Tim Ferriss: Feeling Stuck Right Now? (Use THIS 10-Minute Exercise to Stop Overthinking and Take Action)

21:07Jay Shetty:And I'm like, all of these techniques, they didn't have the language that we have, but the technique existed far back then. Talk to me about the, did you call it the bioelectric?

21:18Tim Ferriss:Bioelectric medicine.

21:19Jay Shetty:Medicine, yeah. Because you're talking about chips versus pills.

21:22Tim Ferriss:Yeah, chips or electricity versus pills.

21:24Jay Shetty:So explain to me what you mean by chips.

21:26Tim Ferriss:Well, just microchips. So actually using a device, which could be in the case of, I think it's Setpoint Medical, for instance, has an implant, which is the size of a omega-3 capsule. I think it's called Setpoint Medical. They were on the cover of the New York Times for this, and it just got approved. It goes in the neck. It's actually a very fast procedure and it applies stimulation to the vagus nerve, which runs right along the carotid arteries, basically. And it is used for rheumatoid arthritis. It gives some people incredible relief where they might have been incapacitated, laying on a couch, can't get up, have to elevate their legs, can't walk more than a few steps.

22:11Tim Ferriss:They get this implant and then boom, like two months later, they're running upstairs on a tour through europe with their husband i mean that's a real example it doesn't

22:18Jay Shetty:solve it it doesn't reverse it it just provides this is that's a very good question i i shouldn't

22:23Tim Ferriss:speak to that because i don't know enough about rheumatoid arthritis and what it looks like in terms of development over long periods of time what i what i will say is that broadly speaking this is controversial but it's um it's not that controversial the few scientists i interact with who look at this very closely, I think a lot of our psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, some of them, you may be predisposed to those things genetically, but I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start with acute infection, much like long COVID or long Lyme disease.

22:59Tim Ferriss:There's some acute immune system insult, often an infection, that leads to then chronic neuroinflammation. And when you address that neuroinflammation, a lot of the symptoms can abate, which is why there have been studies looking at just giving people who are depressed anti-inflammatories. And I'm not saying, by the way, anyone listening or watching that you should go gobble anti-inflammatories. There's side effects. Don't do that. But maybe there are other ways to address excessive inflammation. And it turns out vagus nerve stimulation could be one of those there are other approaches i can't recommend any current device out there i'm interacting with this scandinavian researcher who's amazing i'm hoping that at least in the u.s maybe in the next six months something will be available that people can grab i'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight being corroborated by science because there's a really cool tie-in breathing do breath work there are different types of breath work that absolutely seem to have an effect on the inflammatory reflex.

24:04Tim Ferriss:And that's actually part of the reason why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice, especially if they do it twice a day, like 10 to 20 minutes per session after about two weeks. It's so consistent, right? It's like for the first week, they're like, I don't know if this is doing anything. And then after like seven to 10 days, there seems to be something that happens and people are like, I'm so much calmer. I'm so much this. All right. There are a million different ways you could explain it, but let's throw one out there that doesn't really, I haven't really heard discussed that the rhythmic breathing that you entrain when you're doing that kind of sitting activates the vagus nerve.

24:44Tim Ferriss:If you use a stimulator, guess what? You use it five minutes in the morning, say for the ear, five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night, because the effects last about 12 hours okay and it takes about two weeks for most people to notice everything settle yeah well that's a strange coincidence and if you do box breathing or something like that like for people who are maybe tuning in for like oh meditation oh god like if i have to sit and focus on my breath one more time or you know imagine a candle or whatever it might be it's not necessarily for everybody. I get it. I mean, I, my monkey mind is on like high octane fuel.

25:22Tim Ferriss:I get it, but you could use an app that just helps you breathe, right? Or something box breathing or whatever it might be. Try that 10 minutes, twice a day for two weeks. See what happens. I think most folks will be very pleasantly surprised on the ancient wisdom side. Yeah. I've always been interested but skeptical interested in but skeptical of acupuncture skeptical because as with many modalities practitioners sometimes oversell it panacea for everything it's true psychedelics it's true with massage it's true for pt it's true for surgery it's like i can fix all your problems all right probably not however there there are a few aspects and i went to two universities in China.

26:08Tim Ferriss:I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin in this case. I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture on animals, how does that work, right? As far as we know, maybe there's not a whole lot of placebo effect with dogs, let's just say. So being able to use acupuncture in place of, say, anesthesia with animals, that's pretty weird. That's interesting. The other one that seems pretty compelling, there are several, but the other one is pregnancy, using acupuncture for fertility. So what on earth is going on? If that is actually a thing for the time being, let's say maybe it is.

26:49Tim Ferriss:And I know a few traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and they have walls of photos of babies. And I'm like, that's interesting. Now you can't underestimate the power of the mind and the placebo effect, which by the way people are like oh it's just placebo effect placebo effect is the craziest thing in the world but let's leave that alone for the moment one of the ways that you would stimulate can stimulate some of the fibers in the vagus nerve is with placement on the ear and you're applying electric current on something called this the simba concha right here the placement really matters it's very very specific and then you need another probe to you know ground or complete the circuit effectively.

27:28Tim Ferriss:That would be the five minutes of stimulation. You can also do it the neck, but the neck's quite uncomfortable. The placement of those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners put the needles.

27:40Jay Shetty:No way.

27:41Tim Ferriss:And electricity is not the only way you can do it, right? It's not the only way. I mean, there was a physician in France who experimented with taking ballpoint pens and pressing on different parts of the ear.

27:52Jay Shetty:Right.

27:52Tim Ferriss:Which, funny enough, that was in the 1900s, ended up getting retrofitted and adopted by a lot of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China. But the overlap's interesting, right? Like that's very interesting. And it's also, you have to wonder, it's like, man, how many thousands of years of trial and error did that take to figure out? And how did they figure it out too? Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. And I should say, as one voice of sanity, there's also a lot of stuff that has existed for a very long time that is probably nonsense right yeah of course yeah but suffice to say to answer your question bioelectric medicine is using electricity or electronics in place of drugs to avoid the side effects that being the primary to avoid the side effects to help establish homeostasis perhaps as opposed to overall blocking something or overall stimulating something you know smashing some receptor but then oh by the way it also has an affinity all these other receptors that we don't really want to mess with, but we can avoid it.

28:54Tim Ferriss:And there is a place for drugs. Look, I take prescription medication, right? It's like there is a place for it. But it's in at least the U.S. where it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through. You can advertise on television directly to patients selling drugs. It's outrageous. The pharmaceutical and industrial complex is a very real thing. And the incentives are very perverse in a lot of cases. So we are over-prescribed, over-medicated, without question.

29:30Jay Shetty:Yeah, it blew my mind when I moved to this country and saw those ads. I couldn't believe they were real. I was like, this has to be an SNL skit. Or like, it has to be some sort of comedic. I couldn't believe it. Because you don't have that in the UK. You just, you'd never see that.

29:43Tim Ferriss:Yeah.

29:43Jay Shetty:And so when I moved here, I was like, wow, it's literally telling me that this might kill me. Like, might kill you is a legitimate, you know.

29:50Tim Ferriss:In very, very fast, word-per-minute fine print.

29:54Jay Shetty:Yeah, it's unbelievable. No, I appreciate that.

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33:00Jay Shetty:a lot of what you spoke about you talked about you know doing the the lactate it was like six months to unlock you talked about the of the four four four four like four on, four off, four on, four off, three times a week, six months. And then you spoke about the idea of, uh, you know, two weeks of meditation twice a day to feel the benefits. What I find more and more fascinating, even in myself and what to speak of our community and the audience that tunes into shows like this is we know that everyone struggles with that initial discomfort. Like you said, you have to do it for two weeks to start feeling the benefits and noticing that, that calm or letting things settle.

33:36Jay Shetty:You have to do something for six months. what have you found to be the best startup strategy to a new habit to unlock its potential when it may take two weeks to unlock its benefit this might sound like a simplistic answer but it's

33:50Tim Ferriss:telling people that yeah do you know what i mean yeah because in many cases you're so right it's like hey study a language and you'll learn the language but you're setting someone up for failure in that example. And I use that just because most people are like, oh God, so much PTSD about learning languages. Right. But if you tell them like, Hey, here's what the graph looks like as you, you're going to have this type of experience. And then once you add this new grammatical construction, like you're going to have a bit of a trough of sorrow, don't worry about it. Right. You're going to plateau, but you're not actually plateauing.

34:23Tim Ferriss:Your mind is adjusting to involve this additional complexity. And then you kind of explain what like the stock chart of your brain is going to look like, then people don't freak out and the abandonment rate is going to be less. And so I think with something like meditation saying you may see benefits sooner, but experience seems to indicate that a switch has flipped around two weeks. So commit to two and a half weeks and do less than you think is necessary. Do less than you think you can do. And this applies to any new habit as far as I'm concerned. If you think you can do 20 minutes, but that's pushing it into redline territory, do 10.

35:09Do less than you think you can do because that is going to

35:13Tim Ferriss:contribute to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm. Don't bleed the stone. There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic and yada, yada, yada, rugged individual stuff that we find in many parts of the world, this is not a place to like show how much you can do if you're trying to adopt a new behavior. So with, with the meditation, I, I would just, I think it, it is undervalued how setting expectations can be the missing ingredient.

35:45Jay Shetty:It's just like, Hey,

35:46Tim Ferriss:if I were trying to sell one of my friends, which I do often, I would just say, look, much like ketosis or a ketogenic diet, it's pass-fail. It's binary. You can't do it 50%. The good news is you're going to know after two and a half weeks in the case of meditation, whether this works for you at all or not. And if it works, it could be pretty dramatic. But if you give up after a week, the whole thing's wasted. So just commit to two and a half. And if you need to do a bet with a friend or something to set stakes and incentivize yourself, so you'll be embarrassed if you stop like guess what that's useful too yeah and i talked a lot about that in the four hour chef like how do you actually set up incentives so that it's harder to quit these are very you know have your friend take some photos of you and your tighty whities and unflattering light and that'll get released into the wild if you don't do it for two and a half weeks or it's like a hundred dollar bet and your buddy your friend is going to donate that to your most hated political candidate in your name if you don't do it for two and a half weeks okay great yeah so good you're more likely to do it yeah everyone needs reasons yeah so so good uh i think that's the biggest one honestly it's just setting expectations and in the case of the the norwegian four by four uh this is a quirk of science and interpretation of science so they did do the six months and the effects seem to extend out to five years but that doesn't mean that you need six months.

