way is if it's like oh tim's got denim jeans on that's a thought that's okay but if as soon as i get into a well i've got this thing tomorrow you could do the thing tomorrow and it's replaying the thing tomorrow.

52:11It's doing the thing about tomorrow. If I catch that going more than two or three loops, it's okay. I can either think with my hands, so write it down. And Ralph Aldo Emerson described it as when you would write rather than think in your head, you go from being drunk to sobering up. Because even the working memory that we have in our head is what, like seven plus or minus two? I'm probably at the five mark. So that's one of the reasons why you almost, I got advised once by a cognitive behavioral therapist who said you would never do like even a moderate equation in your head, yet we will do the most complex life decisions just there for years, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating.

52:50And it's an example of where the 10 ,000 hour rule actually doesn't work. If anything, you get worse and worse and worse. So either think with my hands or as you mentioned, then think with your mouth or think with your feet. So as you're walking. So as soon as I get in one of those loops, I'm like, it has to be no brain, hands, mouth, feet. I like that. I like, yeah.

53:10Tim Ferriss:The story you just told resonated because when I was totally stuck on my first book for months, like could not figure out how to crack this really important section and hired a woman who worked as a ghostwriter, but I wasn't going to use her that way to interview me on a phone call. And effectively just ended up talking and cracked it by the end of the conversation. And I was like, oh, I just need to get out of. And like, what is it? It's like self-referential. There's a part of your brain that is capable of this thing. And for some reason, when you weren't talking, you're thinking, you're not accessing it.

53:46It's strange. It's really wild. Yeah. Well, I assume, if I had to think about it from a neuroscience perspective, you're probably using more of your default mode network as you're ruminating. As you're moving your lips, as you're moving your hands, you're activating a different part of the brain. And through the activity, it's almost like you're just releasing the taps. You must know from like Kelly Starrett's stuff and just the way that the human body and brain works, why is it that we want to locomote as soon as we start thinking about something deeply or we have that conversation? Because it's the same for me.

54:14If I get on a good call, even if I now have a habit that if somebody just rings and I've got nothing to do, I'll get up and go for a walk because hooray, it's good to get steps in. But there's other times where you start to get really animated and you just find yourself walking. What is it about the act of walking that makes thinking easier?

54:30Tim Ferriss:I'm not sure. I don't know. I mean, Kelly Starrett, people should look up, becoming the supple leopard. He's a very famous PT performance coach. Deathbound. Really knows. If you've ever used like a lacrosse ball to loosen up or like distraction with a band or something like that, he popularized a lot of that stuff. The couch stretch named by Kelly, et cetera. So he's worth looking up. I don't know. There are people who do really well sitting still. My fidget fix is like Japanese slash East Asian, like pen spinning. That's a whole thing. Um, so that people can find like a 20 year old YouTube video of me showing like the basics of this, but I'll just sit there doing different types of spinning with a pen.

55:10Tim Ferriss:That's my move. Pacing also huge pacer for me. I think it could be, I'm just speculating here, but occupying a part of your mind that is for instance, like the monkey mind. Right. I think this is part of the reason why flow states often include some kinesthetic. component right whether it's music playing violin or something like that surfing whatever it might be uh i think that there is an occupying of certain cognitive faculties or looping mechanisms that is aided with physical movement but that's just it's like when my my 15 month old is annoying me and i'm trying to do something i'll just like hand her something to occupy her and then she's like yeah it's like a little like there's like a 15 month old in my head that's like ah and i'm like shut up there.

56:01Give something a minute. Fiddle the fidget spinner. Hurry up and fiddle the fidget spinner. Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat, and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly is fiber? Well, it turns out that 95 % of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Momentus' Fiber Plus. Most fiber supplements are a one-trick pony, one type of fiber solving, one part of the problem. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once.

56:32I use this every single day. It is kind of hard to get enough fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it every single day for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35 % off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout question for you tim yeah question as you was talking earlier about the treadmills and all the fidget spinning devices and the instagram ads and you're buying stuff i had like a i was thinking in my head of if you was born 10 years ago did you say if you was born if sorry if you were born again british english coming in that's not really i liked it yeah british english talk so much more cool than if you was born around about 10 years ago listen here might would you be my diagnosed of adhd yeah this is like the age-old question in my mind is do i have any am i a classic example of it or not and like i guess i don't know um i wonder if i were born yes in that age whether i would have been like medicated because i was a class clown and but i did well in school and it was never hard for me to like i always assume think of like real adhd is like you're sitting during a test and you're just like you can't focus on the test you need extra time that was once i had adrenaline like oh shit i was like i could focus really well So I don't know.

57:58I don't know.

57:58Tim Ferriss:I don't know. Do you get calmer with stimulants? Are there certain stimulants where you end up like actually calming down and focusing or do you get agitated with stimulants or something? For me, what it is, is like, there's like a perfectionism that is, is if once I, it's like, I can't transition. I'm awful at transitioning. I will procrastinate from starting work for hours. And once I get, have to start, once I'm in it, now I'll get going and then someone will interrupt and I'll miss dinner because I just want to keep working. so it's like it's it's it's this weird like i i'm very a lot of inertia for whatever i'm doing and that to me is a huge thing it's just like uh there's no adult around making me start work and i grew up with that as a crutch always i had to go to class i had to finish this i had to and now there's no one so i will just self-defeat for hours and waste the good part of the day and then finally so that's why i wouldn't again another thing i'd do with my with alicia is uh Alicia's your sister.

58:52Yes. I will share my screen with her at like 10 a.m. And she's working on her. You've got to be very careful with that, depending on how your day goes. Yeah. You have spaces. You go to a safe space. And she is working on her own thing. I don't know when she's looking at my screen and when she's not. She's probably not usually, but she might be. And so I'm not going to procrastinate in front of someone that's mortifying. You've created a digital panopticon. Yeah, it's great.

59:19Tim Ferriss:There are services that allow you to do this. They'll pair you with someone else and you work at the same time. I can't recall. But it has to be someone that really knows. Like if I'm on a certain research page, they might not know. Is he procrastinating? She'll be like, that's not relevant. What are you doing? You know, like you're going too far. Will she actually police you? She usually, she's very like. Tim, no Pornhub until 2 p.m. Yeah. She will say something about me. That will not. It's just World War II. I tell you what, I've got two things. uh number one we we've discussed this earlier i'm always trying to um create new vocabulary for myself i feel it activates a certain part of the brain do you remember my favorite word that i uh invented five six years ago that you love fly dripping yeah fly dripping so i was i was once stood at a toilet and you know men do this where they piss around the seat and i was like what's the word for that wait piss around the seat yes you know when somebody urinates on the toilet seat i usually try to avoid this exactly yeah public toilets there's a bit of public toilets you may see it right sometimes um so i kind of came up with the term fly dripping for that and what's useful about beginning to create your own language is i mean i have to talk about the benefits of languages i'm using language interesting this is the first word that you develop that's the first word that i develop or terms as a whole so one of the things that worked with the high agency piece that I did, or even just having that language meant that I had a name for essentially an idea that people already knew or that I already knew, but it compressed like 5 ,000 words into two words.

1:00:53And then I was like, hold on, I don't have a term for that. That's quite meta, I don't have a term for that. And then Scott Alexander had this term called an idea handle. So an idea handle, you can kind of pick up ideas by like coining terms. So the two ones I've been trying to coin last week um the following so number one kesha's law like the artist kesha kesha's law is whenever you're creating art try not to use any modern references because it may come back to bite you in the arse so the the artist kesha i love i love by the way this may not be the best podcast in the world but we have the highest range we've gone from black holes say what you want about the quality but you can't knock the range um kesha her number one song was started with wake up in the morning feeling like p diddy so that's tough now so what she did so what do you do if you're she had to retcon her own song yes so what she did was wake up in the morning feeling like me flops so now when did she do that so um quite recently in terms of the rebrand around the whole p diddy escapades now she's come out and done wake up in the morning fuck p diddy which is a little bit better but she doesn't really fit the story but ultimately if you put a p diddy bottleneck in there where is the comma in that sentence wake up in the morning comma keshire's law so whenever you're creating things you've got to avoid modern things another law i've tried to create recently i was watching i don't know if you guys have seen the new michael jackson documentary on netflix and there's a scene in there.

1:02:29Tim Ferriss:It's only so much Neverland I can handle. Yes, yeah. I forgot Tim. Sorry to bring it up. You can walk out if you need to. There's a scene in there that's explained some stuff that we've discussed. Imagine you have an axis like here. So you have essentially being an awful person or crimes that you might be able to commit. And I'm not even going to discuss Michael's ones just yet. And then you have talent. So as you go, the talent can essentially get out of the axis and mj okay people are like it's too funny it's fine well mj and there's something about music that like for example no offense to you chris i think you're a lovely podcaster okay but if you started noncing right if you became like a i'm not talented enough to get away with nobody's like nobody is like going yeah but that's all you know what i mean like people but music so this is the crazy thing so michael is in the defense for this pedophilia charge and there's the um the guy who did a documentary on him and they're showing the documentary so it's where michael's kind of got his hand around a child and they're like talking about the child's talking about how he didn't want to go into michael's bed but michael asked him to come into his bed so they're playing the whole documentary as proof of potentially his crimes but within the documentary it plays some of his music so what's interesting you have both the defense um the judge the jury and even the defense said when they played billy jean He saw himself doing that.

1:04:03Tim Ferriss:He saw the judge nodding his head. I was like, wow, MJ's Law. The defense could hear your music and still bob their head. You're giving them actual pleasurable dopamine hits, and that makes that disendearing. yes there's some we talk about this a lot uh of people that are in the pop culture thinkers speakers artists whatever how who is it that's got the largest bank account that they could withdraw from before they go into bill cosby was probably number one and and he he if you had asked me before all the bill cosby scandal came out um i would have been like bill cosby is the number one like like least likely to be cancelled person.

1:04:49And it turns out what he did was so bad that if you're going to actually roofie dozens and dozens of young women that you're promising career breaks to, that is so bad that even Bill Cosby, you can't even... Correct. He didn't have a... I think that's it. If Bill Cosby had released a banger... I think music weirdly... Yeah, maybe. It's almost comedy. before music seems to destroy the human brain more than comedy. So for example, if you really dislike a comedian or they've done something awful, you can almost not find them funny, which is why I use the example then if Chris was in court, again, I'm not planting these rumors, but if Chris was in court for doing something horrific and they pulled up his 4K set with Matthew McConaughey, it doesn't do anything.

