#274 Tim Ferriss - Life-Changing Practical Wisdom Backed by Experience and Science

25:17Tim Ferriss:There's a great book I recommend to everyone. It's a beautiful book called Of Wolves and Men. about effectively the history of wolves and man, but it dives into the biology of wolves, their mythological significance, how they're viewed by various indigenous cultures, and it redefined what was possible within nonfiction writing. It's by someone named Barry Lopez. Incredible writer. I recommend this book to everyone. It's an older book. It's a few decades old. When that book came out, people in, let's just call it, that category of book were like, oh, okay. There's kind of a before this book and then after.

25:57Tim Ferriss:Because he's shown what is possible. And in that book, I think it was the Nunavut people, could be mispronouncing that, but he was talking about their observations of wolves and hunting patterns, and how also with modern technology and radio collars and so on, you'll see sort of, let's just call it wolves traveling, and then to intersect a herd of caribou, they'll turn perfectly from like 100 miles away and then intersect, right? And so you could try to explain that through scent, but it starts to fall apart pretty quickly, right? Or you look at, let's just say, kind of spontaneous coordination of starling or fish school behavior.

26:51Tim Ferriss:And sort of phenomena that are very difficult to explain mechanistically exist. They just do. And so, you don't even need to necessarily step into things that some folks are gonna get very hot and bothered about, like remote viewing, which I do actually think is very interesting. But if you just look at animal behavior, what we might call instinct becomes very hard to pin down. So, that's a very fancy way of saying, I'm not really sure. But whatever the inputs might be, I have paid more and more and more attention to it. I pay attention to it with everything. People, girlfriends, investing, right?

27:41Tim Ferriss:Sometimes it's the flip side, right? You've had Toby of Shopify on the show, and it's like, when I spent time with Toby and Harley, I got this sort of physiological quickening. I don't get it much. It's not like this happens all the time. You do have to be careful about not fooling yourself, right? It's very easy to fool yourself, and to look for evidence, confirmation bias, et cetera, to support what we already believe. But in cases like that, I was like, ooh, There was like a physiological quickening. And I had my analytical kind of hat on looking at Shopify as a business and stuff when they had like nine or ten employees.

28:19Tim Ferriss:But also just being around those guys, I was like, oh, yeah, these are good horses to bet on. Really good horses to bet on. So it's not just a warning system, right? It can also be a go signal. But for people who may not find this to make any sense, I would say you can reaccess these things that you had as a kid. You can cultivate those sensitivities. It just takes practice. And you can start by doing a past year review, go through, and be like, all right, what gave me energy and what didn't? That's usually pretty straightforward. And if you're not sure, if you're like, I'm not sure, da-da-da-da, that is your answer.

29:01Tim Ferriss:I don't know if anybody's seen the movie Ronin. There's some really great chase scenes and so on with Robert De Niro. There's a quote in there that I'm paraphrasing, but I'm pretty close. Like, when in doubt, there is no doubt. So if you're hemming and hawing, it's like, yeah, there's your answer. It's not a yes. That's not a whole body yes. Do you think we've lost intuition over time, the human species? I would say... I would say... I mean, if you look at animals, they all... Yeah. I can't think of anything that doesn't... Yeah, I think that humans have... in some ways, understandably, like, obsolescent intuition or allowed it to atrophy.

29:41Tim Ferriss:In the same way that if you become dependent on Google Maps, you no longer need to develop that faculty, right? If you look at, for instance, some of the literature that's been published recently looking at cognitive performance pre - and post-AI, right? Or looking at, rather, degrees of AI usage or LLM usage and cognitive performance. It's like, yeah, okay, if you're relying on something, you're using an exoskeleton for walking, what's going to happen to your legs? You're going to atrophy, of course. Your body's really smart. It doesn't want to put calories and building into anything that's redundant, right?

30:20Tim Ferriss:You take exogenous testosterone, if you're getting injections, guess what? Your balls are going to turn into raisinets. Body's smart. It's not going to Yeah, let's pump a bunch of hormones to the Leydig cells to produce testosterone. No, it's very, very, very smart. So, I'm very cautious of the technologies that I adopt. And actually, there's a great guy. If you've never talked to him, you should meet him. He's fascinating. Has a big Amish-looking beard named Kevin Kelly, an older guy. But he's a technologist who's one of the most incredibly accurate futurists I've ever met. Like, his ability to predict things is off the charts.

30:55Tim Ferriss:He's like the American tech Nostradamus or something. Interesting. What's his name? Usually Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly. Yeah. He's in his 70s now. And he is, by the way, probably 10 to 20 times more popular in China than he is in the US, which is a whole separate conversation, but they pay a lot of attention to him. Nonetheless, he has literally spent time with the Amish to study how they accept or reject technology. Really? Yeah, he was a founding editor of Wired magazine. You'd think that he just would adopt everything and let trial and error sort itself out in his own life. But no, he studies how the Amish evaluate technology, because despite what some people might think, it's not like they don't actually use technology.

31:41Tim Ferriss:They're just very, very methodical about how they evaluate it. So, that is the way I would think of any of this augmentation, whether it's what people would consider nootropics and smart drugs, or any type of enhancement, which would include Google Maps, AI, et cetera. Like, right now, for instance, I write. AI is... LLMs are getting incredibly good at writing. I saw a piece recently, I think it was in The New Yorker, but it's like a Pulitzer Prize winner, some incredible writer tested an LLM and provided very educated test readers with sample prose, and the vast majority couldn't tell the difference.

32:24Tim Ferriss:No kidding. Wow. Trained on his or her own writing. So the temptation to use it is there, and I'll use it for editing suggestions, but as soon as I use that as my primary mode of writing, it's just gonna be too tempting. It's like digital heroin. And ultimately, I may travel down that path But the point is that I'm being very cautious with it, because I know that certain faculties will atrophy. And I don't know what the consequences of that are. Because if those faculties start to atrophy, and I'm not a Luddite, like I use tons of technology, I invest in tons of technology on the cutting edge.

33:06Tim Ferriss:But what are the secondary or tertiary effects of that? It's probably not just writing essays. There's probably a higher cost to be paid. I just want to have a better understanding of what that costs. How will you find out what that... I mean, how will you find that? I'll probably hang out for a while at the periphery and see what people are finding, talk to researchers. It is not hard to talk to researchers. I'll also use... I'll kind of use certain AI-enabled tools to evaluate the AI itself. There are websites like consensus.app or open evidence, there are tools you can use that make it a lot easier to interrogate published scientific literature with just basic queries that kind of anyone would come up with or could come up with.

33:57Tim Ferriss:So, with certain things, I like to be on the cutting edge. With other things, like what we're talking about, I really like to be on the dull edge. I don't want to be one of the first thousand monkeys shot into space with a... I'm gonna wait. You know, you want to colonize Marx? Great. Maybe I'll be two billionth in line. I'm right there with you. Go spend a month in Antarctica in the winter first and tell me how you like it. Yeah, I am with you on that. I want to talk about a piece of gear you probably use more than anything else, but never think about it. Your wallet. Before Ridge, I was carrying a bulky, beat-up leather wallet that was falling apart and so thick it was actually throwing off how I sat.

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36:13And so I wanted to ask you, I don't know about fear setting versus goal setting.

36:19Tim Ferriss:Yeah. Yeah. So I'd love to chat with you about that. What is it? Sure. Yeah. So, fear setting is something that I effectively found through stoicism. So, the philosophy of stoicism. And people can certainly find a lot of great books written in a contemporary sense by Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way. I actually produced the audiobook for that book. No kidding. And one of his first early writings on Stoicism was a blog post on my blog way back in the day.

37:00Tim Ferriss:And at that point, we resonated on Stoicism because I had been traveling almost always with a copy of Letters from a Stoic, which are the Moral Letters to Leuchilius by Seneca the Younger. Now, Seneca the Younger, controversial character for a bunch of reasons, but very, very, very skilled writer and proponent of stoicism. And in effect, one of the practices that he would encourage is, he had a number of them, but it was in effect defining your fears, thinking about the worst case scenario. So there's a mental component to it. There was also a practiced component, which would be, and actually Kevin Kelly does this as well.

37:47Tim Ferriss:So in effect, practicing the thing that you most fear, like poverty. So like Kevin Kelly, this is a good example, modern example. Like he sometimes will go a week or two just as a practice, like sleeping in his living room in a sleeping bag, eating like rice and beans and instant coffee. And Kevin isn't really afraid of most things, but what you realize, and you realize this too if you go on a week-long camping trip, you're like, this is actually pretty sweet. I don't actually need that much. Simpler times. Right. That's what I've noticed. And when you prove that to yourself, you recognize that the downside risk on a lot of what you might be considering, taking a new job, proposing or ending a relationship, whatever it might be that you're nervous about, that you might be procrastinating or putting on pause, has very limited downside.

38:42Tim Ferriss:The systematic way of doing that, I needed something a little more concrete for myself. I have been hypervigilant my whole life. There are good reasons for that, that we can get into, but I've been very hypervigilant my whole life. Also, I've diagnosed OCD, which did not surprise any of my friends when it came about a couple of years ago. They're like, yeah, well, you know, big surprise. Duh. Yeah, duh. I had the same response, but the point is that with generalized anxiety plus OCD, if you have that hypervigilance plus OCD, you ruminate, or I'll keep it personal. Like, I don't have the hand-washing thing.

39:26Tim Ferriss:I'm not flipping light switches, right? They're different manifestations of OCD, but I have these kind of endless ruminative loops. And they tend to relate to imagining worst-case scenarios. All right. And that can be really paralyzing if I want to bias towards action, which I prefer to do, right? Bias towards action instead of inaction. So, what do you do? Well, reading the stoicism and so on, started to develop this approach, fear setting. I'll explain what it is. So, what makes goal setting effective? What makes goal setting effective? There are different frameworks for this, but, you know, like the smart framework, specific, measurable, achievable, right, with timelines and so on.

40:07Tim Ferriss:Like, there are better and worse ways of defining your goals to make them more likely to be achieved, right? If you have accountability and you have timelines, you have a deadline, you have deliverables, etc. All that makes goal achieving easier. All right, well, what's fear setting? Fear setting, it's really simple. So, if you have the thing that you're worried about, and this is what I still do to this day. I probably do it once a quarter. The thing you're nervous about could be starting your own business. Could be writing or finishing a book. Could be... Getting cancer. Yeah, could be getting cancer, right?

40:48Tim Ferriss:Could be getting older. Could be one of your parents dying. Could be whatever it might be. And to be clear, fear setting doesn't automatically solve all these things, but here's what it does. It defangs a lot of them so you can take action. Let me explain what I mean. So, fear setting is super simple. Let's say the example is, in my case, I'll give a real, like one of the very first huge examples was I'd started my own company. I was completely burned out around 2003, 2004. Had been working seven days a week and I wanted to take four weeks off. All right. Running my own business. How do you do that?

41:29Tim Ferriss:Right? I've created this monster. I'm running it. I have single point of failure, me. And so all of these disasters came to mind, right? So what did I do? I wrote them down. And there's an alternative approach called morning pages, which is slightly different, but I'll explain it. That's from Julia Cameron who wrote The Artist's Way. Really, really incredible practice, but I'll come back to that. So in fear setting, like at the top, I would put, taking four weeks vacation. That's the thing I'm considering. Then in the first column, just write down all of the things that are freaking you out that could go wrong in as much detail as possible, right?

42:10Tim Ferriss:So, I would write down, I'm going to be overseas, and I'm going to miss a letter from the IRS, and then they're going to do this and this, and I'm going to get audited and blah, blah, blah. Okay, write it down. Boom. All right? I miss IRS letter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. What's the next one? Next one is there's going to be some supply chain problem and like blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, write that down. All right, like the president at the fulfillment company is going to get sick and then boom, like orders aren't going to ship and there's going to be this huge disaster. Okay, write it down.

42:45Tim Ferriss:And so you write down all these things, like aim for volume, right, like 10 to 20 things. All right, that's column one. Then column two is, what could I do to decrease the likelihood of this happening? Like anything I could do to try to prevent this. All right, great. So for the letter, at the time, this is back in the day, keep in mind, early 2000s. But there still were services where you could have mail shipped, they would scan it, and they would email you PDFs. It's like, okay, well, let me test out one of those services. I could do that. Okay. What about supply chain? All right, with supply chain issues, there were a few components that I could basically stockpile in advance in case things were disrupted.

43:27Tim Ferriss:And that would reduce like 80 % of the risk. Okay, well I can do that. All right, and you go down the list, and there's probably something you can do to decrease the risk of that happening. All right, so now you have two columns. All the worst things that could happen, the things you could do to decrease the likelihood of them happening. All right, next column. Next column is, if it happens, if that thing happens, what could you do for damage control? What could you do to possibly get back up on your feet? Right? It's like if you start a company and it fails, could you get a bartending job? Could you...

43:57Tim Ferriss:So you go through every contingency plan. Yeah. So then it's like, what can you do to repair the situation? Just to get back to like life support, right? If needed, what can you do? There's always something you could do. So you write that down. Okay. Then you have to ask yourself two follow-up questions. All right. So if I did this thing I'm considering, four weeks of vacation, what are the payoffs and how durable are they? Like what's the upside? I've talked about, I've written down all the downside. What's the upside and what's the durability? Okay, well, if I went on a four-week vacation and I figured out how to run my business and automate things, I would come back and all those systems would still exist.

44:37Tim Ferriss:Like I would have taken myself out of the machine. I would no longer be the Wizard of Oz having to control everything. And like, well, I mean, that could last years in terms of benefits, right? Okay, but when we go down the list, what are all the benefits? How durable are they? And then you look at all the downsides and you're like, all right, how temporary or durable are these? What is the real downside risk? And I'll be done with this in just a minute or two, but it's important because people can do this. And I gave a TED Talk on this for people who want to really dig in, but what you realize often is that the thing you're considering, if it works, is like a 7 to 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 in life-changing impact with durability.

45:22Tim Ferriss:Like, it lasts for a while. And the things that you're scared of are like 2, 3, 4 in temporary pain. And they're either reversible or completely survivable. The last piece, and this is new in the last, I would say, 15 years for me, is on a separate piece of paper, You write down status quo. If I can just continue doing what I'm doing, what are the costs, financially, emotionally, relationally, in one year from now, in three years from now, in ten years from now? And you write that stuff down, because we're very good at thinking about the risks of doing something, but we're not as trained to think about the risks of just continuing doing what we're doing.

46:09Tim Ferriss:And so when I looked at that, I was like, I don't think I can make it five years. Ten years, forget it. My life's a complete, utter disaster. It's like, okay, so now it's not a question of if, it's just a question of when. Okay, now when I look at these two things, right, is doing this thing risky compared to status quo one, three, five years from now? It's like, oh, this thing that I thought was scary is much lower risk. And then you do it. And like, that is what kicked off all these adventures that led to the first book, and like, here we are. If I had not taken that vacation, I would not be sitting here.

46:50Tim Ferriss:That's interesting. Yeah. How do you find the balance, though? How do you find the balance? Because I could see, you know, people going, fuck, I'm going for 16 weeks of vacation. Yeah. Well, here's what I would say, is that fear-setting, much like doing goal setting doesn't achieve your goal. It's almost daring yourself to do what you want to do. It's daring yourself. Here's what it is. It's daring yourself. What it's also saying is some of your fears will be well-founded, right? There's certain things that could be catastrophic, but it's like 1%. Like do not let your fears put an emergency break on your life without cross-examining them.

47:36Tim Ferriss:That's all it says. It is like most of your fears are these phantasms in the fog that are scary because it's like the boogeyman. The lights are out. You haven't looked at it clearly. As soon as you write it down, you realize, flip the light switches on, boogeyman's not there, and then you can take action. But sure, there's certain things that are gonna be scary no matter what, right? Losing a relative to Alzheimer's, right? Someone you love, or suffering some horrible injury, right? These are all things that have real consequences. But your ability to survive and thrive, like your resilience, is a lot greater than I think you realize in most cases.

48:19Tim Ferriss:And you have a track record. Like, anyone who's made it this far, who's watching this right now, like, you've survived a lot. And you've figured out a lot, even when plans went sideways. So, fear-setting, fundamentally, is a tool that you can do in like an hour. doesn't even take an hour, that takes the emergency break off. Doesn't matter how good your goal setting is if you've got the emergency break on. So that's, I'd say, the principal purpose. That's very interesting. You know, you had mentioned earlier about your friend who practiced being in poverty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then found out this isn't so bad.

48:59It's a lot simpler. Sounds like you maybe have experienced that as well. Yeah, I do it every year.

49:04Tim Ferriss:I do it every year. You do it every year. Oh, yeah. Well, part of the reason I do the fasting too, I might do like seven to 10 day fasts, certainly try to live a very minimalist existence for weeks at a time throughout the year to remove the hedonic treadmill that we're all vulnerable to, right? It's like, man, if you live where we're sitting, right, in the United States, not for everyone, but broadly speaking, it's like, if you were born here, my God, did you win the lottery, right? And you look at these comforts and amazing privileges, and it's easy to believe that whatever your kind of latest level of comfort is, that that is necessary for happiness, That is necessary for safety.

50:01Tim Ferriss:That is necessary for fill in the blank. And by and large, it's just not. So, I really try to, you know, get out in the woods, get filthy, do something hard, experience some physical pain. Not excessively so, but just like through training and so on. You're like, okay, yeah, a little bit of pain, a little bit of fasting. If I lost, you know, half of what I have, 75, 80, 90 % of what I have, I'm fine. So, it doesn't mean you just go to Vegas and put it all in black. It doesn't mean that. It means that a lot of these things you're considering, if they go totally wrong, and it's actually surprisingly hard to fail completely if you're pretty smart and have some ability to improvise, completely survivable, right?