37:16Jay Shetty:Right, right, right.

37:17Tim Ferriss:That was just the study design. Yes. So who knows? I would imagine that it's not all or nothing, that it's cumulative. And that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood about today. I said, well, like, what do we know and what do we not know? Because that was the study design. And that's, I'm sure, since been replicated and people are modeling that. But is it possible that instead of, say, four by four, so you know 16 minutes of this po2 max training is it possible that less time would work as long as you hit certain peak levels of lactate could a 10 minute could a five minute session of weight training work if you hit a certain minimum threshold question mark yeah who knows yeah right has anyone done three months no region protocol and looked at the effects yes or no maybe maybe not this is the kind of stuff that i also fund through my foundation right these are I get so tired of kind of chewing on my fingernails, wondering about these things that I just fund a lot of science, but there may be a smaller minimum effective dose for that stuff.

38:23Tim Ferriss:We'll see. Yeah, fascinating. It's the business of science, right? Yeah, absolutely. Trying not to fool yourself, setting things up so it's very hard for you to fool yourself or to bias.

38:32Jay Shetty:Yeah, so I like that. Yeah, under set expectations and do less than you think. That's a great one. Do less than you think, absolutely. Yeah, do less than you think is a brilliant, brilliant method. And I think we're so scared of saying that to our friends or people we love because we know everyone wants instant change. And so because people want instant change, we want to say, do this today and it will calm you down. And we know that isn't true because it's going to take a practice and a discipline and it might, but.

38:59Tim Ferriss:Yeah. I mean, there are some, there are some very fast returns and then other things take, seem to take more time. I interviewed years ago, someone named John Crystal, who I believe is the chair of psychiatry at Yale, or he was at the time. And he did a lot of, along with his colleagues, a lot of the seminal work on ketamine as an antidepressant in humans. And I think it was 0.5 milligrams per kilogram over X period of time. And it showed these amazing effects. But now the 0.5 milligrams per kilogram has become this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners including some scientists who are like this is the protocol and it's like well is it it's one protocol yeah yeah that was tested in that way but it doesn't mean that is the end all be all i would say also just on the ketamine front very risk compound high likelihood of addiction listen to that episode or just do some real deep dive before you ever consider having certainly any ketamine at home whether that's through johnson johnson esketamine spravato or through a clinic my recommendation is do not have lozenges or anything like that at home if you're going to do if you're going to pursue that for different applications i think it's very interesting for suicidality.

40:23Tim Ferriss:It's one of the few things that I've seen if someone is acutely at risk of hurting themselves in some cases with an infusion or an injection, a few hours later, they go from, I'm going to kill myself today to, I don't know what I was so upset about. That's crazy. That big. Yeah. I've seen that multiple times and so have other clinicians. That's one of the few interventions I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario that's pretty interesting. So, and I guess I'll stop there for the moment.

40:52Jay Shetty:I love it, man. This is what I wanted. I was like, I was like, you're one of the few guests. You're one of the few people you can truly do this with. Where I'm just like, Tim, I just want to know what you're fascinated by right now. Let my brain go crazy. But that's what I love about it. Like it's, it's, you know, that, that's what I love about talking to you or like learning from you over the years is that you're just so deeply curious about so many things happening at the same time. And they're just, and they're all just interesting and new and they help you be more curious and ask questions and, you know, and I appreciate that because I'm like, well, otherwise what's the point?

41:24Jay Shetty:Like, why are we doing this, you know?

41:26Tim Ferriss:Yeah, people can see why I need to deal with the double-edged sword of OCD.

41:31Jay Shetty:Yeah, no, I mean, I mean.

41:34Tim Ferriss:It's great when you're looking at science, but if you're looking at some mistake you made yesterday and you're thinking about that for four days straight, maybe not so helpful, you know?

41:42Jay Shetty:How did you make that? Was there ever a turn you needed to make?

41:45Tim Ferriss:Oh, yeah. I mean, that's why I did the antibiotic plus accelerated TMS. Oh, yeah.

41:51Jay Shetty:What helped you make that turn?

41:53Tim Ferriss:A few things, right? I think there's a degree of pain that, especially over long periods of time, you want relief from. And for some of us, that is just the looping ruminative mind that is turning on itself. So whether that's, could be any number of things, right? Could be. And in terms of OCD, like my mom's makes me look like a cakewalk with her OCD, but I'm not flipping light switches and not washing my hands, which is not denigrating any of that stuff. It's like people have different ways of it manifesting. For me, it's all internal. It's all internal. What if this, I should have said that loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, imagining outcomes, et cetera, perseverating on some conversation that I wish had gone a different way.

42:37Tim Ferriss:and it's exhausting it's really exhausting and uh you know rest in peace nolan williams unfortunately passed away but i was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because he pioneered at stanford also he was a real polymath a lot of very compelling research related to ibogaine. So ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from iboga taberneth, which is a psychedelic plant. In this case, the Bwiti tribe and others are using the root bark for these very long, super intense Mount Everest of psychedelic-like experiences. It is not to be trifled with. There are some very significant cardiac risks for certain people.

43:27Tim Ferriss:You can die taking this, unlike most psychedelics. And he was the first to really put under a fine scientific lens, some of the neuroanatomical changes, specifically in veterans. And Ibogaine is, it's a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans and specifically in cases of traumatic brain injury that's strange this is this is not really something you see it's not something that people had observed with other drugs including other psychedelics and it seems to relate to something called glial derived neurotrophic factor but suffice to say i connected with him about that and then it turned out this guy's not a one-trick pony.

44:19Tim Ferriss:He also is one of the world leaders in non-invasive brain stimulation and accelerated TMS. And I started looking at the literature and the results, and I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I mean, this reads like science fiction, number one. Number two, it seems unbelievable, like a total scam. But I know it's not a scam. These are very, very top-tier scientists. And when I realized that it could be applied to, well, a few things. backstory i always had self-described as someone who struggled with depression when i actually was able to address it most successfully i realized that the depression was born of fatigue which came from anxiety which interrupted my sleep so the domino to tip was actually the anxiety piece much like it's kind of like this is not the greatest comparison but like the vo2 max it's like that's right yeah that's the output you can point to yeah but the catalyst was actually the anxiety and i was like well yolo let's try it the safety profile looks really appealing the actual stimulation is relatively speaking pretty low power it's been around for decades it seems like mostly upside potential there are some risks involved people should be aware of and people can search accelerated tms and so on to find those but all in all attractive for someone who's experiencing in my case the amount of chronic mental anguish that's what kicked it off yeah how how accessible is that now so tms itself let's just say conventional tms is actually quite accessible much like ketamine clinics there are fly-by-night operations right so caveat emptor you got to do your homework but TMS is very widely accessible and often reimbursed by insurance.

46:14Tim Ferriss:Accelerated TMS, as far as I know, is not reimbursable by insurance at the moment. So it is available at certain clinics. There's one that I've used called Acacia Clinic or Acacia Clinics in Sunnyvale, California, but it's expensive. It's expensive. It's expensive for the five day. my hope and also part of the reason why i volunteered to be like one of the first 60 monkeys shot into space with the the d-cycloserine this very low-dose antibiotic and the one day is that if you compress the five days into one day suddenly the cost should be much much lower yeah of course dramatically lower and it's much more accessible because not that many people can take a week off of work completely off of work because your brain will be exhausted absolutely when you have this treatment i remember going in for my first day of stimulations got like nine hours of sleep i was feeling like a million bucks i could do jumping jacks all day had my first eight minute stimulation and i felt like i just pulled three all-nighters studying for a test i was so mentally tired so if you do it do not have any delusions of cranking out 50 minutes of work in between these stimulations ain't gonna happen but the one day man it's it could be the future for a lot of people and that is not widely available but people can do some digging there are clinics not a lot of them the two main hardware companies are brainsway that's one which i've used i've used both because i'm in my whole shtick and it's real it's part of the mission for me is being the guinea pig and taking the notes so that not everyone has to just in case there's collateral damage which sometimes there is uh brainsway has some very very sophisticated hardware and then mag venture is another one that has uh very well developed hardware as far as i know those are kind of the two front runners the other that i mentioned which focuses specifically on the one day amp a health i have not tested so i can't speak to that directly there seem to be credible people involved, but I can't, I haven't really done the due diligence.

48:26Jay Shetty:Yeah. Good to know. Good to know. I have so many friends and family members asking and wanting to discover. So very, very useful insight. Tim, I wanted to switch to some of the philosophical aspects you mentioned earlier, like the things that you're fascinated by right now. And I was thinking about even as a society, how we seem to kind of oscillate between this work-life balance to then hustle culture. And it seems that that just takes over the conversation for that period in time. So rewind back probably five to 10 years and hustle culture was the thing. Work-life balance has kind of made its comeback now.

49:03Jay Shetty:And then you could look back 25 years and we were talking about work-life balance when it first kind of probably entered the zeitgeist and it was preceded by this hustle intensity culture or whatever it was called then. And you're kind of talking about this idea of this achievement mindset that you had and has been useful. And then now looking at this acceptance mindset that, you know, you're almost looking at the value of both. And I think that's even this whole conversation, we're talking about the value of both or this and this, or, you know, the connection between old and new and being curious.

49:35Jay Shetty:And I find that with work-life balance and hustle culture or achievement, let's call it achievement, because hustle culture just sounds like working hard without maybe any direction. But achievement culture and acceptance culture, which feel like together they're so synergistic, yet we tend to just go between one or the other in different phases of our life. Where are you at with making sense of that for yourself and thinking about it for others?

