#772: In Case You Missed It: September 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

0:00Hey folks, Tim here. Before we get started, just a quick heads up. My new card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing people at Exploding Kittens is now a national bestseller. Things are going completely bananas. It just launched everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target, 8 ,000 plus retail locations, anywhere you can buy games. So check it out. See some videos of gameplay at coyotegame.com. 300 million social views so far of gameplay. It's kind of mind-blowing. It takes just minutes to learn. I guarantee you'll have a lot of laughs. This has been in the works for two years. Please enjoy it. Check it out.

0:34Coyotegame.com. Now back to the episode. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday. my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time.

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2:28Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

2:44Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between-isode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite.

3:13It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description, probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, Elizabeth Gilbert, number one New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic, and City of Girls, and the creative voice behind the Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert newsletter. You can find Elizabeth on Instagram at Elizabeth underscore Gilbert underscore writer. And you can find her sub stack at Elizabeth Gilbert dot sub stack dot com.

4:02And when I was in my going through my first divorce, I was 30 and the well laid out planned life that I had created very obediently. Like I had done just what my culture had told me to do. I got married at 24 and worked hard and bought a house and made a plan to have a family. And then instead of having a family, I had a nervous breakdown, like quite literally. Everybody was moving in this one direction and my entire intellectual, spiritual, and physical system collapsed, which I now know, I now see that as an act of God. I now see that there was sort of the Tao, you know, that there was a force that was trying to communicate to me, this is not your path.

4:52I will kill you before I let you do this. I will kill you before I let you be a suburban housewife. I'm not allowing it. Like, I will make you, put you in so much physical pain that you're going to have to notice that this is not the life for you. But I was also in so much shame of failure and letting people down and like, we just bought this house. I just felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I don't know why I can't just get in line and do this thing that everybody's saying to do. Anyway, that marriage ended. And then I threw myself into another relationship and that ended. And I was like, I don't know how to orchestrate my life at all.

5:30And here I am 30 years old and nothing is what I had planned it to be five years ago. And I was in the deepest depression of my life. And I didn't have much of a spiritual life at that point. but I remember waking up one night and just shame and getting an instruction. I mean, that's the only way I can explain it. And I'm comfortable with that language because I often have that happen in my creative life where I'm told what to do. This is what you're going to focus on. Here's what you need to do now. And I was given this instruction and it came in as clearly as I'm talking to you. And it said, get up, get a notebook and write to yourself the words that you most wish that somebody would say to you.

6:09Because there was a great loneliness that I was feeling too, as well as the shame. And that letter began, you know, what that letter said was, I've got you, I'm with you, I'm not going anywhere. I love you exactly the way you are. You can't fail at this. Like you can't do this wrong. I don't need anything from you. This is a huge thing to hear. I don't need anything from, talk about no cherished outcome. I don't need anything from you. You don't have to improve. You don't have to do life better. You don't have to win. You don't have to get out of this depression. You don't have to ever uplift your spirits.

6:49You could end up living in a box under a bridge in a garbage bag, spitting at people. And I would love you just as much as I do now. The love that I have for you cannot be lost because it's innate. It's yours. I have no requirements for it. And if you need to stay up all night crying, I'll be here with you. And if tomorrow you have a garbage day again because you've been up all night crying, I'll be there for that too. I'll be here for every minute of it. Just ask me to come and I'll be here with you. And the astonishing thing was that it, like even talking about it now, I can feel the impact that it has on my nervous system to hear those words, even in my own voice.

7:31And it was the first experience I'd ever had with unconditional love. I'd never heard anybody say like, you don't need, I don't need you to be anything. You don't have to do better. Like, this is fine. This is great. You on the bathroom floor in a pile of tears and snot, it's great. It's great. That's fine. We love you just like that. And that's so nourishing because it's so the opposite of every message that I've ever heard. And so I started doing that practice and it's taken me through. I've never had difficult times in the last 20 years, but I've never gone as low again as I went at that time because this is the net that catches me routinely before I can get that low.

8:13And that voice doesn't change.