50:54Tim Ferriss:And for a lot of what I do, you don't make it unless you cultivate that view on things. And you can't be stupid and reckless, but it's like in startup investing, it's like 70-80 % of those are going to go to zero, even if you put seven to ten years down. Right? And so, I like startup investing as a metaphor for life, because you don't need to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life, an incredible life. You don't need to get a lot of things right. You just need to get a few high leverage things right. Those ten relationships? Health? All right. Like, if you get those two things right, guess what?

51:44Like, I know a lot of billionaires, decabillionaires,

51:47Tim Ferriss:you're gonna have more than 90 % of those guys. In terms of durable wealth, what I would consider wealth? Oh, yeah, if you just get those two things right. It's like, sure, money is important to a point, right? I don't wanna minimize that. but don't underestimate what you can do by getting a few things right. You can be wrong a lot of the time. I mean, I've been wrong tons, tons, tons, tons. Damn good point. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Fear setting. Yeah. I still, I mean, I am, you know, I'm not just the president, I'm a client, you know, hair club for men. You got a great haircut. Yeah, I use it.

52:31Tim Ferriss:Yeah, we go to the same stylist. I still use this. And because I promised it, I want to close one loop. Morning pages, Julia Cameron. This is even simpler. People can try this. Maybe this is the appetizer before fear setting. Every morning, that monkey mind with all the worries and things ricocheting around that might be producing anxiety or whatever it might be. Just vomit that onto a page. longhand, write for two to three pages, that's it. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to remember it, you don't have to go back to it, you don't have to solve anything. Just trap that monkey mind on paper so you can get on with your day.

53:08Tim Ferriss:Do that for two, three pages a day. The, arguably the most, one of the most productive writers, creators in Hollywood, even though he lives in New York, but Brian Koppelman co-created Billions, was behind Rounders along with his writing partner. I mean, the guy's super prolific, and he does transcendental meditation and morning pages every day. We could talk about meditation separately, but I recommended, I won't mention him, but like the right hand of a pretty well-known politician who basically is like the COO of everything that politician does, which is incredible, right, in terms of just like track record endurance output.

53:53Tim Ferriss:And he did morning pages based on my recommendation which I got from Brian, for six months. And he wrote me back and he said, this is the closest thing to a magical effect that I've ever found. Wow. Yeah. No shit. So simple. So simple. And what does that have in common with fear-sighting? It's taking these kind of nebulous... problems inside your head and putting it on a paper. That's it. It's very simple. but consistently, right? It's not going to the gym once and then you're like, I guess I'm fit now. It's like, no, this is kind of like flossing your teeth. You don't necessarily have to do it every day.

54:36Tim Ferriss:Although if you do morning pages for a week or two, it's shocking what effect it can have on your wellbeing and productivity. And then you could view that as the flossing. Why do you think that works? I mean, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try it. Yeah. Yeah, you should. Why does it work? What would be the difference whether you think it's bitching about or rather writing? I think the way it works, this is my perspective on it, is that, and this is part of the reason why writing is so helpful also, in general, is that it's incredibly difficult to cross -examine your own thoughts while you're thinking them.

55:16Tim Ferriss:They're too fleeting. It moves too quickly. It's very hard to look at them dispassionately almost as an observer, right? It's like if you hang out with your friends and they've got problems, you're like, man, you can sort out their problems like that, right? And she's like, why don't you just do this, this, and this? You can see it so easily. But it's very hard for us to look at ourselves in the same way, especially with the speed of thought. So the simple act of freezing it on paper allows you to look at it for what it is. and nine times out of ten, you look at it, you're like, okay, that's kind of ridiculous.

55:50Tim Ferriss:Or it's not ridiculous, but once you've put it on paper, I feel like subconsciously, there's part of you that's like, I have that written down, I don't need to remember or think about it. And whatever that tendency is, and some people more than others, certainly I have a lot of it, to kind of white-knuckle grasp onto a thought, so that it becomes this merry-go-round. Writing it down just allows you to relax your grip. and let it go. And if you can do that for a few hours, I mean, in today's world, if you can single task and focus on one thing for a few hours without notifications, without getting distracted, without looping on some future anxiety or past depression, whatever it might be, if you can do that for a few hours, my God, like in the next few years, especially, post-AI, like you're gonna have such an enormous competitive advantage.

56:44huge huge huge like attentional advantage yeah it's already a fascinating conversation love it yeah love it yeah yeah let's get into your story a little bit yeah sure where did you grow up i grew up on long island so eastern long island uh rat tail and all a brattail nice

57:05Tim Ferriss:i had a rat tail i had some terrible haircuts growing up um didn't realize it at the time but but grew up on Eastern Long Island, way out by Montauk. So, people associate that with like, rightly so, you know, hedge fund managers and out by the Hamptons, you know, like, tennis with Steven Spielberg kind of thing, right? These hundred million dollar mansions. And that's part of it, but a lot like any... any tourist town that has a lot of second or third or fourth or fifth homes, like Nantucket or wherever, They're all over the place. You've got the people who come there on the weekends or for the summers, and then you've got the locals, right?

57:47Tim Ferriss:So, the local side is mostly people working in service industries, et cetera. You know, most of my friends' fathers were, like, fishermen, carpenters, landscapers, that kind of thing. So, I grew up working in restaurants. Started busboying pretty early. I'm not even sure it was legal. Probably 14, 14 or so. I think everybody should work a service job. I think everybody should have to work a service job. But that's where I grew up, Eastern Long Island. And school was not great. I mean, you don't really realize, you have no reference point. Like, whatever's in front of you is kind of your reality.

58:24Tim Ferriss:School was not good. So eventually, one of my, I got really lucky, man. You just think about all these things that have to line up for either of us to be where we are. and these sliding door moments. One friend, if I had been two years younger, two years older, this wouldn't have happened, but one guy managed to escape Long Island and his parents sent him to a school in New Hampshire, which was a private school. And he came back and he was like, you have to leave this place. I was like, what are you talking about? And then a math teacher was like, he's right, you need to fucking get out of here.

58:59Tim Ferriss:I was like, what? And started looking into it. And ultimately, got some scholarships. My parents were very supportive. It was all my idea. Like the whole extended family chipped in, and I was able to transfer to a private school in New Hampshire. And that was a huge life changer and inflection point. I mean, that's where suddenly, instead of just being able to study Spanish, you could study anything. And that's how I ended up studying Japanese. And class six days a week, right? Seated meal with coat and tie. I mean, you had mandatory sports, and then in some cases, you had sixth period, which was classes after sports.

59:40So you'd finish school, like, whatever, 6 p.m.,

59:42Tim Ferriss:go back to your room, like, splash water on your face, get on a suit and tie, and then go to seated meal, chapel in the morning. I mean, the workload, the intensity was unbelievable. I was accustomed to doing really well in school without having to try very hard, and suddenly I was, like, barely keeping my head above water. And it was great for me. It was great for me. It was really hard, but having a few male role models in particular who were like, you can do it. Yeah, it's hard. Like, yeah, you can do it. And just like having to push through that initial sunburn effect. Too much sun exposure in terms of stress.

1:00:24Tim Ferriss:What were you into as a kid? I mean, at that point, I mean, I was very interested. Even at that point, I was very interested in neuroscience. I wanted to be a neuroscientist. So I'd seen my grandmother disintegrate with Alzheimer's. And I was also very interested just in learning in general, and how you could accelerate learning from a very young age. Because it just seemed like there was a wide open field of possibility there that folks weren't exploring. and we can dive into that. I was also a wrestler. That was the only sport I was ever any good at. Oh, really? Yeah, I was born premature. I was tiny, super hyperactive, and one of my mom's friends was like, you gotta put that boy in, kid wrestling, to tire him out.

1:01:14Tim Ferriss:And because I was so puny, I just got the crap kicked out of me all the time until about sixth grade. And... like, team sports were out. I would just get massacred. I mean, I wouldn't even go out to recess until probably like fourth or fifth grade, because it was just like being out in the prison yard. Wow. I just got the crap kicked out of me. So I would just stay inside safely near the teacher and read books, mostly on marine biology. Because my parents... Actually, this is something my parents did. I want to give them credit. We didn't have a lot of money, but my mom said, if you want books, we always have budget for books.

1:01:55Tim Ferriss:and so we would go to the bookstore and there were remainder tables, you know, these books that the bookstore's trying to get rid of. And I'm like, that was the permissible real estate. It's like, all right, you get to choose from these books. And I was like 40, 60, 80 % off. And got a big hardcover book called Fishes of the World. And out on Eastern Long Island, maybe people don't know this, but lots of sharks and Great Whites, and the crazy shark fisherman from Jaws was actually based on a guy named Frank Mundus, who was a... No kidding. ...rod and reel shark hunter off of Montauk. And so my mom took me to meet him.

1:02:37Tim Ferriss:I was fascinated by sharks. And... that is just a roundabout way of saying, for a long time, it was not safe for me to go into kind of like group sports. So my mom threw me into kid wrestling. Weight class, right? It's like puny kid versus puny kid, perfect. And that stuck all the way up until the beginning of college. And so wrestling, wrestling was the center of my athletic life. Gotcha. Yeah. If you want to get good at Sufferfest, wrestling is a good way to do it. I was a wrestler too. Yeah. Very familiar. Also puny. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I would say those are a few things that I was into.

1:03:24Tim Ferriss:I was very interested in drawing, I think just genetically. There's... My grandfather was a sculptor. Seems to be something just in the bloodline for that. So, I was always drawing. So, I was... I kind of had, I guess, three in tandem, right? The neuroscience and cognitive performance and stuff, that was an interest. And I thought, oh, man, it could be really interesting to to be a scientist. And then there was the marine biology also, right? The intersection of science. But then there was comic book penciler. I wanted to be a comic book penciler. Yeah, yeah. I still have all my comic books from when I was a kid.

1:04:00Tim Ferriss:So I wanted to be a comic book penciler. But this was pre-Marvel Studios, like before... I mean, you were basically signing up for poverty if you were a comic book penciler back in the day. Nonetheless, still, a lot of icons and idols to this day. I have so much respect for Jim Lee, who was one of my favorites. So, I still draw. Like, I still get into it. But for a long time, I wanted to take that path. Right on. Yeah. So, those are some of the early stages. I mean, I have the... I think it was in childhood, bipolar disorder, OCD, depression. How did you overcome those things? How did they pop up on your radar?

1:04:48Tim Ferriss:Yeah, you know, it was sort of the water that I swam in, right? In the sense that I didn't know life was any different for most people. So a lot of bipolar, major depressive disorder, a lot of addiction in my family. So, you've got, you know, alcohol induced cardiomyopathy on one uncle, so he drank himself to death, got early onset dementia. My aunt died of alcohol plus Percocet. She's pretty messy. So, a lot of addiction. And, which I think is really, and Gabor Mate, I think, has the right framing on this. It's before we ask why the addiction, we should ask why the pain. Right? And so, I think a lot of that is undiagnosed psychiatric disorders, right?

1:05:39Tim Ferriss:And so that was always part of my experience, right? This anxiety, this kind of OCD-like dysregulation and rumination, worrying, hypervigilance. I was also very badly abused as a kid, not by my parents, but that's... we can get into that if you want. But that turned everything up. How were you abused? I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son, like, weekly for a couple of years. By a babysitter's son? Uh-huh. Yeah. How old? Two to four. Two to four. Two to four years old? Yeah. Do you remember it? Yeah, sadly. Yeah, it'd be better, maybe better if I didn't, but... So you take, you take, like, out-of-the-box hardware that's already predisposed.

1:06:30Tim Ferriss:and then you add some type of traumatic event like that. It's not a great combo. And I would say that... I was... driven, right? I wanted to get out of Long Island, et cetera, et cetera. Money issues were always kind of a problem in the household. Like, that was always a conversation. So I was like, all right, I need to make money. So there was like, get out of Long Island, be good at school. That's your ticket." And that was kind of the narrative in the household, which I think was actually a helpful narrative. It's like, you got to... If you're good at school, you can write your tickets. Like, alright.

1:07:08Tim Ferriss:So, I took all the rage. I was a very angry kid. Very angry human, I would say, up until probably... 2013, 15? Wow, after the book. After your first book. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. I didn't start to deal with any of the trauma until probably 2015 in any meaningful way. But the anger and the rage, even though it's not a clean fuel, I don't think it's a clean fuel. Like, you do a lot of damage to the vessel. But it's a fuel, right? Like, it's a propellant that I used. So I was just fucking intense, super intense, and took that experience and everything, compartmentalized it, And I was just like, okay, like, no rearview mirror, forward, that's it.

1:08:02Tim Ferriss:And I think for... that can work for a while. You know, it can work for decades in some cases. Ultimately, I think, if you want a semblance of peace and well-being, you kind of have to pay the piper and deal with it. And I have been surprised, I mean, look, how many of the friends I have who are veterans who operate at a very high level, came out, ended up, for any host of reasons, doing, say, Ibogaine or other psychedelic therapy, who in the process of doing that realized that it wasn't principally, say, PTSD, often some component of TBI, but there was some type of trauma they didn't deal with.

1:08:55Tim Ferriss:Super common. Super common. I would say 80 % of the guys I know. Mm-hmm. And... So it's really... Like, the numbers are staggering. And the people who kind of survive, as opposed to, like, self-destructing, at least in the beginning, I think get really good at compartmentalizing. Right? But compartmentalizing, while it can help you with performance, for relationships, for friends, for family, it doesn't work very well. You end up being emotionally cauterized. And, you know, the armor that you develop to keep things out keeps a lot of things in, and it keeps a lot of people out. So, to answer your question, though, things that ended up really having a positive impact would include psychedelic-assisted therapies, so we can talk about that, because they're not a panacea, they're not for everyone, and there are real risks, depending on the compound that is in question.

1:10:03Tim Ferriss:Brain stimulation, like accelerated TMS. I literally just did another round of accelerated TMS two days ago, so we could talk about that, very fresh. But different types of non-invasive brain stimulation. Incredibly interesting. So, microchips over medicine, in a sense. I think bioelectric medicine is one field where I'm paying a lot of attention. Bioelectric medicine? Yeah. Yeah. So, where can you use stimulation? It doesn't automatically have to be stimulation. It could be something more like ultrasound, but how can you use non-invasive technologies, or even an implant to, say, change how your brain is firing or to inhibit or excite a certain part of the brain or to stimulate the, say, vagus nerve, in some cases related to autoimmune dysfunction or rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, there was a piece on the cover of the New York Times not too long ago about this.

1:11:07Tim Ferriss:how can you use electricity, in effect, to treat issues with fewer side effects than pills? Or injectables, or IV, or whatever it might be. So the accelerated TMS specifically, I think, is very interesting. There's a protocol called the Saint Protocol. It's been modified in a couple of different ways, but the primary, or one of the best-known researchers behind that, unfortunately, committed suicide. a few months ago, a friend of mine, Nolan Williams, developed a lot of these approaches along with his team. But you see, in some cases, after a week, 70, 80 % remission of treatment-resistant depression.

1:11:49Tim Ferriss:Wow. Wow. With just as much, if not more, durability than psychedelic experiences. Wow. So I have a lot of time on the research side, also on the experiential side, with psychedelic-assisted therapies, and have taken copious notes for well over a decade on everything and know a lot of the people who are at the top of that field. And I would say that bioelectric medicine is just as interesting. That has had a huge impact on my life. Very early days, very early. But that is certainly of interest. And then I would say the therapies and tools like morning pages. It's so simple. Morning pages and fear setting.

1:12:38Tim Ferriss:These are not small things, guys. At least not for me. Like if your life is ruled by fear, because what I realized is for me personally, I miss... In a sense, I was mistreating myself by focusing on the depression. And what I only realized in the last five years is that the depression was downstream of other things. I had anxiety, which was maybe out of the box. Like, I have family members who make my OCD look like amateur hour. Like, they're so over the top. When you combine that with hypervigilance, like, your life is ruled by fear and worry.

1:13:20and when you have that as one of your defaults,

1:13:26Tim Ferriss:something like fear setting, something like morning pages, is not a small thing. Like, it is actually a very big deal. And when you start to look at psychedelic-assisted therapies or frankly, honestly, off-the-rack regular antidepressants antidepressants like SSRIs or, you know, selective, like SNRIs. I mean, there are many different types. For some people, those are a godsend, right? But when you start to combine some of these things with medical supervision, with therapies, right, whether that's CBT, there's one called DBT, which I think is very interesting. Peter Atiyah, MD, is a big proponent of DBT.

1:14:10Tim Ferriss:it's the combination of things plus investing in relationships. I think Tony Robbins said once, I heard at one of his events, I've only been to two of his events, they're a bit too much stimulation for someone who's pretty introverted. It's a lot of stimulation. But he was on stage and he said, yeah, I, I, I, me, me, me gets to be a really fucking boring song after a while. And I was like, that's the way to put it.

1:14:40Tim Ferriss:And I think the best way to help the self is to escape the self sometimes. Not by doing coke, not by getting plastered every night, but by doing what we're evolved to do, which is spend time with other people, right? Doing things, not just like sitting there in a circle like AA, talking about all your worries and pains, even though AA is actually a spectacular organization and format is incredibly impressive, but you don't necessarily have to do that. You can just be a bunch of dudes sitting around a fire and not making eye contact, making fart jokes and talking about hunting. Like, that's fine.

1:15:16Tim Ferriss:That's actually incredibly therapeutic. It's like people process things in different ways. It doesn't have to be. Like, not everyone has to do it the same way. Yeah.

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1:18:05Tim Ferriss:So, those are a few thoughts, but yeah, I mean, I almost killed myself in college, had a date in the calendar, had a plan, knew exactly how I was going to do it to make it look like an accident. I mean, it was... How were you going to do it? But I won't mention it because it's too good, and other people will copy it. It's... I've never... I've never wanted to discuss it because there are people who are probably watching this who are in pain, and until I give them maybe a glimpse of how I got out, I wouldn't want to give them any blueprint. It's just too risky. I wouldn't want to feel the responsibility for that.