50:03Tim Ferriss:Well, I'll say something might surprise people. So the first thing, as the guy who wrote a book called The 4-Hour Workweek, Like, I have no problem with 80-hour work weeks if there are good reasons behind it. So, I'll just let that settle for a second. And I'll add something that normally I wouldn't add to that, which is like, read the serenity prayer, the actual serenity prayer. Acceptance across the board for everything is effectively becoming a cow standing in the rain, right? That's just complacency, passivity. and then completely unrestrained achievement is just a greyhound running around a track chasing a rabbit and those dogs can't run very long but they can sprint so number one if you can't control or affect something that probably lands in the acceptance bucket right which is why i've not had social media on my phone for three or four years doom scrolling not helpful for a million different reasons i know people probably agree with this at face value nonetheless yeah like let's look at behavior right like show me what you do not what you say kind of situation it's like my friends even some of my most accomplished cheaper friends these are like mega stars within business i know one guy in particular such a smart guy he's so good he's got a wonderful family and he took x off his phone a few years ago and it's like he went through 20 years of therapy right it was like a month later like everything's better yeah and then i'm in a group thread with him and a few months ago he started sending links to things on x and i was like uh-oh you're back on the sauce when did that happen and he's like oh i got dragged back in the cesspool it's the worst it's like he's been it just came out of pow camp like he's a mess uh i mean if you're listening Sorry, not a mess, but it's just like, it's not an improvement.

52:02Tim Ferriss:It's a worsening of psychological state, right? So that stuff, it's like if you can't act on it, or if you're not going to act on it, that has to go in the acceptance bucket or in the ignore button, in the selective ignorance bucket. then on the achievement side for me i would say that as a way of kind of setting the table one of my friends josh waitskin my second ever podcast by the way uh he was the basis for searching for bobby fisher he's considered a chess prodigy he hates that doesn't really describe him well either because he's become world-class very like top one percent in a couple of different disciplines it's very systematic but one of his guiding tenets maxims is avoid the simmering six and that just means you're either off like you could be taking a nap under a set of bleachers or something or you're on like you are the great hound right you are completely focused and you're in sixth gear he's like avoid everything in between yeah so avoiding the simmering six and i and a lot of people i think are at risk of the gravitational pull of the default which is the simmering sex getting interrupted by text messages and emails and responding to everyone else's manufactured emergency and so on that's the simmering sex and that will just murder you psycho-emotionally.

53:26Tim Ferriss:So for me, I try to really oscillate between restfulness or sprint. The fact of the matter is, as much as I would like to think otherwise, like I'm a working dog, right? I'm like, I'm like a border collie, right? If, if idle hands are the devil's workshop, then, you know, by extension, it's like you leave a border collie trapped in an apartment long enough it's going to chew the cows the couch to pieces turn into a neurotic mess it's like a lot of people are like that i'm like that it's good for me to have a mission a project yeah me too um yeah it's just and i don't think anyone needs to apologize for that yeah uh so for instance like with this i have an 850 page draft of a book and it's like all right well what am I going to do with that beast?

54:15Tim Ferriss:I'll probably do a retreat where all I do is eat, sleep, exercise, right. That's it. And it will be full on as many hours a day as I can handle every day for a few weeks. And it's not going to be the four hour work week, but it's with an end point, with a very precise purpose that I feel good about, that I feel aligned with, and that's fine and then after that i will probably bookend it by booking something like three to seven days with a handful of close friends doing something to just park it in zero and i recognize that exact sequence of events will not apply to everybody but if you just use the mantra of avoid the simmering six i think you can get a lot of mileage out of it yeah i like

55:09Jay Shetty:that too. I think you're spot on. I think that's probably where I've netted out too, because I think that simmering six is the distraction and is where all the stress and the tension comes from where you're trying to balance both at all times perfectly or get distracted by, I'm trying to spend time with my family, but I'm still on my phone or I'm at work and I'm trying to make sure everything's okay at home. And you're never going to win that way ever. And you have to have these really clear. I was invited, yesterday was Sunday, and I was invited to a work thing last minute on a Saturday night.

55:46Jay Shetty:And years ago, I would have said yes immediately because I thought it was extremely valuable and I needed to be there. And if I wasn't there, then I'd miss out on opportunities. And I was saying to my wife, and I had to say it to her only to make myself feel better about myself. I was like, I'm so proud I said no, because I've really promised myself that my weekends are off time. And that wasn't the case in the beginning. And I'm glad it wasn't the case because I was sprinting and I needed that extra work and that was important. And I don't feel bad about it. It was the right thing to do. But at this point, this was the right thing to do, to be able to say, well, no, I really want a Sunday off.

56:20Jay Shetty:I don't want to run to a work thing in the middle of the day, which will probably take four hours. And I don't need to. It's not an emergency. I'm not solving anything. And yeah, what do you think is the biggest, obviously the simmering six is the obvious answer, but what do you think is the biggest thing people come up against when they're trying to do on and off? Like what's the hardest part of that? Your friend, for example, who quit X, felt the benefit, saw the growth, and then gets pulled back in.

56:46Tim Ferriss:I think he had too much time on his hands.

56:48Jay Shetty:Right, okay.

56:49Tim Ferriss:He was sort of post-economic and border collie. Yeah. He has a lot of time for unusual, rare reasons, right? but I would say that if you do not have a primary project or mission and it doesn't mean your job has to be something you love 24 7 like working to live and just having a job that you can tolerate

57:13Jay Shetty:that you're good at great like I actually think that's fine but if on the other hand let's just

57:18Tim Ferriss:say you're an entrepreneur and you're kind of floating around like maybe you have a few cool things you're pursuing, but there's no hell yes, kind of along the lines of Derek Sivers, you're going to be tempted to wander. And that's how you end up sitting on the toilet, looking at Instagram and you're like, I can't feel my legs. Oh, I've been here 45 minutes. That's how that happens. And I've been there. And it means you don't have a big enough yes. You need a bigger yes. And I would say that the avoid the simmering six though is unhelpful in so much as it's telling you what not to do. But that doesn't really give you a whole lot of direction.

57:58Tim Ferriss:So another way to frame it is actually quoting a friend of mine, Chris Saka, phenomenal, incredible guy, just like one of the best investors I've ever met. His story is nuts. And his question is, effectively, are you living offense or defense? So if you're responding to everyone else's agenda for your time in email, defense. Right. If, for instance, I don't know when this happened, maybe you've experienced this, but I guess people feel so stressed out and short on time that a lot of very busy friends of mine are now catching up on Sundays. Sundays is like their catch up on email day. So I get texts that are like about business stuff.

58:41Tim Ferriss:and my response has to be for sanity because if I engage with that, I'm playing defense and breaking my own rules and boundaries. So I'm just like, hey bud, exclamation point, sorry, don't do business on weekends. Like text me again on Monday, Tuesday, whatever. And Dr. Seuss has this amazing, Ted Geisel has this amazing quote, those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. It's like if somebody gets pissed off about that, guess what? let them opt out and with with all my friends they're like love that cool yeah talk to you this week yeah they're fine yeah so i would say aim for offense not defense offense means you're deciding on what you want to do and you're applying a certain amount of time or energy

59:27Jay Shetty:towards that yeah before you're reactive yeah you know jim collins the writer of author of good to

59:32Tim Ferriss:grace and built to last and these iconic books he tracks his creative hours and i think for every 365 day period he's got to have 1000 and something hours and he tracks it daily and if he's running behind on the count he's like something's got to change i don't take it to that level but i try to make before i manage in sense like when i really try to reserve the hours after i wake up for creative work to the extent that i can i actually think i do my best creative work incredibly late at night, but that is socially incompatible with any type of partner. So I've had to switch things around a little bit.

1:00:15Jay Shetty:Have you, wow. Have you really? Oh yeah.

1:00:17Tim Ferriss:That's impressive. I mean, my four hour work week, for our body, for our chef, all written between like 9 PM and 4 AM.

1:00:24Jay Shetty:I would do research during the day, but the actual synthesis writing, et cetera,

1:00:28Tim Ferriss:was all done very, very late at night. So how have you managed to change yourself

1:00:32Jay Shetty:to a morning person?

1:00:33Tim Ferriss:I don't think I am a morning person. I would say that there are a few things. So one is recognizing relationships are the meat of life. If you're vegan or something, it's the sustenance of life. I wrote this blog post, just went up like five days ago. I spent so long putting it together called, you know, the self-help trap, like what I've learned after 20 plus years of quote unquote optimizing myself, talking about some of this, but basically reorienting Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which by the way, Abraham himself never made a pyramid and he he added an update to that people are accustomed to thinking about self-actualization at the top yeah he actually added self-transcendence later and and it was always something that was moving and shifting but i have recognized for myself for quality of life for the experience of time dilation just getting more life out of your years right not just adding more years to your life, we could talk a lot about that.

1:01:40Tim Ferriss:Relationships, close friends, family. It sounds so self-evident, but how many people do we know? Maybe you look in the mirror and you see them who at the end of a year, if you ask them, did you spend as much time as you would have liked this last year with your 10 most important relationships? Almost everybody's going to say no. so really taking that on as a challenge means if i'm sacrificing 20 of my output because i'm forcing myself to pretend to cosplay as a morning person yeah that's fine yeah right now one could make the argument and it's not totally uh off base that well that's convenient for tim to say because you know he's had decades of putting things out that have luckily done well enough but i i don't think that does hold some water but it doesn't it doesn't really hold all the water that's that's not i don't think a real expression but the point is i have through sprinting right but not ending up at the simmering six over many decades right or like the simmering seven or eight which is even worse.