1:05:31But there's something about music. Someone really funny, I think it does have some of the same effect, but not to the level. Not to the level. Now, another example would be, and this doesn't work for the whole population, But political tribalism is like this just powerful drug that just makes brains crazy. And so if you're a really politically tribal person, and the person that you are that is part of your team, you'll forgive anything. And you can see this with a lot of famous politicians today. And I think that the people of that tribe, or you can see with other kinds of tribalism, there are many people who refuse.

1:06:14Jussie Smollett is innocent. And there's every bit of evidence, but because it gets tapped into a really tribal thing, the people that see him as on our side and the people criticizing him are the bad guys. There's nothing that could make them turn on him.

1:06:27Tim Ferriss:Could I workshop a new word with you guys right now? All right. I've been struggling with this because I like doing the same thing. I like these, the invention of words, right? And so I'll give two examples of ones that I'm proud of rightly or wrongly. One is a word, teledultery. So teledultery is when you and your partner have watched a show together and then someone separately watches more episodes without you. Oh, that's good. television it's exactly what it feels like yeah tell adultery you're like how could you right yeah and then uh the the newer one which is like ah it's not quite as good but i like it there's something there is hallucinatives like the first generations to assume that llm responses are fact to do no cross-checking hallucinatives right it's like ah it's not bad i mean it's not as good as tell adultery is gonna stick in the lexicon that one i put up this like probably 10 years ago on twitter so back when it was twitter so so we'll see i stay better than fly dripping i stay fly dripping's not bad um it's just such a niche issue oh it's such a the one i want i'll tell you some mcdonald's and the northwest that's the denny's if you do the fight start niche start niche the the one that i've been trying to figure out is and this maybe i'm the only one i don't think i am where everyone is so overwhelmed with notifications and bullshit on their phones that at least most of my friends have do not disturb on.

1:07:53Tim Ferriss:So they'll be like, sure, man, call me. And then you call them and it goes straight to voicemail. And they're like, no problem. I'll call you straight back. They call you back and it goes straight to voicemail. So it's this like, do not disturb death loop. But I have not been able to come up with like a pithy word for this. I always joked that if I could have a job, it would essentially be this. So if I could have any job in the world that I would do for free. Coming up with these words. Yeah, the one I, so this type of thing, or it would be like, you probably don't get it as much in America, but in the UK you have the proper British red tops.

1:08:25So it'll be the, and they did horrific things. What's a red top? Red Top will be like the proper scummy newspapers. I get that. But they'll have something like Wayne Rooney's shagged a prostitute that's a grandma, and they're running the story tomorrow, and they need someone to write the headline. Oh, it's like a New York Post. New York Post. Yeah, New York Post. The ability to just, I actually hate the articles, but the ability for just somebody to give me a story and then just say, we need four words, five words. We need some horrible pun. Yeah, yeah. In this headline, yes. Yeah. yeah i'm thinking about like disturb loop like or a do not loop or uh disturbipede which makes me think about like the human centipede uh like ouroboros like playing something into that could

1:09:06Tim Ferriss:be fun something with a boomerang we could throw that one out to the audience too best ones in the comments below for when you ring someone and it's do not disturb i will say like as a blogger do not disturb all the way down like explaining things and coming up with like terms and stuff like that. And it's like most of the terms don't stick. And the posts are ideas of mine that have gone most viral or just stuck around the most or almost always like where I nailed the term. And it really is like, it is such an important thing because if you can really, I mean, look, look at cancel culture. It was this concept.

1:09:39People said, you know, where the people are, there's too much political correctness or like, you know, it's a little bit, you know, it's like, it feels like there's witch hunts. It wasn't quite getting it. And then this one term. and it labeled it and it exposes it. Now you're acting kind of like that. And it just, it did a number on it. It was really like, it was a powerful, it changed the culture war, this term. I mean, so you can, examples like that are just so, and people who can do that really well.

1:10:03Tim Ferriss:Oh, can I throw out one more related to that? Bigoteer, like a racketeer, someone who labels others for profit or gain of some type of bigoteer. That's great. Very nice. That's great. So what are some of the blog posts that have really nailed the terminology. Like you mentioned the TED Talk that's gone really viral. And I think part of what was successful there was procrastination is something that so many people experience and was just, again, putting labels to things like I called, when you are procrastinating, I said, you know, you're in the dark playground. And it's a specific thing where you're digging around social media, you're texting with your friends.

1:10:45I'm looking up one of your blog posts. you're texting with your friends and you're you're doing whatever and and it is you're in the playground you're having fun right it's leisure time but it's not fun at all this is just dread and guilt and stress and anxiety that you're here and you know you should start working and you feel this it's not fun that's why it's the dark playground but now i get messages from you know mothers that are saying my son my nine-year-old son said oh mom i'm in the dark playground i need to get out and it's like okay you know that was a successful term and it's like yes you know it's interesting the leverage what about the leverage that exists i'm so sorry what about

1:11:17Tim Ferriss:the tail end yeah is that am i uniquely affected by that no no that one and that's do you guys know this blog post yes i think so yeah you should describe it because this was sent to me by a friend matt mullenweg and like it's i still think about it constantly you remember the guy that sent it to you yeah oh yeah yeah you want to dad if yeah so this was this is why i like blogging because i want to take lots of swings at the bat swings swings at the bat because then you might hit a home run once in a while and you don't know which ones but if you're just doing that's why books is like one giant swing over three years i don't like that um and this is an example of one where i was procrastinating during the spacex post i was writing the spacex post and i was like you know what i should really do is write another blog post yeah classic classic thing i was like i have an idea i'm just gonna do instead of doing this like big giant mountain i'm just gonna like oh i'm just gonna do this little idea that i've had for a long time but then i like thought about it in bed in the morning and i was like oh okay i know how i want to do it and then i just got up and did it in a couple hours and it made it it's one of those that really made a big impact um and the idea is that um so one of the things i like to do is just like use visuals or whatever to look at how much time we have i like to zoom out and i don't i don't want to just unconsciously go through life and then be like oh wow like look how much time passed i never i want to be like how much let's just look at it how many weeks are there left if i live to 90 like let's just let's just see this for what it is and so i'm not like caught you know i'm not blindsided by it later um and so i would think about okay i've you know even just watching the world cup i'm like i don't know maybe i have 12 world cups left depending on like longevity research um and that's if i'm lucky you know and how many christmases how many exactly so i do this kind of thing but then i kind of had a disturbing thought which was not all of the important things in life are evenly distributed world cups are christmases are um i grew up spending 350 days a year with my parents or whatever you know when i got older i went to camp maybe 330 over 300 days a year with my parents um and my sisters and um and then you graduate and you know you you you move either go to college whatever you're doing you know you if you if you move out of the city especially you might see your parents, I don't know, 10 days a year, 20 days a year.

1:13:31I don't know. If they live in your city, maybe you see them 80 days a year, whatever. But either way, the number is much smaller. And so then I was like, well, if you actually add up the total number, if I just say I'm seeing them 15 days a year right now, so that's, I need 20 years now to capture one year of parent time when I was a kid. I was like, wow, if you look at the whole number, I'm 95 % of the way through with my in-person relationship with my parents. And I would, this was, I had this thought when I was 30. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. When you graduate. So now I'm even older. Right. And so, um, and this is if you're lucky, if your parents live long lives.

1:14:07Um, and it was super depressing. And also one of those things where I'm like, I need to, some thoughts I have that are, you know, or ideas that are depressing and don't serve any positive purpose. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to just share my misery and spread it. Um, this, I was like, no, this is important. We need to look at this. We need to look at this for two reasons. One, if you are living in California and your parents are in New York or whatever, and you are seeing them 10 days a year, and that's just a reality. Or again, with a friend, there's some friends I saw all the time in high school that I'll see once every five years now, once every five years sometimes.

1:14:41These are close friends. I might see that friend 10 more times, period. I might see my parents only, I don't know, 200 more times 150 100 more times and so if that's the reality being like staring it in the face and being aware of it will at least make you treat those times you are together as what they are which is precious or also you can maybe make a big change i've had people tell me they moved back home to where their parents are because of this post because if you go from living in california to you move back home and you see them now 60 days a year you actually just brought that percentage down oh instead of being 94 done i'm only 81 done like what that's a you can change the equation so it's this actually really empowering thing or at least you know i'm not living in the same city as my parents but i'm i've become like so adamant about like we need to all see each other every eight weeks like somewhere it needs to be revisit we visit my sisters there then we visit home then we have thanksgiving then you should all come here for this so it's like it's helped motivate me to i mean and again it's not pleasant but having the delusion that we have endless time together is not helpful.

1:15:46It encourages a bias for action. One of the worst things to do is to identify something uncomfortable that it feels like you can't change or fix. That is where people really, really don't like, you know, this is how bad social media is for you. And people push back against that a lot because I feel like it's out of my control. I kind of agree with the problem, but you haven't yet given me, oh, the solution feels a little bit more out of reach

1:16:11Tim Ferriss:than that i mean i just start i personally started taking my whole family on a family trip every like year to two years and did that up until my parents were physically in incapable of doing it but like that post was a real catalyst conversations that i had with matt and other people about it and i was like okay like look i'm not going to move back home i don't have any desire to live in the middle of nowhere but at least we can block out like two to three weeks of concentrated time where we're sharing these adventures together. We have the anticipation of the trip leading up to it, which is a big piece of it.

1:16:43Tim Ferriss:We have the memories and photos. That from you, that from you is one of my favorite ideas. Look at this, just mutually fellating each other. One of my favorite things from you is that most - You promised it in the text to me, so here we are. That is true. Like Bonnie Blue. Range. You're right, your insight. Range, dude, it's the most, the highest range podcast on the planet. Your idea that the holiday that you go on, you should book them as far out in advance as possible because so much of the enjoyment is done in anticipation. So there was this great study done a while ago. I did my master's dissertation on the effectiveness of anti-alcohol advertising on students at Newcastle University.

