Speaker 1: If you just get off of social media for two weeks,
Speaker 1: it will do the same amount of good for a
Speaker 1: lot of folks as ten years of therapy.
Speaker 2: What advice has made you the most money?
Speaker 1: Don't aim to be the best, aim to be the anist.
Speaker 2: What's something that the top one percent obsess over? Now?
Speaker 2: Most people never even think.
Speaker 1: About the absolute sacredness of.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. Today's guest is
Speaker 2: someone that I've been waiting to reinterview for nine years.
Speaker 2: I'm speaking about the one and only Tim Ferris, one
Speaker 2: of the most influential thinkers in personal development and performance
Speaker 2: of all time. Tim's the best selling author of The
Speaker 2: Four Hour Workweek, host of The Tim Ferris Show with
Speaker 2: over a billion downloads. If you're someone who wants to
Speaker 2: learn how to make better decisions, overcome fear, and design
Speaker 2: a life that actually works for you, you won't want
Speaker 2: to miss this. Please welcome to On Purpose. Tim Ferris.
Speaker 2: Let's dive in. There's so much to extrapolate today with you,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to start off by asking you, like,
Speaker 2: what's a thought that reappears in your mind often today?
Speaker 2: Or what are you fascinated by today? That kind of
Speaker 2: steals your attention and gets you excited because you've done
Speaker 2: so many things, You've accomplished so many things, You're so
Speaker 2: active in so many ways. I wonder what fascinates you now.
Speaker 1: I can tell you literally was getting some texts on
Speaker 1: the way here from a few people I've been interacting
Speaker 1: with a lot. One is Tommy Wood, doctor Tommy Wood,
Speaker 1: who's a neuroscientist also a phenomenal athlete. Interesting combination looking
Speaker 1: at and we'll probably get into this more deeply, but
Speaker 1: different fuel sources for the brain and extending your cognitive runway.
Speaker 1: So in life, if you as I, for instance, have
Speaker 1: a lot of neurodegenerative disease in your family, whether that's Alzheimer's, Parkinson's,
Speaker 1: or otherwise, what can you do now? Assuming a lot
Speaker 1: of these conditions take decades to fully develop, how can
Speaker 1: you intervene early. So that's a question that's occupying my mind.
Speaker 1: And have found I think some very very compelling options
Speaker 1: that are not new to me. But if you go
Speaker 1: through the scientific literature and you talk to people on
Speaker 1: the front lines, you do find some interesting options. So
Speaker 1: we can talk about those. I would say bioelectric medicine,
Speaker 1: which ties into this in other words, microchips and electricity
Speaker 1: over pills. A lot of medications have off target effects.
Speaker 1: So you have a problem, or you want to prevent
Speaker 1: a problem, you take a drug. Very often it is
Speaker 1: not as specific as we would like. There are side effects.
Speaker 1: There's a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine that can be
Speaker 1: applied to a million different ways. We probably should talk
Speaker 1: about it, but I'll give you an example. Here's a
Speaker 1: crazy example. There's a technology called TMS transcranial magnetic stimulation
Speaker 1: that has existed for decades and it's basically using a
Speaker 1: magnetic f field to affect brain activity. So they put
Speaker 1: a paddle close to your head. There are different ways
Speaker 1: to do it, might be a cap with a few
Speaker 1: other things, and you can either excite or inhibit different
Speaker 1: parts of the brain. Slightly more complicated, but let's just
Speaker 1: assume that's the case. And a scientist Daan Nolan Williams
Speaker 1: out of Stanford along with others, developed something called the
Speaker 1: Saint protocol, which is an accelerated version. So instead of
Speaker 1: taking let's just say TMS treatments that you would do
Speaker 1: once or twice or three times a week over five months,
Speaker 1: they can press it all into one week, five days,
Speaker 1: and you're getting zapped ten times a day on the hour,
Speaker 1: every hour each of those five days. And what they
Speaker 1: end up seeing in many instances, and there's good published,
Speaker 1: pure reviewed studies, people can look at seventy percent remission
Speaker 1: of treatments is in depression that is durable. You start
Speaker 1: to see impacts on things like OCD generalized anxiety disorder.
Speaker 1: But one thing that I experimented with recently, this is
Speaker 1: maybe four months ago, because I have diagnosed pretty severo CD,
Speaker 1: which I think can be a superpower but can also
Speaker 1: be a super handicap. Also, just look at my family,
Speaker 1: who knows how much of it is nature versus nurture,
Speaker 1: but generalized anxiety disorder pretty high. And that can be
Speaker 1: a helpful monkey on the back for getting a lot done.
Speaker 1: But there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to see if I could dial back
Speaker 1: both of those. Would I lose my edge or would
Speaker 1: I actually improve my edge? I just wouldn't be holding
Speaker 1: onto the blade of the knife, right. And I went
Speaker 1: through this experimental protocol which is one day, so instead
Speaker 1: of taking a week off of work, one day where
Speaker 1: you preload and there's science behind this with something called decyclisarian.
Speaker 1: It's an antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis,
Speaker 1: among other things. Put in a lozenge in your mouth,
Speaker 1: and then an hour later you start these stimulations. You
Speaker 1: do one day, three minute stimulations on the hour, and
Speaker 1: I have gone from basically like an eight or nine
Speaker 1: of tense severity with generalized anxiety to like a zero
Speaker 1: or a one for four or five months. Now you
Speaker 1: cannot that one day from that one day, it is incredible.