1:02:52Tim Ferriss:You're running hot. I have burned out so many times that coming back to the meditation, right? Do less than you think you can do. If I dial back, let's say I lose quote unquote lose 20 % and I don't burn out. Well, that's like playing sports and not getting injured, right? If you get injured and you're out for two months and then you have three months of rehab, you didn't save any time by being intense. You lost time. So I feel like also not being a morning person like some folks i have so many friends they're just like i wake up i'm on fire so jealous now playing with your fuel source can can help this actually but i feel like if even if i have less energy what that means is i just have to be very smart and selective about what i apply myself to so it makes me more selective with projects more focused on what i'm trying to do because i'm like all right friend x gets four hours of lightning in a bottle every morning I probably get maybe 90 minutes depending on how much caffeine I've had.

1:03:54So I need to make those 90 minutes count.

1:03:58Jay Shetty:Yeah.

1:04:00Tim Ferriss:And that's actually a helpful forcing function for me.

1:04:03Jay Shetty:Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think going back to what you were saying about doom scrolling and screen dome, I mean, this sounds again so basic, but it is the stuff we all struggle with. Like I had to really make a commitment that if I was on a screen, that I was only on one screen at a time. Because what I would find was sometimes my wife and I would sit down to watch a show in the evening. And I'm like, there's very little TV that gets my attention enough to really commit. And I'm not someone who's generally loves using their time to do that. But at the end of a long day of work and it's been busy and we've had dinner together, we've connected and you just kind of want to zone out.

1:04:45Jay Shetty:I don't have the energy. I'm more the other way. I have lots of energy in the morning. in the evening, I can hang out with friends or family, but I don't do creative work in the evening. I never have. And so mine's the opposite where I have less energy at that time. And so kind of switching off is kind of nice, but switching off and feeling like I wasted my off time is not a fun feeling. Like I don't enjoy that feeling. So we'd watch a show and I wasn't committed and then I'd be on my phone or I'd kind of be on my laptop too. And now I haven't achieved anything at work. I haven't doom scrolled well enough and the screen is boring me.

1:05:16Jay Shetty:And now I'm feeling like I'm wasting days. Like in the evening, I'm like adding all these hours up and going, God, I wasted like three hours in front of the TV and I didn't do anything. And all of a sudden, A, there was a show selection problem. So we sorted that out where I was like, okay, let's find something we actually care about watching. But the other part was just, okay, I'm going to leave my phone in another room where I just can't get it. I don't work at this time. So the laptop can't be near me. And I have to do this old school thing of like sitting in a theater in my own house, like saying, okay, I'm at the movies now.

1:05:48Jay Shetty:Like, what does it feel like to go to the movies and watch a movie, which we all used to do and go to the theater without any other distraction and actually enjoy or experience it? And it's, it's been huge for unlocking presence and enjoyment and entertainment, even, even from a stillness point of view, because I feel like we're not even doing rest properly, which is why we can't work properly.

1:06:12Tim Ferriss:oh god we could go so many directions here yeah no i know it's well i was just gonna say i mean i am very plugged in to technology and digital right i mean my my main business per se is actually angel investing which i've done since 2008 like that that's actually the the larger piece of my professional life from like an economic perspective so i'm constantly involved with tech. I lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years. And the people who created these tools, a lot of them, I mean, the social dilemma people can check out, treat it like smoking. Like it is

1:06:50Jay Shetty:incredibly bad for you, even in moderate doses.

1:06:54Tim Ferriss:So what I would suggest to folks, and I mentioned all of that being plugged into tech simply because if I were Amish and I'm like, I don't have any social apps on my phone, people are like, well, Tim can do it, but that's nonsense because he's an edge case. Like, no, no, no. Like my, a lot of what I do is predicated on knowing what is happening.

1:07:10Jay Shetty:Yeah. Same.

1:07:11Tim Ferriss:And I still have no social media apps on my phone. And what I would say to folks is even if the counter argument is, well, I need it for my business. Okay, fine. You can still access through a laptop and guess what? You can still record videos. You just have to batch upload them later or schedule them in advance. You just can't be self-interrupting with these apps on your phone. If that is within the realm of possibility, try for two weeks. And my feeling is if you can't do that, if your entire livelihood does not depend on it, you're addicted, just like

1:07:47Jay Shetty:an alcoholic, just like a smoker.

1:07:50Tim Ferriss:It means you have a problem, right? And I would say, look, I can talk about meditation and bioelectric medicine and this and that and the other thing. if you just get off of social media for two weeks just like my friend i think it will basically do the same amount of good for a lot of folks as 10 years of therapy if you're constantly tapping a vein with social media as you're doing that therapy also feelings on caffeine i think that's also true for cutting down on caffeine talk to me about that people are like i'm anxious i'm like how much coffee you drink like three to five cups i'm like that's liquid anxiety of course you're anxious.

1:08:27Tim Ferriss:So coming back to the fuel thing, it's like, maybe it's not a problem solving problem. Maybe it's just a biological issue. And caffeine is not a fuel, right? It's forcing you to use your fuel faster. And look, guys, I understand actually how chemistry works and the denosine and so on, but let's keep it simple, right? It's not adding fuel to the system. It is burning fuel faster. Also has some pretty profound effects on glucose levels too. If you ever wear a CGM and you have a bunch of coffee, it's like, oh wow, I'm suddenly way out of range. So when people have a caffeine crash, it's not necessarily because the caffeine is wearing off, because you still have trouble sleeping at night, it's because your glucose spikes and then crashes.

1:09:10Tim Ferriss:Uh-oh, we're back to the fuel problem again.

1:09:12Jay Shetty:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The fuel problem's there. All roads lead to fuel. We're looking for the four-hour fuel book now.

1:09:21Tim Ferriss:Got to chip away at this thousand page monster first.

1:09:24Jay Shetty:Yeah.

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1:12:15Jay Shetty:told me about the acceptance piece like what's been the what's been the hardest thing to wrap your head around with acceptance the idea of acceptance well i'll give two examples uh

1:12:25Tim Ferriss:the first is that personally doing any type of meditation that involves observing rather than suppressing or fixing right so if you have frustration coming up restlessness aversion just labeling it and allowing it to be like a mother consoling a crying child that's hard it's hard but i think it's a valuable practice so and that that's something that i've explored there are lots of good apps out there you know i'm involved with the way so and i used it but prior to getting involved with henry shookman but there are many good options right there's call in those headspace lots of different options but i would say that specifically exploring something that cultivates your ability to observe things that you would call uncomfortable or negative without trying to change them is valuable all right the second in terms of acceptance is relational humans are crazy man like every human's nuts like like irrationality is just table stakes yeah like we're not which is why any of the mark like the if the uh efficient market theory stuff where it's like we're all rational agents acting in our own best interest i'm like have you met have you actually walked out economist and met humans like what are you talking about uh so in relationships uh i i'll give a resource there's a audiobook there's no print version called fierce intimacy by terry real who is an amazing therapist you should have him on the show that guy's incredible and very opinionated very he just he's not one of those therapists who just echoes questions back and forth you're like terry you know what do you think he's like what do you think like he doesn't do that he's like let me tell you like you're being an idiot for these reasons and like you need to grow up because of these reasons he's not exactly like dr phil or anything but he's he's very very good at what he does and fierce intimacy along with his other materials and he's not the only person the gotmans are pretty interesting as well but terry real specifically has a number of principles that undergird his entire approach and one of them is when it comes to relationships objective reality doesn't exist so for instance right he gives this example i'm going to butcher it it's very funny when he tells it he's like all right, let's say husband and wife are out to dinner.

1:14:54Tim Ferriss:Waiter comes over, takes the order, walks away. And the husband says to the wife, honey, you don't need to yell. And she's like, I wasn't yelling. And he's like, yes, you were. And you see where this is going, right? And let's just suppose, and he gives this example, the husband says, well, honey, you know, I thought this might come up. So I actually hired professional audiologists and brought in recorders and based on the decibel level, let me show you. In fact, based on any conventional definition, you were yelling. Like, is that going to help? Of course not. It's going to be a disaster. So in terms of interacting with the significant other, as this context is describing, accepting that we, for each of us, our interpretation of reality, our experience of reality is real and if you try to fix it or win the situation by arguing over objective reality

1:15:51Jay Shetty:it is just a dead end and that is what we all do yeah it's what we all do that's literally all we

1:15:56Tim Ferriss:ever do i think i think men are not not to get too gendered but let's call a spade a spade guys uh like men are particularly bad in terms of habitually doing this women do it too but in effect accepting for instance someone's upset all right and trying to be curious and this is going to sound like some hand wavy you know kumbaya stuff but it's like trying to be curious before you react right that is sort of the key piece it also ties into all the productivity all everything is so related right it's just like do you have the space to think or are you just reacting to that text on a Sunday? You need the space.

1:16:37Tim Ferriss:And there are a lot of ways to cultivate it. One is meditation, sure, but it's not the only tool in the toolkit, right? By the way, if you've had three cups of coffee and your sympathetic system is in overdrive, what are you gonna do? You're gonna bite someone's head off.

1:16:48Jay Shetty:Yeah.

1:16:49Tim Ferriss:Right? So that's another lever you can pull. Okay. Fuel, are you depleted? Okay, well, let's fix that. And then on the relational piece, you gotta practice in the messy reality of relationships or it just doesn't count. You can read all the relationship books in the world. You got to practice it. And historically, I did not, to put it mildly, grow up in a household that modeled conflict resolution very well.

1:17:11Jay Shetty:Yeah, mine too.