1:17:21I wanted to see what sort of interventions we can do to try and reduce. This is when drinking was a problem, not drinking, which is now the new problem. But the thing that I realized is doing a little bit of reading and a bit of research around this was a study was done looking at when people enjoy nights out the most. And this included people that were drinking. So you'd think, how many drinks deep is it? Is it when you arrive at the night club? Is it when the music, the mainline DJ comes on, the headline DJ and everyone's there and they're having a great time? No, it was in the flat, in the apartment, as you were getting ready for the night out.

1:17:57Like the middle of the bullseye of dopamine and human satisfaction is things are about to get a little bit better than i'm just a friday at 3 p.m at work is the happier moment than like midday saturday correct and by the way the ultra the the inverse of that is if you if something shitty is if that i'm going to dread is on my plate i want to know about it as late as possible i had six months to think about that i have a ted talk hanging over that's gonna add this horrifying thing over the horizon i wish someone had just told me a month before you have to if you want me to speak at your wedding tell me freaking 10 days before do not give me six months where I'm like, ah, after that wedding, I have to come up with a really good speed.

1:18:31Oh, that's so good. Yeah, because you're front-loading the paint. Exactly. As well as front-loading the anticipation. So you want to know about good things? We're ahead and you want to know about that. Tell me about the gangbang a year in advance, but tell me about the tax return one week before.

1:18:42Tim Ferriss:Depends on the details. Which side of the gangbang you want to be? That's true. That is true. You know, the most depressing version of your kind of tail end thing, it's this old proverb in China. And it essentially goes along the lines of like, The saddest feeling in the world is to grow the desire to take care of your parents, only to realize they're no longer there. So there's a proverb in Chinese culture, I'm like, Jesus Christ. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night.

1:19:21But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. See, most people, like Jared, don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet.

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1:20:18There's a great line that I came across I wanted to read to you guys. It's from Sal Higone. It says, you'll regret it if you get married. You'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids. and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows. Whatever you choose, you'll regret it because the problem isn't in your choices. It's in romanticizing a life. Grass is always greener. A person always finds an untraveled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with.

1:20:47And that was that Douglas Murray line. In life, we must choose our regrets. And you go, okay, in advance of a big decision, you might want to think, which decision do I want to live with. But the better question is, which regret could I not bear living with? Yeah, that's the one. It's a little like if you're someone who you can't be too perfectionist about finding your life partner. It's like, which flawed person and flawed relationship are you going to choose? And each one is going to have a different set of flaws. And I think in both of these cases, internalizing that is very helpful because it can make you realize that if I have regrets, it doesn't mean something horribly wrong happened.

1:21:23if this if marriage is imperfect it doesn't mean i did something wrong like it's and and so it can help you accept which is half the battle i mean it's like regret is only really painful when you feel like i wish i could i i made a huge mistake as opposed to like this is part of a call that i made yet so thinking about uh pendulum swinging in one direction or the other going from we were worried about binge drinking in 2010 when i wrote my dissertation and now in 2026 we're worried about sobriety culture coming and taking away the way that people are able to communicate and spend time and socialize.

1:21:55An equivalent for this, I think, and I've messaged Scott Galloway about this too, as a famously unmarried man in his 30s, the conversation of you don't need to think that deeply about your life partner to now a lot of the biggest reels that Scott's done and Warren Buffett, the single most important decision that you're going to make in your life as your life partner. This is a piece of advice that distributes unevenly to people. It makes people who are already prone to overthinking feel even more pressure. Meanwhile, the people that were just blasé making decisions on vibes are just coasting through it.

1:22:30And it's applying even more pressure. I think this is, it's a noble insight, which is, hey, this is an important decision. And if you choose wrong, it can make your life hell. But the don't choose wrong turns into, I must perfect. I must become a perfectionist in choosing right. And it creates paralysis of analysis. This is David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box. Fucking money, by the way. Really, really good. Yeah, it's really good. But yeah, that -

1:22:58Tim Ferriss:What's the basic premise? I have an old one to recommend too. Constraints breed creativity. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, he is really great at bringing stories together, but he has this, what was it called? The Magic Company. What was that? it was all of the engineers from Apple. And it was the first ever Goldman Sachs idea IPO. So they didn't even have a product, but they just had such an amazing team that they IPO'd just with ideas. And they were able to do, they had unlimited budget, they'd IPO'd before they had a product. And he gives this example of a story where they were going to create basically the iPhone before the iPhone.

1:23:38And one of the engineers said, I'm going to run it from 1904. Let's say it's going to be 100 years something like that let's say and another engineering team came in and said well why do it from then why not do it from further back because people might be doing using apps for historical recording and stuff okay well i'll do it from year zero and we'll get up to 2004 whenever it is and another team came in and said well that's stupid why don't you go all the way back to the beginning of time so that we've got a full calendar that people can and it ended up what could have been four lines of code turned into this huge unwieldy project this is general magic if you don't general magic that was it there's a great documentary on this and it's also

1:24:15Tim Ferriss:like if i can interject for a second it's like uh yoda worsky's dune i don't know if you guys have ever seen this documentary it's about this ill-fated attempt to make a dune movie which was just like i guess it was made by this crazy man named yoda worsky and it goes through all these disasters and it didn't work out but the team ended up being geiger who designed the alien and so on the the talent density of that failed project was so high it's hard to believe this is true of general magic too right you had like very very young tony fidel who went on to create the ipod and the iphone you've got the person who went on to create android uh it's it's kind of nuts and despite that or in this i say in spite of in spite of having this incredible talent density it's like if you don't have constraints, well, if you have a lot of brilliant people with a lot of ideas, that could actually be a fatal recipe.

1:25:13Tim Ferriss:Correct. Yeah, constraints. This is another, we said coming up with the term is really important. Well, it's also just like, I don't know, just getting a certain like

1:25:24anchor concept that can help anchor your rationality. So like, one of the things I've always thought about with relationships for perfection, because I'm like this, and one of the times when I was able to kind of like finally, you know, pull the pin. Yeah, is because I think I grew up a little bit and was in enough relationships when I was like, again, the fact that like every they're all flawed, every single one. So but you also don't want to be like, well, they're all flawed. So this relationship is fine. And it's actually really bad. Like, right. So it's more like what are of there if there's 30 things you would love to have in a partner?

1:25:56You're 100 % going to be missing a bunch of those in every partner. But what are your deal breakers? Like, actually think about two or three or four. Don't get too much with these. that are like, this is critical to me. Like, I will not marry someone who does not, you know, whatever. I was going to say on both sides of the fence, because they can be things that you must not have and things that you must have. Exactly. And I think it's a mistake. It's not being perfectionist enough to sacrifice on those deal breakers. And I think it's being way too much of a perfectionist to be like, you know, it's like she's not, you know, she doesn't love to jam music with me.

1:26:31And I did that with my previous girlfriend. And that's a must. It's like, you can't have a ton of those or you're never going to ever, no one's ever going to be enough. One of the biggest issues in relationships that people don't talk about enough are bedtime lag issues. Like if you don't go to bed and wake up within maybe an hour of your partner, I think that there's a lot that you're missing. Like just literally you're missing out on a lot of time together. But I think it causes an awful lot of friction between you and your partner because like you're going to be woken up when they get into bed.

1:27:01They're going to be woken up when you get out of bed. Sleep's really important. There's health effects. going to begin to resent them if they come in at a different time. Maybe some people are laissez-faire enough or a deep enough sleeper that it doesn't really matter. But I think aligning the sleep rhythm is probably one of the sort of unseen. That should be, in order to get into the conversation, that's probably across the board a piece of advice that most people should follow.

1:27:22Tim Ferriss:I'll play devil's advocate just because I have historically had very strange - Big sleep gap relationship? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's some very good relationships, including my current relationship, but it's a few hours, I would say. Very often it's like one to two hour gap. She'll get up before I do. I think it can work if you are okay with going to bed at different times. Also, as soon as you have a puppy or a child, like you're on the same schedule. Right. Or if someone's doing the morning, the other person's going to sleep. So actually - It might actually be adaptive. Yeah. If you've got someone that goes to bed at three in the morning, typically, and you're like, okay, well, you're obviously going to do the night shift up until three.

1:27:57And then if your missus is usually getting up at five, if it's all right we'll just run that back a little bit earlier and then i usually come up a little later and i'll usually like close down the house and like clean up the kitchen a little bit and like turn off all the lights and like take the dog out and then like she'll be more likely to wake up and do morning stuff before we move on from terms we are still struggling to fucking name this podcast series it's currently rabbit hole which is the the working title but we're still struggling was it uh fuck me good dudes good vibe rabbit hole he's pretty good fuck me Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:28:26Fire up the autism engine was another one, obviously. But yeah. What's wrong with this? Rabbit hole described what we've done today. We've just gone down 20 rabbit holes and we go underground burrow to a different rabbit hole and then come back up. It's funny the power of a name though, right? You know, here's a little test for you. Here we go. Have you ever heard of a book called Women, Love and Relationships? No. No, because nobody fucking did. So this book released, I think it was in the 80s or the 90s. sold nothing so he came along changed the title and just jazzed it up a little bit to men are from mars women are from venus and it was the best-selling book of the 90s and just it was the basically the same book different title well it's like uh was the last time you had patagonian toothfish not recently right chilean sea bass now we're talking question given that we've got we've got two authors and one fledgling author at the table what is a book that you think is amazing but failed because of its name oh great question so mine my my kind of go-to for this is a little bit niche but it's mate by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller to become the man women want.