Speaker 1: Does it help? Does it hurt? The dose does matter? Right,
Speaker 1: you can overdo it, but this is a combination of
Speaker 1: pharmaceuticals to help with neuroplasticity and then brain stimulation. So
Speaker 1: I've been looking very closely at bioelectric medicine. I think
Speaker 1: this is and if I try not to do it
Speaker 1: too much, but pat myself on the back a little bit,
Speaker 1: say look at the four our body. And then the
Speaker 1: subsequent ten fifteen years, a lot of that played out
Speaker 1: and ended up being very very highly reinforced by science.
Speaker 1: I'm placing a lot of my bets attentionally and then
Speaker 1: on the more philosophical side, but intensely practical. I don't
Speaker 1: think philosophy can be inert and kind of flaccid if
Speaker 1: you choose the wrong approach. But ultimately, if you're trying
Speaker 1: to decide on values, you're not going to do a
Speaker 1: randomized control trial in them, right. You have to find
Speaker 1: your way. Fortunately, people have been attempting to do this
Speaker 1: for millennia, and I would say that in the last
Speaker 1: few years especially. There's a great book called Already Free
Speaker 1: I think it is by Bruce Tift that discusses kind
Speaker 1: of two complimentary approaches, which are the let's just say,
Speaker 1: developmental achievement approaches that Western psychotherapy might take, or self
Speaker 1: help broadly, how do I improve myself? How do I
Speaker 1: change my circumstances. But then on the opposite side, a
Speaker 1: perhaps let's call it more Buddhist approach, although it's not
Speaker 1: unique to Buddhists or Buddhism alone, the acceptance peach, recognizing
Speaker 1: what is, allowing what is. It's a balancing act to
Speaker 1: do both. But I've been so, I would say for
Speaker 1: decades most of my life focused on the achievement piece,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot to be said for it, a
Speaker 1: lot of upside. Paying also attention to the approaches the
Speaker 1: practices that cultivate the other side, because guess what, none
Speaker 1: of us have as much control as we might like
Speaker 1: to think, so especially once you add in other humans. Yes, sorry, guys,
Speaker 1: that's an illusion. So I would say those are a
Speaker 1: few of the things that are very very present for me.
Speaker 2: I love it. You've just given us the contents page
Speaker 2: of our conversation. It's brilliant. This is what I enjoyed them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: do you mind if we dive into some of those
Speaker 2: a bit?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And my hope and I also said
Speaker 1: this before we hit record. It's like I don't have
Speaker 1: anything to pitch or sell. I really am excited about
Speaker 1: some of these things that I'm exploring now. So if
Speaker 1: I can give people very specific, concrete recommendations, then I'll
Speaker 1: be that in some way expand their thinking or help them.
Speaker 1: Then I'm thrilled.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I'm really grateful for you to coming on.
Speaker 2: Let's dive in a cognitive fuel then to go first,
Speaker 2: what do we currently do or what do we currently
Speaker 2: know that we use for cognitive fuel? And then the
Speaker 2: new approaches that you're looking at, how are they so different?
Speaker 2: As you said, they have less side effects. We're talking
Speaker 2: about potentially.
Speaker 1: In terms of fuel. First, a caveat not a doctor,
Speaker 1: don't play one on the internet, so talk to your physicians. However,
Speaker 1: what I will say is it's helpful to think of
Speaker 1: the brand like huge think of musculature.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The mind body separation duality is a complete falsehood. So
Speaker 1: everything's really really tightly interlated. What I will say is
Speaker 1: that if we look at the extremes to inform the memes.
Speaker 1: This is something I like to use as a heuristic.
Speaker 1: You can learn a lot by studying the extremes in athletics,
Speaker 1: in business, the best and the worst outcomes, and that
Speaker 1: tells you a lot about the middle, but not the
Speaker 1: other way around. Like if you study the average, this
Speaker 1: the ideal customer, the AB or C in the middle,
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually help you solve the edge cases. All right,
Speaker 1: So if we look at let's just say Alzheimer's, some people,
Speaker 1: some scientists and doctors refer to Alzheimer's as type three diabetes.
Speaker 1: Why because the brain and there are many factors go
Speaker 1: into this can end up in a state where it's
Speaker 1: very bad at utilizing glucose insulin insensitivity. You're basically diabetic
Speaker 1: in your brain and I'm simplifying here, but for instance,
Speaker 1: and I have done this with relatives of mine with Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1: You give them an exogenous ketone supplement of the right kind,
Speaker 1: give them a little shot, and I'll do it with
Speaker 1: them so they're not freaked out. Within twenty minutes, their
Speaker 1: sentences are longer, their rate of speech is faster. In
Speaker 1: some instances, there's something called the clock test, for instance,
Speaker 1: where you can look at the severity of Alzheimer's or
Speaker 1: other conditions by having someone attempt to draw clock and
Speaker 1: they just can't do it, and boom, like some type
Speaker 1: of stage magic. Thirty minutes later, they can draw clock.
Speaker 2: Crazy, So what's going on?