1:17:12Tim Ferriss:Lots of yelling and screaming. It was, I didn't, if I learned anything, it was all of the most counterproductive ways to handle conflict. Yeah, me too. And I carried that into my relationships. Surprise, surprise. Didn't produce miracles of positivity. but in the last i'd say 10 years have become much much better uh oh terry real a debt of gratitude and my one of my exes who introduced me to terry terry's work and my friend kevin rose for that matter not to say terry is the end all be all just resonated with me just like different people have different parenting styles some people love dr becky kennedy i tend to resonate with her stuff but other people resonate with other things but for me when it comes to to return to your question acceptance man oh man does that matter a lot in relationships and there are many different iterations of it so those would be two right there's the how do i sit with uncomfortable feelings without the necessity of fixing them or suppressing them which by the way ties into workaholism and hustle culture and social media use compulsive social media use you're like i'm bored i don't like it i need to do x yes yes now some people might get a little pedantic and say bored isn't a feeling you get the idea yeah it's an experience you don't like that highlighting

1:18:34Jay Shetty:and that connectivity that you just put together but the main piece on how the objective reality is what we always debate is fascinating because it's the simmering six of relationships like it's it's the distraction it's the focal focal point that steals everything away because that's all we ever think is the thing to solve is objective reality. When, if you accept that, that's how that person felt in that moment, regardless of whatever objectively you experienced or you think objectively you experienced. And that's really hard to do because we're so wired to be like, but this is the truth. And in relationships, there's almost very little truth.

1:19:13Tim Ferriss:If perhaps like me, it sounds like, like you, you didn't, you grew up in a household where conflict haymakers were modeled really well, but resolution was not modeled well. I think his name is Marshall Rosenberg. Might be getting the name wrong, but Nonviolent Communication. Read the book. Yes, it is schlocky in the sense that there's a format and it can feel a little repetitive, but guess what? In the beginning, if you're coming from an upbringing that didn't teach you anything helpful on the conflict resolution side. You need a format. You need a template. And it's incredibly, incredibly helpful.

1:19:57Tim Ferriss:If only for, there's a whole process to it. People can just look it up. I'm sure Chachi PD or anything else will give you a good overview. But at the end, make a request. Don't just bitch and moan about how you feel, what your partner did. Have a request.

1:20:14Jay Shetty:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:20:15Tim Ferriss:Right? Right. Yeah. Don't just tell them what not to do. That's actually not helpful. And I really had this driven home. Part of the reason I like exploring all these weird different nooks and crannies is you realize how much you can copy and paste to other places. Yeah. So a friend of mine, Jason Niemer, he's the co-creator of something called Acro Yoga. You know, we're in Southern California. It's everywhere. so you go to a park and you see like people with other people on their feet and they're doing all sorts of cool stuff and in those circumstances basically partner acrobatics although it can be pretty chill if somebody is say like standing on your hands saying uh don't push your heel down is very unhelpful and actually kind of dangerous so instead of that you say more toe more toe right it's you always want to give them direction for what to do yes not what not to do yes and it applies to conflict resolution as well so that the nonviolent communication and also sometimes you can talk about the objective reality yeah but you can't do that when one or more people are dysregulated yes you just can't it's not gonna work and that also counts for yourself so sometimes right i'm in a great relationship right now my relationships have never been better like the last few years, every one of my relationships, they are as good as they have ever been better.

1:21:32Tim Ferriss:If I am feeling dysregulated, maybe I had too much coffee, maybe whatever it might be, not to throw coffee under the bus, but it is the world's most consumed stimulant. Too little sleep, a bunch of bullshit going on on the business side, somebody dropped a ball, whatever. And my partner wants to talk to me about something. If I'm not resourced, I'll just say, babe, I'm happy to talk about this. Let's do it at dinner. I am really unresourced right now. I'm just not in a place to have a good conversation about this. And I'm pretty pissed off about a few things. It has nothing to do with you. And she's like, okay, cool.

1:22:07Tim Ferriss:So you also on either side need to be able to agree that that's an option.

1:22:12Jay Shetty:Yeah. Yeah. And the productivity with that. Sometimes I find like, I'll say to my wife, like I've got a crazy week coming up. so just in advance i'm just letting you know that this week i may not have the same space and stillness that i usually have or presence that i usually have to to deal with something

1:22:28Tim Ferriss:because i can preempt how i'm gonna feel yeah based on you know and luckily you know i have

1:22:34Jay Shetty:a partner that understands that where i'm like hey i'm traveling this week i'm only literally back home for like three hours and then i'm back out and it's like just people being aware of what your week even looks like because we kind of walk around thinking our partner should know

1:22:46Tim Ferriss:Well, what does this sound like? This sounds a lot like what we were talking about with how do you get someone to do the two weeks of meditation? Setting expectations. You can have almost anything that you want in life if you manage expectations early.

1:23:02Jay Shetty:Yes, yes, exactly. And I think we assume that we know our schedule and that our partner should somehow know that we have a busy week this week because we're coming home like huffing and puffing or we're like, you know, whatever it is, we're on our phone and we're like, oh God, I got to, you know, it's, it's almost like we're trying to send all these cues without just spelling it out and just saying, hey, this is what my week looks like. And what does yours look like? And I try and do that a lot as well. It's fascinating. You said that we've been asking these questions about life and relationships and philosophy for like, you know, thousands of years.

1:23:33Jay Shetty:Forever. Yeah, forever, but at least documented thousands of years at this point. And I feel like we are still somewhat asking some of the same questions. We were mentioning this earlier, and I know you actually have a website that allows people to ask these questions. I want to ask, what are the questions that are worth answering? Because I feel like we ask a lot of questions, and now with AI, we're asking more questions than ever before, which by the way, I think is better than the answer generation that we grew up in, which was having the answer was smart, when we both know that asking the right question is smarter, which hopefully AI can help us get better at because we all have to get better at asking questions.

1:24:14Jay Shetty:But what are the questions that are worth asking? Because I just feel like we're distracted by a set of questions that are not valuable.

1:24:22Tim Ferriss:The questions that I keep returning to, a lot of them I've borrowed from different sources, right? And I pointed out, you know, the book right behind me, Letters from a Stoic, Seneca the Younger. That's the Penguin's Classic Edition. I've probably given away 100 copies of that book. stosis and buddhism also a lot of parallels a lot of overlap one would be and this is actually borrowed from politics someone who co-ran the war room for bill clinton put this in one of their books i bought i was on a road trip and i just grabbed it from his bookstore but the question stuck with me which i think they got from newt gingrich and it's like they also are diametrically opposed to newt politically but they were like he was ruthlessly efficient and effective at gaining control of the house and blah, blah, blah.

1:25:05Tim Ferriss:And the question was, are you hunting antelope or field mice? And the story behind it is effectively like, if you're a lion, sure, you can keep yourself alive by hunting field mice and just eating like 100 a day. Or you could put in the energy and the focus to kill an antelope. And then that lasts you a day or two or three or whatever the number might be. and that's a metaphor for in effect coming back to what we're talking about like are you doing a bunch of little micro projects putting out fires living on defense juggling 10 different kind of cool projects instead of one big yes if so you're eating field mice and it's like that's no way for a lion to live you can survive that's not really living like you need to hunt antelope so to encapsulate all of that into one question is are you hunting antelope or are you hunting field field mice.

1:25:58Jay Shetty:Do you ever hear people who just say, well, Tim, Jay, I don't want to be a lion. You know, you guys like being lions. You want to be lions. You want to go chase antelope. Like, I don't want to be a lion. I just want to chase film mice. Like, you know, like, what do you say to that? Because I always find it interesting. I feel like, again, mentally as a society, we go between, you know, type A winners, this, this, this versus, hey, I just want to have my lot in life and be happy.

1:26:23Tim Ferriss:I'm glad you actually, you're asking about this because I think lion, okay, king of the jungle, etc. It implies almost that the person using the metaphor might want to be an apex predator, king of the hill, whatever. That's an unfortunate side effect maybe of the picture that it paints, but the point is coming back to people falling apart when they have too much free time, right? This is a huge reason why Most retirements fail and people have their health go off a cliff as soon as they retire. In many cases, it's about knowing what your big thing is. Having a focus. And that's just what we need as humans.

1:27:06Tim Ferriss:Psychoemotionally, philosophically, humans are in the meaning making business. You can't do that with triaging email. You cannot fool yourself into thinking that that is deeply meaningful. There's a part of you that will know it is not and you will suffer accordingly. so uh that's how i would answer yeah i'm glad you went there because i think sometimes

1:27:25Jay Shetty:achievement mentality gets mixed with meaning making yeah in that people assume that oh you just there and there are some people who just want to win right and that's not even to do with meaning yeah so you could go kill a big antelope and still not win because you didn't have meaning as a human yeah well let me give i'll give i'll give a it's not even a counter example it's a

1:27:44Tim Ferriss:compatible example yeah let's just say it's a kindergarten teacher and her north star is like i'm i want to put as much time as possible into whatever makes the lives of these kids better yeah beautiful that's it yeah so that's the answer is doing is managing the bake sale for the pta adding to that if if those aren't the parents of your students no it's not no therefore words a no yeah right is responding to email from friends or texts from friends or asking you to go out to have drinks on a wednesday night going to contribute to that no it's actually gonna be kind of productive no right you can still have fun i'm not saying don't have fun but you can have a north star by the way it doesn't have to be one thing forever that can be very intimidating like what is my purpose in life what is my what is my mission it doesn't it doesn't have to be this permanent thing for me it generally isn't for me it's it's like i mean i do have overarching things that guide my behaviors values but uh i will just go completely immersive into fill in the blank bioelectric medicine for six months that's it that's all i care about how do i translate that into something usable yes in the real world yes or you know for like supporting science related to psychedelic assisted therapies and starting 2015 like for a long time that was it and if people are like well i want you to do policy work or this that related to it i'm like nope that's not my power zone like i am focused on science okay and i made and it's supporting the science not capitalizing on it so i had a rule like no investing in for-profit companies related to psychedelics.

1:29:28Tim Ferriss:Not that that makes someone, we need those. But I was like, for me, that's a hard boundary. Okay, great. I feel like I've kind of done what I set out to do in that world. So I've largely stopped. I'm out. I pass the baton, let other people do it. So it doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be some grand giant thing. It could be teaching your kids.

1:29:50Jay Shetty:Yeah, it's focus. It's central.