1:29:48It's an evolutionary psychology-inspired dating book for men. Is that a bad title or is it just too generic? I just think it should have done, because Models by Mark Manson, also I reckon had he have given it a little bit more magic, would have been, because it's still great and sold relatively well, but could have been significantly better for what it was. Made by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller is one of the best, if not the best book for guys to understand, understand how women think, understand what their fears are it's very like sort of both sides of the spectrum in terms of being understanding about women being pro-men without being too apologetic and it fucking rips and i think they even renamed it once i'm not sure why uh but it's that's just one that comes to mind like fuck that book was so good and it it didn't take off and i feel like there was a big unlock in in the name i think with a book it helps i think with like certain things like a company or even like a blog maybe it's like like xkcd i think if i were advising my friend before that started i would have been like no one's it's just four random letters like someone will be like you should you should read that blog it has the four letters they'll be like what it's obviously a massive success um you want to explain what it is for people um xkcd is randall monroe's uh he's this you know brilliant comic he's a you know he does a he does a three comic monday wednesday friday he also puts out books it's like comic strip yeah it's a comic strip but it's like nerdy and science and he's just it's amazing um and uh it has a giant around forever yeah cult following yeah he's been doing it forever and um and he probably gets more reads than like anything in like the the you know the comics of the newspapers these days i mean he's probably bigger than um but um so i think although maybe the fact that not everyone's heard of him maybe maybe it would be even bigger i mean that that's that's true i don't know um uh i i think i say people say what's your blog's name wait but why and they go what and i'm like it's i'm sorry and it's i just was looking on i was looking on uh godaddy and i was like i need a domain that has a dot com and i had like my hundredth idea and i was like okay that's one and i had like a small list of ones that actually had dot coms and i was like sure i think like it names in certain situations are overrated i think with books probably not i think books maybe is something that it's uh but i think you know i think company names i think if i see a lot of really dumb

1:32:02Tim Ferriss:company names yeah i think it depends a lot on the nature of the company i'm literally having this conversation with one startup right now like whether to keep or change and in their case i don't think it matters because they're b2b and selling in a very like long sales cycle to sophisticated buyers as opposed to a product that is b2c where it's like a consumer facing product where you want people to be able to easily say hey have you tried x and if they can't remember x you're kind dead in the water uh i do have a book example uh there are a lot of books that didn't do particularly well but i don't think it was solely due to the title this one i think might be title related i've probably sold half the copies that this book has sold in total at this point because i've talked about it and i have a bookshelf in my guest bedroom with just this book for people to yank but awareness anthony de mello anthony de mello yeah and it's got you know the subtitles the perils and opportunities of reality that's the better subtitle that they they change the subtitle the conversations with the masters which makes no sense to me because this conversation with one guy and transcribed uh conversations but that book if i had to pick one book to read on an annual basis that would probably be the one i mean i have some other close runner-ups but that that one for sure and it's so short why what's the kind of reflections from the book i would say it is honing your ability to observe your own thinking and your own state and without that meta ability i think you're you're striving to develop other faculties is severely if not wholly handicapped right you have to be able to sort of observe to the extent that you can without enhancement, there are certain drugs and so on that help with this or practices like different types of meditation, but without any augmentation, it's very hard to look at your operating system, right?

1:34:05Tim Ferriss:What are the biases? What are the weights? Almost as if you were an AI model, right? Like what has been built into the confirmation bias and the narratives over time that you inherited from parents or whoever it might be that have not actually been stress tested that you didn't arrive at through any type of firsthand experience, or maybe there was one outlying experience that It was tremendously painful, and therefore you lived from that point forward for 15 years with this filter on reality, which actually isn't defensible. But it's sitting in the background governing how you make decisions. And it's incredibly colloquial.

1:34:40Tim Ferriss:It's lectures that were transcribed and cleaned up. And it's unforgiving in its delivery. It's very harsh. So some people don't like it. It's very in-your-face in some ways. But I have had so many people, friends of mine, including people who are very, very accomplished, either get more done or feel like they have removed gauze from their eyes or pain from their life or all of the above after reading this book. It's like 150 pages. It's called Awareness. Awareness. Yeah, it's a red cover by Anthony DeMillo. He was a Jesuit priest, also a psychotherapist. And he's pulling from a lot of different traditions, but it's very pithy.

1:35:27Tim Ferriss:You would, I mean, I think all you guys would like it, but I was thinking of you, George, because of the naming, right? His sort of idea handles that you then carry forward, the stories that he tells. I mean, I've read it like 20 times, so of course I've had some reps, but even after one reading, the stories that stick with people are so compelling and funny. It's a funny book. it's a really sticky effective book i think that winzip file of i say that one word and it unlocks this entire you know we i still have an obsession with language i've always loved language since i was a kid and one of the problems if you do 1100 podcast episodes where you kind of obsessed with language is you can sometimes get nerdy on it and you can start aphorism maxing maxim maxing and uh But for me, it's really important if I've got a single sentence that explains a huge concept.

1:36:20One of the best ones I came up with last year was advice hyper responders. So advice doesn't land evenly. People who have a predisposition toward it tend to take it on board a lot, while the people that didn't already pay attention to it just coast-passed unchanged. I'm like fuck like that explains so much of why certain people have their traits exaggerated while the people that the advice is actually for like the prescription to work harder seems to be absorbed much more by people who are already working too hard than people who don't work hard enough and fuck that now explains it opens up this entire world for me and it was a term that I needed for myself and that if you're a super successful author who's got like ton of readers and distributes all of this stuff out like you can move the entire sort of cognitive topography of everybody that comes into contact with it and then people who don't even know the book or don't even know where it comes from yeah that spreads even bigger than the readers meme being one of them right catches on too and starts to change the world for the advice hyper responder was there any examples of some maybe bad advice that you hyper responded to and then some good advice that you have ignored or still ignore to this day?

1:37:28I think the one about working harder is a good example of that as a person whose proclivity, predisposition was always to lean into, I'm not doing enough. I should be working more. I need to be more diligent. I already pay way too much attention to stuff. And it sounded to me like type A advice for type B people. I just took that advice on for me as a type A person and it worsened my imbalances as opposed to correcting them. But the thing that's interesting about the type A advice for type B people, or type A people have type B problems and type B people have type A problems, the reason that's particularly interesting is that on average, maybe more people do need David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder than Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that they're already enough.

1:38:12Perhaps that across the whole world, it would be better for more people to pay more attention and work harder. But for a certain cohort of people, mostly people that listen to podcasts like this one, they actually need to hear the opposite message. They need to be rest day maxing, not work day maxing. That ties into awareness. I mean, that's where I think like the most important possible skill you can develop is self-awareness and just being able to see, I go too far here. I'm not going to listen to that advice. And if you see that about yourself, you're not going to fall into that trap as much.

1:38:43One of the problems with that prescription though, is that people who are already self-aware will take more self-awareness on. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then too much self-awareness is not great. It's restricting. Yeah. You're too self-conscious in everything you do. Bingo. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true. Yeah. You also, the problem with self-awareness is when you think too much about yourself. One of the exercises I was trying to write about the other day for the book, it's an interesting little thought experiment for you two gentlemen, which is, imagine we have - Gentlemen, hold on now. Gentlemen, hold on.

1:39:13Imagine we have a room here, okay? And there's 10 people inside the room. but one of them is secretly miserable, but they're keeping it together. Everybody else is moderately happy. Now think of everybody in your life that you know. Who do you think you could send in that room and have the best probability of figuring it out? Figuring out which one. And who would be the worst? Obviously don't answer the worst one publicly, but if you think of those two people in your head, who would be the best person? Esther Perel. Why? What is it about them? I don't know. I just feel like she is so unbelievably perceptive of, And I mean, I know this, I mean, her talks and stuff, but I know her personally and I just feel like she just like sees what I'm actually trying to say or what I'm actually feeling like really, really well, which is part of why I think she's so magnetic in her.

1:40:00Tim Ferriss:Also an amazing podcast. Yeah. With couples work. Oh yeah. Which is, I mean, and that's who's better at doing a podcast with couples. Couples therapy is usually this person who barely knows you two can within a few minutes start to see stuff that you don't see with each other. it's like that's incredible power yeah they're also i mean i would think of for instance my friend kevin rose super close friend serial entrepreneur amazing investor great guy eq off the charts off the charts so he would walk in and observe the room and i think with millions of years of evolution tilting in his favor i don't think it's necessarily something he could verbalize but he would pick it out it's an interesting idea of is it a trainable skill What's also interesting is that you could kind of replace secretly miserable person with psychopath, con man, having an affair, and you'd probably pick loosely the same people to be able to go in to do that.

1:40:57And it appears that it's closely related to theory of mind, which seems to come online at four years old. So a three-year-old almost has no theory of mind. They can't understand that Tim has thoughts or thinks differently to me, and it happens at four years old. I think that's when lying starts as well. Yes. So this ability to be able to think, oh, think how Tim thinks, and then sometimes think how Tim's thinking. You do not want to do it. I'm thinking. Yeah, I know. It's funny watching up close, like there's stages before that. First is like, I am the only person and everyone else is like here for my, everyone's a figment of my imagination.

1:41:34And then there starts to be like, oh, like other people are here and they're real. like they actually have their own consciousness, but they're all here for me. They're all here. And then there starts to be like a kid and everyone smiles at you in the grocery store and it's, oh, everyone's doing their own thing. They're not here for me, but everyone likes me. Everyone's good. Everyone loves me, you know? And then you start to realize like, oh, I'm just a random person. And like, I'm not a kid anymore. And people aren't like all smiling. The first existential crisis. Yeah. About five years old.

1:42:00And actually there's a lot of theories. I forget who originally, but it's, you know, there's this oceanic feeling that you have when you think everyone is there for you and that everyone loves you and everyone knows you is some people cannot let that go. And the desire, the deep desire some people have for fame is forever chasing. Oceanic. Yeah, the oceanic feeling is this feeling that you're in this ocean of love. And then later you feel this very cold loneliness and fame is like, if I could be famous and everyone knows me again and everyone loves me and I'm admired. And I think a lot of people have a real, Like 13 to 15-year-olds have like this, a lot of them people go through.

1:42:43I think I went through this at that age. You want fame more than anything in the world because it's the ultimate being popular in school. And then most people grow out of that, but I think some people don't.

1:42:54Tim Ferriss:To your question about trainability, I think it is trainable, but different people have better raw materials or some people, right? It's like vertical jump, muscle mass. Like, sure, you can improve on those metrics a lot with really thoughtful training. And I think that's true. But some people just get it. And I think it goes beyond human-to-human interactions, too. Like, I'm very, very interested in dog training and mammal training writ large. Actually, it goes beyond mammal training. That's like a whole separate— Why? uh because i think that it's interspecies communication however primitive it might be is fascinating in and of itself i think that i mean dogs in particular like the relationship between dogs and humans is kind of crazy like if you start to look past the familiarity of seeing dogs everywhere like yeah dogs you're like wait a second like think about how unusual it is that we have effectively co-evolved over time.