Speaker 1: Ketones are an alternate fuel source. And if you ever fast,
Speaker 1: if you ever experiment with intermittent fasting, which we can
Speaker 1: also come back to another thing that has my attention.
Speaker 1: If you cultivate your ability to use ketones, suddenly you
Speaker 1: have this very compelling alternate fuel source. I'll give you
Speaker 1: a third one though that is new to me, even
Speaker 1: though I look back at my experience in life through sports,
Speaker 1: I'm like, ah, okay, that helps connect some dots. Lactate
Speaker 1: If you ever have done a bunch of cycling, or
Speaker 1: you go in the gym and you get that burn.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, a big part of that is lactic
Speaker 1: acid lactate. Turns out the brain can really use that
Speaker 1: not only as a fuel, but it's also a signaling.
Speaker 1: It's almost it's a signal or messenger that can produce
Speaker 1: all of these changes in the brain. And there is
Speaker 1: for instance, Tommy would introduce me to this, the Norwegian
Speaker 1: four by four. People can look this up. Norwegian four
Speaker 1: by four is a fact in effect doing it's view
Speaker 1: T max training. We can explain what that is, but
Speaker 1: it's not really important right now. Basically, four minutes of
Speaker 1: incredibly hard let's say stationary biking, you're getting up to
Speaker 1: eighty five ninety percent of your max heart rate in
Speaker 1: the last minute of those four you don't think you're
Speaker 1: gonna make it right, Basically you're running away from wolves, okay,
Speaker 1: and then you take three to four minutes off and
Speaker 1: you repeat that again and you do four cycles. So
Speaker 1: you're doing four minutes on. Let's just call four minutes
Speaker 1: off four minutes on a data for four rounds. If
Speaker 1: you do that, there's there's a study conducted three times
Speaker 1: a week, and I think it was for six months.
Speaker 1: The effects on your brain, which includes some plausible volumetric
Speaker 1: changes like certain structures in your brand like the Hippi
Speaker 1: campus actually grow right, one of the primary rs affected
Speaker 1: by Alzheimer's, Those effects extend out for five years from
Speaker 1: six months of training three times a week. What is
Speaker 1: going on?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What is on the VO two MAC is just an
Speaker 1: indicator of the work that you're putting in. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: why does that kind of work matter? Because steady state
Speaker 1: aerobics walking for long distances doesn't do it. And there
Speaker 1: are people, credible people who focus on this who think
Speaker 1: that lactate is the main driver. So, for instance, this morning,
Speaker 1: before I came here, I was like, well, I'd like
Speaker 1: to have a little bit of extra energy. So I
Speaker 1: did a weight training workout where each of my sets
Speaker 1: with leg press or leg extension or whatever large muscle groups.
Speaker 1: I just turned on a music track that lasts four
Speaker 1: to five minutes, and I was like, all right, I
Speaker 1: can't stop for forty five minutes and it's going to
Speaker 1: be really painful. And that's it. Because I think that
Speaker 1: the cycling itself doesn't necessarily have any magic to it,
Speaker 1: like you could use it grow it's the lactic acid,
Speaker 1: it's the actual concentration in the blood. Those, I would
Speaker 1: say are three interesting fuels to consider. And I'm sure
Speaker 1: we'll come back to this. But like sometimes you don't
Speaker 1: have a problem solving issue. Sometimes you don't have a
Speaker 1: quandary in your life that you can think your way
Speaker 1: out of. You have a fuel issue. So before you
Speaker 1: try to riddle yourself with journaling out of all of
Speaker 1: your issues, maybe you're just starving. Yeah, and that could
Speaker 1: mean you need food, could mean you need to improve
Speaker 1: your insulin sensitivity. Maybe look at intermint fasting, which completely
Speaker 1: blew my mind with how it changed my insulin sensitivity
Speaker 1: and biomarkers over the course of four weeks. It really
Speaker 1: shocked me. And or when these are actually compatible looking
Speaker 1: at building up your keutogenic machinery, which you can do
Speaker 1: in a whole bunch of ways.
Speaker 2: I love the point you're making about fuel. And I
Speaker 2: was definitely someone I always felt like when I came
Speaker 2: to this work, I had a really strong mind because
Speaker 2: of my previous work, but I hadn't really worked on
Speaker 2: my body. And it was when I married my wife,
Speaker 2: who's a nutritionist and a dietitian. Yeah, very useful, extremely
Speaker 2: useful for many of itsh But the body became a
Speaker 2: part of the conversation because she was so much about
Speaker 2: physical health as well as mental and emotional health. And
Speaker 2: I think I was so in the mental emotional sphere
Speaker 2: that I kind of disregarded the body to some degree,
Speaker 2: only to realize how much I was limiting myself based
Speaker 2: on this fuel point, and even to speak to a
Speaker 2: very recent occurrence, probably a few years back, I was
Speaker 2: experiencing fatigue and low energy. Although I was positive and
Speaker 2: living my purpose and felt meaning in my life and
Speaker 2: had beautiful relationships, but I was just tired. And I
Speaker 2: remember getting my biomarkers done and everything, and it turned
Speaker 2: out to be something really basic, but they were just like,
Speaker 2: your vitamin D is out of ten. It should be
Speaker 2: at a sixty to one hundred. I'd like, you know,
Speaker 2: for the optimal, but you're at ten. Like, how did
Speaker 2: I not understand that something as small as this could
Speaker 2: be affecting my energy? It wasn't just about meaning, And
Speaker 2: I think you're so right. People are journaling really hard
Speaker 2: to on their purpose. They're trying to do this thing mentally,
Speaker 2: and half the time it's like you're not giving yourself
Speaker 2: enough fuel to even be able to have that breakthrough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't matter how good you are driving the
Speaker 1: race car if no one's done oil change, no one's
Speaker 1: checked the tires.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, no one's.