1:29:51Tim Ferriss:It could be, for instance, for me now, if I consider doing adding, I mean, I'm a promiscuous activity adder. I love hobbies and I'm just all over the place. And now that really focused on my current relationship that's going incredibly well, thankfully, right? Fingers crossed. and i and i borrowed this from a friend of mine kelly starrett who's an amazing performance coach and pt but at one point he told me because he also does tons of activities he said he's only adding new activities that consume time physical activities that he can do with his wife or kids yeah that's it no solo activities it's like wow what a great forcing function yeah okay cool so with my partner that's it it's like what can we do together okay and you can change your mind six months later yeah it's like okay for now that's it yeah only adding new time-consuming hobbies yeah if i can do them with her that's absolutely that's that's a great question that's it that i think counts as a big yes yes yes yeah so that's a great question yeah i'm glad to be unpacked earlier yeah yes that's one uh you know another one which i i think about and have been thinking more and more about is what if I could only fix this only fix this is even tricky with achiever types what if I could only subtract instead of add all right so I'm sure this is true just about everywhere with humans but you have some type of medical issue or you're trying to achieve x you want to add things what new software can I use what new magic supplement can I take?

1:31:28Tim Ferriss:Add, add, add, add, add, right? What books can I read? Well, what if you turn all that around and you're like, what if I could only achieve whatever the goal is or solve the problem by stopping reading certain categories of thing? Example given, getting rid of your social media on your phone, right? What if, this is not medical advice, just informational example, but I am incredibly i think intermittent fasting and fast mimicking diets are incredibly undervalued incredibly undervalued so cutting food out could be better than figuring out the right this is a harder conversation to have with doctors because they're generally in the business of adding because they only get 11 minutes on average per patient in the u.s right but for instance you know i've seen it's like i could take trisepatide or glp1 to try to and there might be some reasons for it neuroprotection and so on.

1:32:23Tim Ferriss:But I could do that to try to get my metabolic health under control. But I could also do intermittent fasting, which is portable, proven, right? Humans have been going periods without food for a very, very long time since before we were humans, so to speak, all the sapiens. And the changes that you see with something like, and just to define what I'm talking about specifically, in my case, intermittent fasting would be 16 hours of fasting, eight hour feeding window. And generally within that eight hour feeding window, I'm having two big meals. That's it. And it's Mark Mattson is a scientist, M-A-T-T-S-O-N, who's done a lot on this, but you want to have at least 16 hours so that you deplete your liver of glycogen and then your body develops the machinery to turn on ketones more effectively, right?

1:33:15Tim Ferriss:But you do that, I mean, my entire family has insulin insensitivity. We have a lot of wonky genetics for this stuff. And if you're getting regular testing, don't just do fasting glucose, get your insulin measured, and also do an oral glucose tolerance test. There's a lot more you should test, but at least hit those three. And after four to six weeks of intermittent fasting, number one, all of my energy dips that I used to remedy with caffeine, gone. Like completely gone. I just sustained energy. and when i woke up i was awake all right one of the benefits of ketones uh and my lab work the oral glucose tolerance test my doctors were like a plus plus wow four to six weeks that's nothing that is nothing it's also well we can come to if we want to talk about asceticism and just like the actual i think the values that are a little more esoteric like fasting and stuff abstaining i think there's a lot to it q seneca it's got a lot on that but what if you could only subtract and you could do that also by looking at what you're spending your time on like do an 80 20 analysis but identify the peak energy drainers in terms of activities people etc okay what if you

1:34:27Jay Shetty:you could only remove you can't add more stuff yeah that's a great question right so how do you

1:34:32Tim Ferriss:how do you develop a system to block or say no to these things totally okay subtraction subtraction As a flip, I would say on the default, very helpful. Similarly, you could ask whatever your common practice is or whatever rule you have in place. Like what if I did the opposite for 48 hours or a week? This what if I did the opposite I think is very powerful.

1:34:58Jay Shetty:Give me an example of something that you could flip that way.

1:35:00Tim Ferriss:My first job out of college was as a technical sales guy at a mass data storage company. So And we're selling at the time, I mean, it's laughable now, but, you know, petabytes. Oh, my God. These network storage systems to movie studios and National Geologic Survey and so on. All of the experienced sales guys got in the office whenever they got in the office. Let's call it nine. And then from nine to five, they're sending emails and making cold calls. Yeah. Right. Trying to reach CTOs and CEOs mostly. And I was having terrible results doing this. And most of them were having terrible results, but that's how they did it.

1:35:40Tim Ferriss:So what do I know? I'm fresh out of college, so I was just copying them. And at some point, I'm like, this sucks. And I was one of the lowest paid people in the company. I'm like, I'm living in a very expensive part of the country. This is in the Bay Area. It's like I'm eating a jack-in-the-box, for God's sake, through the drive-through. If I'm going to make more money with commissions, I need to solve this. So I was like, all right, what if I did the opposite? What's the opposite? don't make any calls between nine to five okay and i started making calls between seven and nine and then from five to seven and what i figured out very quickly is that part of the reason the results were so bad between nine to five is cto's and ceos are busy of course they are so they have gatekeepers they have they have bulletproof vests in the form of people who say no yeah and those people are usually gone yeah before nine and they're gone after five yeah and so i had multiple experiences of calling pretty large companies and literally the person who answered the phone like a receptionist was the president or ceo that's crazy within the span of i want to say two or three months two very large competitors who had new york and la offices i sold i outsold all of our largest competitor which i think was publicly traded even then outsold their entire offices combined well by doing what just by doing the opposite yeah because if it's not working yeah Yeah, if it's not working, try the opposite.

1:37:05Tim Ferriss:And if that doesn't work, okay, try something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, with the podcast, for instance, you're like everybody, almost everybody, even still today, offers advertisers net 30 terms, net 60 terms. For people who don't know what that means, that means that you run the ad, they don't pay for it for 30 to 60 days. And that can create a lot of complexity because you need someone to chase them down. There are going to be people who relate. There are lots of invoices and accounts payable, accounts receivable. There's all sorts of shenanigans that goes on. and I was like, all right, well, what's the opposite?

1:37:34Tim Ferriss:Pre-payment, that's it, everybody pre-pays. What does that look like? Okay, and another maxim, I guess, of mine is like, try the ideal thing first. You can always do the standard later or you can do the complicated thing later. But like, what would my dream be? My dream would be people pay in advance and was able to make it work. And I was like, wow, well, I'm glad we tried that first.

1:37:55Jay Shetty:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:37:56Tim Ferriss:And there are a lot of examples like that.

1:37:59Jay Shetty:These are great questions

1:38:00Tim Ferriss:and everyone can find them at tim.blog is is the website there are literally thousands of pages of free stuff um if you go to tim.blog slash 17 however you want to spell it the number or spell it out and that there's a pdf with like 17 of these questions amazing and i use them all

1:38:17Jay Shetty:the time i still use them all the time when you say all the time do you have a regimen of how

1:38:20Tim Ferriss:often you reuse them or just whenever it feels right like it's it's more when they feel right So I would say most frequently, it's like if I'm starting to cry my teeth or just wake up and I've got the type of groan, it's like, eh, probably time to break out the toolkit. Something is not, something's chafing. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or on the flip side, for instance, I have one or two startups that I'm going to be getting involved with. And they're going to be very exciting, big commit projects. Oh, wow. And it's like, okay, these are going to be very fast moving, very competitive. Let me test a whole bunch of assumptions about these industries because I'm advising typically to be helpful.

1:39:12Tim Ferriss:and I will pull these questions out.

1:39:15Jay Shetty:Yeah.

1:39:15Tim Ferriss:I'm like, what does everyone say you need to do? Yeah, yeah. Okay, is there anything to support that? Or like science, is it just that somebody did that first and then everybody else copied and they're like, well, that's just how it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is usually the case. Yeah. Okay. You know, what does doing the opposite look like? What might that look like? And 80 % of it's going to get thrown out, but you don't need 100%.

1:39:36Jay Shetty:Yeah.

1:39:36Tim Ferriss:You just need one or two little levers. So I use it for the good stuff too.

1:39:41Jay Shetty:Yeah. No, I love that. I love having a core base of questions to come back to rather than just reminders or reflections or questions. Just great because you can, you can usually tell straight away that you've been chasing too many field mice.

1:39:57Tim Ferriss:exactly and what i like about that is it's you know i've tried for myself over time to make these questions like tighter and tighter and tighter because when i'm running around even if i'm not journaling if i'm just sitting on a train ride or a plane and i'm thinking to myself man why am i so stressed out yeah right i have other tools that i'll use uh people might be familiar with some of them from the four-hour work week and i didn't create them like 80 20 analysis, et cetera. Calendar reviews, past year reviews, all that stuff for your setting. But you can just sit there and look out the window and ponder some of these questions.

1:40:32Jay Shetty:And then you're like, hmm, too many field mice.

1:40:35Tim Ferriss:Too many field mice. I'm always slightly hungry. Why? Existentially, there's some malaise. Why? I'm eating field mice.

1:40:42Jay Shetty:Yeah. It's when we were walking over to the studio and we were talking on the way and I was yeah, like, I feel like I've, this is finally a year where I'm know what to say no to what to say, right. It's, it's that I didn't ask you in that way. And I love that language for it because it was that I was, I spent years over committing, under committing, not know, you know, all that kind of all the, all the versions of it. Like you just said, like do the ideal, do the opposite, figure it out. And then, and then you start going, okay, no, I've finally found a flow through asking these questions. And guess what?

1:41:13Jay Shetty:The flow will be disrupted again by something else. and so those questions will become valuable again.

1:41:18Tim Ferriss:Yeah, you're never, it's not set it and forget it.

1:41:20Jay Shetty:Exactly, yeah.

1:41:21Tim Ferriss:It's like meditating or weightlifting or whatever. I guess it's a practice. So you come back to it.

1:41:27Jay Shetty:Yeah.

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1:44:17Jay Shetty:I also find like if you just get good at what, if you can figure out the process of doing one thing well, that process usually helps you do multiple things well.

1:44:26Tim Ferriss:Oh, it's all the same. Right?