1:43:56Tim Ferriss:Yeah, there's an animal that lives in my house. Yeah, it's an animal lives in your house. Actually, this is like a companion slash guardian. I grew up with four cats. Look, cats are great, but cats are animals that live in your house. Dogs are sort of in a separate category if they're trained. And I think a certain different type of awareness and consciousness comes online for dogs vis-a-vis training as you develop kind of labels for different things. uh so for for all of those reasons but it extends to equine training and how that could be apply like animal interactions to people with autism or ptsd like you see some wild stuff and this doesn't end up being limited to to to horses for instance in the case of the therapy you i've seen instances i volunteered at a wolf sanctuary in colorado for a period of time which is a long story but wolves that have either been injured trapped by ranchers or raised in captivity which is a terrible idea please people don't get like wolf dogs or anything like that it's really it's really really awful on a lot of levels but uh there are these ambassador wolves that they have i think it's just called mission wolf in colorado if people want to look at it and possibly support it but uh these civilians can come in and visit and like donate money if they want and the the ambassador wolves will go straight up to people who are seemingly having the most pain in the room it's weird no one it's weird yeah or the people who are most withdrawn like autistic and autistic kids and things like that and uh it just raises a lot of really fascinating questions i've seen some videos of dogs that are there to stop seizures if people are about to fall and have seizures maybe people have got epilepsy epilepsy and these dogs are giving us some pheromone they can use them for autoimmune disorders before someone has the collapse it's able to be there and it jumps up and because when they're shaking the dog sort of lies on them like a weighted blanket or make sure that they're not going to fall over and there was a woman that was taking some food there's a i don't know why there's a video maybe it was a ring doorbell camera like internal doorbell camera or something and she's taking food out of the oven and the dog jumps up and pulls her back so you know when you're sort of crouching down she's already halfway down grabs her in the back of the collar and pulls her to the ground and lies on her and she's fine and she's thinking what is this dog doing is it okay is this something that's going to go on and then seizure she has a seizure after the dog's been there so insane so this raises yeah i mean if we want to get into like crazy town territory let's go let's go tim well i'll do let me let me do non-crazy town and then we'll segue to crazy town so the non-crazy town is the reason i bring up the dogs is that you will i i've noticed that the same people who have the highest eq around humans often have the highest eq around animals right so they like intuitively know how to interact with animals or be guarded around the right type of animals say a dog that's really quiet may actually be really afraid and could be aggressive or they can read that type of body language, even though it's a different species.

1:47:04Tim Ferriss:Whereas some people have no awareness, right? They'll walk up to a dog that is clearly uncomfortable and they'll come top down to like put their hand on the dog's head. It's just like, oh my God, you're just asking for trouble. Or they're not paying any attention to their kids. Like why do so many little girls have dog bites on the faces? Because little boys are kind of assholes. They like to like poke dogs and stuff, but little girls like to hug dogs around the face and neck. Dogs don't like that, right? And parents aren't paying attention. So it's not actually necessarily the dog's fault. It's the parent's fault so i think that eq is not limited to human to human um and that just relates to the theory of mind stuff which maybe maybe the theory of mind can be expanded to dogs are like pattern recognition machines on four legs i once heard saying that's part of why i i think like i noticed with my dog like she can if i'm about to leave but i haven't even started getting ready yet she can tell something's different the way he's you know yeah um but but you know i i'm interested in dog training i'm not a good dog trainer my dog is not very well trained but i training a mammal will make you realize um an important skill which is uh you are a mammal and your brain if you treat treat your brain like a dog um and great things can happen you just become a behaviorist yeah because you're you know the idea that well i'm a person it's like no no you have a you might be a person with like you know this higher consciousness in your head is a mammal brain yeah and it's not that different teaches you about how to train yourself yes seinfeld talks about this in training his mind like a dumb little puppy yeah if you shouldn't say dumb little puppy it's just like a blank slate puppy doesn't know what to do it's a primate brain we're all like this consciousness is stuck inside of a of an ancient primate i mean that's what it is and so it's like if you realize that and you're like like you said you want to have positive you want to have things on your desk that encourage i mean that's what is that that's because you're a dumb primate that is going to be the person sitting at the desk how else have you applied this behaviorist dog training lens to yourself i mean just just reward yeah i mean really it's it's so i i should say like if we're talking about like bf skinner and skinner boxes like we're getting you can get into territory where you you don't you basically assume and i'm simplifying here that something does not exist if you can't observe it externally, right?

1:49:27Tim Ferriss:But this is how you get into like, oh, animals don't feel pain. Oh, blah, blah. Which by the way, we assumed about infants for a very long time. It's not that crazy. It's not that long ago that people were operating on infants without anesthesia, right? Crazy. So, I mean, I'm careful with the Skinner stuff, but when you get into like classical conditioning, operant conditioning, there's an amazing book called Don't Shoot the Dog, which has a terrible title. Maybe this is a good example of a book that failed. Don't Shoot the Dog, But it's written by this woman, Karen Pryor, who worked in training marine mammals, dolphins and so on.

1:50:03Tim Ferriss:And I think she and her colleague also worked with the military, training cats. The military has trained cockroaches to turn light switches on and off. I mean, this is not science fiction. This is real stuff. Like a crazy town now. So it's like, how do you do that? Oh, yeah. I'm just getting warmed up. Oh, yeah. But this is well documented. That's not fiction. um sidebar the mosquito sized or the fly sized drones out of china right i don't know if you guys have seen these videos holy shit terrifying yeah anyway yeah where's neil stevenson when we need him to make some predictions but um i took myself completely off the rails don't shoot the dog don't shoot the dog karen prior when you're training say a marine mammal right okay dolphin doesn't do what you want to do you can't hit it with a rolled up newspaper you can't chastise the dolphin just swims away from you, right?

1:50:54Tim Ferriss:So you end up focusing on positive reinforcement, right? Providing rewards for the behavior that you're trying to shape. And behavioral shaping is also just an interesting concept I could explain in a second. And she started using different auditory cues and that converted into clicker training for dogs. So to teach a dog what to do or not do - Hang on, sorry. The training of dolphins is where the clicker for dogs comes from yes from aquatic mammals no fucking way yeah because they would use clicking at dogs because we clicked at dolphins they used i think they used whistles but it's the same idea and because you're trying to indicate to this dog and this applies to humans too like what is the right behavior what is the wrong behavior but for instance like the dog shits in the house you come home two hours later and then you punish the dog it's so temporally dislocated the dog has no idea right it's it's not effective it's just going to make the dog less likely to offer behaviors because it doesn't know when it's going to get punished right uh and i look i understand approaches to e-collars and i think they have their place and so on but this is just to say that when you start digging into this and you start thinking about behavioral shaping so i'll give an example of behavioral shaping a simple example and look i'm not a professional dog trainer, but I do find it really interesting.

1:52:18Tim Ferriss:So for instance, if you're trying to get a dog to sit is really easy, but if you have a treat, right? So you're using a lure and you start with a motion that's, let's say the dog's right here, it's standing and you do this, you push it back behind its head. It sits down to get its mouth closer to the treat, right? And then over time you lose the treat because now it has figured out how this dance works. And then you get to a point where you're using like the international sign language for sit. And then you start to pair that with sit and then this, and then you can actually remove the manual signal altogether and just use the rearable cue.

1:52:58Tim Ferriss:But if you're trying to get a dog to turn around and do a spin, which is more of like a vanity trick than a safety thing or a functional thing, but as soon as it turns slightly, it's not going to get it on the first go-around. You click, you give it a treat. And so you're basically encouraging it to continue that behavior. and you can shape really complex behaviors over time as long as you're not trying to boil the ocean at once. So how does that pertain to humans? All of it pertains to humans, whether you're trying to train yourself, whether as you're building a family, you're thinking about, like you're not gonna crate train your kid, although you kind of do, I guess, with the crib in a sense.

1:53:36Tim Ferriss:But I think a lot of this applies and people get upset and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe you're comparing a baby to a dog. And I'm like, guys, evolutionarily, speaking, like we're not that different. I mean, there are some important differences and it's like, yeah, we've got more, you know, white matter and so on, but. Don't breastfeed a dog. Yeah. Yeah.

1:54:01Tim Ferriss:I've been fostering a dog for the last six months who was going to get euthanized. She was on the, she was on the street. And so it's been, so I've been very much in the thick of it with a dog that was effectively a wild animal off the streets uh a really adorable dog uh looks to be haven't done the genetic testing but like an anatolian shepherd mix so very tawny colored with a black muzzle uh out the one that i meant no that's your the different dog different dog yeah the rear feet are slightly externally rotated so could be some great Pyrenees in there, but much smaller. The Anatolian shepherds can get huge.

1:54:42Tim Ferriss:They're found in Turkey. They're found in the Caucasus region. They can get up to like 150 pounds, 200 pounds, at least 150. They're huge. She's a lot smaller. She's about 60 pounds. So I would guess that she's a mix with something else, possibly German shepherd or Belgian shepherd, something like that uh but man when you're starting with something that is really feral it's different and what's the original dog trainer like the the actual dog trainer is the dog's brain offering dopamine treats so when you give food it's not the food it's the dopamine hit that the brain gives that makes the dog one and so this is what before humans were there to trained dogs animals across the animal kingdom for millions of years have been trained by their genes to act a certain way using dopamine treats yeah and then and so it's just and then so all we're doing is leveraging this system that's already in place in the dog's brain and we're saying oh we can we can get the brain to do a dopamine hit when for that and tie that that and then the dog can tie that hit to this behavior instead of the thing it's programmed to be tied which is get food yeah so a big part of it is figuring out right because humans have been selectively breeding dogs and all these weird shapes for millennia yeah is what does this dog respond to yeah because some dogs are really food driven but then then your brain is also giving you dopamine treats sure and this is what social media platforms do is they are geared towards flooding your brain with dopamine treats when you give it attention and therefore add dollars Well, we also think of ourselves as like the masters of the universe, but it's like, to what extent did we domesticate certain plants and to what extent did they domesticate us for propagation, right?