1:18:43Tim Ferriss:But I got really, really lucky once again. one of those sliding door moments. If it had been two or three years later, I wouldn't be here. The reason is I went to Firestone Library at Princeton where I went undergrad. Funny story, but my guidance counselor in high school was like, you should definitely not apply to Princeton or any hard schools for that matter. We can talk about that if you want, but misaligned incentives. Anyway, got in and was reserving a book on assisted suicide from Firestone Library. But someone else had already taken it out. Some other student was reading it. And I put in a request.

1:19:24Tim Ferriss:So you put in a request with the library, what do they do? At that point in time, they would mail you a postcard. But I was taking a year away from school at that point. It's like a break from undergrad. Which is what the school and what a lot of schools will encourage you to do if they think you're having... if you claim any mental duress, because they don't want to suicide on their watch on their campus, right? Might not help you, but they don't want that as a blemish on their record, so to speak. So, the actual postcard got mailed to my parents at home. I'd forgotten to change my mailing address at the registrar's office.

1:20:03Tim Ferriss:So, postcard goes to my parents' house, and it's like, congratulations, your book is now in on assisted suicide, whatever. Mom called me freaking out, and I tap-danced and I lied. And I was like, oh, it's a friend at Rutgers who couldn't get the book, and I was just trying to help him out, da-da-da. But it snapped me, it broke the spell. It snapped me out of it. Because when you're in that much pain, you think nothing can fix it. You think you're fundamentally broken, that you're uniquely flawed. You become so I, I, I, me, me, me that all you want is the pain to stop. Anything must be better than this, so let me just close the curtain and turn the show off.

1:20:42And when my mom called, I realized, oh, if I do this, number one, now I can't make it look like an accident.

1:20:49Tim Ferriss:Number two, even if I tried to make it look like an accident, doing what I had planned to do would have been like putting on a suicide bomber vest, walking into a room of all the people I care most about and detonating. Like psychologically, emotionally, that would have been the impact. And so, I didn't do it. and quadrupled down on physical training, which is how I ended up going to the nationals for Chinese kickboxing in the US. I was like, you know what? The only thing I know how to do that gets me out of my head is train under imminent threat of being kicked or punched in the face. Like, I am not allowed to daydream under those circumstances.

1:21:29Tim Ferriss:So I'm just going to train hours a day. And that's what I ended up doing. and ultimately everything was fine. Like, there was a... There were some reasons for me getting as deep into that hole as I did. Not all my fault. And much later, this is probably only ten years ago, I wrote a post called Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide. And like, if anyone's feeling really dark, like, go read that post. Like, it has saved hundreds of lives, and it doesn't sugarcoat anything. The reason I wrote that So, I was at an event in San Francisco at the time, being interviewed on stage. I got off, and a couple people came over, and there was a small circle around me, they wanted books signed and things like that.

1:22:13Tim Ferriss:And this really nice guy, you know, dressed up in a suit and everything for the event, gave me this book, and he's like, oh yeah, I just wanted you to sign this for my brother. And I was like, sure, no problem. What would you like me to say to your brother? And he just kind of froze. And it was like a weird interaction. I couldn't quite figure it out, but I was like, you know what, I'll tell you what, let's chat afterwards. You can think about it for a bit, I'll sign it afterwards. And then I went on and interacted with everybody else. And then as I was walking back to the elevator to leave, he joined me and he was like, yeah, I'm really sorry I froze, but my brother killed himself.

1:22:49Tim Ferriss:And my mom has kept his room exactly as it was. And he was such a huge fan of yours. And I just wasn't sure what to put in the book. and ended up signing the book. I gave it to him and he's like, have you ever thought about talking about anything related to mental health? He's like, because my brother listened to you. And I was like, fuck. Okay. And it took me months. I was not committed to publishing it, but I spent months working on this piece, some practical thoughts on suicide. And then, like, my parents didn't really know, right? because I'd lied. Family didn't know. Best friends didn't know.

1:23:30Tim Ferriss:Damn, man. And I certainly, like, yeah, it's like... The two things that I would say I'm proudest of in terms of publishing, probably, if I had to pick two... If I had to pick two, it'd be a blog post on suicide, right? Some practical thoughts on suicide. and then the podcast during COVID on the childhood abuse, which also, like, parents didn't know about, nobody knew about. Your parents didn't know about that? Nobody. Nobody knew. So I didn't want them to blame themselves. I had intended to, like, write a book after they passed away, so they wouldn't blame themselves. And then during COVID, right, this is early COVID, people don't know what's coming, like, it's scary, right?

1:24:19Like, and...

1:24:25Tim Ferriss:And I was, I was, I remember, I had flown to Costa Rica to have some optionality in terms of travel. I was like, all right, let me figure out what's going on here. Like a friend of mine who works with a lot of hedge fund managers they're giving me a very early heads up on COVID. And I was like, oh, this is bad. This could be really bad. Let's try to preserve as much optionality as possible. We're leaving now. So I ended up in Costa Rica. and we're sitting there having a meal, and somehow this came up, because she knew about it. There were two girlfriends, like long-term, long, long-term girlfriends.

1:24:56Tim Ferriss:As I was mentioning earlier, when you're like cauterized and compartmentalized, like, there are a lot of relationship costs. So, it works up to a point, and then you hit a wall, and suddenly it doesn't work. And so, with these girlfriends who are, you know, three, four, five, six years, right, there was a point where I shared with these two women specifically, I guess it was three long-term girlfriends, about the abuse. And this one girlfriend... I was talking about writing the book, and she was like, you know we're sitting in the middle of COVID. She's like, have you ever thought about how many people are going to die of natural or unnatural causes before you ever write that book?

1:25:39Like, it's gonna be 10 years, 15 years?

1:25:42Tim Ferriss:She was like, why don't you do a podcast? And I was like, ugh. because I don't want to talk to my parents. I don't want to talk to my friends. Like, it's too vulnerable. It's too vulnerable. But ultimately, I had had a friend, Debbie Millman, amazing human being, incredible graphic artist, teacher. Design Matters is her podcast. It's been running even longer than mine. And when she came on my show, I had noticed in all my research, she never really talked about her family. And so I asked her before we started recording, I was like, would you be open to talking about your family at all? I've noticed a huge glaring omission.

1:26:19And she was like, maybe.

1:26:22Tim Ferriss:She's like, you can try it. And then if I'm open to it, we'll talk about it. But if not, then not. And we were friends. And we got into it, and she opened up the first time really publicly about horrifying sexual abuse, like throughout her entire childhood. And... It's crazy how many kids go through this. Yeah, it's awful. And I mean, the numbers are staggering. Like, it's really high. Oh, I know. 50 % of the people that have been on here have talked about it. And then there's another percentage that won't, that will talk about it, but not on camera. Yeah. So it's pervasive. And so I asked Debbie if she would be open to having a conversation with me about how we've both tried to overcome or address this.

1:27:13Tim Ferriss:Because she and I took very, very, very different paths and used very different tools. And so we recorded the conversation, and I told her in advance. I was like, look, Debbie, I don't know if I'm going to ever publish this. She was like, that's totally fine. And we recorded it. Eventually, I was like, all right, here goes nothing. And published that, stayed off of all social media. I told my team, I was like, I don't want to see any feedback unless it's from people I care about, and it's positive feedback. I was like, I'm too... It's too raw. Like, I don't want to... Internet's a nasty place.

1:27:47Tim Ferriss:It's a full contact spore where every fucking village idiot has been given, like, a halberd and a mace. Right? It's not pretty. So I was like, I'm staying off of everything. But the opposite happened, didn't it? Well, I ignored everything, except the only people who could reach me were my close friends. So what happened? I would say somewhere between 25 % and 35 % of some of my oldest, closest friends reached out and left me the most heart-wrenching voice memos and voicemails you can imagine about their own abuse that they'd never told anyone about. Fucking horrible. I had anticipated bad behavior on the internet, so I stayed away.

1:28:34Tim Ferriss:I did not expect such a high percentage of my really close friends to confide in me. That was really hard. But I have a lot of, for whatever reason, capacity for that. With friends, with people I care about, I have a lot of capacity for handling that.

1:29:00So, fuck, man.

1:29:01Tim Ferriss:How did it feel? So, it felt... It felt... And I had to decide in advance what would... what feeling would make it worth it. Right? Because no outcome's guaranteed. You have no idea what's gonna happen when this thing gets released into the wild. So, it was like, it was an unburdening for myself. Right? I wasn't expecting apologies from anybody. I wasn't expecting a make good. I wasn't expecting any Harry Potter magic spell to do, Control-Z undo on these experiences. I just, I was exhausted by carrying the weight of that secret around.

1:29:44Tim Ferriss:And furthermore, I'd had this very skilled therapist tell me at one point, and maybe she just didn't realize that this would stick. I guess we very seldom realize these little things we might say that actually can make a big difference to people. She said, take the pain and make it part of your medicine. And... by taking my own experience and turning it into something hopefully that would help people, it gave it some redemption. It gave it some meaning. Am I glad it happened? No. Right? When people say, it's like, well, it made me who I am. Fuck that. Like, if I could remove that, I would remove it, for sure.

1:30:23Tim Ferriss:The amount of damage that's done is unbelievable. And it certainly contributed to the near suicide, in retrospect, right? I thought I had 17 different problems, but when you look back, hindsight 2020, it's like, oh, yeah, all that stuff makes sense. There's one, like, it was like hardware, like genetics, plus trauma. Like, is that... Did you learn that through psychedelics? That's part, I would say it's one of the tools that made it very clear, where I was able to see how these seemingly disconnected pieces of puzzle fit together perfectly.

1:31:02Tim Ferriss:And psychedelics are fascinating for a lot of reasons. I've stepped outside of the public discussion of psychedelics largely in the last few years because I've just been disgusted by all the infighting and humans being humans. Like, there's this... Like, humans just cannot resist soiling the nest, peeing in the pool, choose your metaphor. It's like all of the infighting and nonsense and politics and power grabbing that you see in any group of humans, you also see within the psychedelic ecosystem, right? So anyone who thinks you just need to put LSD in the water supply and we're gonna have world peace, like, I'm like, you should go to a psychedelic conference and see all the assholery and fuckery afoot.

1:31:50Tim Ferriss:And trust me, I can assure you that that will not work. And at the same time, I mean, some of the most beautiful, wonderful, inexplicable, and also painful experiences I've ever had have involved psychedelics. And you do need to be very, very careful with them. I really feel like, as one of my good friends who passed away due to cancer, but Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, he said, in effect, like, you're using... psychological nuclear power. It's like, it doesn't just bend one way. Like, it's inducing a level of plasticity and suggestibility and malleability, but how you shape that Play-Doh, once it's heated up, matters a lot.

1:32:39Tim Ferriss:So, you can't just dose and run. It's like the experience does matter. Experience itself does matter, but the way I encourage people to think about it is, number one, like, treat it as if you're going and to have brain surgery. You're not gonna find a shaman on Facebook for your brain surgery. So, if your friend's like, bro, yeah, I got an awesome shaman who's coming in, and like, come sit this weekend, and it's like three days till the weekend, Like, you would never do that if you were having your skull opened up. Don't do it, in my opinion, without a lot of prep and consideration. So you have a very healthy respect.

1:33:18Tim Ferriss:I have a very healthy respect because... And this isn't scaremonger, it's just a fact of the matter. There's a lot of survivorship bias in the sense that you tend to, especially up until a few years ago, you hear about all the amazing transformations. The people who get their psyche shattered and who have some type of persistent perceptual disorder, they're not necessarily showcasing that. They're not sharing it. They might be ashamed. They might get criticized by friends who are proselytizers for psychedelics who take their difficult experience as a risk to the quote-unquote movement. There are a lot of forces at work and dynamics at play that make it challenging for people who have hard experiences to get the help they need.

1:34:11Tim Ferriss:But as someone who… I had a podcast in 2015 about Ibogaine, and Ibogaine in Mexico specifically. And I've been around these things certainly not as long as many. Like, there are facilitators who have tens of thousands of sessions under their belts over 40, 50 years. I mean, these people know infinitely more than I do. And certainly, indigenous practitioners are coming through practices handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of thousands of years. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface there. But I've had enough time, I would say, as someone who's taken it very seriously and effectively had researching and experiencing and experimenting around psychedelics as my unpaid full-time job for 10 years, to say that once I had a platform, the number of emails that come over the transom from people who have been destabilized is not trivial.

1:35:14Right?

1:35:15Tim Ferriss:No shit. Yeah, it's not trivial. And you can...

1:35:22Tim Ferriss:You can mitigate some of the risks. There are better, or I should say safer, and less safe ways of approaching different psychedelics. And it depends on the compound, right? Like, a psychedelic is not a psychedelic, it's not a psychedelic. Like, these are as different... as completely separate classes of drugs, in some cases, in my opinions. and even at different doses they behave very differently. So, it's like 10 micrograms of LSD is very different than 200 micrograms of LSD, as an example. But I would just say that, take it seriously, right? And if you're going to consider these tools, the way I put it with folks, because a lot of friends come to me to discuss this, is I say, you should look at this as like, you're having the neurosurgery example is a good one, But let's use perhaps a better comparison in some respects, which is you're about to have both knees or both hips replaced.

1:36:23Okay?

1:36:24Tim Ferriss:So you're going to do a lot of homework on who's going to do that surgery. And you're going to understand all the risks involved. You're going to understand the durability, right? You might need to get those hips replaced later again. And what are you going to do? You're going to do a lot of rehab. Mm-hmm. It's like the surgery is the catalyst, but it's like if you have both knees replaced and you don't do any rehab, that could have a worse outcome than not having surgery in the first place. Mm-hmm. So what you do afterwards really matters. And there's a lot of, I think, compelling research and a number of theories around this that I think...

1:37:02Tim Ferriss:I think are very credible from, say, Gould Dolan, who is a researcher who I believe now is at UC Berkeley, used to be at Hopkins, who looked at MDMA extensively among octopuses also. Among octopuses? Yeah, and how octopuses, which are very asocial or antisocial most of the time, but how even with a completely different nervous system, how they would display pro-social behavior, just like humans on MDMA. Oh, seriously. Really fascinating stuff. But what she is also looking at now is how you might use psychedelics to... and I might be getting some of the details wrong, but I'm not that far off, to say help stroke patients to redevelop motor control.

1:37:46Tim Ferriss:Is there an application there? And the reason that she's looking at potential applications like that is that she believes certain psychedelics open a, reopen a critical period or a critical window, much like if kids don't learn to, say, they speak a language within a certain age range, right? It's much later to do later. There's a critical developmental window for certain things. Can you reopen those windows using psychedelics? And it seems like the answer is yes. In which case, all of the advice that the old timers have been given about integrations for people who might be familiar with ayahuasca in a traditional context, the diets afterwards, where it's abstaining from certain things for a few weeks.

1:38:32Tim Ferriss:What does that sound a lot like? It sounds a lot like what science is only beginning to scratch the surface of, which is the reopening of these critical periods, critical windows, within which you can start to rewrite behaviors, like before the concrete sets. So, I'm very, I would say...

1:38:56Tim Ferriss:mind blown and impressed with what these compounds can do as part of a larger context of some type of therapy. And there are a lot of different approaches to this. And the westernized version of like neo-shamanic practices is very different from what they actually do. in whether it be the Amazon or Africa or fill in the blank, right? Like, the practices are very different, or the Mazatecs in Mexico, et cetera. So, I would say I'm very impressed, and I'm also very conservative. And the vast majority of people who come to me and they're like, yeah, yeah, I really want to do psychedelics. I talk them out of it, not into it.

1:39:38Tim Ferriss:Really? Yeah, the vast majority. I talk out of it. Which is not to say, I think, the risks outweigh the benefits, but there are certain people. If you have family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, I do not recommend using these things. Which is another reason why I'm so excited about the different types of brain stimulation or vagus nerve stimulation because... Or, this is another one, actually, that I'll throw out there, metabolic psychiatry using diet, the ketogenic diet specifically. There's an associate professor, I think he's still an associate professor at Harvard, named Chris Palmer, who has looked at this very extensively.

1:40:18Tim Ferriss:For certain, let's call it, people aren't gonna like this, some folks, but chaotic psychiatric disorders. So, let's just say there's a river, and you can swim in the middle, that's like complete normalcy, that's pretty much no one. And then on one side you have hyper-rigidity, let's just say, which is like OCD, depression, chronic anxiety, anorexia nervosa, which are all characterized in a sense by a certain looping and rigidity, which is part of the reason why I think psychedelics are mysteriously effective for this constellation of seemingly different diagnoses, right? They're on this rigidity side.

1:40:59I think

1:41:00Tim Ferriss:classical psychedelics can be very, very helpful for that side of things. Then on the other side you've got, let's just call it a more chaotic constellation of disorders, which would include schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder. On that side of the river, it would seem that something like metabolic psychiatry is very, very interesting. You see people who have been on dozens of medications and they're on the ketogenic diet for four weeks, and then they get off of all of their medications. Are you serious? Yeah. It is shocking. Shocking. So, like, the three, let's just call it But current, it could get replaced, but pillars of the mental health technology stool, for me, that are most interesting, ketones and metabolic psychiatry, brain stimulation or bioelectric medicine, more broadly, bioelectric medicine, and then psychedelic-assisted therapies.

1:41:56Tim Ferriss:But I'm tool agnostic. Like, psychedelics at the time were most interesting, most compelling, because of some of the effects that you were seeing and the durability, right? With PTSD, with major depressive disorder, with alcoholism through, like, NYU addiction, which, by the way, is not new. We were doing this research with LSD in, like, the 50s. Were we really? Yeah, 50s and 60s. And then once Nixon signed it off into Prohibition era, that all went away. And there were a lot of political motivations behind that. There was not a scientific reason for that. I was more politically motivated, but...