Speaker 1: Put proper fuel in the tank, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So I think that those levels are important to check, right,
Speaker 1: Like you mentioned the vitamin D in a lot of
Speaker 1: my friends who have complained about anxiety or depression are fatigue.
Speaker 1: They might do a micronutrient test and realize that they're
Speaker 1: deficient in trace minerals very common, whether it's copper, selenium
Speaker 1: or other. And it's like, okay, here, try and like
Speaker 1: eat a handful of brazil nuts once a day for
Speaker 1: a week and let me know how it goes. And
Speaker 1: they're like, I have of energy. I'm like, well yeah, okay, great,
Speaker 1: Well then you can check off the selenium. So which
Speaker 1: I think can be very reassuring for folks, right, because
Speaker 1: if they've been banging their head against the wall trying
Speaker 1: to quote unquote figure out X and they're just not
Speaker 1: making progress, it's not necessarily because your brain isn't working,
Speaker 1: you're not smart enough. Well, maybe it is because your
Speaker 1: brain isn't worrying, but you can fix it holistically through
Speaker 1: looking at your mind and body as one thing. Certainly
Speaker 1: through say meditation, right, you can have you can exert
Speaker 1: all sorts of interesting effects on your body right through
Speaker 1: the breath as this sort of interface with the autonomous
Speaker 1: autonomic nervous system. So it stands to reason you can
Speaker 1: do the other. It's bidirectional, like if you want to,
Speaker 1: you can improve the mind by working on the body,
Speaker 1: and you can improve the body by working on the mind.
Speaker 1: They go together absolutely, So that's that's a lot of
Speaker 1: what has my attention. I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: nonsense floating around out there about vegas nerve stimulation, but
Speaker 1: if you talk to certain scientists like doctor Kevin Tracey,
Speaker 1: who wrote a great book. I think it's a great
Speaker 1: book called The Nerve, all about the vegas nerve, which
Speaker 1: is really like two Transatlantic cables on either side of
Speaker 1: the neck with roughly ninety two hundred thousand fibers on
Speaker 1: either side. He's got a great story in the book
Speaker 1: where he's discussing all of this research related to in effect,
Speaker 1: activating something called the inflammatory reflex and preventing overwhelming cytokine
Speaker 1: storms for covid, for you name it, and you can
Speaker 1: stimulate the vegaus nerve a bunch of different ways. You
Speaker 1: could have an implant. There's actually something called femodidine over
Speaker 1: the counter. Talk to you doctor, don't just start taking this.
Speaker 1: But it's an ant acid, I believe, and that actually
Speaker 1: has some incredible effects related to that. But he was
Speaker 1: on stage talking about this at one point and the
Speaker 1: Dalai Lama and the Dialama's contingent happened to be at
Speaker 1: the same event, and the Dalai Lama got up afterwards
Speaker 1: because Kevin was talking about the vegas nerve right just
Speaker 1: for simplicity singular, and the Dialloma asked a question after
Speaker 1: the presentation. The translator translated and said, you know, his
Speaker 1: Holiness would like to know are there two of these
Speaker 1: that run down the neck? And he said, yes, actually
Speaker 1: there are two, and the dialogum kind of chuckled, and
Speaker 1: there's a practice that they have that involves meditating on
Speaker 1: these two channels that run down the neck and then
Speaker 1: basically innervate the rest of the body, including the abdomen,
Speaker 1: And it's like, hmm, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I find I find that East West connection,
Speaker 2: like so fascinating, and how the science is being able
Speaker 2: to prove these ancient techniques. I remember when I was
Speaker 2: talking to someone else on the show. It was that
Speaker 2: idea of them talking about circadian rhythms and looking at
Speaker 2: the sun first thing in the morning, et cetera, which
Speaker 2: of course you've talked about as well. And I was
Speaker 2: talking about how in the monastery in India it was
Speaker 2: always about sun salutation. So Suriya namashkar is the Sanskrit
Speaker 2: version of sun salutations, and that was the because you
Speaker 2: woke up in the morning and you paid respects to
Speaker 2: the sun, which meant making you know, eye contact with
Speaker 2: the sun and allowing the sun rays to enter. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, all of these technic they didn't have the
Speaker 2: language that we live, but the technique existed far back then.
Speaker 2: Talk to me about the did you call it the
Speaker 2: bioelectric bioelectric medicine medicine? Yeah, because you're talking about chips.
Speaker 2: Where's is pilled?
Speaker 1: Yeah, chips or electricity resistor.
Speaker 2: Explain to me what you mean by chips, well.
Speaker 1: Just microchips, so actually using a device which could be
Speaker 1: in the case of I think it's set point medical
Speaker 1: for instance, has an implant which is the size of
Speaker 1: omegas recapsule. I think it's called set Point Medical. They
Speaker 1: were on the cover of the New York Times for
Speaker 1: this and it just got approved. Goes in the neck.