1:56:32Tim Ferriss:I mean, it's like, it's a fun question. Oh, yeah. Say more on the tumble down the rabbit hole here. Yeah, I mean, it's just like if you look at like wheat, corn, soy, etc. I mean, they've been very effective at propagating themselves as a species. And I don't want to attribute like anthropomorphizing the wheat necessarily, but just from an evolutionary and sort of propagation imperative, it's like, how did they end up being so ubiquitous? I just think it's a fun question to poke around. Well, when I was studying like history and you're looking at, oh, we domesticated not just plants who domesticated the horse who domesticated the dog.

1:57:12And now the modern cow, the modern house dog, they couldn't survive in the wild because they've been domesticated. So now they rely on this artificial structure. And then I, you know, you read more about humans and oh shit, what a civilization. We domesticated ourselves. Yeah. We cannot survive. as if you bring us back to 50 ,000 BC, pluck any, I mean, maybe you're like one of these people that might, most of people I know, we would die. We don't, we're not, our natural habitat, we cannot live in it. Just like the Maltese cannot live out in the natural wolf habitat. We can't live there because we domesticated ourselves.

1:57:48And this is one of these weird things where we now live within this structure that we only can live in, just like a house. It's like a dog can only live in a human house, a dog pet, we can only live in this civilizational house. None of us know how to, again, very few of us know how to hunt and truly gather and do the things. Would that not be different slightly that we have, like, genetically, anatomically, in terms of our features and our functions, humans are not too dissimilar to what would have been around 50 ,000 years ago, but dogs would be very different to what was around previously. If we had been born back then, culture would have been - We haven't gone to the full extent that, yes, that is, I mean, I'm sure there are some little changes, but yes, like maybe we're less aggressive than we would need to be back then or something like that.

1:58:31But you're right. We haven't domesticated our biology, but when we are now raised in this world, we have totally domesticated ourselves psychologically and intellectually and just in the skills we have. uh and it just it kind of um you know it just it explains a lot and you then you see interesting clashes back in you know when first civilizations were developing where you have these wild people essentially um clashing with domesticated people and that doesn't always go you know sometimes that when the weapons got good enough eventually that the domesticated people couldn't be fucked with But for a long time, these, you know, step hordes, Mongols and others, you know, whatever, the Huns and many, many others, would come down with no technology at all.

1:59:19But they were essentially wild people. Again, they had horses. Except for horseback archery. Yes. They had horses. They were pretty good. They had horses, but like on the wild to domesticated scale, they weren't very far. and When they would clash, it wasn't just that they were really great with their weapons. They had this level of kind of wild brutality and kind of a lack of a civilizational notion of empathy for human lives or whatever are worth something. I mean, the Mongols thought of humans as cattle, as another, you know, whatever. Killing them was not a moral wrong. And that was this huge advantage.

1:59:55So it's just interesting to like when you, you know, and this is what's scary. It's very scary when you think about civilizational collapse, talk about AI apocalypse, things like this. I mean, what's scary is just the power goes out. That means the internet goes out. I mean, you'd see a lot of very domesticated people in a total chaotic situation. And it would be, yeah.

2:00:15Tim Ferriss:People lose their shit really quickly. I was in San Francisco and I was volunteering for something called NERT, which is the Northern California Emergency Response Team. And it's a volunteer coalition of people who are distributed throughout, in this case, San Francisco. And it's done in collaboration with the police and fire department to train volunteers to respond in the case of a highly destructive earthquake or natural disaster of some type. and i remember in the very beginning they effectively said okay the broader san francisco area has population of x whatever it was 1.2 million people guess how many fire engines we have and they defined like what a fire engine was and so on they're like 10 okay so what happens if we have a conflagration which i think is a square block on fire of x magnitude and they're like you should expect to be without water and electricity in these following areas for this period of time, like seven to 10 days.

2:01:18Tim Ferriss:I remember I was living in Glen Park in San Francisco and PG &E had a rolling blackout. I was like, okay, power's out. And for like the first few hours, people were like wandering out outside. It was a Saturday and they're like, hey, your power out? Yeah. Wow. Nice to see you, Bob. You know, everyone's very civil. And then it's like five or six hours and then people start to realize oh all of my food my freezer is going to thaw at some point and i think the water may have also been off and around like 10 hours post there's one guy in the neighborhood who had a little honda generator because he was a burner he went to burning man and he was like keeping his stuff frozen and one or two people wandered over and they're like hey joe could i borrow that after you're done with it clearly he's not gonna be done with it because he's using it and i think it was at like hour 15 or 18 there was an entire throng of people who are these like hyper liberal peace you know live long and prosper live and let live types who are getting openly hostile about who would get to use his generator next this is less than 24 hours so the the basic courtesies of modern life fall away very quickly.

2:02:37There's a whole wild person in every human that is completely contained in a normal situation. I sometimes I'm in a coffee shop and I see all these people standing in line. So, and I just like suddenly have a split screen to like those people, like stabbing each other for food. And then I was like, they come back here and I'm like, you know, it's a little, like it's the, you know, we're, it's all fine when it's fine. And you know,

2:02:58Tim Ferriss:I don't know. So let me say a couple of things real quick. So this is going to sound strange, not to like defend, you know, Genghis Khan and the step hordes, but - Steelman pillaging for a second 10. Not pillaging, not pillaging. There's a book, I won't recommend it to be by one of the, I mean, a name everybody would know. There's a book called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. It is from like modern postal systems to infrastructure to religious freedom. They did kill and rape a lot of people. um but uh that book is is worth reading especially the first half of it uh just to get a full grasp of the historic implications the second just to give an og podcast shout out uh wrath of the cons by dan carlin oh my god listen to every dan carlin episode i mean honestly still maybe the best no offense no offense best podcast of all time dan carlin hardcore history wrath of the cons it's like a five-part series each one is four to five hours long oh so so many not be bored you will rip through it they are i mean there's a whole other topic yeah but like the history of podcasts are one of my favorites and he is the goat yeah i heard that he used to do them in a single take and if he messed up he just restarted again oh god it wouldn't surprise me he's a perfectionist i mean that's why they took so long still doing i haven't seen i'm not sure but part of the reason I also love Dan as an example is that wherever you are, whenever you are, you run into whatever industry, these things that are taken to be true because they get repeated a lot, right?

2:04:32Tim Ferriss:You have to post X times per week. You have to do this. You have to do that. No one's going to listen to a podcast that's longer than 60 minutes. And Dan was like, I'm going to do one six hour podcast or five hour podcast once every six months. And he was top of the charts forever for years upon years. Not many people are doing A plus work. And when you are, none of those rules apply. Yes. Yeah. The rules just didn't apply. The best tagline that we found for this is there will always be room for better. Yeah. There will always be room for better. It doesn't matter what the industry is. You know, it's just something really great.

2:05:07There's just not very much of it. It doesn't matter how many podcasters there are very few people are doing A plus. It feels like that's accelerating now because you have LLMs churning more shit out and you're going to have more video models churning more shit out. It feels that whether there's less quality today or it just feels maybe there's less quality relative to the amount of quantity. So it's also a discovery problem. It encourages everyone to average back to the mean, right? It regresses the aggregate of content that's being covered. And then people get discouraged and think, oh, there's so much content.

2:05:38Like, what's the point? It's like, no, no, no. If you can do something great, it will just rise above this and the world will see it. Speaking of Novel content, the Japan and USA algo crossover because of the translate mode that happened has resulted in some pretty spectacular outcomes. None more so than Kenki Kids account. Have you seen this guy? Okay, so he describes in his bio on X as a company employee living in Yokohama's Kanai area, originally from Yokohama, born in 1985. currently 41 years old, single, 41 years with no girlfriend history, non-appealing to the opposite sex, unattractive, amateur virgin, likes sex services, hobbies of watching soccer, overseas travel, planning to retire early from the company at age 50, has given up on marriage, and is currently seeking a comfortable single life.

2:06:26So, it's interesting about this guy. He's been tweeting about - That is one hell of a bio.

2:06:31Tim Ferriss:How did he end up picking so many characters? I think you were able to compress things down in Japanese. Pressing for a dog as well. uh he's been tweeting about visiting different hand job parlors in japan and is using the revenue paid out from x to fund his future trips he's essentially unlocked an infinite hand job glitch in reality chelsea supporter it's also just no one in in in the in the western world talks like this it's just a very specific like japanese uh so there's a quote tweet go to the quote tweet jared uh it's where he says today both my regular hand job spot and the married woman place are running discount events and i'm torn about which one to go to that's quote tweeted by an american saying americans be like i can't even get some chopped foid from a dating app to go on a 250 date with me while the japan bros are like damn the handjob parlor and the milf joint are both on sale tonight i don't know which one to pick and he is using the x revenue in order to fund his handjob like the most honest man in the world it's unbelievable you said a calendar reminder for black friday hanky kids dude unbelievable yeah the crossover from uh american people finally being able to see japanese content on x has resulted i mean i i did love the i don't know if you've seen these split videos of like japanese cleaning the stadium after a game and nicks fans you brought this up yes even what's interesting when the japanese team played at wembley against england they cleaned the changing rooms afterwards the players even did it's completely different cultural difference.

2:08:01What's interesting though, is you have these languages merge online. I'm assuming you're going to have podcasts, language merge. Do you actually lose less, um, the cultural differences as much? One of the reasons why Japan is so unique is because they did that Sakuku, right? Where they, whilst the rest of the world was all mixing ideas. If you left Japan, killed. If you tried to enter Japan, killed. So it's so unique. It's so alien.

2:08:22Tim Ferriss:It's like the Galapagos of culture. Yes. And I wonder with, with, it's a great way to put it. Yeah. With the internet now, do you actually have, because I can feel it already that English culture is becoming a bit more American. Or even like this internet culture, it's not even American now. It feels like it's post-American. It's becoming more online. It's just global. It's just the online culture. The internet is like the anti-Japanese isolationist culture effect. Yes. Unless you're on the dark web. And then what's unfortunate is then, what's nice is when you have all these independent cultures and each one does something really well.

2:08:55When it all starts to blend, you really lose the variety. The variety is where variety in both evolution and cultural evolution is the engine of creativity and growth. And it's like instead of having a bunch of different brains in a room brainstorming, you just have kind of like one thinker. And it's a shame. Someone wrote a blog post a few years ago about where did emos and goths go? And the question was that subcultures need time to wassify. and if you've got this sort of global permaculture thing that's always moving and any bit that moves in one side of the membrane affects another bit over here, it's like everybody being on a bouncy castle at the same time and somebody that jumps up and down over there impacts everybody else.