1:42:34Tim Ferriss:The point being that... I'm very excited about what the future holds for psychedelic therapies. But I've been most interested in the science. Once it turns into, like, policy and politicking and grandstanding and befriending the right special interest groups... Yeah. It's not... I have zero patience for that stuff. I just can't... I have a lot of trouble with it. So I prefer to just deal with the scientists and the practitioners. Like, I've been very heavily involved with groups like the Amazon Conservation Team and looking at indigenous land rights and really trying to the extent possible to support and reciprocate these groups who effectively gave the world these things that are now being medicalized, right?

1:43:21Tim Ferriss:I do think that's important. I do think that's really important. especially since some of these folks operate in such hostile territories. I mean, you've got, like, illegal mining interests, you've got logging, agriculture, narcos. Like, you know, these folks are routinely assassinated indigenous leaders all over the place. Look at Brazil, you look at Colombia, Mexico. It's a very, very tough world that they inhabit in a lot of ways. What got you interested in psychedelics to begin with? I've always been interested in altered states of consciousness ever since I was a little kid. And I don't know exactly where that comes from.

1:44:04Tim Ferriss:I think it was just suspecting that there was, on some level, I think, researchers like Donald Hoffman, he's a bucking bronco, he could have on. But there was always part of me that kind of suspected that this was what we're looking at here and experiencing, like a user interface. It's like a desktop on a computer, where it's like, okay, we have these icons and so on that represent something, but that this is just one interface. If we were a mantis shrimp or a different animal, like, it wouldn't look or feel like this. So, this is a reality, but it's not the end-all, be-all, objective reality.

1:44:46Tim Ferriss:I always just had that feeling. And you can explore that through a purely scientific, physicalist lens, right? You don't have to get out there, you don't have to be running around the full moon swinging a dead cat over your head with a hawk wing, right? Like, you don't have to get into pure woo territory to ask some questions about things. And then I would say later, I was always interested in mythology, and my mom got me this crazy book, I think it was on the remainder table, called A Lycanthropy Reader. And A Lycanthropy Reader was a historical collection of essays on the mythology and belief of shape-shifting.

1:45:35Tim Ferriss:Which you see in pretty much every culture, right? Whether it's like North American, Plains Indians, or Siberia, or wherever, right? And there were chapters in there about the use of different plants. So, mandrake, belladonna, henbane, et cetera, by, quote-unquote, witches or werewolves, right? Who would basically go on these incredible psychotropic journeys and then come back with stories of shapeshifting, which are still very common in the Amazon, by the way. this belief and these type of stories. I mean, they might call them skills or powers, right? I mean, dieting certain plants is intended to help you with some of this stuff.

1:46:24Tim Ferriss:So that opened the door to me asking, like, okay, let's just assume for the time being that people cannot turn into animals. But, like, the idea that you could ingest a plant or put on a salve that would so fundamentally change your consciousness, that you would come back with complete belief that you had done it was also interesting to me. And so I then became this sort of intrepid, very amateur biochemist looking at how that might happen. And so you combine that then with the fear of Alzheimer's in my family, and it just led me to really want to focus on brain function. And a few things happened around the same time.

1:47:09Tim Ferriss:towards the end of high school, I read a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge. And still to this day, I think it is one of the most impressive books I have found for teaching a skill in a systematic way. And it teaches you how to induce lucidity in dreams. And it's nothing mysterious. I shouldn't say that. It is provable within the confines of laboratory that you can cultivate the ability to control your dreams and become conscious in your dreams. And the way they demonstrated this is like an EEG or other means of confirming that someone is in a sleep state, and you devise in advance, for instance, eye movement.

1:48:02Tim Ferriss:Like when you're asleep, what happens? Rapid eye movement, right? Your eye movement still correlates to what you're doing in a dream. So you determine in advance a sequence between experimenter and subject, where it's like Morse code, basically. It's like right, right, left, right, right, left, right, right, left. And then when the person's in the dream, they just perform that eye sequence. Are you kidding me? Yeah. So as I started really, once I got accepted to college, I was like, I can do whatever I want now. Like, it's just basically wrestling. All I wanted to do was compete and go to nationals and do well and lucid dreaming.

1:48:39Tim Ferriss:That was it. And within pretty short order, I'd say within a month or so, some people come to it very naturally. Within a month or so, I could get to the point where I was inducing lucidity like once or twice a night. And that is a bizarre experience when you get to the point where you can actually modify your dream at will or extend your dream in certain ways. And at first, I'm going to tell everybody in advance what you're going to do. You might protest, but what everyone's going to do is they're going to do two things. They're going to fly as much as possible and they're going to fuck as many people as possible.

1:49:19Tim Ferriss:Those are the two things everyone's gonna do. So then you'll fly around and fuck everybody for a while. And then you can... And then you can start messing around in some really peculiar ways. So what I was doing at the time, one of my favorite wrestlers, just a phenom, John Smith from Oklahoma, famous for low leg attacks. Never met the guy, but I watched tons of video. So at night, in my dreams, I would have wrestling practice with John Smith. Okay. And it improved my wrestling in real life. So, there are some really unexpected levers that you can pull and corners you can explore just through lucid dreaming.

1:50:03Tim Ferriss:And it does take work. You have to train up to it. You have to have a very scheduled way to record dream content. Like, it is a practice. But that also kind of raised a lot of questions. Like, oh, okay. Well, if I learned something 10 years ago, could I use lucid dreaming to go back and pull those books off the shelf? Is that possible? Maybe. And then I would say very early college, so this would have been, actually no, it was still in high school. At the very end of high school, I had my first experiences with psychedelics, with mushrooms first and LSD. And after that, I was like, oh, okay. I don't understand how my experience of time can be cut up into slices and rearranged in the way that I just experienced it last night.

1:51:00Tim Ferriss:That is, that is, it doesn't really fit with my consensus experience of this reality. So, what does that mean? I have no idea. But I'm interested in exploring what that might mean. So, when I went to Princeton, I went to Princeton for a couple of reasons. Where I applied to Princeton early action, which is like an exploding offer. In retrospect, I think it would have been much happier somewhere else. Princeton was a very difficult, stiff environment for me. But I went there because they had one of the best East Asian studies departments in the world. Really phenomenal. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.

1:51:45Tim Ferriss:They had a very, very strong psychology and neuroscience program. Danny Kahneman was there. There was a guy named Barry Jacobs who had done a bunch of research with LSD and did a lot of research also on the serotonergic system involving cats and stuff because cats kind of sleep all the time. I really wanted to work in his lab. And then thirdly, there was something at the time, I was very sad that it ended up getting wound down maybe a year after I got there. But there was something at Princeton called the PEAR Lab, P-E-A-R, Princeton Engineering Anobolese Research Laboratory, where I think I could be getting some of the details wrong.

1:52:29But I'm pretty sure at one point they had military funding or, you know, three letter acronym funding. They also had money, I want to say, from like SRI International to use sort of computational and quantitative measures to study things like telekinesis, remote viewing, etc.

1:52:50Tim Ferriss:And literally that had been started by, I want to say, Professor John, J-A-H-N, I believe it was. And somebody should fact check this, but I'm getting pretty close. I think he was the former dean of the engineering department or engineering quadrangle, and one of his postdocs, not postdocs, but one of his grad students had looked at human influence on random number generators. And he was like, really? He was like, he's like, look, if you want to waste your time on this, it's not going to help you with anything. Looks like a terrible idea to me. And then when all the data came back, he was like, Hmm.

1:53:29Tim Ferriss:Okay. And ultimately became so interested that he spearheaded this engineering anomalies research laboratory, and I wanted to know what the hell they had figured out. I wanted to get a read on what they felt like they had figured out. And this is a... I mean, this is a high-end, incredibly credible engineer, right? This isn't some rando. This is someone who was on the far side, extreme skeptic, end of things, who ended up then spearheading this. You can still end up with beliefs that you want confirmation for. So again, the purpose of the scientific method, which is really a framework for thinking, is to prevent you from fooling yourself, right?

1:54:19Tim Ferriss:But all of those things came together... To answer your question, and I was like, you know what? I think all of these things, if for the moment we provisionally say that maybe some of those phenomena have something to them, right? In the anomalies research laboratory, even if you exclude that, psychedelics, lucid dreaming, certain types of like religious experience that I'd read about, I was like, I feel like there's a possibility these are all touching like the hem of the same garment. Mm-hmm. And perhaps that's all internally generated. Maybe it's like a temporal lobe epilepsy, kind of seizure.

1:55:00Tim Ferriss:Like when you look back at a lot of scripture, it's like, hmm, that sounds a lot like seizure. But does that invalidate it? I don't know. Like some of the most creative people we've ever known have also had something very similar. So it's like, all right, all of it meant like, I want to know what the hell is going on in here. Mm-hmm. How do you even study it? It's like three pounds of fat sitting in this skull. What do you even do to study that? So, I mean, all of those things, I would say, catalyzed it. Then went pretty hard in the paint with all of that for a while. And then since I had no, certainly no training, my friends and I had no training in how to structure psychedelic experiences.

1:55:48Tim Ferriss:And I had a terrifying experience of coming out of a mushroom psychedelic experience in the middle of the night because my asshole friends, so the three of us had wandered off on some like hike and I was left alone in a house and I started looping because I was on a bear. I'm sure we weren't even measuring doses at the time, but I'm sure it was in retrospect, I would say it was probably like six to eight grams of dried I had Slasabi mushrooms, which is a lot for people who don't know. And so I was looping, looping, looping, wandered over to my parents' house, and my friends were like, you definitely didn't go over there.

1:56:22Tim Ferriss:And then the next day my mom's like, big night, huh? And I was like, what do you mean? So that was already a problem, right? I'm tripping my balls off, sitting on like the kitchen floor with my parents, like that's bad enough. But when I was walking back to this other house where I was staying with my friends, I came out of my trip in pitch blackness, walking in the middle of the road and almost got hit by an oncoming car. Like the headlights coming at me is what woke me up and then I like jumped out of the way. And I was like, okay, we're done. And I stopped. And the only reason I got back into it, the interest always persisted.

1:56:58Tim Ferriss:And the other things, the lucid dreaming, the neuroscience, the interest, all of that continued. But I was like, psychedelics, that's off-paste. And then in 2012, probably, 2012, my girlfriend at the time went on retreat to Peru and did three nights of ayahuasca and came back and was just a different person. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. And she said, you really need to do this. And I was like, I don't think so. And she said, it's 20 years of therapy in two or three nights. And I was like, damn, you know me too well, that's a pretty good pitch. And I was like, okay. And keep in mind, this is before I unpacked all the trauma stuff, but she was aware of it.

1:57:47Tim Ferriss:And I was just white-knuckling with my compartmentalization. I was like, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then just basically around 2012, just like, you know, the re-entry from outer space, like, the front of the hall is getting red hot, and I was like, oh, okay, I'm at risk of blowing apart here. and two things simultaneously happened. One, a friend of mine, one of the most successful extreme photographers in the world, said, you need to try some type of meditation. He's like, go pay someone and do transcendental meditation. And I was like, eh, really? I'm going to pay like whatever it is, 500 bucks, 1500 bucks to have some guy give me a mantra and I have to give him flowers?

1:58:27Tim Ferriss:Are you fucking kidding me? And he's like, you can afford it. And I was like, and he's like, really? He's like, look at yourself. And I was like, all right, fine. So, I started doing TM, which was actually an incredibly good investment. And the money matters. Why? Because you don't want to lose that money. And you have the accountability. So, you're actually gonna do it. Secondly, I started thinking about a re-entry into the playing field of psychedelics. And I was like, all right, if I'm gonna do it, now that I know how to read research properly, and I have access, I was living in the Bay Area, I'm like, I am in the epicenter in North America for exploring this type of thing.

1:59:07Tim Ferriss:I'm going to do it in a really conservative, step-by-step build-up leading to, but not committed to, potentially ayahuasca. And so, just thought about how to structure it safely. You know, interviewed, for lack of a better term. I was hiring for a job, different facilitators, had people help me with the vetting, got reference checks. I really went over the top because that experience in the middle of the street had rightfully scared the hell out of me. Like, I could have very easily been hit by a car. And it's like, bad things do happen. Like, people jump out of windows. Like, I hate to say it, but like, those things do happen.

1:59:47Tim Ferriss:So, I wanted as many safeguards as possible. And so that was sort of starting in, let's call it... 2011, 2012 was the re-entry onto the playing field. Right on, man. Yeah. But being much more, much more methodical about the whole thing. Are you a Christian? I wouldn't identify as anything from an organized religion perspective. Oh, good. Just ask, you brought up scripture a couple times. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I think scripture, I think it doesn't matter if you're religious or not. I think you should read scripture. I think there are different ways to approach it, but I mean, if something is sort of the...

2:00:29Tim Ferriss:one of the foundations of Western civilization, it's like, yeah, maybe you should get familiar with it, right? Like, if you haven't read the Constitution, maybe you should read the Constitution too. Mm-hmm. It's like, you know, the Constitution's a much shorter read, so maybe start there, but... What do you think happens when we die? What do I think happens when we die? I find it increasingly difficult to believe that we simply have a machine that gets turned off. So I think that's informed by some of the experiences on psychedelics. And I recognize I could take, and I think it's important, if you have a strong belief...

2:01:13Tim Ferriss:I think it's really important that you try to attack that belief with the strongest possible version of a critic's arguments, right? I really think that's important. If you want to become a better thinker and a better human, I think that's important. So, I recognize that I could also make a bunch of arguments for why it should just be lights out. But if I'm looking at... some of the documentation around near-death experiences, if I'm looking at like the sort of...

2:01:50Tim Ferriss:CCTV-like view from above, where people are able to confirm things that happened, where objects were placed, what people said while they were clinically dead. It's hard to explain that with like hypoxia and death-rattle spasms in the brain and erratic neuronal firing. Seems pretty hard to explain. And there's enough in terms of documented cases where, at the very least, it raises some interesting questions. So what do I think happens when you die? I mean, the best placeholder that I have is that consciousness is fundamental, just like matter. I'm not even convinced time is fundamental. But... Yeah, Carlo Rovelli, I think his name is, like, there's some really interesting writing from physicists on time.

2:02:42Tim Ferriss:Like, it's not as static, uniform, constant as one might like to think. But if consciousness on some level is fundamental, kind of Max Planck style, then I think when you die, it's like a drop or turn to the ocean. You think what? I think that your consciousness is like... what we experience is sort of a skin-encapsulated ego that we associate with ourself, and all of that can dissolve and go away on psychedelics. Right? And you have the experience of something you might call consciousness. Collective consciousness. Is that what you're saying? What was that? Some type of a collective consciousness.

2:03:21Tim Ferriss:Sure. Something like that. Yeah. Where it's like, yeah, okay, you're a drop of water, and you just get returned to the ocean. What does that subjectively mean? No idea. Right? I mean, what's it like a few months before you're born? I don't know. What is that? I don't know. What is that like? Not the slightest clue. But, you know, I've had conversations with people like the incredible biologist, also computer scientist. You just talked to this guy, Michael Levin, out of tots, who is on the cutting edge of more things than I can even list off at this point. But if you're looking at the development of a human from embryo, and I'm getting seemingly a little off track, but I don't think so, like...

2:04:11Tim Ferriss:The development of consciousness, which we kind of need to define, but let's just think of it as having an identity of me, an I, that is separate from the outside, and maybe you're aware that you're aware, right? Which might distinguish humans from other species in some way. Okay, well, when does that happen? Is there just a point in the process where it's like Frankenstein galvanizing, it's like lights on and suddenly, or does it actually exist at a cellular or subcellular level, and it just scales up to what we experience, kind of like a beehive? I tend to lean towards the latter, right? And I think Michael Levin would lean towards the latter.

2:04:57Tim Ferriss:Like, very good scientists. These aren't people running around at Esalen with tinfoil hats on. I love Esalen, by the way. No smack to Esalen. I've been there before. But it's like, these are people who have some of the most... analytical, critically-minded... brains in the scientific field. Mm-hmm. And these are open questions. So... What do you think happens when you die? Well, I mean, I'm a Christian, so I think you die and you either go up or down. yeah um but but i don't know i mean when i did psychedelics i mean i was uh i don't know if i would say i was an atheist i wasn't an atheist i believed in something i just wasn't sure actually i i don't know i don't even know how to explain i didn't i didn't think about it yeah you know and um i didn't think about it until i did ibogaine and five dmt i climbed the mount everest of Yeah.

2:05:56And then... I'm going to go skiing.

2:05:57Tim Ferriss:Okay, I'll do it without oxygen down Everest. Let's go. Yeah. And then we did, you know, 5-MeO after that, which is a death experience. And it made me realize, oh, there's definitely something after all of this. Yeah. And so that's where I landed. Yeah. So I would say I was for a period of time, for lack of a better descriptor, like a militant atheist. One of my friends, I was not raised religious. The school I went to, the private school, was Episcopal, so nominally Christian, had chapel every morning outside of one or two days, but that was really for like roll call and announcements. And you could go to religious service, and I would occasionally actually go to religious service.

2:06:48Tim Ferriss:But a friend of mine, a few years out of college, was getting divorced. and he joined a church that was very, very, very extreme. And for... I would say a weaponized version of religion, like a very extreme. And I was incredibly worried for him. But he was very, very, very, is very, very, very smart. And so, he had done all this reading. He had kind of prepared himself for every possible counterargument, and I was like, well, I gotta stock up on some materials here. So, I bought all these books, and I'm like, Bertrand Russell and this, this, and this, and we would have these long debates, and I'm trying to kind of prevent him from being weaponized in this church, because he was, like, the heir apparent.