Speaker 1: It's actually a very fast procedure and it applies stimulation
Speaker 1: to the vegas nerve, which runs right along the crowdies basically,
Speaker 1: and it is used for utoia furnace. It gives some
Speaker 1: people incredible relief where they might have been incapacitated laying
Speaker 1: on a couch, can't get up, have to elevate their legs,
Speaker 1: can't walk more than a few steps. They get this
Speaker 1: implant and then boom, like two months later, they're running
Speaker 1: upstairs on a tour through Europe with their husband. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a real example.
Speaker 2: It doesn't solve it, it doesn't reverse, It just provides.
Speaker 1: This is that's a very good question. I shouldn't speak
Speaker 1: to that because I don't know enough about arthritis and what
Speaker 1: it looks like in terms of development over long periods
Speaker 1: of time. What I will say is that broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: this is controversial, but it's it's not that controversial with
Speaker 1: a few scientists are going to interact with who look
Speaker 1: at this very closely. I think a lot of our
Speaker 1: psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Some of them you may be predisposed to those things genetically,
Speaker 1: but I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start
Speaker 1: with acute infection. Much like long covid or long lime disease.
Speaker 1: There's some acute immune system insult, often an infection that
Speaker 1: leads to then chronic neuroinflammation. And when you address that neuroinflammation,
Speaker 1: a lot of the symptoms can abate, which is why
Speaker 1: there have been studies looking at just giving people who
Speaker 1: are depressed anti inflammatoris And I'm not saying, by the way,
Speaker 1: anyone listening or watching that you should go gobble anti
Speaker 1: inflammatories their side effects. Don't do that. But maybe there
Speaker 1: are other ways to address excessive inflammation. And it turns
Speaker 1: out vegas nerve stimulation could be one of those. There
Speaker 1: are other approaches. I can't recommend any current device out there.
Speaker 1: I'm interacting with. This Scandinavian researcher is amazing. I'm hoping
Speaker 1: that at least in the US, maybe in the next
Speaker 1: six months, something will be available that people can grab.
Speaker 1: I'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight
Speaker 1: being corroborated by science, because there's a really cool tie
Speaker 1: in breathing. Do breath work. There are different types of
Speaker 1: breath work that absolutely seem to have an effect on
Speaker 1: the inflammatory reflex, and that's actually part of the reason
Speaker 1: why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice,
Speaker 1: especially if they do it twice a day, like ten
Speaker 1: to twenty minutes percession. After about two weeks, it's so consistent, right,
Speaker 1: It's like for the first week they're like, I don't
Speaker 1: know if this is doing anything, and then after like
Speaker 1: seven to ten days, there seems to be something that happens,
Speaker 1: and people are like, I'm so much calmer. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: to this all right. There are million different ways you
Speaker 1: could explain it, but let's throw one out there that
Speaker 1: doesn't really I haven't really heard discussed that the rhythmic
Speaker 1: breathing that you and train when you're doing that kind
Speaker 1: of sitting activates the vagus nerve. If you use a
Speaker 1: stimulator guess what, you use it five minutes in the
Speaker 1: morning save for the year, five minutes in the morning,
Speaker 1: five minutes at night. Because the effects last about twelve hours, okay,
Speaker 1: and it takes about two weeks for most people to
Speaker 1: notice everything settle. Yeah, well that's a strange coincidence. And
Speaker 1: if you do box breathing or something like that, for
Speaker 1: people who are maybe tuning in, we're like, oh, meditation, God, Like,
Speaker 1: if I have to sit and focus on my breath
Speaker 1: one more time, or you know, imagine a candle or
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. It's not necessarily for everybody. I
Speaker 1: get it. I mean, my monkey mind is on like
Speaker 1: high octane fuel. I get it. But you could use
Speaker 1: an app that just helps you breathe right, or something
Speaker 1: box breathing or whatever it might be. Try that ten
Speaker 1: minutes twice a day for two weeks. See what happens.
Speaker 1: I think most folks will be very pleasantly surprised. On
Speaker 1: the ancient wisdom side, I've always been interested, but skeptical,
Speaker 1: interested in, but skeptical of acupuncture. Skeptical because, as with
Speaker 1: many modalities, practitioners sometimes oversell it panacea for everything. It's true, psychedelics,
Speaker 1: it's true, massage, it's for pet it's true. For surgery,
Speaker 1: it's I can fix all your problems, all right. Probably not. However,
Speaker 1: there are a few aspects, and I went to two
Speaker 1: universities in China. I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin. In this case,
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine, traditional
Speaker 1: Chinese medicine, acupuncture on animals. How does that work?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: As far as we know, maybe there's not a whole
Speaker 1: lot of Pacibo effect with dogs. Let's just say so,
Speaker 1: being able to use acupuncture in place of say, anesthesia
Speaker 1: with animals, that's pretty weird. That's interesting. The other one
Speaker 1: that seems pretty compelling. There are several. But the other
Speaker 1: one is pregnancy using acupuncture for fertility. So what on
Speaker 1: earth is going on? If that is actually a thing
Speaker 1: for the time being, Let's say maybe it is. And
Speaker 1: I know a few traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and they
Speaker 1: have walls of photos of babies, and I'm like, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: You can't underestimate the power of the mind and the
Speaker 1: pace effect, which, by the way, people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just place effect, sebo effect. It's the craziest thing
Speaker 1: in the world. But let's leave that alone for the moment.