1:44:27Jay Shetty:As far as I can tell. Don't you feel that way? Like, yeah. For sure.

1:44:30Tim Ferriss:It's easy to lose sight of that, right? It's like I was just in New Mexico doing a short meditation retreat, which I find helpful. Nothing like what you've done, but yeah, sure. A little check in with some teachers. And one of the meditation teachers, Valerie at Mountain Cloud in San Francisco, used to be a very high level, like world-class flute player. she and I were comparing notes on in her case flute and then I used to compete in archery and we're comparing notes and I realized holy shit I totally I was having some challenges with meditation I was having a really hard time with this retreat I was just really frustrated a lot of the time and I thought to myself oh wow her discussing flute made me think of archery and there are all of these things from archery that I can just copy and paste directly into meditation and then literally right after that the next three sets totally different world and i was like wow how funny it is that even at this point after making a career of drawing parallels between fields i had sat there and i'm like i need to get better at meditating and hadn't even looked in other areas

1:45:39Jay Shetty:of my life to copy and paste literally yeah i was like dummy god come on ferris no i feel like that all the time i was i was uh this recently i got i mean not that i i'm not even sure if i'm gonna do it for real but it was like i got sent an audition for an acting gig and it was interesting the role was interesting and i was like oh this is a bit flattering this is a bit fun like let's see and then like all the like fear came in around like oh my god what if i do it and i fail and like what if i send an audition tape and i look like a fool and what if someone like sees this and then thinks all my other stuff isn't you know whatever all the stuff that and and i was like wait a minute like why am I and I was like oh of course I'm scared because I haven't got a coach and I haven't done any classes to see if I even enjoy it or like it and I haven't even done the scales version of like you know making different faces or and then and then I got a coach and it was like within hours I was like oh I could do this well I could give it a go if I wanted to like I could give an audition not saying I could get the role I could do the audition with a little bit of confidence because now I had a system and I had tools and the coach would talk about how like he was like you know if you're doing theater you got to be able to like be big and he goes so I always try and get everyone to be a 10 and so you start at a 10 and then for tv you roll that emotion

1:46:57Tim Ferriss:back down I'm so introverted this is like my nightmare yeah well I remember doing a little bit of tv way back in the day and they're like okay just more energy more energy and they did they kept telling me more energy and I'm just like bro maybe this isn't for me

1:47:11Jay Shetty:but for me it was the technique it was like really helpful to go he's like acted as a 10 and then for tv you'd roll it back into a two and i was like what a cool like technique and i was like oh yeah that makes sense and i i was i was actually gonna ask you have you read the book

1:47:25Tim Ferriss:the zen of archery yeah yeah yeah i thought so i was like i was thinking about i've got some

1:47:30Jay Shetty:favorite stories from that book it's a great book i'll come from another one because i was

1:47:35Tim Ferriss:talking about music and it ties into a lot of what we're talking about one of my favorite short books i can't remember who recommended this to me might have been seth godin it's called the art of possibility by i want to say benjamin zander i'm blanking on his wife's name which is embarrassing but zander z-a-n-d-e-r and it's a conductor very high level like orchestral conductor and it is a wonderful book it ties into everything that we're talking about so for folks who want I think it's like 150 pages or something. Really, really exceptional book. Wow. Yeah.

1:48:11Jay Shetty:Yeah, that's cool. I love it. Tim, you've been so fun to talk to as always. This is like - Yeah, my pleasure, man. So you're such a fascinating individual, truly. And I'm so grateful that you've always been the human guinea pig because it's fun being in your mind and talking to you just about things you're exploring because I think it brings back a zest for life naturally. It's contagious. It creates this curiosity in everyone. And at the same time, I think we've talked about so many practical things that people can actually apply in their lives. I wanted to end with two segments. One of them is a bunch of questions that we just got from our audience that we love that I wanted to throw at you.

1:48:47Tim Ferriss:You want me to keep my answers short or what do you want?

1:48:49Jay Shetty:No, these ones you can flow a bit. Just riff. Yeah, you can riff a bit. These are questions, kind of what you were saying, questions that you ask repeatedly. There are certain questions that we found our audience loves knowing the answer to from different people. And so we throw them out to you. so this one is what makes a good friend what makes a good friend that is a damn good question

1:49:09Tim Ferriss:i would say it's someone who says what they mean means what they say who's reliable you know someone you can share your joys and sorrows with over time i mean that's about it i would say that over time this applies across the board intelligence in quotation marks because what does that even mean has become less and less important to me like trustworthiness and reliability come way before that now yeah not to say my friends are stupid like my friends tend to be you know they tend to be pretty smart but i'm not sorting first by that yeah i love everyone

1:49:50Jay Shetty:who's made it now is wondering wait a minute that makes sense what's the difference between being efficient and cutting corners?

1:49:59Tim Ferriss:I mean, what comes to mind for me is cutting corners implies aiming for short-term gain, but long-term side effects or consequences, right? Cutting corners implies you're not doing something you should do. And I would expand that further just to say that I do not focus on efficiency as much as people think. Efficiency, and I'm borrowing from Peter Drucker here, also the effective executive, everybody should read that. Holy cow, what a great book but peter drucker paraphrasing effectiveness is doing the right things and then efficiency is doing things right the way i would reframe that is like what you do like picking your big yes matters a lot more than how you get there it's kind of like if you're starting in kansas and you're intending to go to california but you're pointing towards new york it's like you could be mario andretti yeah doesn't matter you're going the wrong direction yeah so the what matters a lot more.

1:50:52Jay Shetty:Yeah. What advice has made you the most money? These are good questions. I like these.

1:50:59Tim Ferriss:It's hard to attribute to one person. I wish I could, but it's, it's from a couple of different folks. Well, I'll actually give a nod to some folks who have informed the thinking, aiming to be a category of one. So don't, don't aim to be the best. Although I think that's fine. Once you do what's what I'm about to describe aim to be the only, right? And we were chatting a bit before we started recording about how the podcast landscape has changed and it would be very hard to start my show now absolutely right you would need to be more probably narrowly focused and differentiated in a bunch of different ways so for that there's a great essay if you can find online at kk.org kevin kelly wrote 1000 true fans i think it was true 10 years ago and it is going to become ultra ultra true is ai starts to gobble everything 1000 true fans you got to read it the law of category is a chapter from the 22 immutable laws of marketing i think i put it i think i excerpted it in tools of titans or tribe of mentors because that chapter had a huge impact blue ocean strategy also those are all related yeah so so the advice to basically aim to be the only definitely one another one would be this relates to i guess the angel investing and so on is to and mark andreason very famous entrepreneur and technologist and investor but also uh the late scott adams controversial guy but certainly was very good at what he did with dilbert had had similar echoes of this basically talking about two things the first is that trying to become top 1 % and this relates to the first point, like Michael Jordan in basketball.

1:52:44Tim Ferriss:Very hard. Yo-yo-ma, very hard. Almost everybody's going to get cut. But if you can be top, say, 25 % in two fields that are rarely combined, right? Software development, although AI is going to kill that, but software and let's just say debate or a law degree. Oh, that's interesting. so i tend to think about combining top 25 percent of of fields that are rarely combined and then the the last one would be choosing projects based on acquiring skills and either building or deepening relationships that transcend that project because a lot of my projects fail by any external metric but if i'm building friendships with very interesting people who are smart and I'm developing skills that are kind of transferable over time.

1:53:36Tim Ferriss:You just win. It's very hard not to win.

1:53:40Jay Shetty:That's great advice. That's huge. There's so much in there. Huge advice. Thank you. This one. What's something that the top 1 % obsess over that most people never even think about?

1:53:51Tim Ferriss:I mean, this is going to sound self-serving because my 850 page book is about this. uh saying no the absolute sacredness of focus they're all i mean some people are better at this than others but in their own way they are very very militant about that in a way that's very different from say the top 40 yeah right like the top one to five percent even if they don't realize it have set up systems or they have employees or they have you know no available email address or whatever or unusual ways to calendar even if they don't realize it they're very very

1:54:32Jay Shetty:good at firewalling their attention what's the allure of yes like what is the allure is it people pleasing is it distraction is it busyness like what have you found to be the i think those

1:54:42Tim Ferriss:are all good answers right so i think there's fomo because everything in modern marketing is

1:54:48Jay Shetty:intended to foster fear of missing out but if you only have one good idea or one good chance you're

1:54:53Tim Ferriss:screwed yeah you you need to develop and you only do this through experimentation and time on the field the confidence in your ability to generate or capitalize on opportunities right this is incredibly important and i i mentioned angel investing a bit for people who don't know that just means investing and in my case in companies very very early right so when it's two people and an idea on a napkin, investing in those people. If you don't have the ability to say no, you run out of money, your debt game over. That's the end of your angel investing, right? Because most of them are going to go to zero.

1:55:29Tim Ferriss:And I would say that that seems like something that doesn't apply everywhere else, but guess what? You can make more money later. As far as we know, you can't create more time later back to Seneca on the shortness of life. And people are really burning time in ways they will realize are pretty terrifying, but FOMO is a piece of it. People-pleasing is another, which generally is short-term, nice, long-term mean. You can always end up paying the piper with that one. It's like, you're going to have to have an uncomfortable conversation. Do you want to have two years of pain before that, or do you want to just do that now.

1:56:10Tim Ferriss:Then I would say field mice. If you don't have an antelope and someone else is like, hey, come help me with my antelope. Hey, why don't you come to my party about my antelope? You're like, antelope, sexy. All right, sure. I'll say yes to your party. Sure. I'll come to your bat mitzvah and magic show. Sure. I'll do this. Sure. I'll do that. And before you know it, your calendar is full of field mice. Those are some of the pieces. you can spend quite a lot of time on on that diagnosing it but those are a few of the big ones

1:56:45Jay Shetty:absolutely great answers all right uh what's the emotional cost of constantly trying to improve

1:56:50Tim Ferriss:yourself the emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself in a vacuum without the acceptance piece is that you always think you're broken and that is too high a cost for anyone to pay it's an expanded discussion in the the self-help trap blog post that i wrote by the way i think it's probably now within 24 hours i knew it was going to be my most popular blog post of the last 10 years probably wow it's wild i didn't know if it would resonate but yeah holy shit so the cost to constantly improve yourself almost by definition you have to constantly be looking for ways to fix yourself, which means you're looking for ways you're broken.