2:07:41Tim Ferriss:Like, he's got a really smart guy, very intense, super aggressive in everything he did, and I was very concerned, but ultimately realized that at that point in time, he had no safety net. He was going through this horrible divorce. His life was falling apart. His family was having all these problems, meaning his family of origin. And I was like, I think if this gets taken away, I'm not even convinced I can take it away, but if I were to be able to take it away, then what? And I was like, I'm not willing to... I would rather him roll the dice with this particular church than have on my conscience that he killed himself.

2:08:22Tim Ferriss:or something horrible happened. But from that point forward, I had this really bad taste in my mouth, and so I had really strong conviction around... not necessarily atheism, but like hyper-skepticism, which I think I still have, and it's served me well. But after some of these psychedelic experiences, and also just, frankly, after spending time with some of these indigenous groups, with the recognition that, like, Some of these groups also use what we might consider like stage magic, right? Like, there are performances that a mentalist or someone could potentially try to replicate, right? Just like someone can mimic remote viewing, right?

2:09:06Tim Ferriss:Like, there are people who've done this. There's a great documentary called Honest Liar that people should watch. But I've just seen too many things now and experienced too many things, not entirely on drugs. dead sober a lot of time where I'm like, there's just more to the story. And we've never known the whole story. Like there's, we are very, very, very early in neuroscience and psychiatry, right? Like, it's like surgery 500 years ago. Yeah. So, I mean, the reason I was, the reason I had asked you that is I was, I was going to follow that up with, you know, what do you think? Like, are you solely into the science of psychedelics, or is there potentially some type of spiritual component?

2:09:57Tim Ferriss:Oh, there's a huge spiritual component. I just don't usually talk about it, because I've got so much I want to do on the scientific and policy side that if I sort of show my full hand, then people are going to be like, oh, that guy's a wackadoodle. So, I haven't... I don't usually talk about the stuff that I can't really defend with, like, randomized controlled trials. I don't talk too much about, typically. But there's a huge spiritual component. Mm-hmm. I don't love that word spiritual, but I don't know a better replacement. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know a better replacement. But I think that if what you're looking for is relief from something like depression, OCD, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder.

2:10:42Tim Ferriss:I think the brain stimulation is incredibly compelling, and that the effects with a successful treatment, and there are some really... There are some new approaches to that which make it really interesting. Like, single day, stimulations, a few minutes per hour for ten hours straight, predosing with a drug called decyclicerine, that's it. That's the treatment. one day. And you might have durability for three to 12 months. I'm like, anxiety from 10 to 1. Wow. Wow. They're not, I can't say that for, I can't say that reliably for any psychedelic. So if you're looking for relief from those symptoms functioning in this world, I think there are a lot of tools in the toolkit, which is good news, right?

2:11:30Tim Ferriss:Metabolic psychiatry would be another example. If you're looking to tangibly touch something that feels timeless, whatever that is, right? Even if it's just a hallucination. But if you're looking to touch something timeless and lose your fear of death, I think a lot of human suffering is wrapped around being, as far as we know, the only species that is aware of its own pending death. Right? I don't think you get there through brain stimulation. I do think you can get there through psychedelics. But we start getting into... Are you saying take away fear of death? Yeah. Do you fear death? No. I fear certain declines to death.

2:12:23Tim Ferriss:But actual death? No. I do not. Do I fear something like neurodegenerative disease? Yes, I do. But death? Like, no. I mean, I think that... you can get more out of life if you assume that you are gonna die around the age of your grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents. And if I look back at my family, 85 for men. More or less, right? It's like, okay, great, we have antibiotics, cool. Infort mortality, way down, great. But there's not a whole lot we've found that really extends life a lot. We could talk about some things I find interesting, like sure, rapamycin might be interesting.

2:13:12Tim Ferriss:For people who have metabolic dysfunction and don't exercise much, metformin may be interesting. Intermittent fasting and so on, sure, okay, I think there might be benefits. But they're all question marks in humans. And if you just assume you're gonna die at 85, I think you make more, potentially make better use of your time. And then if you're pleasantly surprised, great. Scientists come up with some, like, injectable clotho or gene therapy related to clotho, which is a really interesting protein. Fantastic. All right, great. You can avail yourself of that when it comes out. But until then, read on the shortness of life by Seneca, And it's like, make every minute count, because I think you can do a lot to extend your health span, like how long you can function at a high level.

2:14:01Tim Ferriss:And I think, certainly, you have a copy of Outlive by Peter Attia on your shelf. I would recommend people check that out. I think Peter is... He is a credible... former scientist and physician who really pays attention to the details, and does not sell hype. If anything, he undersells certain things, which I appreciate. So I do think there are ways, and Peter's a better resource for that, but he's also my doctor, so... Nice. Yeah, I've known him since 2008. So, yeah, make the most of your time. But, like, when your clock is up, your clock just might be up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Tim, let's take a quick break.

2:14:48When we come back, I'd like to dive into conception of time. Let's do it. Perfect. Listen up. 2026 is the year you finally launched that business you've been dreaming about. Don't let February arrive with the same old story. Taking action is the key. Let this be the year you become an entrepreneur or founder. One move puts your future in your hands. Starting a business with Shopify. Maybe it's an idea you can't shake, a craft everyone tells you to sell, or a store you've already designed in your head. With Shopify, 2026 is when you make it real. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person.

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2:16:17That's shopify.com slash srs. Here you're first. This new year with Shopify by your side. Want more from the Sean Ryan show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content, like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions. Our new SRS on-site specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly.

2:17:00Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show story. All right, Tim, we're back from the break. Getting ready to move into perception of time. We're having a mini conversation about it. I think I cut you off at breakfast because I was like, oh, shit, we got to talk about this. on them so i mean it is it's a fast it's a i mean i think about it all the time a lot of the things that we've discussed already today thinking about a lot uh especially the slowing down thing or not the slowing down thing the the simplification pretending that you're in poverty and then realizing oh shit i can survive this is nice yeah it's nice not having shit to do it's nice It's nice not having an agenda.

2:17:51It's nice not being in the fucking grind all the time. But it's interesting. As nice as it is, we, for some reason, refuse to pull ourselves out of it.

2:18:03Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I think that most of us, if we're attempting to have healthy social fabric, live within the context of a society or a culture, and there are certain norms, there are certain expectations, there's certain rewards.

2:18:22Tim Ferriss:And it's very difficult and also probably undesirable to operate completely monastically outside of all of that. But what that means is at every turn, every moment, you will have temptation to do something that is probably not serving your long-term interests. You know, I mean, you are 100 % agree with that. You're a well-traveled guy. I'm a well-traveled guy. I am very curious. Let's say there's a happiness scale. Where does the US lie compared to a lot of the other places that you've been? And then I'll share my. Yeah. So I would say in the last, I'll back up and just say in the last 10 years in particular, I've been exploring a lot of the US.

2:19:16Tim Ferriss:It is a huge country with so much diversity. And I don't mean diversity in the DEI sense. I mean diversity in the cultural sense, where if we take culture to be a shared set of beliefs and behavior, it's like going to Louisiana versus going to Upper Peninsula, Michigan, versus going to Maine, they might as well be different countries. Sure, we ostensibly have the same language, but they're really, really different. So, I think the default baseline of happiness that I observe throughout the US varies quite a lot. But I would say, if we're looking at countries, I don't know if I'm gonna get myself into hot water with some folks, but this is just what I've observed.

2:20:04Tim Ferriss:I would say that where you have rich social fabric and human interactions combined with some sense of safety, there are different types of safety you could have. That could be physical safety, that could be a social net of some type with healthcare, as would be the case, say in a Denmark, for instance. Those things combined, which offer a certain level of predictability, not predictability across the board, but I'm not sure how heavily to weight various polls and happiness reports. But you might have, say, for instance, a few years ago, you had Singapore, which is fascinating, little country, right?

2:20:55Tim Ferriss:A little postage stamp, but like from swamp to what it's become is fascinating. So Lee Kuan Yew and so on. Nonetheless, like highly structured, quite strict, predictable, but purportedly a high level of self-reported happiness. Okay. Then you take that and you compare it to, say, Denmark, and you could point out a lot of differences, but if you talk to Danes about why they might rank highly on these happiness report cards, they'll get some serious responses, mostly around, like, the social safety net, frankly, specifically as it relates to healthcare, I would say, and physical safety. so they don't have to worry about their kids running around outside, etc.

2:21:44I did have one friend, because you might guess from the size of my head,

2:21:48Tim Ferriss:I've got some Scandinavian genes. So one of my Danish friends who's like... I said, why are you guys so happy on these reports? And he goes, low expectations. Now, I think there's actually something deeply profound about that in a way. Low expectations? Well, if happiness is, and I'm not the first person to come up with this, but reality minus expectations, it's like, well, you can work on both of those, right? What do you expect? What do you feel entitled to versus your reality? And you can work on either side if that is in fact. Do you think entitlement is the same as high expectations? They're not the same.

2:22:30Tim Ferriss:They're not the same. I would say that entitlement is a perverted type of high expectations in excess. So, there's... They're kind of different windows through which you can look at high expectations. I have high expectations. Look, if, like, someone's working on my team, if I'm working with someone, if I'm in a relationship, like, I have high expectations of myself, and I have high expectations of pretty much everyone around me. In terms of, let's just call it the professional context, like certain core tenets, commitment to excellence, shipping and meeting deadlines, right? Certain things that are non-negotiable.

2:23:13Tim Ferriss:When you feel like you should have A, B, and C, I deserve D, E, and F. I think that's where you get into murkier waters. But then if you look at Costa Rica, right, which was also in the report that I looked at, top three, what do they have? Very rich social environments, right? Whether it's extended family or walkable neighborhoods, et cetera, you can find a lot of these things in the US, maybe minus the healthcare piece. But you can find a lot of those elements in the US. So the way you might interact with people in, say, Indiana or Boulder is very different from how you're gonna interact with people in like the Upper East Side.

2:23:57Tim Ferriss:I wouldn't say that happiness seems very high on the other side. I would not say that. So, what's been your experience? With happiness and travel in the world? Happiness in other places. I mean, some of the happiest people I've ever met have been... Two come to mind. Ethiopians in the Tigray area, which is like... I don't think you can even travel there right now. Dirt poor in villages. And Shangon people in South Africa also. So, I mean, not quite as destitute, but very rough situation, displaced people. I would say, and this is just my perception, you know what I mean? And so, minus the war-torn countries that I've been to, I've been to a lot of third world, you know, countries in extreme poverty.

2:24:50And I really, I have to say that I think that the countries in poverty seem to be more happy than we are here at the U.S. who have literally every fucking thing we can think of at our fingertips. All right.

2:25:07Tim Ferriss:So, if I'm gonna armchair quarterback this, which, why not, since I'm sitting in an armchair, I would say I think that having everything is part of the recipe for dissatisfaction, right? You start fearing having those things taken away. I do think your level of entitlement goes up. And there's a great book by Sebastian Junger called Tribe. I really recommend everyone read this. Sebastian has been through some shit. That's about PTSD. And he wrote a book on PTSD. I don't know if it's called Tribe. I know who this is. Yeah, Tribe, Sebastian Junger. It's about veterans, I believe. It includes a lot of discussion of veterans.

2:25:54Tim Ferriss:Tribe really talks about social cohesion. But if you look at, for instance, I think the example, there are a number of examples he gave, but looking at World War II bombing in the UK and how... admittances to hospitals, and there are a number of different ways you could explain this, but effectively, the incidents of mental illness, suicide, et cetera, all seem to plummet while the city's being bombed. What's going on there? And you see a similar pattern in other places. Well, I think that when you have seemingly everything, you by default almost necessarily can easily end up majoring in minor things, right?

2:26:41Tim Ferriss:Because you don't have any major problem to deal with. But humans love having problems and solving problems, right? In order to solve problems, you have to have problems. So I think humans are problem-solving machines, but the dark side of that is you can become a problem-seeking machine, problem-creating machine. So these small things take on the proportion of something big, right? It's kind of like, I'm sure a lot of people have the experience where it's just like, there's some old cat lady in the neighborhood who's part of the HOA, and man, is she just a pain in the balls. Like, she's just like, okay, so-and-so didn't put out the recycling bin.

2:27:18Tim Ferriss:So-and-so didn't, whatever. It's because she doesn't have anything else to do that is bigger, right? That is kind of forcing her hand. So if you're really way up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I think it's easy to become more sensitive to slight turbulence in life, which is also part of the reason for practicing not just minimalism, not just necessarily poverty, but like subjecting yourself to shared privation. The things I do with friends are definitely type two fun, maybe type three fun. It's like, sure, okay, we might do like a ski touring trip. That's mostly suffering. It's like, yeah, you're going to spend an hour and a half going up the hill for six turns down.

2:28:02Tim Ferriss:If you just want to ski, that's a terrible way to do it. But you get through that experience. You're stuck in a snowstorm. It's whiteout. I'm not, by the way, suggesting that everyone do this. There are scaled down versions of it. It creates a bond. It creates a bond. It creates a bond because you have overcome some type of adversity. Exactly. Exactly. So, in a world or in an environment that doesn't offer you those things, and by the way, there are lots of reasons why you would want a more comfortable experience. I'm not saying go move to Sierra Leone, right? So, I'm incredibly grateful for just the number of miracles, effectively, that ended up with me being born here, having opportunities, etc.

2:28:50Tim Ferriss:Hugely beyond grateful. I do not take it for granted. And I do think that in the absence of real environmental stressors, we are built to overcome and adapt to stress. And there's a book called The Comfort Crisis, I believe, that really delves into this, but it's like, there is a great argument to be made for engineering certain stress into your life, including physical stress. And... I think veterans are amazing at that. Yeah, yeah. I'm amazing at that. So, yeah. I should say also, I mean, you know, obviously, multitudes more veterans than I do, but a couple of my best friends are vets. And I think that if you don't very explicitly, consciously engineer suffering, it sounds strange to put it that way, but it really is like adversity, suffering, stress into your life, there is, I think, an innate push to manifest it subconsciously while it seeps through the edges.

2:30:00And that might take the form of slow burn workaholism.

2:30:04Tim Ferriss:It might take the form of certain types of self-sabotage. It might take the form of blow-ups and arguments with your wife. It might take the form of fill in the blank. And I have just found it so incredibly, and I've seen this too, in a lot of my listeners and readers over decades. It's like when you engineer in periods of stress, some of those other things just resolve themselves in an unexpected way. It's not always the case. I mean, you still need to be able to talk to your wife. But it's like, if you're a working dog, like, you need a job, right? You can't be a border collie stuck behind a laptop all day.

2:30:47Tim Ferriss:You're gonna go crazy, start chewing on the couch. Are you happy? I feel like I am the happiest... We could definitely pull apart that term and what it means, But I would say I am the most at peace. That's more my goal than happiness, I would say. You're reluctant to say that you're happy. Well, I feel like I'm reluctant to say happy because I'm such a stickler. It could be the OCD kicking in, but for terms, right? When people are like, I just want to be successful, I'm like, let's talk about that very carefully, right? When people get into fights about God, I'm like, are you guys talking about the same thing?

2:31:26Tim Ferriss:Like, let's make sure we're talking about the same thing. I am very happy right now. I have great relationships. I have, you know, taking care of people I care about, doing meaningful work. Very happy. But I think happiness comes and goes. So looking for a steady state of smiles, I think is a fool's errand because you're going to be disappointed. And if we come back to the sort of, let's say, long-term durable happiness, is reality minus expectations. If my expectation is I'm never going to have hard days, I'm never going to have moments of self-loathing, then in the long term, I think I'm handicapping my peace of mind.

2:32:10Tim Ferriss:Does that make any sense? If, for instance, right, I can give a lot of examples of this. If you're trying to learn a language, which I think people can become, let's just say native English speakers, conversationally fluent in a bunch of languages in like eight to 12 weeks, if they really dedicated themselves. There's no magic trick involved. Like there's a very methodical way to do it. I mean, look at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey. Like the stuff they can do is incredible with language instruction. They're very interested in bioelectric medicine too, by the way, potentially as an augment.

2:32:39But if you're going to learn a language,

2:32:43Tim Ferriss:if you expect your progress to look like this, right? Weight training, same thing. It doesn't look skill acquisition. It's going to be lumpy, right? You're going to have predictable setbacks. It's like, okay, you memorized 100 phrases, fantastic. Or 100 words. Man, you're gonna be making rocket-like progress. But as soon as you start introducing a little more complicated grammar, which you need to do, to make it for the long game, you're going to feel like you're getting worse. Your ability to juggle those balls is gonna take time for adaptation, and you're gonna get worse. Boom, boom, boom. And then up, and then down, and then maybe there's more of a plateau.

2:33:18Tim Ferriss:And if you know these in advance, you can kind of plan for them, right? in the service of the long-term goal of being fluent in the language. But if you have a teacher who's trying to do the right thing, and they tell you everything's going to be great, you know, just one step in front of the other, you know, slow and steady wins the race, and you expect it to be this linear progression, you're going to get crushed as soon as you suffer a setback. And I feel like psychologically, this is where Stoicism is such an incredible arrow in the quiver. It's just expecting people to be... Like Marcus Aurelius meditation is like, effectively, when you go out, expect people to be insolent and rude.

2:33:59Tim Ferriss:Expect people to disappoint you. Expect A, B, and C. And there's a thin line between that and just being pessimistic or nihilistic, right? But... I think you're just talking about drive. Personal drive. I mean, if it was easy and the incline was like this, set it a thousand times, everybody would fucking do it. Then you hit a setback and 75 % of the people fucking quit. Yeah. You know what I mean? But the drive keeps the 25 % going. Totally. And I think that there's just like baseline drive. It's like, okay, what kind of engine do you have? And then there's how do you drive the car? and it's almost like rally racing.