Speaker 1: One of the ways that you would stimulate can stimulate
Speaker 1: some of the fibers in the vagus nerve is with
Speaker 1: placement on the ear and you're applying electric current on
Speaker 1: something called the symbicancia. Right here, the placement really matters.
Speaker 1: It's very very specific, and then you need another probe
Speaker 1: to ground or complete the circuit effectively. That would be
Speaker 1: the five minutes of stimulation. You can also do it
Speaker 1: the neck, but the next quite uncomfortable. The placement of
Speaker 1: those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners
Speaker 1: put the needles. No way, and electricity is not the
Speaker 1: only way you can do it right, and it's not
Speaker 1: the only way. I mean, there was a physician in
Speaker 1: France who experimented with taking ballpoint pens and pressing on
Speaker 1: different parts of the year, which, funny enough, that was
Speaker 1: in the nineteen hundreds ended up getting retrofitted and adopted
Speaker 1: by a lot of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China.
Speaker 1: But the overlap's interesting, right, Like, that's very interesting, and
Speaker 1: it's also you have to wonder, it's like, man, how
Speaker 1: many thousands of years of trial and error does that
Speaker 1: take to figure out?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And how did they figure it out too?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, it's wild and I should say as one
Speaker 1: voice of sanity. There's also a lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: has existed for a very long time that is probably nonsense,
Speaker 1: right of course, but it suffice to say to answer
Speaker 1: your question. Bioelectric medicine is using electricity or electronics in
Speaker 1: place of drugs.
Speaker 2: To avoid the side effects, not being the primary.
Speaker 1: To avoid the side effects, to help establish homeostasis, perhaps
Speaker 1: as opposed to overall blocking something or overall stimulating something,
Speaker 1: you know, smashing some receptor. But then, oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: it also has an affinity all these other receptors that
Speaker 1: we don't really want to mess with it, but we
Speaker 1: can't avoid it. And there is a place for drugs. Look,
Speaker 1: I take prescription medication right, It's like there is a
Speaker 1: place for but it's in at least the US, where
Speaker 1: it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through.
Speaker 1: You can advertise on television directly to patients selling drugs.
Speaker 1: It's outrageous. The pharmaceutical and you know, industrial complex is
Speaker 1: a very real thing, and the incentives are very perverse
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. So we are overprescribed, over medicated.
Speaker 2: With our question, yeah, I blew my mind when I
Speaker 2: moved to this country and saw those ads, I couldn't
Speaker 2: believe they were real. I was like, this has to
Speaker 2: be an snl skit so like, it has to be
Speaker 2: something so bad. I couldn't believe it because you don't
Speaker 2: have that in the UK. You just you never see that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so when I moved here, I was like, Wow,
Speaker 2: it's literally telling me that this might kill me, like
Speaker 2: might kill you is a legitimate you know, in a.
Speaker 1: Very very fast word permitted fine print.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's unbelievable. No, I appreciate that. A
Speaker 2: lot of what you spoke about. You talked about, you know,
Speaker 2: doing the the lactate and it was like six months
Speaker 2: to unlock. You talked about the of the four four
Speaker 2: four four like four on four our four on for
Speaker 2: off three times a week six months, and then you
Speaker 2: spoke about the idea of you know, two weeks of
Speaker 2: meditation twice a day to feel the benefits. What I
Speaker 2: find more and more fascinating even in myself and what
Speaker 2: to speak of our community and the audience that tunes
Speaker 2: into shows like this, is we know that everyone struggles
Speaker 2: with that initial discomfort. Like you said, you have to
Speaker 2: do it for two weeks to start feeling the benefits
Speaker 2: and noticing that that calm or letting things set, or
Speaker 2: you have to do something for six months. What have
Speaker 2: you found to be the best startup strategy to a
Speaker 2: new habit to unlock its potential when it may take
Speaker 2: two weeks, don look, it's benefit.
Speaker 1: This might sound like a simplistic answer, but it's telling
Speaker 1: people that, yeah, do you know what I mean? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because in many cases it's it's like, hey, study a
Speaker 1: language and you'll learn the language, but you're setting someone
Speaker 1: up for failure in that example. And I use that
Speaker 1: just because most people are like, oh god, so much
Speaker 1: PTSD about learning languages. Right, But if you tell them like, hey,
Speaker 1: here's what the graph looks like as you you're going
Speaker 1: to have this type of experience, and then once you
Speaker 1: add this new grammatical construction, like you're going to have
Speaker 1: a bit of a trough of sorrow. Don't worry about it. Right,
Speaker 1: You're gonna plateau, but you're not actually platauing. Your mind
Speaker 1: is adjusting to involve this additional complexity. And then then
Speaker 1: you kind of explain what the stock chart of your
Speaker 1: brain is going to look like. Then people don't freak
Speaker 1: out and the abandonment rates can be less, and so
Speaker 1: I think with something like meditation, saying you may see
Speaker 1: benefits sooner, but experience seems to indicate that a switch
Speaker 1: is flipped around two weeks. So commit to two and
Speaker 1: a half weeks and do less than you think is necessary.