8:19next up another unpredictable and entertaining edition of the random show with technologist and serial entrepreneur kevin rose you can find kevin on twitter and instagram at kevin rose and you can find his sub stack at kevin rose.com like the the one thing that that struck me about today. And I just like, let's have a little real talk for a second. Oh, wow. Oh God. Coming to Jesus moment. Here we go. Like you went on this sabbatical and yet you had to write a book. I didn't have to. Hold on, hold on. Our mutual friend. Oh boy. Who shall not be named pointed this out as well. Yeah. Where it's like, can you sit and just be you or would that be too hard?

9:09Okay, let's do it. All right. so i let yeah this is this is good let's let's get into the fucking chewy bits so i routinely every year spend at least a month off the grid right like last october i was gone i was in i was off the grid yeah but you were doing shit i was doing stuff but here here's my question right and this was in our shared text thread i basically said okay look so the accusation is that Tim doesn't know how to chill out. I'm like, okay, fine. Let's take that as true. If Tim were to chill out, what does that look like on a daily and weekly basis? And one of my challenges was humans are built to be social.

9:51You have a family. Our mutual friend has a family. There's an inbuilt social network in that family. I don't have that, right? So my - I mean, you're a brother to me, so you always have a family. Yeah, I appreciate that. And like on a day-to-day basis, when I wake up in the morning, like, you know, my hotel room, my house is empty, right? So I need to go externally. I need to travel outside of the confines of my house to find that human interaction. So the question is like, okay, well, if you could write the script, what would Tim Ferriss chilling out look like? I don't know what that would look like.

10:30What would it look like? Oh, it's very simple. All right. I got the best answer for you ever. Oh, boy. No script. That sounds like some fucking fortune cookie stuff that I can't make sense of, though. What does that mean? I know you can't make sense of it, but that's the point. It's no script. When have you done that? When I did my meditation retreats. When I do, there's no script. No, but you had a schedule for each day. Sure, but like, I think. That was like an intensive, silent retreat where you're meditating eight hours a day. You want to flip this back, bitch? Like, okay, I suffer from the same thing you do.

11:00I suffer from the same thing you do. And that is that we can't. There's a reason we're all friends, right? We're all fucking border collies. We're chewing on the couch. We can't turn it off, you know? And it's like, honestly, I think the healthiest thing, though, would be to wake up with no agenda for a month, with no friends for a month, with the fact that you just wake up saying, what is today going to bring? And that is damn fucking hard for people that are driven like you and me are. So I did that for almost a month last October. But you did some psychedelics during that time and shit. Come on.

11:33You did some shit. Towards the end. But in that particular case, I mean, I'll just say that I don't think humans are built for isolation. Agreed. And there is a fetishizing of self-sufficiency and independence in the U.S. that I think is unhealthy. It exists in other places for sure. But if you look at our evolutionary biological, like our biological programming completely refutes that. To be exiled, to be excluded from the group is effectively death. 100%. And I'm not arguing that, but what I'm arguing is like, what if you couldn't touch a pen or a computer for a month? They shoot arrows. Or both.

12:09Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think, and I can't remember the particular attribution of this. Man, I wish I could really remember it. Ron Jeremy? The hedgehog? No. It was someone else. But it's basically like man finds leisure through the switching from one activity to another, like one compelling activity to another or something along those lines. And I wish I had the exact quote and the attribution, but I don't. And this applies obviously cross-gender. But the point being that I'm not convinced that being idle is a fruitful goal to have. if you can't sit with yourself for five minutes, that's a problem.

12:55Right. But different people have different constitutions. And for me, for instance, right, if you look at the four hour work week, okay, so I get rid of, not get rid of, but I automate my whole business, blah, blah, blah. What do I do? I end up doing tangos like six to eight hours a day. But that was not done from a position of obligation or fear. It was done from a place of enthusiasm and excitement and love. That's different. And that, I think, is good medicine, right? So as long as I have the self-awareness to distinguish between something that is done from a place of fear or guilt or prestige hunger or responsibility or some nebulous obligation versus the things that enliven me, I think being active is fine as long as I land in the latter category.

13:54For instance, I'm doing a lot of archery right now and I fucking love it. I am so fed by it. And I'm not saying I'm the world's best. I certainly am not, but I just find it so meditative. But can I ask you one question? One of the things I'm really curious about is like, Tim, I respect you so much because of how I've watched you dissect and assimilate information like no other human I've ever seen on earth. And you are able to learn and pick up and go deep on any topic within a matter of minutes or hours or weeks. You do that quite well. The one thing that is the rounding out of the holistic picture of Tim that I'm curious if you can ever tap into is the Tim that says, I can just be without having to go for those things or having to engage in that type of thinking, you know, that type of like pursuit, that type of analyzing, you know.