2:09:36So you don't have time to silo off to create this sort of weird niche trends, music, tastes, language. Now you see subcultures on the internet with language, but very quickly, look at looks maxing. All of that immediately now has become common vernacular because one part of the bouncy castle is now affecting everyone's scrunchies. To me, I'm just pulling from words you're throwing out.

2:09:56Tim Ferriss:You want a podcast name idea? Yes. Bouncy Castle Gangbang. Bouncy Castle Gangbang. I'm actually not far off. It's evocative. It's very visual. It's either that or fire up the autism engine. It's one of those two. It is visual. Why have you mentioned goths and emos then? When was the last time you thought about goths and emos? Yeah, and I always ask Chris this question. I ask you two guys this. which is when the fascinating thing about something fading away is that you don't notice it fading away because by definition it's fading away. Is there anything that's currently fading away or has faded away that you think we would have forgotten about until you mentioned it?

2:10:33A good example is the voicemail. The voicemail, if you watch, I was watching Breaking Bad and there's about five minutes every episode of a voicemail scene where the voicemail will be playing across the house and it's just disappeared. It doesn't exist. But nobody really discussed it because by definition if something's fading away yeah there's stuff that's fitting into like mullets

2:10:54Tim Ferriss:mullets are back and that's very very bad that's why mustaches came back yeah you you're actually only able to grow i don't know if i could make a well i can't do like the flat top mullet which would be my sort of like aspiration because i was just not going to work so i could do like a power donut rat tail power donut power donut rat tail also not a bad podcast name yeah that's true um yeah not a bad grinder name as well power don't power donut right yeah you know what i'm talking about right like professor x yeah that's that sounds like a wonderful couple that could be born out of grinder power donut and rat tail yeah would get together very well what else have you brought from home you've got this bag i brought lots of stuff i'm gonna throw I'm going to throw out some fun stuff.

2:11:40Tim Ferriss:You're talking about like humans, modern humans in the wild, dead, right? Domesticated dogs in the wild, dead. One exception, if you take domesticated pigs and release them into the wild, they rapidly undergo physical and behavioral transformations. Within just a few months, they develop thicker bristly hair, longer snouts and tusks. Like they literally revert back into savage animals within months. Does anyone study what's happening to them? Cool. They call it phenotypic reversion. Wow. And have you brought one? There's a small pig. You brought a feral pig. Wild boar. I brought a whole stack of things.

2:12:17Tim Ferriss:This is exciting. Oh, wow. And then, so we can talk about these. Oh, drugs. You brought drugs? I brought drugs. So this one is, I'm still like, jury's out, but the data are pretty interesting. So this is Avmacol. I know exactly what this is. You know what this is. So some people have heard of something called sulforaphane. and I'm going to pull this up so I don't misquote here. Let's see if I can find it. Bear with me here. I love when my autistic newsfeed and Tim's autistic newsfeed come together. They merge together. Yeah. All right. Just say it. Just get Tim to get you on. What's that? Carry on.

2:13:00He needs more frosty beverages. I don't know.

2:13:02Tim Ferriss:Yeah, okay. So this stuff, so sulforphane people might have heard about, like broccoli sprouts were kind of making the rounds a couple of years ago. And I think Rhonda Patrick should be giving credit for bringing this to light for a lot of folks. And this does not contain sulforaphane itself, but a precursor and an enzyme. So your body then produces sulforaphane. And I'll explain why I'm bringing this up. Because I've been taking this for probably nine months and predominantly because there is some possibility that it could help with mitigating the risk of neurodegeneration uh so that that's again whether it's the xylitol or this stuff having multiple family members with alzheimer's uh i'm paying a lot of attention to prevention you'll have done your uh genetic testing as well right oh yeah yeah cool yeah uh what's what's interesting is is quite a few people in my family and i know this isn't the only risk factor but they're apo e3 3 which should be the lowest risk at of uh alzheimer's and yet so there's other dysfunction uh and in this case you know sulforaphane reliably activates nrf2 related pathways in humans all right so the it's promising but not proven slowing aging preventing cancer preventing dementia extending lifespan treating chronic disease it's basically detoxification but the reason i brought it is that my supplement regimen has been very consistent for at least two or three years and i do constant blood tests and so on just did a blood draw this morning actually and in the last maybe six months i've been getting could be coincidence but more compliments and questions about my skin than ever before.

2:14:52Tim Ferriss:And I was like, what is going on? Is this just coincidence or is something going on? And so I looked at the two things that I've added to say curiosity, nothing new. Otherwise I was like, okay, diet's the same. There is the Avmacol and then there is your list, your letthinae and timeline timeline. And, uh, and it turns out that it is plausible that this stuff helps with skin tone. Rhonda's thing was, that was for microplastics, right? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, there's, there's a bunch that it does, but yes. Like, did you see, so I brought this up last time, but I didn't get a chance to actually say it.

2:15:29I had it ready for last time. So the microplastics numbers were wrong. The gloves were the source. So the university of Michigan researchers just amended a core consumption assumption about microplastic science, latex and nitrile gloves worn by the scientists doing the measuring shed sterate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene. Standard infrared and ramen instruments couldn't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic. So you know that every American consumes a credit card sized amount of microplastics every year. Like when you pick up the little Petri dish, because it's human blood and feces and tissue samples and stuff, they're picking it up.

2:16:12But the way that it bends, the reason that gloves are able to bend is that tiny teeny teeny teeny tiny bits break off that's why it's malleable and they switched from that to some other type of glove and it just went through the floor i like that i was happy to see that all the microplastic research looks like it could be wrong wow that's not to say that we're not consuming we probably are but the numbers i think are 100 credit card doesn't sound that bad i'll eat a credit card once a year how bad could it be i'd front load it i'd get it all done january 1st

2:16:40Tim Ferriss:get the amex in yeah kind of grind it up so just to be clear not a doctor don't play one on the internet this this stuff right the avmacol biologically plausible reasonably safe interesting human data but not yet a slam dunk clinical intervention but still interesting because it activates your own detoxification pathways as opposed to being an external antioxidant they consume so the sort of hormetic stress response could be really interesting and have broader benefits so that's why you do have cred with these kind of things because you're like annoyingly healthy looking you're like the healthiest looking person thank you you seem very like robust and unsickly all the time thank you yeah i'll be 50 i'll be 50 before you know it which is crazy yeah the uh the key is to go bald early so your photos look remarkably similar uh i think as you get older bald is an asset you end up like it's hard to age you yeah no exactly that's what i'm saying people oh here's the giveaway yeah if you're trying to do like the dead squirrel comb over or whatever white knuckling dead giveaway uh should i talk about these things real quick yeah so uh i have when i was a kid i collected i mean comic books that was kind of my first business was buying and selling comic books wanted to be a comic book penciler forever was an illustrator throughout school paid a lot of my bills in college as an illustrator so i love graphic novels and what i found as i'm being domesticated not domesticated but trained through llms and everything else to have uh shorter and shorter attention span effectively right i'm trying to offset that but another insight that i've had for me personally i am and we talked about the um aphantasia i guess it was and hyper visualization i'm so visual that often as I read or even if I meditate, we could talk about how meditation factors into this, but I'm conjuring these images constantly, which can be very distracting.

2:18:35Tim Ferriss:Conjuring what images? Images, just visualization in my head or scenes or whatever. Like there's constantly, and as I'm here, there's like another movie playing in my mind. It's like watching like two screens with different movies. So will it tend to be like a past event or a future event? Or is it completely random? Could be that. That could be just random bits and bobs. So I've taken to going back to graphic novels, because once you are reading a story with visual accompaniment, it occupies that part of my brain. And I just love graphic novels. So I thought I would share after reading like dozens and dozens over the last couple of years, some of my favorites.

2:19:13Tim Ferriss:This is Something is Killing the Children, Real Uplifting. This is going to be made into a very expensive series by Netflix, but basic premise the artwork is amazing story is really fun and basic premise is monsters are real only children can see them and there are these cabals of of monster hunters it's like a it's a beautifully simple premise and it's very light yeah it's uh it's it's it's great if you're into the sci-fi stuff this is lazarus which is kind of a post-apocalyptic um these cartel-like families run giant swaths of the united states and the world and it's about their kind of geopolitical battles and how technology factors into it uh if you want something more fantasy uh and this this gets into some deep psychological terrain and inner turmoil, but it also throws in lots of fantasy tropes.

2:20:14Tim Ferriss:So it's kind of like fantasy plus a bit of steampunk monstrous, which just based on the cover, I was like, I'm not going to like this at all. In full disclosure, I liked the first, maybe like 200 pages, the most of what I read. But the testimonials and stuff are insane. So This is another one that is beautiful. I tend to be very biased towards the stuff with really gorgeous penciling. Daytripper. This is from Brazil and does not have any sci-fi, any fantasy. It's sort of a reflection on mortality. It's about this young man who has a star author as a father whose shadow he's constantly living in, who, as his job, writes obituaries at a local newspaper.

2:20:59Tim Ferriss:But it gets much more interesting. So how long does that take you to read compared to a book? How many page book is that? Yeah, you'll rip through this, which is part of the reason why I'd say if you're going to get in, this is 250 pages. I read this in three hours. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, you get through it very quickly. It's also an expensive habit. If you're using hard copy, this is going to be$25. five bucks. As someone who takes forever to do the simplistic drawing, and granted these people are far more talented artists, like I mean, today maybe they're using AI, but like when I look at this, I'm like no, these are all, it's just this one picture.

2:21:37Tim Ferriss:Yeah, yeah. The artwork in all of these is tremendous. Amazing. Have you ever read a comic book? Not in a while. Yeah. Since I was a child. Yeah. I've never, basically never. Yeah, I mean, there's some. I think I could get into it. There are some iconic Calvin and Hobbes i used to calvin hobbs is amazing like calvin hobbs is amazing look i mean sandman there's some real like genre busting yeah graphic novels this one is from france ama which i'm currently reading really deeply philosophical very psychedelic this one also gets pretty trippy as you would guess by the name uh what i'd suggest so this is impossible to get as a hard copy it's very very challenging just get the kindle get the kindle versions and kindle or i should say amazon acquired a company that allows you to read these graphic novels panel by panel.