Speaker 1: Do less than you think you can do. This supplies
Speaker 1: to any new habit as far as I'm concerned. If
Speaker 1: you think you can do twenty minutes, but that's pushing
Speaker 1: it into redline territory, do ten, do less than you
Speaker 1: think you can do, because that is going to contribute
Speaker 1: to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm. Don't bleed the stone.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic
Speaker 1: and YadA YadA YadA, rugged individuals stuff that we find
Speaker 1: in many parts of the world. This is not a
Speaker 1: place to show how much you can do if you're
Speaker 1: trying to adopt a new behavior. So with the meditation,
Speaker 1: I would just I think it is undervalued how setting
Speaker 1: expectations can be the missing ingredient. It's just like, Hey,
Speaker 1: if I were trying to sell one of my friends,
Speaker 1: which I do often, I would just say, look much
Speaker 1: like katosis or a ketogenic diet. It's pass fail, it's binary.
Speaker 1: You can't do it fifty percent. The good news is
Speaker 1: you're going to know after two and a half weeks,
Speaker 1: in the case of meditation, whether this works for you
Speaker 1: at all or not. And if it works, it could
Speaker 1: be pretty dramatic. But if you give up after a week,
Speaker 1: the whole thing is wasted. So just commit to it
Speaker 1: and a half and you know, if you need to
Speaker 1: do a bet with a friend or something to set
Speaker 1: steaks and incentivize yourself so you'll be embarrassed if you stop,
Speaker 1: Like guess what that's useful too. Yeah, I've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about that in the four Hour Shaft, Like how
Speaker 1: do you actually set up incentives so that it's harder
Speaker 1: to quit? These are very you know, have your friend
Speaker 1: take some photos of you and your tidy whities and
Speaker 1: unflattering light and that'll get released into the wild if
Speaker 1: you don't do it for two and a half weeks
Speaker 1: or it's like one hundred dollars bet and your buddy,
Speaker 1: your friend is going to donate that to your most
Speaker 1: hated play medical candidate in your name. If you don't
Speaker 1: do it for two and a half weeks, Okay, great,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to do it. Everyone needs reasons, so
Speaker 1: so good. I think that's the biggest one. Honestly, it's
Speaker 1: just setting expectations. And in the case of the Norwegian
Speaker 1: four by four this is a quirk of science and
Speaker 1: interpretation of science. So they did do the six months,
Speaker 1: and the effects seem to extend out to five years.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that you need six months. That
Speaker 1: was just the study design, So who knows. I would
Speaker 1: imagine that it's not all or nothing. That is cumulative,
Speaker 1: And that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood
Speaker 1: about today. I said, well, like, what do we know
Speaker 1: and what do we not know? Because that was the
Speaker 1: study design and that's I'm sure since been replicated and
Speaker 1: people are modeling that. But is it possible that instead
Speaker 1: of say four by four, so you know, six minutes
Speaker 1: of this potwo max training, is it possible that less
Speaker 1: time would work as long as you hit certain peak
Speaker 1: levels of lactate? Could a ten minute could a five
Speaker 1: minute session of weight training work if you hit a
Speaker 1: certain minimum threshold? Question mark?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Who knows?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right? Has anyone done three months to range a protocol
Speaker 1: and looked at the effects yes or no, maybe maybe not.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of stuff that I also fund
Speaker 1: through my foundation. Right, I get so tired of kind
Speaker 1: of chewing on my fingernails wondering about these things that
Speaker 1: I just fund a lot of science. But there may
Speaker 1: be a smaller minimum effective dose for that stuff. We'll see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fascinest it's the business of science, right, Yeah, absolutely, trying
Speaker 1: not to fool yourself, setting things up so it's very
Speaker 1: hard for you to fool yourself or a bias.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I like that. Yeah, underset expectations and do
Speaker 2: less than you think. That's a great one. Do lesson
Speaker 2: you think, do less than you think is a brilliant,
Speaker 2: brilliant method. And I think we're so scared of saying
Speaker 2: that to our friends or people we love, because we
Speaker 2: know everyone wants instant change. Yeah, and so because people
Speaker 2: want instant change, we want to say do this today
Speaker 2: and it will calm you down. And we know that
Speaker 2: isn't true because it's going to take a practice in
Speaker 2: a discipline, and it might.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean there are some there are some
Speaker 1: very fast returns, and then other things take seem to
Speaker 1: take more time. I interviewed years ago someone named John Crystal,
Speaker 1: who I believe is the chair of psychiatry at Yale
Speaker 1: or he was at the time, and he did a
Speaker 1: lot of along with his colleagues, a lot of the
Speaker 1: seminal work on ketamine as an antidepressant in humans, and
Speaker 1: I think it was zero point five milligrams per kilogram
Speaker 1: over X period of time, and it showed these amazing effects.
Speaker 1: But now the point five milligrams per kilogram has become
Speaker 1: this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners, including some
Speaker 1: scientists or are like, this is the protocol, and I
Speaker 1: was like, well is it. It's one protocol.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that was tested in that way, but.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that is the end all be all.