15:02No, I, Daria, my wife is, she's a PhD in neuroscience and, and I oftentimes get engaged in intense debates with her about this where I'm just like, chill the fuck out. No, I'm just, cut that. Daria, don't listen this far. So, but I'm just like, you know, I'm like, I'm like, I wish, I wish with all my friends balance. balance and I think the, where our mutual friend was trying to get to is like, might you find, might you find a little bit more of that side of the house? Cause you have the other in spades. Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, I'll sit with it. I think the balance can come in a lot of different forms, right?

15:41So the balance is time bound, right? In the sense that, is it balanced on a daily basis? Is it on a weekly basis? You're analyzing it though, dude. No, hold on, hold on. No, it's not. It's finding the right conceptual framework through us to think about it. And I don't think that's a mistake. I think it's actually very helpful. Depends on how your mind works, right? For me, though, it's like if I'm super intense for a month and I'm going 10 out of 10 and then I'm 0 out of 10 for a month, like that equates to kind of a 5-5, right? That's, for me, a certain degree of balance. but it's not, if you looked at it on the minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, it would look very lopsided.

16:22I know a fantastic app that I would love to build for you, which would be like the Tim Tim random app. And like you open it up every morning and it tells you what to do for a month. And it'd be like today, it's like, what the fuck is this? And you'd be like, oh, I have to buy a slip and slide and go down at 20 times. Like, just like something where it's just like throwing you completely out of your like, and you're like, wow, I didn't have to think about it. I didn't have to overanalyze it. It's just a fucking thing I'm going to do. Well, this is part of the curse of the entrepreneur. But it's also – No, I'm just saying.

16:53Yeah, 100%. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Dude, I know exactly what you're saying. We've talked about this. But also – Jesus. But also at the same time – These are your mics. I know. These are my mics. But also at the same time, I will say that like when you introduce another partner, it's the dance that's fucking hard, right? Yeah. Because Daria is very much about like structure and shit. Daria and I are very similar. Very similar. Super similar. Yeah. Love you, Daria. She's you with hair. You're the best. Yeah. Kevin does know what he's doing. She has a better body. No offense. I mean, you look at my AI.

17:27Her ass is better than her. I'm sorry. We got to shut this up. You got to catch the mic. Okay. Thank you everyone for tuning in to the show. Great to see you, buddy.

17:41Next up, Jerry Colonna, co-founder and CEO of Reboot.io, an executive coaching and leadership development firm, and the author of Reboot, Leadership and the Art of Growing Up, and Reunion, Leadership and the Longing to Belong. You can find Jerry on Twitter, at Jerry Colonna. You know, if we go back in time to my mid-30s, when I was a Prince of New York and a former VC and totally fucked up as an individual, I was knee-deep in the first decade. I'm now in my fourth decade of psychoanalysis. And I had a very tough-as-nails nice Jewish lady psychoanalyst named Dr. Sayers. and what she taught me repeatedly, endlessly, boxing my ears when she'd say this, is how have you been complicit in creating these conditions you complain so much about?

18:49And you have to picture it, right? I'm lying on the couch. There's this old Jewish lady who's 30 years older than me who's just basically had it with me, complaining. And so the roots of the question are really a kind of an exasperation, not just from my analyst to me, but eventually with me about me. And it was really only by taking that question, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want, that there was a massive unlock for me. Now, you asked about the misinterpretation. The first level of misinterpretation that people go through is that they assume I'm saying, how have I been responsible?

19:42And I am very, very particular. I get very, very angry when people misinterpret the word complicit for responsible. And it's not because I want to let people off the hook, but quite the opposite. I want people to understand that they've been an accomplice. Here's the thing, Tim, when we get into our mindset that says, I am responsible for all the shit in my life, we're actually walking away from doing the hard work. Could you expand on that? Yeah, sure. Because guilt is a defense mechanism. Right, because some people might say, well, that's extreme. ownership, as I say, I'm responsible for all the shit.