2:34:50Tim Ferriss:Like I did a little bit of training in rally racing, which is incredibly dangerous, but also... No shit? Yeah. The whole team here is going to the... Where'd you go to rally racing school? I went to New Hampshire. Dude! Yeah. You went to O 'Neill. I went to O 'Neill. Fucking awesome. I went to O 'Neill. He's great. He's amazing. I love that school. Hilarious. So, yeah. So I went to O 'Neill. As you know, pretty risky endeavor. What do you... Okay. What does that look like? well, you have a navigator. In the case of your life, like, you are both the driver and the navigator. And are you going to take a rally course race at high speed without studying the course?

2:35:27Tim Ferriss:Fuck no. You need to know if it's like right three or right one, right? Or you're going to hit a tree because you need to plan for all of these subtleties of the course in advance. So all I'm What I'm saying is, if you have this drive, which is like the base engine, right? Some people, I think, are just born with a huge engine. Right? Like, they're born in a Ferrari. Other people might be born in like a Miata, but guess what? It's like, I've seen pro drivers in a Miata smoke people in McLarens on a driving course. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Why? They know the course. They've trained. They know how to do it.

2:36:07Tim Ferriss:Fundamentals. Yeah. And similarly, like, I don't think, in some ways, I think I have certain advantages, but I do not have, like, a huge psychological buffer. Some people have incredible inbuilt, I really think, psychological resilience. Like, they have a lot of margin of safety. I don't have that, right? I do not have the batteries and infinite endurance of some serial entrepreneurs I've seen or professional athletes, right? It's just like they have different, like Kobe Bryant or, I mean, you could look, Travis Kalanick of Uber or whatever, like just like different batteries. These guys are coming to the table with a different engine.

2:36:47Tim Ferriss:But you can give yourself a competitive advantage if you know the track. So for me, with anything, it's like, know the track. What does that look like? What does that mean? Well, it kind of applies, it knows like, it's identifying in advance, if you're learning anything, doing anything, like where am I going to be most likely to quit? What are the failure points? Why do other people quit? When do they quit? And then if you know in advance, like, okay, it's very likely three months into this that I'm gonna hit, like, a crisis of meaning, and I'm gonna plateau, and I'm gonna be tempted to quit. If you know that in advance, when you hit it, your little engine is enough to get you past that plateau.

2:37:25Tim Ferriss:So, I just, I think about that a lot, right? It's like, if people aren't following, why do some people quit diets? Why do so many people make New Year's resolutions, and then by February 1, they're long gone? Smoke. exhaust in the rearview mirror. It's like part of it is they have these very optimistic, well-intentioned visions of what they're gonna do, where they go to the gym three times a week, it never gets interrupted. They don't reverse engineering. They never need to make a phone call. They never get into an argument about who's gonna watch the kids. And as a result, they don't have any type of safety net on that plan.

2:38:02Tim Ferriss:um so i would say you know these are some of the ways that uh that i think about it i know there's a lot there but well i mean one thing you said about happiness is um i think you said this i know this high expectations can be a a roadblock yeah it's a double you said you have exceedingly high expectations so i'm curious yeah how did you overcome those high expectations to find happiness? Because I struggle with this. Yeah, I mean, I struggle with it. I have extremely high expectations. Yeah, I've struggled with my whole life. I think I have found certain approaches and tools that have helped me to use the double-edged sword without holding the blade as a handle, right?

2:38:54Tim Ferriss:And I expect, here's the other thing, I expect this will always be a challenge. So I'm not going to beat the shit out of myself if I don't eradicate it like polio once and forever, right? It's like, right, it's like, this is part, I think, of my hardwiring. I really do. Not to belabor the dog. You wouldn't be where you are without high expectations, though, either. Yeah, right. And, you know, I think that I'm at a point also where it's like the incremental dollar or whatever, the incremental media mention is not worth as much as the incremental hour or even 15 minutes with someone I deeply care about.

2:39:38Tim Ferriss:And those are very... Mastering... It's not strange to say this, but becoming good at those two sides of the track are very different things. They require different skill sets. So for me, I would say, first of all, I think high expectations can be great. I think it can be amazing. And, you know, while, I guess, archelocus, way back in the day, right, we do not rise to the level of our hopes, we fall to the level of our training. Like, I think that's a real thing. So hope alone is not enough. Expectations alone is not enough.

2:40:17Tim Ferriss:But I would say that for me, realizing that what you do matters a lot more than how you do any one thing is critical. What do I mean by that? So, what you do versus how you do. This seems kind of strange. In other words, you can get really, really good at having high expectations for things that don't matter very much. And being perfectionist about little things. But that doesn't really move the needle for you or other people. You can spend your whole life focusing on little things. I think that's gonna become the default for most of humankind in the next few years with AI. Like, the idea that we're all gonna have this incredible leisure class with tons of free time.

2:41:01Tim Ferriss:Complete nonsense. It's never happened with any technology before. It's gonna get worse. The parents are coming out. So, I would say that... There's a book called The 80-20 Principle by Richard Koch, K-O-C-H. Read that, and this comes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is you really don't have to get a lot of things right to have an amazing life. So I used to over-optimize. I would attempt to optimize almost everything, because I felt like I had the bandwidth to do it. Maybe I did. But that can make you an insufferable son of a bitch, not just to other people, but to yourself, right? Because if you have unreasonable, unhelpful expectations in environments that you cannot control, interpersonal relationships, your girlfriend or wife or husband or whatever, your kids, you're going to drive not only yourself, but the people around you completely insane.

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2:44:25Tim Ferriss:So, you know, when I sat down here, you might remember this. There was a little piece of paper stuck in here from a prior guest. Serenity prayer. And I folded it up and I was like, oh, I like the serenity prayer. And I put it in my pocket. So, Srinity, prayer, is stoicism, right? Being able to, you know, separate things you can control versus things you can't control, and then the wisdom, hopefully, and experience to be able to tell the difference. And I've realized that being incredibly forgiving, while knowing your non-negotiables up front with interpersonal relationships, is, for me at least so far, like the path to intimacy and longevity and happiness, and peace, and then with other types of compartmentalize, silos in my life, let's just say maybe it's writing a book, having unforgivably high standards, but with a deadline, so that I'm not allowed to procrastinate forever.

2:45:25Tim Ferriss:Because if I don't have a boss and I don't, that perfectionism can turn into permanent, meaning you're not shipping anything. So, I still apply super high standards for myself with certain non-negotiables related to physical training, or to building a... cultivating and developing conditioning a mental reserve, right? To hopefully stave off things like neurodegenerative disease. Those are all non-negotiable. But with human interactions, I think I have really learned through fucking it up over and over and over again. I mean, really, it's just like, God, I look back at some of my past girlfriends, I'm like, God bless you, you saints.

2:46:16Tim Ferriss:Like, God, I was such a pain in the ass. And I was so convinced I was right. So convinced I was right about so much. And guess what? It doesn't matter. Maybe I was right. But I really encourage people to check out, there's an amazing therapist who is brutal, but decades of experience, and I don't agree with him on everything, but Terry Real is his name. He's got to be one of the highest-paid couples therapists in the world. He has to be. But he has a number of books. There's an audiobook, doesn't even have a print version, called Fierce Intimacy, that I really recommend people listen to. So they have a toolkit for communicating in intermittent relationships.

2:46:59Tim Ferriss:Because I don't think men and women were ever meant to spend as much time together as they do now. That's a very unnatural situation, I think. And as a result, we need tools that we did not historically need. And I think Terry is very good at providing a toolkit for modern relationships. But one of his tenets is, like, there's no place for objective reality in most relationship disputes. And he gives this example of, like, husband and wife go out to dinner. Waiter comes over to take the order. Waiter leaves and the husband's like, honey, you don't have to yell. And she's like, what? I wasn't yelling.

2:47:34Tim Ferriss:And he's like, no, you were yelling. And then so it turns into one of these things, right? It starts to spiral out. And now their date has turned into a heated debate where people are getting ramped up. And the point Terry makes, he's like, the husband could say like, honey, I knew you were going to So actually, I hired a team of professional audiologists and recording artists. They have mic'd our table and everything around us, and based on this decibel level, you were, in fact, yelling. Like, you think that's gonna help things? I don't think so. Probably not. I don't think so. So, once you, I think, even as a test, an experiment, ask yourself, all right, well, if objective reality doesn't exist in most conflicts, and your only job, especially as a male, is to try to understand your partner's position.

2:48:28Tim Ferriss:I think men are particularly pig-headed about this. Women can be pretty bad too, but I think men are much worse. And to really understand why they feel the way they do, what, if done differently, would have changed anything? It's like, man, so many of the problems just go away. Yeah. It's kind of like meditating, where it's like, don't fix anything. Just like, actually don't try to fix anything. Just sit there and develop more awareness. And then like, oh, all these problems go away. Oh, my friend's chronic pain went away. What's going on? Who cares about the mechanism? It's like going from problem solving, right, which is closely related to problem seeking,

2:49:07Tim Ferriss:to understanding someone's inner experience as opposed to trying to like validate your objective reality. It may sound a little squishy, but like, listen to Terry Reel. It gives you a lot of practical tools and language you can use. That is a huge part of life, as I've already talked about, that I've revamped my entire way I think about my calendar, the entire way I commit time, defend time, say no to things around these most important life-giving, energy-giving relationships. And that means how you navigate those, how you interact with people, how you cultivate your EQ, how you feel what someone is saying, not just listen to what they're saying, preparing to offer them some words of condolence.

2:49:53Tim Ferriss:Maybe that's not what they need. Like, bearing witness to that person in a true felt sense is... It's like if my 20-year-old self could hear me saying this, like, would have vomited in his mouth, but it's like, at that time, I was a bull in a china shop. I was leaving just a wake of collateral damage in my relationships. Not because I was abusive, like, was not abusive. I saw enough of that. Didn't want to, you know, no thanks. But I wasn't available. I was very, very concerned with being right. And I think if you're instead, even in the case of work, like, dedicated to what you put out in the world, but if it's someone else's idea, or if you just want, if they need to believe it's their idea, fine.

2:50:39Tim Ferriss:Sure, why not? could just be getting older and softening around the edges. I don't know. Not as much piss and vinegar. Talked about saying no to certain things, but I want to go there too. But first, about 45 minutes ago, we were going to talk about the perception of time and how fast it goes. Yeah. These are all tied together also. Sounds like you've done a lot of thinking about that. I've done a lot of thinking. I've done a lot of, what do I call it, flight time in different states, too, which can stress test a lot of the subjective experiences we have around time.

2:51:16Tim Ferriss:I would encourage... It can be hard. You can watch his TED... Not TED Talks. You can watch his YouTube videos and so on before digesting videos. But Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. I believe he's most focused on quantum gravity. And he has some really thought-provoking writing on time. I think one of his books is called The Order of Things,

2:51:41Tim Ferriss:but you realize pretty quickly that even within the halls of quantum physics and mathematics, time is not this straightforward thing. Like a clock at your head runs at a different speed than a clock at your foot.

2:52:01Tim Ferriss:And when you start to look at these fundamental equations, I'd say maybe especially quantum gravity, time becomes this very slippery thing, right? Like, it's kind of like money. Like, money is real in practice, but it's actually an abstraction. Not like you can use it, but it's really an abstraction. If you think about, like, there's a book called The Biography of a Dollar about the history of money, which is worth reading. Like, it's a very useful abstraction, but it's an abstraction. And so you can certainly, just from a secular scientific perspective, from credible sources like Carlo, read enough where you start to scratch your head, and you're like, okay, well, wait a second, okay.

2:52:47Tim Ferriss:Does that mean that in certain experiments, like, A comes before B, but B also comes before A until they're observed? Like, okay, that's strange. And is it possible that time is actually more like a book? And sure, we're on page 237, but like all the pages are already there. We just happen to be in the middle. Like, is that actually something that could be defensible? In which case, let's just say, right? And again, I'm very careful with this stuff, but if that were the case, then is something like precognition that crazy? I don't know. I don't know. Is it even precognition? Or is it just cognition?

2:53:36Tim Ferriss:And look, I've spent a lot of time around magicians and illusionists and people who are incredible at mentalism because I don't want to fool myself. I want to know if you wanted to fake this, how would you do it? If you want to try to replicate these phenomena and fool an audience, How would you do it?" But there's still like a flickering of a sliver of some examples that are pretty interesting along that raise more questions than they answer. Same with UAPs and stuff, right?

2:54:08Tim Ferriss:So you can really bring this down to Earth though. It's like, all right, sure, I could read about quantum gravity, but what does that mean for me? It's like, well, we've all had the experience of a day that seems to last forever. or you go on a trip and you're like, wow, did we really only get here two or three days ago? Man, it feels like it's been two weeks. We've also had the experience of saying, holy shit, where did 2025 go? My God. Like, did the frame rate change? Like, what happened? It seems like that was just a commercial break. It was 2024, there was a commercial break and now it's 2026.

2:54:43Tim Ferriss:What happened? And, you know, I was just in Silicon Valley for a few weeks, I haven't been back in like eight years. And just wanted to kick around, check it out. It's having a real renaissance at the moment because of AI. Very exciting. And have a lot of old friends there. And folks have probably seen this in the news, but a lot of billionaires are preoccupied with living forever. Right? Now, rich people have always been obsessed with living forever. And some of them are funding very interesting research. But the goal is extending biological lifespan. So far, I think there are some things that are interesting, but certainly not definitive.

2:55:31Tim Ferriss:Nothing is conclusive yet in humans. People have been trying to find the founding youth for a long time. And every generation, somebody seems to have the answer. And so far, they've all been wrong. But what if that example that I mentioned, where you experience two or three days and it feels like two or three weeks, what if you could increase the number of experiences like that? So the way I've been thinking about it is you have biological lifespan. I'm very skeptical that we're going to be able to extend that meaningfully, at least before you and I kick the bucket. Very, very skeptical. So, all right, well, if I make it to 85, sure, there's certain things I can do.

2:56:16Tim Ferriss:I'm not gonna eat ho-hos all day, fine. But could I increase, instead of my biological age, what about increasing my experiential age, right? So, if someone's preoccupied, they're anxious, they're depressed, right, when they're having dinner, they're thinking about what they're doing after dinner, after dinner, they're thinking about the work they're doing the next morning. That's how your weeks feel like days. But what if you can make your days feel more like weeks? All right, well, let's look at some of those experiences. Right? Whether it's like a trip where things have a lot of novelty. Okay.

2:56:51Tim Ferriss:Novelty may be interesting. What else? Could be duress, stress. Like if I put somebody on a stationary bike and I'm like, all right, you're going to do a Norwegian 4x4. What does that mean? It's four minutes of sprinting. Like minute one, hard. Minute two, oh, wow, this sucks. Minute three, I don't think I can make it. Minute four, like, I'm being chased by wolves, and I'm gonna die. And you're gonna do four rounds of that. Those... Those four sets of four-minute sprints, effectively, are gonna feel a lot longer. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I do think there's a certain element of stressor. Okay? What else?

2:57:28Tim Ferriss:Mm-hmm. Well, it's like I don't hunt often, but I hunt maybe, like, eh, once or twice a year. Okay, what's happening? You're waking up in the dark, Right? Probably, depending on what you're doing, if you're at high altitude, I mean, for me, high altitude, if you're, whatever, 11 ,000 feet, and it's the middle of the day, haven't had any luck, what are you gonna do? You're probably gonna eat some junk food, which is, like, hunting's largely an excuse just to eat a bunch of energy gels and garbage that you have. Okay, sure. So, you eat your grid all the bars that you shouldn't have. That's fine.

2:58:01Tim Ferriss:And then you're gonna take a nap. All right? And then you wake up. So, these breaks that are basically separate chapters I think also make a big difference. And if you're going to, like, Italy for a few days, what are you doing? You're generally gonna be making the most of that day, and you're gonna have these kind of breaks. But you're also on vacation, you might take a nap. What else is happening? Lots of location switching. Also true in something like hunting or hiking or ski touring. There seems to be something related to context switching that increases the frame rate, so that your experience is more, it's closer to slow-mo than the reverse, like fast forward.

2:58:42Tim Ferriss:So I do think there are ways that you can begin to do your past year review, look at experiences that felt like a lot more than they were. I had an experience like this in Japan recently. So a number of my friends, it's been a dream of theirs since I was 15 and went there as an exchange student. They've always wanted to go to Japan with me. but some of them have tighter financial situations than others, no way. All right, so how do I spend money? It's like, I'm going to take those guys to Japan, like cover everything. They have to have a little skin in the game. So it's like, all right, we're all going to get there.

2:59:11Tim Ferriss:You have to get there, but then once we get there, I'm going to pay for everything. And there was one day on that trip where all of us were like, today felt like seven days. And our minds were blown. Like the amount of time dilation versus like time constriction, time dilation was so extreme. I was like, we sat at dinner, had a couple of beers. We're just like, what just happened? So do a little dissection of those experiences. And I really feel like if you're able to turn days into the feeling of weeks, enough in a given year, and it's like your experiential lifespan could go from... If you're a preoccupied person who dies at 85, maybe you live 40, 50 of those years.

2:59:53Tim Ferriss:Maybe you get to 120 experientially. And I challenge anyone, it's like, if I put an eye shade on you and give you some psychedelics, tell me if that feels the same as the four to six hours you spent the day before. It's not. Never does. It's going to feel like a lifetime. Okay. But I certainly don't want to do psychedelics every day. And then you don't want to, well, I don't know, I never want it to end. Yeah, well, this is, yeah, I mean, that's a whole separate conversation, right? When navigating or putting yourself into these spaces, you know, what safeguards and intentions do you have around it?

3:00:35Tim Ferriss:Because there are times when it's like, wow. I think for me at least, that feeling, and this might sound strange, but I'm just like, oh yeah, this is probably what it feels like to be dead, on some level. When there's no... There is an observer, there is an experiencer, but there's no space, There's no time. There's no Tim. I'm like, yeah, it wouldn't totally shock me if it's something like this. And in some of those experiences, like you experienced 5-MEO-DMT, depending on the experience, but it's like, if you think back, like, could, if it gets abstract enough, where you feel like you're looking at machine code, could you recall play-by-play what happened?