1:57:31Tim Ferriss:And that means you're always in the red, right? There's always one more problem. And so the feeling of peace eludes you by one more workshop, one more book, one more retreat, one more psychedelic, whatever it is, you're always going to be one step behind. If that's the only lens through which you're looking at things. The achievement, self-improvement side. If you have the acceptance side, then you can start to balance out the wobble board. So I would say that's what comes to mind.

1:58:03Jay Shetty:Yeah. It's almost like the old idea of climbing the mountain and pausing to look at the view and then climb some more and looking at the view. And you'd never go on a hike and not stop and look at the view. It's a ridiculous idea. You'd never just go, I'm only going to look at the view and I get to the top and then there is no top because you just keep discovering a new top. And it's like, no, I grew, we got to a flat piece of land and then I stopped and we had a little, you know, sandwiches and had some lunch and looked at the view and had a bit of peace and appreciated how far we'd come.

1:58:34Tim Ferriss:And furthermore, I'll just add to this, the hyper individualism of most self-help, I think is very problematic. And I want to keep this not, prevent it from becoming a TED Talk, but Pema Chodron has a really great poem who Henry Schuchman introduced me to, actually. And I won't be able to recite it because it's pretty long, but it effectively, it's from When Things Fall Apart.

1:59:02Jay Shetty:Yeah, yeah, great book.

1:59:03Tim Ferriss:And it talks about ascending the mountaintop, just as you were describing, And the problem with that is that you leave your alcoholic sister, your schizophrenic friend behind. And then when you get to the top, you realize, oh, it just descends. And actually the mountain descends back into the messiness of human relationships. So that's, if you want to be on the playing field.

1:59:29Jay Shetty:Yeah, that's powerful.

1:59:30Tim Ferriss:I think it really... Another question, like a question that I'm asking myself right now, which is not one of those 17, is what if almost everything you did or project you added had to improve your relational life somehow? That's the criteria.

1:59:47Jay Shetty:Because that's your antelope right now. Yeah.

1:59:50Tim Ferriss:Well, it also feeds and reinforces and strengthens everything else. Or what if, just to make it simple, you put together your to-do list. What if for the next week, two weeks, the first thing you had to do was one that was going to improve your relationships some way? By the way, it doesn't need to be a big thing.

2:00:09Jay Shetty:Yeah.

2:00:10Tim Ferriss:Sure. It could be having that long overdue hard conversation with your parents, but that's a heavy lift. It could also be saying hi to your significant other in the morning and kissing him or her on the cheek before you jump on your phone. Right. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Totally.

2:00:25Jay Shetty:Yeah. I lost one of these. If someone feels behind in life, what would you tell them?

2:00:31Tim Ferriss:I'd say a few things. I'd say, number one, it's never too late. I've seen so many examples of people doing amazing stuff starting in their 50s, 60s, 70s. Jim Collins actually has a new book. I don't know if it's out yet, but What to Make of a Life profiles something like 30 people. And these are incredible examples of success. And a lot of them did their most important work in their 50s 60s and 70s so it's not too late number one and number two uh i'd recommend i'm giving so many book recommendations it's great just like oh god we'll make it we'll make a list from this podcast yeah so 4 000 weeks by oliver berkman oh i love that i think is a phenomenal book and there's a chapter in that book specifically you can find it online called cosmic insignificance therapy and people should check this out i i and this is not some people are like oh tim's become so nihilistic i'm like no no no no this isn't nihilism but you can make your problems seem

2:01:33Jay Shetty:less life or death by zooming out and oliver does this very well yeah right a friend of mine

2:01:39Tim Ferriss:ed cook he's a world-class memory competitor for a long time he trained i think it was joan allaire writer to become national memory champion in the u.s in a book called moonwalking with Einstein. I mean, the guy's a stud. And Ed Cook will do the same thing, even though I don't even think he knows who Oliver Berkman is, which is imagine zooming out to above his house. If he's really stressed out, zoom above his house, then zoom out to above the city, then the country, then out to seeing the planet, then zoom out even further looking at the solar system. And there's something to it that almost always takes some of the pressure out of the tires.

2:02:17Tim Ferriss:absolutely and it's like okay at the end of the day and i don't think this is bad news but like we are a bunch of monkeys on a spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos right so maybe the fact that somebody said a you know sent a really pissy email to you like ah like in the grand scheme of things yeah yeah like okay it's and i need that for myself too i'm not like wagging a finger at people i'm like look i can get wound up about that i'm really good in crisis and with giant like projects and problems. It's the dumbest shit in the world. Like somebody cuts me off at the buffet line and like an airplane lounge or something.

2:02:50Tim Ferriss:And I'm just like, really, that's what you're going to get wound up about for like two days. Like for the next eight hour flight, you're going to think about that guy. What's wrong with you? So trust me, it's like, I'm drinking the medicine too.

2:03:00Jay Shetty:Yeah, absolutely. No, no, I can relate to both. And it's both. It's like, there's times in life where thinking what you do matters is everything. And then there's times in life that embracing your own insignificance is the only way to function.

2:03:14Tim Ferriss:Yeah, there's a great Bertrand Russell quote. It's along the lines of the sure sign of impending nervous breakdown is taking one's work incredibly seriously.

2:03:24Jay Shetty:Something like that. I'm butchering it, but it's very close.

2:03:27Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I like that. And the dose makes the poison, right? Like you have to believe in what you're doing. Yeah. And at the same time kind of recognize like we're all in the moment show here.

2:03:38Jay Shetty:Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. As the Buddha would say, you have to hold a bird in your hand, but not too tightly. It's like you hold it too tightly, you suffocate it. And if you don't hold it at all, then you can't help it. And so it's hard. It's hard. And you're always going to go in between.

2:03:55Tim Ferriss:Yeah, you got to crush a few birds first and let a few go to figure it out. Exactly.

2:03:58Jay Shetty:Yeah, sadly. Tim, we end every episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one sentence maximum. So these are short. So Tim, these are your final five. Question number one, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

2:04:11Tim Ferriss:Don't believe everything you think.

2:04:14Jay Shetty:Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

2:04:17Tim Ferriss:You need money to make money.

2:04:19Jay Shetty:Question number three, what did you used to value that you don't value anymore?

2:04:24Tim Ferriss:Achievement without acceptance.

2:04:26Jay Shetty:What did you never value before but that you do deeply value now?

2:04:31Tim Ferriss:Emotional experience. Really? yeah i mean i thought emotions were just limbic system liabilities for a long time what changed your mind on that well a few things i mean i realized you just can't get around it like who are we kidding right like no but i think it's a really good conversation that's that's one right you just can't get around it so coming back to the serenity prayer it's like yeah good luck with that ferris uh and even if you could become spock you're going to interact with people who are not Spock. So we're right back at square one. And that's one. And secondly, there's quite a long story behind this that I won't get into, but - You can if you want.

2:05:12Tim Ferriss:Yeah. I would just say to experience the full richness of being human, you have to embrace being human. And a very large part of that is emotional. Is emotional. Yeah.

2:05:22Jay Shetty:Well said. Fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

2:05:30Tim Ferriss:i'd say smile and say hi first yeah and i'm borrowing that from from gabby reese amazing woman who i interviewed alongside laird hamilton a long time ago but yeah go first was hers yeah like smile and say hi first it changes everything it actually does

2:05:47Jay Shetty:it actually changes everything if you walked into a room and brought the energy you hope to get out

2:05:52Tim Ferriss:of it it's like yeah there's another this isn't this isn't as poetic but there's another one somebody told me at one point, I'm like, oh God, that's good. They said, if you walk out one day and you beat an asshole, that person's an asshole. If you walk outside and everyone's an asshole, you're the asshole.

2:06:12Jay Shetty:It's true. It's true. I know plenty of both.

2:06:16Tim Ferriss:Go get some ketones or macadamia nuts or a cold shower.

2:06:20Jay Shetty:I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope everyone checks out tim.blog forward slash 17 for the 17 questions. And people can actually read your new book kind of to get, you want to talk about that? Yeah, sure.

2:06:32Tim Ferriss:People can get, if they go to tim.blog, that is a URL, kind of confusing, but just type tim.blog in. You can get, I want to say 175 to 200 pages of my various books to read. Plenty of actionable, tons of actionable stuff. It's not just buttering you up for the book. Like you don't ever have to buy the books. I mean, there's more in the books, obviously, but there's, uh, yeah, if you go to Tim.com blog, you'll find 175 plus pages. And then for the notebook, which is kind of the code name for the book about saying no, definitely my funniest book so far, because I did it with Neil Strauss, who acted as my student and he was so bad, so comically bad at saying no.

2:07:13Tim Ferriss:There's a lot of funny exchanges, real text messages and experiments and stuff but you can find i want to say 50 75 pages of that uh at tim.blog slash notebook and uh yeah so all that stuff all that stuff is free people can check it

2:07:29Jay Shetty:out well thank you well everyone has been listening and watching make sure you tag me and tim on instagram x tiktok wherever you're viewing the show or seeing clips i want to know what resonated with you what you're practicing with what you're trying uh what you're exploring i love seeing how what we discuss here turns into reality. So let us know what you're taking action on. And Tim, thank you so much. I hope you'll come back on the show and we won't take nine years again.

2:07:54Tim Ferriss:You're very good at what you do, man. It's fun to watch and it's fun to experience also.

2:07:58Jay Shetty:It's easy with someone like you. This is like a dream. It's like my favorite kind of episode. You're the best. Thank you, man. Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.

2:08:17Tim Ferriss:I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison is invaluable.

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