20:24That's the beginning of the solution, but where do they take a wrong turn? So I like the kind of ownership. I like the word ownership. I don't like the word responsibility. And the reason for that is because, and the reason I think it can be a defense mechanism is because it can be an old structure. So many people that I encounter, myself included, spend our childhood pendulating between grandiosity and a sense of worthlessness. I'm either shit or I am the best. You got rid of that in your childhood? Man, good for you. Well, I got rid of it in my adulthood. This is the point, dude. I got rid of it by actually asking the right questions of myself.

21:13If the word complicit is replaced with the words even extreme ownership, the danger is that I tip over into misunderstanding what actually has been going on, and I end up in this zone of being responsible for everything. And the truth is, it's much more complex than that. I was just thinking that you're referring to a pendulum and that not taking any responsibility for anything is one example of sort of absolving yourself of the hard work. But I never thought of the opposite. If you're accepting that anything and everything bad that happens is your responsibility slash fault, it puts you in a similar position, it seems.

22:02Exactly. The position it puts you in is unable to actually, with discernment, diagnose what's really going on. And you know what? You don't get to transform stuff if you don't really know what's going on. And so to understand what's really happening for you, you have to understand what your role is and what it isn't. So how do you walk, say, a client through answering that question well? How are you complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don't want or the conditions of your lives in your lives that you say you don't want? How do you walk them through their rough draft of trying to answer that?

22:47Okay, so the unlock on the question is the second half of the question, which people skip. You say you don't want. So give me an example from your own life, Tim. What do you say you don't want? Oh man, how much time do we have?

23:06I have become better at this. So I'm not dodging the question, but I would say probably some form of busyness, right? I've got this and I'm overscheduled and I've got this and that and the other thing that is imposing on what maybe I say I want, which is more locked out space for writing or making. Right. So you say, Mr. Four-Hour Workweek, I don't want to work more than four hours a week. Nice turn. Nice turn. I think you said that to me in the first conversation. Right. So you say you want to be so efficient and so productive that you get everything done that you want to get done so that you have time to play, take care of yourself, wear Breathe Right strips as you talk to you, right?

23:58This kind of thing, right? Okay. Just a quick sidebar. Breathe Right, this one's on me. Next time you got to sponsor the podcast. I could recognize them because I'm a Breathe Right user. I use them to sleep at night. Oh my God. And we were both like a lifetime supply, so feel free. Okay. So you say you don't want to be so busy, right? And you were asking, how do I walk a client through to understand the role of complicity, right, in this regard? So how does it feel when you're not busy? I would say, and I don't want to steal your thunder here, but since I'm cheating with a cheat sheet, right? This is...

24:49It's your show. So it's your thunder. And action. So segueing to a compliment or maybe a necessary component of the first question, how are you complicit in creating conditions that you say you don't want, which is in what ways does that complicity serve you? okay so to answer your question and that at the same time i would say probably and this is almost a certainty looking back at some of the scariest depressive episodes in my life it's when i had a lot of empty space and there is an underlying fear even though i haven't experienced anything close to that magnitude of desperation and darkness in a very long time there is a fear that if I create a void, that is the voice, that is the narrative that is going to come to dominate my thoughts.

25:44I would say that therefore my complicity serves me by avoiding that. Right. And so if you really want to transform, when will you be comfortable with the void? that's a good question and uh in my in my defense your honor i will say that you know i'm about to go off the grid for a week starting this friday so in a few days i'll be going completely off the grid no phone no nothing for a period of time so i have injected these periods but let's get into the messy stuff for a second since life is rarely as much of a randomized controlled trial as you would like i've had an ongoing number of chats with friends and whatsapp and different messaging platforms and it's been around taking breaks creating space chilling out right so a lot of these friends of mine have passed every hurdle and objective they could have had and their goalposts keep moving right they wanted to make a million and then it was 10 and then it was 20 and then once that gets indefensible, then it's a trillion.

26:55Once it gets indefensible, then it's like, what's your annual compounded growth rate? And this, that turns into percentages because they can't even with a straight face defend the rest of it. But what they claim to want and what they believe I need is to chill out, take a break, create all this space. My experience is as social animals, or at least as a person who benefits from social interaction, I do best around other people. I just do. And there are, it's not 100%, but it's not 0%. There's a risk that I do return to some of those dark places or dark narratives. It's not zero. So I struggle to answer the question of like, when can I allow space?