3:01:16Like, no, no way. Okay, can you recall what happened a month before you were born?

3:01:21Tim Ferriss:Like, oh, yeah, maybe something like that. Who knows? And there are lots of, I would say... I mean, have you heard about... We just talked about this with Chase Hughes, I think I was talking about this. Have you heard about this guy? I think it wasn't 5-MeO. What's another psychedelic? Oh, there are lots. DMT? No, no, no. I can't remember the name of it. I almost got two CBLs. No, it's something like the 5-MeO experience. I can't remember the name of it, but it may have been five, but he did it, and he had experienced an entire life, wife, kids, child, all of it. Like, 70 years, maybe. I don't know.

3:02:11Had a 70-year experience from child to getting married,

3:02:18Tim Ferriss:having kids, probably, you know what I mean? An entire lifespan. And then comes out of it and misses. It was like 15 minutes. And then misses where he just came from. He thinks he experienced 70 years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about lucid dreaming and time dilation and all this. It's part of the reason why I like Inception. I love that movie. By the way, Christopher Nolan, when he was a student way back in the day, take a quick sidebar here, would wake up early in the morning, he'd work all through the night, and he'd wake up early in the morning to get free food. There was like a free breakfast at school or whatever.

3:03:01Tim Ferriss:So he would like work all night, wake up, have breakfast, and then go back to sleep. And what did he start getting good at? Lucid dreaming. Because that is unbeknownst to him. It's one of the techniques where you basically take a break at like four and a half hours of sleep, stay up for like 20 minutes, go back to bed. And that's what he was doing accidentally. So, yeah, Christopher Nolan, if you're listening, I want to talk to you about a lot of things. But there are some very, very, very, very strange reports of things on psychedelics. There are also some very strange reports if you want to look at...

3:03:35What has been done at UVA, Professor, I think his last name is Grayson, has one of the best databases in terms of documented near-death experiences, and he's very clinical.

3:03:49Tim Ferriss:If you look at that, in the same, also at UVA, they've looked at, and I recognize how easy it is to poke holes in these things, but there are, again, out of maybe a hundred quote-unquote documented examples, There might be like one or two where you're like, that is incredibly hard to explain. Some of the others you're like, okay, sure. If you had a team of David Blaine's... David Blaine is an illusionist team. Like, they could, yeah, okay, cool. They could maybe come up with 99 of these. Okay, sure. But that one, I'm not so sure. And you have stories of reincarnation that are specific to children in India and other places.

3:04:33Tim Ferriss:where they'll like recount this whole life. This is like a little kid. And they're like, yeah, it's such and such village, and I was this old, and my wife is this name, and this and this, and then they go over, and like, lo and behold, like, this is not actually infrequent. Like this... Okay. Now, people could also be making this shit up, right? I recognize this. A lot of people send me the telepathy tapes and all this stuff, and I'm like, people also want to believe there's more than this. Because guess what? The real world is a suffer factory. And it's very comforting to believe that there's wonder and awe and some type of salve for that that's just beyond our reach, even though we can feel it's there.

3:05:11Tim Ferriss:I recognize that. Parents might lie. They might train their kid to lie. Okay. But on psychedelics, man, you see some... If you get enough reps, right? And I say enough reps because I really, like, I... not to get on like a high horse, but it's like when people do psychedelics once or twice and then they become proselytizers, I'm like, stop. You have gone skiing twice, you didn't have a catastrophic accident, and now you're teaching the world how to ski. I was like, don't do that. And it's like, skiing on ice in New England is different from skiing and forgiving champagne powder in Utah. By the way, it's like if you're on a groomer, that's different from the moguls.

3:05:54Tim Ferriss:If you're backcountry with avalanche risk, that's a different thing." And it's like, if you start to get more reps, like, you're gonna have accidents. Then you're gonna realize the different species of accidents, and so on and so on and so on, right? So, when you have enough repetition, when you have enough flight time, to put it another way, in enough environments, you just start to see really, really strange things. I mean, I know, I don't want to dachshund, but like, this is a friend of a friend. Like, this is not a game of telephone. This is a direct friend of one of my best friends. had an experience with NNDMT.

3:06:29Tim Ferriss:So, if it lasted 15 minutes, chances are it was 5-MeO-DMT or DMT. It's a bit confusing because the phenomenological experiences, right? The subjective experiences are very different with NNDMT, which is also what people experience through ayahuasca, or 5-MeO-DMT. They're very different in terms of their effects. But if it's 15 minutes, probably one of the two. But this particular guy had this experience with NNDMT, feels like he gets this huge download related to physics and production of... I'm trying to protect this guy. Something related to physics, at like the very outer bounds of physics.

3:07:14Tim Ferriss:This guy has no history in physics whatsoever. Seems really destabilized after the event. disappears, won't talk to his friends. It's just like online, trying to watch YouTube videos about physics, write down what he supposedly downloaded, blah, blah, blah, blah. Fast forward like two or three years, the guy's a co-author on a peer-reviewed public paper at like the cutting edge of physics, all based on the shit that he saw. How fucking wild is that, man? On an experience. And what do you talk that up as?

3:07:56I have no idea.

3:07:58Tim Ferriss:I have no idea. It's... But when you see that, or you see someone, like, spontaneously singing in a language they don't speak, you're like, okay. And there are also non-drug-related examples of, like... I think it's called something like immediate savant syndrome. Like someone jumps into a pool, hits their head, they wake up and they can play the piano. Like, what is going on here? Like, that's not... That is not out on the fringe conspiracy theory. Like, there are multiple documented cases of this. What is going on? I don't know. I mean, it would certainly seem to imply that not all of our perception access or experienced reality is mediated by something local.

3:08:52Tim Ferriss:I mean... Like there's a gate. Yeah, although maybe it is. Although maybe it is. I mean, there are people within the exploration of psychedelics who think of the mind more like a receiver, right? So it's like, yeah, you can damage the brain and cause tremendous dysfunction, right? You can do that for sure. But maybe that's not because the brain itself is generating something, much like a television screen. Like, the television screen isn't generating the images you're watching. It's a receiver of some type, at least back in the day, if those people are old enough. And at the same time, you have documented cases of people with minimal brain volume, right?

3:09:39Tim Ferriss:Like, their brains should not function, and yet they have average IQ. And we don't really have, as far as I know, a good explanatory framework for allowing that to be possible. So, I don't know. I mean, this is part of the reason why... Like, my position is always... kind of impossible until proven otherwise, but I'm open-minded about it. And that's why I've poured so, I mean, millions of dollars into science, right? Because I'm like, I want to better understand this. I recognize, as Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist said, like, it is important not to fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool.

3:10:25Tim Ferriss:Like, when you want something to be true, even if it's 1%, experimenter bias and everything. It's a real thing. You'll convince yourself that it's... Yeah, you can just... Or just look for evidence that something is real. which is why I do value the scientific method. And have you seen Karl Popper and all... Falsification, all that stuff is so, so critical for us to have arrived where we are, right? Like, Western medicine is the greatest healing system that has ever been devised, period, full stop. But is it the full picture? No. Like, 50%, you know, any MD, I think this is an ongoing joke, but it's kind of like 50 % of what we know is wrong.

3:11:06Tim Ferriss:we just don't know which 50%. Like that's like a accepted sort of joke within medicine and science. That's always been true. So... As much research as you've done into psychedelics, you're talking about downloading machine code. Have you read about the laser, the ones and zeros inside the laser? Yeah, I did. I did. I looked at that. So I haven't experienced it, but there was a... I want to say he was like a... laser crystallography expert or someone who explained it just purely through optics and like how that could be the case even if you're not on drugs. So I think there might be a purely mechanical explanation for this.

3:11:49Tim Ferriss:For people who don't know, I did watch this because it got sent to me. You would imagine, right? You can imagine all my friends were like, bro. Same here. And so I got this video. I was one of those friends. And so there's this guy who looks shockingly similar to Lionel Messi. I don't know if I'm the only person. I was just like, what? Is Lionel Messi in the psychedelic game now? Anyway. And he would use DMT, probably still, and then direct this laser at a wall and get in a certain position and basically had this. And he had people who could replicate this, right? They would see the same thing or claim to see the same thing, which looked like some type of matrix-like code.

3:12:33Tim Ferriss:and he had drawn them out and everything. There was, I went down the rabbit hole in this because I was getting asked about it so much, and I found a very long, what appeared to be defensible engineering explanation for how that is a explainable phenomenon without needing access to matrix code. So, who knows, maybe. But I would say, even without that, like, it's just... Stuff is weird. Stuff is really weird. And, I mean, you don't have to go very far. I'm trying to remember his name. Fabrizio Benedetti, maybe? I think that Ashley... No, it's not Ashley Vance. There's another author. But read any book written by a credible scientist or science journalist about the placebo effect.

3:13:30Tim Ferriss:All right. And if that is not one of the weirdest collections of verifiable data you've ever seen, I mean, you look at any given study with an intervention, like a drug or whatever, you look at the supplemental materials, like there's almost always going to be someone in the control arm with a placebo who showed just as much effect. with nothing, with nothing, whether it's a surgery, whether it's a powerful drug, psychedelic even. And so there are a few questions that come to mind, right? It's like, well, these are just normal people. They're not biochemists. They couldn't tell you how psychedelics act on the brain.

3:14:15So it's not like they're rolling their eyes back and going in and trying to affect certain enzymes or whatever.

3:14:27Tim Ferriss:They have no idea. And yet, they are reporting the same, not just effect, but magnitude of effect as matches the other people. What the hell is going on? Weight Watchers now offers access to affordable GLP-1s. Weight Watchers has everything I need, from weight loss medications to nutrition support and help with my side effects. with our program our members are losing more weight with expert nutrition and side effects support weight watchers prescribing glp1 medications it's been life-changing better results expert support lose more weight make it last get started for as low as 25 at weight watchers.com all medications require eligibility and prescription first month as low as 25 with 12 month plus plan does not include the cost of glp1 medications i don't know i have no idea but But you don't have to go very far to get into really terra incognita, like unknown, there be dragons, waters.

3:15:24Tim Ferriss:It's actually very easy. You don't have to get out into remote viewing or whatever, even though, again, I'm very interested in that stuff. But it's like, just look at the placebo effect, which gets, understandably, right? Because people are trying to assess something, and that is the intervention in some of the RCTs that I fund, let's just say. But the fact that there are commonly people who produce the same effect, same magnitude of effect, with a sugar pill or placebo or a sham surgery is incredibly strange. Yeah. It is super, super strange. So, I will say, not to be the broken record citing Richard Feynman and the It's Easy to Fool Yourself, but it is easy to fool yourself.

3:16:15Tim Ferriss:So, it is a challenge to be... to attempt to be radically open-minded while also being suitably skeptical. Right? Because there are a lot of con artists out there. There are a lot of delusional people out there. there's a lot of bad science out there. There's a lot of pseudoscience. God save you if you're getting all your health advice from Instagram. And so it's a challenge to navigate. There's something for Peter Ortiz actually. He did a series of blog posts called Studying the Studies. And I also put out a blog post related to Peter about scientific literacy. And I would say one One of the best investments you can make for your life and for the people you love or care about is to just invest like a week.

3:17:05Tim Ferriss:And now you can use AI to make this easy. There's a company I actually invested in called Oboe. O-B-O-E dot com. They'll create a course for you. And it's just like, teach me how to read science. Boom. And like spend a week, hour to a night doing that. And that will pay dividends for decades. It will help you sift the signal from the noise. Anyway, but yeah, the weird stuff is interesting. It's probably the understatement of the year. You had brought up... you were going with the power of no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the power of no. I mean, I feel like... So I started... at the behest of my friends and some of my audience, I started working on a book about saying no.

3:17:57Tim Ferriss:That's it, like six years ago. And I started doing that because people just kept asking me for help. A lot of my friends, even very successful ones. And over, I'd say, probably a decade, I was using Evernote, which I was the first advisor for. Didn't quite pan out as I had hoped, but still a pretty interesting tool. Anyway, every time I got a rejection from somebody that I thought was really artful, that left me feeling neutral or better about the person than worse, I'd be like, ooh, that's good, I'm gonna steal that. So I'd copy and paste it. So I had this swipe file, which is just a term that some people use for ink.

3:18:38Tim Ferriss:I used to do it for advertising. Like, whenever I bought something, I would save the advertisement, put it into a three-ring binder, so that I would think about how this convinced me to buy something. And then I'd use that for designing my own ads, right? So similar, I had a swipe file. I had hundreds of these examples of polite declines, I called them. And they're really useful. Really incredibly useful. You can copy and paste to make your own. So I was printing out of this book, and then it just became too hard. Because I thought a lot of my friends were going to help, and they were like, me?

3:19:09Tim Ferriss:I'm terrible at this. You need to write the whole book yourself. And I was like, oh. So I stopped. I shelved it. I gave up. Returned the advance. The biggest advance I ever got in my life. Returned it. It was like real money. Returned it, I was like, I'm sorry, I can't do it. And shelved it. And then over the last handful of years, as I've watched people to fray, watched people start to fray at the edges. Because back in the day, it was one inbox. Then it was two or three inboxes. Then it was like, oh man, all right, well I'm just gonna tell the people I really care about to text me. Uh oh, all right, so then it's text.

3:19:46Tim Ferriss:And then it's text plus Google Voice. And then it's text plus Google Voice plus Signal plus Telegram. And you see where this is going, right? And then it's like social media DMs. And all of a sudden, you're fucked. And it's not just the interruption or the burden of those messages. It's the temptation to triage, right? It's like you're spending all your time triaging injuries as opposed to actually getting up and marching where you're supposed to march. So I want to write a book about how to say no, because there are tons of books on how to say yes. And I just don't feel like writing another book about how to say yes is very helpful.

3:20:28Tim Ferriss:Although when you start to look at how to say no, it very quickly becomes an exploration of how to say yes to a few things and how to say no to everything else.

3:20:43Tim Ferriss:and still working on the book. It's long AF. It's like 750 to 800 pages now.

3:20:54Tim Ferriss:But if people might want to check it out, I mean, they can get a bunch of free chapters. I don't know when the full thing is going to be published, but if they go to tim.blog slash notebook, N-O-B-O, okay, tim.blog, it's not a typo, slash notebook, a bunch of free chapters people can get, which will help them. Because I've had proofreaders read this thing, and I kind of put it on a shelf. So it's done. It's close to done. But here's the thing. A book is like a marathon, where it's like, you get to mile 20. You're like, congratulations. Or mile, you know, 22. And you're like, wow, you're almost done.

3:21:27Tim Ferriss:Congratulations, you only have 50 % left. Like, that last, getting back to like the high expectations. Oh, okay. Right? Like that last polish, It's like, yeah, to make the sculpture out of clay as a rough model, yeah, sure, I'll do that in the afternoon. To create the finished piece in full scale, to put in a museum, like, yeah, okay. Gotcha. So it's gonna last. To polish the book's gonna take at least two or three. So what's gonna be in it other than nice ways to tell people to... Oh, there's a lot more to it, because that doesn't do the job. That doesn't do the job. Right, because I could tell you, okay, and Martha Beck, who's like one of the amazing women, and was like Oprah's life coach and all this stuff.

3:22:09Tim Ferriss:Incredible lady in her own right for a lot of different reasons. And, you know, she turned me down for something and she was like, sorry, can't make it due to Life Tetris. I'm like, oh, that's very short. You're not giving them something that they can negotiate against. I'm like, great. I'm like, Life Tetris, I'm definitely going to use that. Simple, to the point. But when you give people templates, and I realized this with the 4-Hour Body, because I was writing 4-Hour Body, everything in there works. It's been tested with hundreds of people, now thousands, tens of thousands of people. And I had very busy CEOs of companies I was working with who'd be like, hey, I don't have time to read a long book.

3:22:45Tim Ferriss:Like, give me the index card, tell me what to do, and I'll do it. And I did. Success rate, 0%. Why? Because if you give people the prescription, but you don't help them change their behavior, which also goes down to changing their beliefs, it's just not going to stick. It won't be durable. So, for instance, if you don't say no because the story is, I'm too nice for that. I'm a kind person. I'm generous. I like helping people. Okay? That can be true, but that can also be a justification for saying yes to way too many things and being a martyr. If your answer is, well, must be nice for you. I'm not successful enough yet.

3:23:24Tim Ferriss:Okay? We can start to tease that apart. But I know people who have hundreds of millions of dollars who still say that. So, part of the reason this book has taken so long, and it comes down to when we're talking about like the drive and predicting the bumps in the road and using the engine to the best your capacity, just having an index card, which is kind of what the internet largely does. Not everyone, but they're like, here are the three tricks to mastering crypto tomorrow, before the crash, you know, whatever. And I mean, look, I'm interested in a lot of things. not to malign crypto, like, I've been interested in a long time.

3:24:03Tim Ferriss:But the point is, if your goal is, like, durable behavioral change, which also comes back to the psychedelics, right? Like, you need frameworks, and you need to be able to put your beliefs, which are like your underpinning philosophical guide rails, under some degree of scrutiny. And if you don't update those, right? Like, if your story, for instance, in the realm of physical fitness is, well, I'm good at my job, I'm a good father, but like, you know, my whole family has big bones and I'm just, it's just the way it is, right? You accept that partial completeness, right? And you're like really type A and like problem fixing oriented in a positive way in other areas of your life.