2:22:24Tim Ferriss:And it has this like zooming in, zooming out function that is beautifully designed. That's why they put the new full color Kindle together, I think, to try and encourage people to get into more graphic novels. Oh, it's beautiful. And I'll actually just... It's bode well for all of my... Yeah. The graphic novels are not easy to read on mobile, but on, say, laptop or iPad or something. What I want is, and I don't know if it would apply to this, but for my books and for a lot of others that have a lot of visuals, is I want Audible or some... to be like you're listening and then it's like ding and you look and the screen just has the current drawing, the current image.

2:22:58So easy to do. And then you see, you put it back in your pocket and it's like ding, oh, there's a graph. Yeah. Right? And it's, why? Why not? Supplementary materials available. Here's your attached PDF. It's such a game changer for me. Yeah, that's what I do. It's attached from a PDF. It sucks. I've got into Dungeon Crawler Carl. Have you read this book?

2:23:14Tim Ferriss:That's a fun one. Fuck me. It's a fun one. It's, I mean, so Red Rising is the most addictive fiction series that I've found pretty much ever. And they're about to release, Pierce is about to release book eight, I think, soon. And I got told, you know, when you get a book suggestion from two or three different people who don't know each other, yeah, all right, I just obviously need to do that. I've triangulated, they've triangulated me. Even the second recommendation, I'm like, okay. Yeah, I should admit. Dungeon Crawler Carl. So it's a lit RPG, literary RPG. So you're basically reading, imagine somebody played a video game and you read a description of what happened.

2:23:52That's kind of what it's like. And it is fucking unbelievable. And this guy is on book eight or nine now and he released the first one in 2020. Yeah.

2:24:02Tim Ferriss:When are the, what? And I remember the number of reviews was insane. It was fucking wild. Dungeon Crawler Carl for me is up there with Red Rise. Very different. It's very edgy. It's really lighthearted and fun. There's a lot of inner monologues. there's interplay, you can tell that the story's going to get huge and unwieldy. There's progress. What's interesting is because he's leveling up, he's playing the game or he is the game. And as he goes along, he levels up skills and he's got to make a choice between which class he wants to be or this one. Do I want to make this particular sacrifice in terms of my strength and my dexterity and my intelligence?

2:24:38Or what should we upgrade this pet that we've got as and what armor should I put on? And you'd think, oh, that sounds so dry and boring, but it is, it's got me. It's got me. We were watching. It taps into the same thing that makes those games addictive to play, probably, right? Without feeling... Watching someone upgrade. Yeah, whilst getting to...

2:24:54Tim Ferriss:82 ,000 reviews on Amazon, 4.7 stars. How many on Goodreads? I bet it's half a million on Goodreads. Goodreads is 427 ,000. It's insane. It's really... Since 2020. Yeah, it's pretty fun. I only got through book one and I enjoyed it. So I didn't make it beyond that. I don't know how you stopped at book one. Yeah. He was about to choose his class. How did you stop at book one? I know, I know. What have you been reading recently? Anything good? so I for a long time I've been alternating between like because for my writing I'm constantly reading like nonfiction history or science you know whatever things like that for right now I'm just reading a book called what's it called Something with Time by Carla Ravelli The Order of Things The Order of Time Benedict Cumberbatch did the audio I would listen to him read anything so Benedict Cumberbatch is so good and he's reading it and that's a book where talk about like people who listen to books on like 2x or whatever i want to do that in like 0.4x because i have to constantly pause and just like think about what he just said and then i go back i i'm going through this short four-hour book over like so slow but that's for work that's like for my book um i usually alternate between like history podcasts and sci-fi uh those are my right now so i read the first book in the um expanse series uh which i i liked i didn't love i liked so i didn't keep going um and then i read my my wife like an instagram post of her favorite of the books she read in the year with the favorite to the least favorite stacked and i i usually don't cross over that much but i was like that top one it's their top book so i read it and it was so good it was called a fraction of the hole by steve toltz he's this australian author takes place in australia and it is so funny and it's such an adventure and it's this just fantastic fiction book um and uh it's not that well known and it was just such a joy and i was a that's a i would never have just picked that up on my own but i i loved that um and then um and then i um more recently obviously i read the whole three body problem trilogy which is by the way an example of one of those times when i couldn't do that either you know oh really oh no here again i love the bailed out let me tell you let me just this is very important so there's three there's three books the first book is only a sixth of the length of the whole thing because the second and third book are much longer the first book is a bb plus it's it's the it's the appetizer to the whole thing the second book the first third of it is slow so it is it's really if you don't lose people there you're going to lose people there when you get 200 pages into the second book the rest no no no no i know that sounds bad remind this is 1400 pages 75 this is 400 1400 pages the series and you're only 500 total pages and now the next 900 pages is the greatest thing i've ever read it's the biggest adventure and it's not like the first part's bad it's just a little slow and it's then it it just takes you on this ride you've never been i so if you haven't gotten this it's so worth i'm halfway through the first book and i'm not kidding it's taking me 10 attempts just just just i need to grind it out you got you have my my thought process with things like this and particularly as i'm writing now good news this takes an hour yeah great i like high octane and maybe it's just like my standard as a writer that i try and apply to somebody else but i'm like why did you have to wait to this two and a half pages why like if you watch breaking bad the first scene of breaking bad some trousers land in an air there's an rv driving walter white's got a mask on with three people passed out looking dead in the back and he's got a gun in his pocket that comes out in the first five minutes that's what i want i don't listen that's ideal that's ideal uh in this case first of all it's like when once you get to the end you also like the beginning has more meaning to you i totally agree and but it's this has managed to be so popular despite the things i'm saying yeah yeah yeah um and this is by the way an example of an author who actually i think didn't do a great job with the title which was not three body problem the title is remembrance of earth's past that's the title of the full series and no one knows that because basically readers were like we're gonna pretend you didn't say that we're gonna come up with a little bit like game of thrones they didn't name game of thrones a song of fire and ice which is the actual title they're like game of thrones the first book that's gonna be the title of the whole thing because it's it's just i like when a certain you know the fans kind of decide for you that we're not gonna it's interesting when something succeeds and then the real like nuanced conversation is how much of it succeeded despite all this variables.

2:29:34Because often, and you could look at Steve Jobs and go, the answer is turtlenecks and carrot juice. But I mean, those are either completely irrelevant or in despite of, and it tends to be like one power law that exists. Correlation, not causation. Yes. And that's a real constant IQ test. Yes. So you're saying three body problem could be your vote for a book that succeeded in spite of a bad real title. And a slow first 500 pages of the 1 ,400. I've never read Dune, but I've heard that Dune goes real up and down as well. So my problem is -

2:30:06Tim Ferriss:I just stuck with the first one. Yeah, I read the first Dune. It was good. After Three-Body Problem, to me, it's just like, I read six Ian Banks books from the Culture series, and they were really good. It's just, it'll never be - What makes it so good? The Three-Body Problem? Yeah. I mean, I think Dune is a masterpiece, right? I think Herbert was a genius. The writing is not great. It's very, like, kind of just like literal notes. it's not funny at all it had to be translated as well too it had to be translated the characters are super like boring people like plain you know there's no character development this is a three by roll yes you're selling me well no the plot the plot is the best plot i've ever read in my life for anything the it is the most gripping rich plot and the concepts in the plot are so mind-bending and delicious and everything that i've ever thought was cool you know how like interstellar which i don't think was actually that great a movie but they had some killer concepts like you go to this planet and and time is different and you come back and your seven-year-old daughter or whatever is is 25 and it's like whoa right it has so much of things like that like the coolest thing i've ever heard like he now weaves it into the plot um and and and again it's really one big game theory i don't want to blow it for anyone but like in the first you know two you know 20 of the very first book the the plot is launched and it's one it's not a bunch of things it's one thing happens in the early part of the first book and then the rest of the book is basically playing out game theory what would happen how could this play out and it's 1400 pages of this is one story that's happening this one thing that happens and then what goes on from there so i i just think anyone who likes sci-fi or like space or like just uh uh it is you got to get through so the first book, the first book in the series is Three Body Crawl.

2:31:59It's called Three Body Crawl. And then there's The Dark Forest and then Death's End. And again, The Dark Forest is one of my favorite books of all time. And The Death End is also one of my, these are like two of my favorite absolute books. And again, people also, it's like, oh, the first book is slow, but that's only a sixth of the whole series. So that's what I would say. Well, I mean, Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson, the moon explodes in the first line. The first line of the book, the moon explodes. I love that. It was something like it was just after midday on a Sunday when the moon exploded. That's the first line of the book.

2:32:27Wow. It's pretty good. Boys, I appreciate you all. You're all fucking awesome. Tim, you're going traveling for a bit, so I'm not going to see you for a while. Yeah. Shame. What have you got going on? Where should people go to keep up to date with the shit that you've got happening?

2:32:37Tim Ferriss:Just go to tim.blog. Just put up a blog post talking about how nonfiction is imploding. Thanks to LL. Very good blog. If you want to see real sales numbers on disruption, that's there. Yeah, tim.blog. Sign up for the newsletter. Tim.blog slash Friday. day it's got two million subscribers it's fun it's free um so right until my book is out uh that can't no one can buy that so um that's fall of 27 so for you well i'll be who knows um waypointwide.com is my homeland on the internet and all my posts are up and they're usually pretty evergreen so that's still fun i think um but likewise i would say newsletter is the thing to do because i don't post that often and i only send an email out when i post something so it's not annoying and i always encourage people to get on board there uh highagency.com forward slash books um find out about oblimov who i spoke last time my 400 page russian novel where a man spends the first 50 pages worrying about how he's going to get out of bed now that's a having just criticized a man who's been 500 pages.

2:33:42Read it and see like watch Oblimov sit there. The most exciting time in bed. All right. My beauties, I appreciate you all. I'll see you again soon. Thank you. Let's go. Boys. Yes. There we go. All right. What time is it? Fun as shit. Yeah. Boom. Good job, everyone. This, the amount of treats was such a... I had so much fun. These are incredible. Thank you. Take some away. Yeah, they're fine. Take some away. That was so much fun.