3:24:47But there's this one that you don't touch because that's just the way things are. If you don't fix that, no number of books on strength training,

3:24:57Tim Ferriss:no number of gym memberships is going to fix it. So a lot of it is unpacking. And this also, like, everything kind of ties together, right? The fear setting. It's like, okay, you don't want to say no. Why? Okay, you're worried that person's going to shit talk you to somebody you care about. Okay, you're worried they won't send you opportunities anymore. Right? They sent you one, but it's really a bad fit. doesn't align with your priorities. You're worried they're not going to send you an opportunity in the future, okay? You're worried that you will become irrelevant, right? Like, that's another dangerous catchphrase, like, staying relevant.

3:25:33That's a very pitfall-laden path.

3:25:38Tim Ferriss:Okay, so then it's like, so what? And then what? And what's the worst thing that happens, right? So it's kind of an unstructured approach to fear-setting. But when you start to really unpack it, and instead of saying, all right, you're going to go to the gym five days a week for the rest of your life, it's like, okay, you're going to go twice a week, you're going to do less than you think you can do, but for two weeks you're going to go on a no-diet. And you're just going to copy-paste one of these three templates, and you have an assignment, which is like you're going to do it three times in the next week, or your buddy gives a hundred bucks to your most hated politician in your name.

3:26:15Tim Ferriss:Okay. Now we have structure, right? Now we have structure. And I ended up in the last, I guess, year or so, collaborating with a friend of mine, Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, Emergencies, written like 10 New York Times bestsellers. Terrible at saying no. He was pressuring me to write this book. And I was like, we were both kind of drunk at the time. And I was like, Neil, he was busting my balls at a table. I was single at the time. And he's kind of like embarrassing me in front of these women. And I'm just like, Neil, if you're such a hotshot, I see what you're doing. You're doing this lame power play in front of these girls trying to impress them.

3:26:48Tim Ferriss:I was like... Which is not totally true, but I was just like, all right, you want to spar, let's go. And I was like, if you want to write this book, if you want to read this book so badly, why don't you help me finish it? Get off the bench. And he was like... And then the next day when we both sobered up, he was like, hey, if you're serious, like, let's talk. And so he became kind of like the student, and I would have him test these things. And then like 50 % of the time, he'd fuck it up, He'd fumble it, he'd create some mess. But what ended up happening, or he wouldn't do the homework. He would not do the homework.

3:27:18Tim Ferriss:And I was like, oh, this book doesn't work. Okay, well, I need to make this book work. So how do I make it work for this guy? If I can make it work for this guy, it'll work for other people. And then started testing it with a private community of about 100 people also. And ultimately got it to the point where it's like, that guy is different now. Like after a year working together, like his life, how he interacts, He still sends me texts to this day. He's like, you would not believe it just happened. It is a different life. Like, before you have the shield of no, and after you have the shield of no, wielded artfully, they are two different experiences of life.

3:27:54Tim Ferriss:And this also... If you want more time dilation, right? If you want more experiential lifespan, you want more intimacy, you cannot do that if you have a porous mesh through which everyone else's agenda filters to you. That you feel morally obligated for reasons that are unclear, to say yes. Do you say no more than you say yes? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have to. I have to on a lot of levels. And if I give you sort of a sterile example, it'd be like in the world of startup investing. If I don't say no to 80%, 90 % or more of what comes my way, I run out of money, right? I have to play it like a smart blackjack player.

3:28:32Tim Ferriss:It's like, okay, like, yeah, I can try to learn how to count cards, and I know I'm not supposed to do that, but sort of like bringing down the house or the movie 21. It's like, okay, like, you can try to, like, get better at it, and then you need to know when you have a hot hand, you need to know when the deck is in the right place, you need to know your statistics, but you're not gonna bet on it, you're not gonna bet heavy on every hand. You'll run out of bankroll. So, in the start of investing, it's just an existential imperative, right? You have to say no to the most things. So, you have to have rules.

3:28:59Tim Ferriss:And what are those rules granted? They're grounded in certain principles. And then what are those granted? They're grounded in certain beliefs. And I'll give you an example of a belief. And the one belief would be, there are plenty of opportunities. You can wait for a fat pitch along the lines of Warren Buffett. But if you've been taught and conditioned yourself to have this fear of missing out, the game is lost. It's lost at the belief level before you ever get to the principles, before you get to the strategies, before you get to the tactics. So a lot of it is solved with fear setting. How do you pick your investments?

3:29:36I've been here early on Facebook, Shopify, a whole bunch of companies.

3:29:41Tim Ferriss:Yeah, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Clear, the biometric security company, all the airports, Alibaba, a whole bunch. Wow. Yeah. So how am I early? Were you seeking them out or they saw you? Both. So there are a few things that I think are

3:30:07Tim Ferriss:maybe copy and pasteable, and then some things that are probably not as copy and pasteable. The things that I think are copy and pasteable, and there's a book coming out soon by a legendary venture capitalist named Bill Gurley called Running Down a Dream, I believe is the title of the book, which really makes this point well. But going to the epicenter of the action matters. It really matters in real life. So, me packing up after college with my piece of shit, hand-me-down Plymouth Voyager minivan, like, so beaten up, like, hundreds of thousands of miles. Like, the back seats got stolen out of a parking lot when I first got to the Bay Area.

3:30:50Tim Ferriss:I mean, you know, I got ruthlessly made front of by my coworkers, but it's like, I picked up and I was like, I am going west to Silicon Valley to make my riches. And that didn't happen quickly, but what it did do is it put me in the very center of the pinball machine where I could bump into things. And I could bump into things by volunteering. Like, you don't have any network? Get creative. What do you have? You have time. Okay, you've got endurance, right? You're young in that case, right? What are your advantages? You always have advantages. All right, well, design something around your advantages.

3:31:31So, in my case, I volunteered for a number of startup nonprofits,

3:31:36Tim Ferriss:like the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, the Indus Entrepreneur, which Sriram would know, past guest, really nice, brilliant guy. The Indus Entrepreneur almost wholly focused on the Indian diaspora and entrepreneurship around that, right? And the numbers of amazing entrepreneurs who've come out of India, who have chosen to come to the US, just unbelievable, right? I'm not Indian, as you might have guessed. But I would go there and be like, hey, I'll do anything. I'll fill water, I'll punch tickets, I'll rearrange chairs. I just want to be in the room with these speakers, right?

3:32:19Tim Ferriss:And as a volunteer, if you do more than someone asks you to do, you're going to get noticed by the people running the event. You don't have to do very much, but I would just do a lot more than they asked me to do. And eventually they're like, hey, do you want to help organize one of these events? Like, we're not getting paid. We have a day job. Like, do you want to help? I'm like, can I, I would love to, but really what I like to do is at least organize the speakers. They're like, sure. So now I get to reach out to people way above my pay grade who ended up in some cases being long-term relationships.

3:32:50Tim Ferriss:I mean, Jack Canfield, the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, who I met through a nonprofit by volunteering and doing a little bit extra. He later, years later, introduced me to my book agent, who after whatever, 30 plus projections, sold the four-hour work week. And I just had Jack Canfield on my podcast like a few weeks ago. Whatever it is, like 24 years later, right? All from volunteering and doing a little bit more than anybody asked. So, the network matters. Exceed the expectations. Yeah, exceed the expectations and be in the center of the action. So, it's like, if you're really serious...

3:33:31Tim Ferriss:There are other people who have said this. Scott Galloway, I think, puts it really well. It's like, it's better to be average at something in the center, like fashion in New York, comedy in LA or New York, whatever, we can give a lot of examples, than to be great in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. And so putting myself in the middle is important. And I could give very concrete examples of that. That's something people can model, right? Not everyone, but some people can. You can also do it in virtual space in places like subreddits and so on. But so that's one. The second is, and this is harder to model, of course, but the four-hour workweek, when it had its explosion in 2007, I very deliberately targeted very tech-savvy, initially males, say between the age of like 25 and 35, in Silicon Valley and then New York.

3:34:28Tim Ferriss:And then that bled out to both genders. No problem, that was an easy hop. And then it began hopping to other cities like LA and Chicago. But I wanted to focus on people who could broadcast the message most effectively. And that's relevant because the success of the book, especially targeted at startups, is what led to, for instance, being in the switch box in Silicon Valley. I started going to events like RailsConf, related to Ruby on Rails, I'm not a programmer. But there, who did I meet? I met Toby of Shopify when they had like eight to ten employees, and he had read the book, and that was a context for a conversation.

3:35:10Tim Ferriss:and then ended up becoming their first, I believe, advisor. And so that's an example. I do think that you can engineer that type of thing just by cultivating a network, which, by the way, just like my friendships, is like a few people, very deep, not a scattershot collection of business cards. I don't think that works very well at all. And it comes off as what it is, which is transactional and superficial. Because here's the secret. The secret is, if you develop true friendship with someone you love like a brother or sister, or could, who could become one of your true long-term friends, and they happen to be an A player at something, A players in one domain tend to know A players in a lot of domains.

3:36:02Tim Ferriss:You don't need to know everybody. Mm-hmm. Right? You really don't. Okay, so there's that. I'm trying to answer this question in the least long-winded way I can, but it's nuanced. So, in terms of selection, so then I start seeing startups, but I don't have very much money at the time. Got a little bit, and I had fantasized about going to Stanford Business School for a lot of reasons. I was like, I would have been so much happier at Stanford than Princeton, which I think is probably true. And it's gorgeous. It's got like palm drive. It's an amazing campus. And it's completely integrated with venture capital and startups.

3:36:38Tim Ferriss:They have real operators to teach at that school. So, I went through the application process twice, and then for one reason or another, I was like, I just can't do it. I just don't want to be back in school. And then I was helping a friend of mine, Mike Maples Jr., who was a super angel. He was a very good angel investor. I had met him through one of my professors at school, just by asking. A lot of people don't get what they want because they don't ask for it. And he wanted to lose some weight. So this was well before the four-hour body. So I was helping him get in shape. And I was like, hey, do you mind if we just, like, after the workouts or whatever, like, we can trade information on that.

3:37:15Tim Ferriss:He also wanted to know about PR and launch for the four-hour work week. So I would share all that, and I'd say, can you just explain the deals you're doing? Like, how are you choosing them? Why yes? Why no? And eventually, at one point, I was like, hey, I'm willing to put skin in the game, and I can be really cheap labor. Like, is there any chance I could invest small amounts along with you into some of these startups and help them with go-to-market strategy, whatever. And he's like, I can ask. And what I decided to do was rather than go to graduate school, I'd take the cost that I would have paid out of pocket, sunk cost.

3:37:50Tim Ferriss:So I think Stanford Business School is like 60K for two years. 60K, 60K, 120. And I was like, all right, I'm going to make the Tim Ferriss fund. I put it in air quotes because it's not a real fund. But I'm gonna spend, I'm gonna plan on spending 120K over two years, small checks. I assume the money is all going to zero. But what I'm optimizing for is skills and relationships. Mm-hmm. Just like business school. Mm-hmm. And that's how it started. Then there's the question of what do you say yes to, what do you say no to? I only said yes to things where... The ones that worked out. I made a lot of mistakes.

3:38:28Tim Ferriss:but the ones that worked out, which then became rules for me, were, can I be a power user of this product myself? Does it solve a problem or help me achieve a goal personally? Right? Even if I weren't involved, would I use this? And by extension then, that means, through the books, I built the blog back when blogs were huge. Some blogs are still huge, but like, my blog was one of the most popular in the world. I was like, okay, can I help them through the blog? Now that would be podcast social media, But can I actually help them directly to increase the value of the company and therefore the value of my equity?

3:39:02Tim Ferriss:Okay. And ideally, ideally, this doesn't always work, but is it a premium product so that there is more room for error, more margin of safety? I do not want to be in a race to the bottom situation where the company is suddenly commoditized and they're competing on price and just get pressed down. And that's about it. And then the price has to be right also.

3:39:32Tim Ferriss:And just to address this also, 2008, when I really started, that was a great time. That was a great time to be investing. That was a great time to be investing. And it was not a crowded playing field because it was in the middle of what people might consider a dot-com depression. So the fair-weather entrepreneurs, the fair weather venture capitalists and angels, they had all run for the hills. They were like, screw this, I'm going back to investment banking or consulting or whatever. This is too risky. IPO market's dead.

3:40:09But it's harder now.

3:40:10Tim Ferriss:It is harder now, especially right now with the froth around AI, which has contagion into other things, making them even great companies if they're too expensive, it's a bad investment. Depending. The specifics matter. But I do think people can use a lot of what I'm talking about investing in what you know, something you would use. Like, it applies to... I hesitate to say people should do any stock picking, because that's a dangerous game. I think most people, including myself, I do a lot of passive, low-cost index investing. I think that's the right move for a lot of people. But if you just look at how you spend money, what you're spending more money on now than three years ago, where you're trying to cobble together solutions for something that doesn't exist.

3:40:57Tim Ferriss:Just looking at your own personal behavior can inform how you think about investing. And I'm not a registered investment advisor or anything. I'm not giving investment advice. But it's like, if you stray outside of what you know, you will probably get your face ripped off. Yeah. Good advice. Rule number one, don't lose your money. Don't run out of bankroll. Damn good point. Damn good point. Well, Tim, it's a fascinating interview. I got one question left. If you have three people you'd like to see on the show, who would they be? On your show or my show? On my show. Three people. Who would I like to see?

3:41:41Tim Ferriss:I should start asking that question. I'm tucking that away in my swipe file.

3:41:49Tim Ferriss:I would say... someone who is genuinely part of some mystic tradition, who has never been on a podcast, but who is a good communicator. And we talked very early on about Scripture, and you were like, Scripture. If you look at the Christian mystics, you look at, say, Sufism within Islam, you look at Kabbalah and so on within Judaism, it's like... When you start to read even the poetry produced by all three, they seem very, very similar. And having someone on who could speak intelligently, and they need to be good with words to do this, but to describe their firsthand experience of the divine, I think would be a service to listeners.

3:42:52Tim Ferriss:So that would be one. Love that idea. Yeah. I'd say second, I'm trying to really go off menu here.

3:43:04Tim Ferriss:So you've covered a lot of ground I enjoy already with a lot of your interviews. I would say...

3:43:15Tim Ferriss:probably dealer's choice, meaning you're the dealer, but old traditions, like really old traditions, who have not been exposed or picked over by a lot of other podcasts. And that could be just about anything, because my approach to, you know, whether it's investing, exploration, it's kind of a barbell approach, like Nassim Taleb's investing, right? Like super, super safe or super, super speculative. is how I do things. I'm not saying everybody should do that. But also, with respect to my own intellectual exploration and scientific exploration, I'm like, I'm typically cutting edge, or I'm looking at things that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years that are durable.

3:43:56And I think exploring the really old stuff is interesting.

3:44:01Tim Ferriss:So the mystics are kind of one example of that, right? This has just been a consistent feature of humanity for millennia. Might be something there. I don't know. I think there is. So, I would say... This is getting very close to the same territory, but you could interview...

3:44:25Tim Ferriss:Like, and you'd have to pick them very carefully, but I'll give you an example. Like a Greek Orthodox... Church singer... Hmm. ...who knows a lot about droning. or a musicologist who can speak to, I could recommend one, he's a wild card. I'll say it off-camera just so you can do your due diligence, but someone who, for instance, has knowledge of historic use, cross-culturally, of harmonics or overtones for religious experience and altered states. That would be interesting. Who could speak not just to the cultural context, but also to what we actually know from a musicology perspective, from potentially a neuroscientific perspective.

3:45:20Tim Ferriss:Very interesting. There's some... You do not need drugs to have some shockingly alarming altered states of consciousness. Music has been one major tool and toolkit for a long time. Yeah. So that could be interesting. And then number three, who's lucky number three? I would say a physicist focused on time. Not just a science communicator. There are physicists who have certain credentials who are primarily science communicators, but like a working physicist. Somebody who's still an operator. Okay. Who's kind of at the forefront of work that involves consideration of time, fundamentally. I think would be squirrely enough to be fun for you and mind-bending for listeners.

3:46:14Because it's weird.

3:46:15Tim Ferriss:It's very strange. Fascinating topics. Yeah, I think all three. And because at the very end of the day, it's like, what can we be certain of? Like, how do we know we're not a brain in a jar in a simulation? What can we actually know is true? And I think one of the few things we can know is true is that we're aware of the fact that we are aware. And therefore, maybe it makes sense to really put that under a microscope, try to understand it. Which mindfulness and meditation practice has done for millennia as well. So that would be if I had to pick a fourth, just to round out the dinner table. Someone who has a lot of experience.

3:47:00Tim Ferriss:I've known one guy in particular, Henry Shuchman, who I've ended up doing some collaborations with because he just blew me away, but who's specifically a Zen practitioner, which is like layering weird on top of weird, but in ways that are oddly productive, like koans and so on. What a strange thing. So, I'll leave it at that. But those would be four I'd put around the table. Thank you. Thank you. You have a fascinating way of thinking about things. I've really enjoyed this, so thank you for coming. Thanks for having me, man. I really, really had a great time. Thanks for the gifts also. My pleasure.

3:47:43Let's go break that thing in. Let's do it.

3:47:58No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

3:48:22Tim Ferriss:If you're a podcast host, listen up, this one's for you. My name is Ali Jackson. I'm the host of Finding Mr. Height, a dating and relationship podcast that I've been doing for four years now, sharing my positive and practical approach to dating that's built on my own life experience. And I wanted to share another experience that I've had, my secret behind monetizing my show. It's called Red Circle. And I was just telling my colleague about how much I love their platform. With Red Circle, not only am I getting a seamless hosting experience, but I also love the support I receive in ad sales. It's not just typical ad sales either.

3:48:52Tim Ferriss:It's targeted opportunities based on my show and my life. And the platform is super simple. You just set your preferences and Red Circle matches you with sponsors that align with your show. You can vet every opportunity and their platform gives you great analytics. More recently too, my Red Circle team has brought me opportunities outside of my podcast on social media to really augment the podcast partnerships, bring them full circle. I just can't recommend them enough. If you want to give it a try, go to redcircle.com to get your free trial. That's redcircle.com for a free trial.