Speaker 1: I would say also, just on the ketemede front, very risk, combound,
Speaker 1: high likelihood of addiction. Listen to that episode or just
Speaker 1: do some real deep dive before you ever consider having
Speaker 1: certainly any ketemine at home, whether that's sir Johnson Johnson
Speaker 1: as ketamine spravado or through a clinic. My recommendation is
Speaker 1: do not have lozenges or anything like that at home.
Speaker 1: If you're going to do if you're going to pursue
Speaker 1: that for different applications. I think it's very interesting for suicidality.
Speaker 1: It's one of the few things that I've seen if
Speaker 1: someone is acutely at risk of hurting themselves in some cases,
Speaker 1: with an infusion or an injection, a few hours later,
Speaker 1: they go from I'm going to kill myself today too.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I was so upset about. That's
Speaker 1: crazy that. Yeah, I've seen that multiple times and so
Speaker 1: of other clinicians. It's that's one of the few interventions
Speaker 1: I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario.
Speaker 1: That's pretty interesting. So, and I guess I'll stop there
Speaker 1: for the.
Speaker 2: So. I love it, man, this is what I wanted.
Speaker 2: I was like, I was like, you're one of the
Speaker 2: few guests, You're one of the few people you can
Speaker 2: truly do this with. Well, I'm just like Tim, I
Speaker 2: just want to know what you're fast in my brain.
Speaker 1: Crazy, that's what.
Speaker 2: But that's what I love about it, Like it's it's
Speaker 2: you know that. That's what I love about talking to you,
Speaker 2: or like learning from you over the years, is that
Speaker 2: you're just so deeply curious about so many things happening
Speaker 2: at the same time, and they're just and they're all
Speaker 2: just interesting. And new, and they help you be more
Speaker 2: curious and ask questions and you know, and and I
Speaker 2: appreciate that because I'm like, otherwise, what's the point, Like
Speaker 2: why why have we been doing this? You know?
Speaker 1: It's it. Yeah, people can can see why I need
Speaker 1: to deal with the double edged sort of OCD.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, it's great when you're looking at science. But if
Speaker 1: you're looking at some mistake you made yesterday and you're
Speaker 1: thinking about that for four days straight, maybe not so helpful.
Speaker 2: You know, how did you make that? Was there ever
Speaker 2: a turn you needed to make? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean that's why I did the antibiotic plus accelerated TMS.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well I helped you make that ten a few.
Speaker 1: Things, right, I think there's a degree of pain that,
Speaker 1: especially over long periods of time, you want relief from.
Speaker 1: And for some of us, that is just the looping,
Speaker 1: rumitative mind that is turning on itself. So whether that's
Speaker 1: could be any number of things, right, could be. And
Speaker 1: in terms of OCD, like my mom's makes me look
Speaker 1: like a cakewalk with her OCD. But I'm not flipping lights,
Speaker 1: which is I'm not washing my hands, no, no, which
Speaker 1: is not to denigrate any of that stuff. It's like
Speaker 1: people have different ways of manifesting. For me, it's all internal. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's all internal. What if this I should have said
Speaker 1: that loop blup loop loop loop imagining outcomes, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Perseverating on some conversation that I wish had gone a
Speaker 1: different way, and it's exhausting. It's really exhausting, and interest
Speaker 1: in peace. Nolan Williams and certainly passed away. But I
Speaker 1: was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because
Speaker 1: he pioneered at Stanford. Also, he was a real polymath.
Speaker 1: A lot of very compelling research related to I begain
Speaker 1: So I began as an alkaloid derived from Iboga taberneth,
Speaker 1: which is a psychedelic plant. In this case, the Whiti
Speaker 1: tribe and others are using the root bark for these
Speaker 1: very long, super intense mount everest of psychedelic like experiences.
Speaker 1: It is not to be trifled with. There are some
Speaker 1: very significant cardiac risks for certain people. You can die
Speaker 1: taken this unlike most psychedelics. And he was the first
Speaker 1: to really put under a fine scientific lens some of
Speaker 1: the neuroanatomical changes, specifically in veterans. And I began is
Speaker 1: It's a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it
Speaker 1: effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans, and specifically
Speaker 1: in cases a traumatic brain injury. That's strange. This is
Speaker 1: not really something you see. It's not something that people
Speaker 1: that have observed with other drugs, including other psychedelics. And
Speaker 1: it seems to relate to something called glee ol derived
Speaker 1: neurotrophic factor. But suffice to say, I connected with him
Speaker 1: about that, and then it turned out this guy's not
Speaker 1: a one trick pony. He also is one of the
Speaker 1: world leaders in brain non invasive brain stimulation and accelerate TMS.
Speaker 1: And I started looking at the literature and the result
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I mean,
Speaker 1: this reads like science fiction number one, number two. It
Speaker 1: seems unbelievable, like a total scam. But I know it's
Speaker 1: not a scam. Like these are very, very top tier scientists.
Speaker 1: And when I realized that it could be applied to
Speaker 1: well a few things backstore, I always had self described
Speaker 1: as someone who struggled with depression. When I actually was
Speaker 1: able to address it most successfully, I realized that the
Speaker 1: depression was born of fatigue, which came from anxiety which
Speaker 1: interrupted my sleep. So the Dominoda tip was actually the
Speaker 1: anxiety piece. Much like it's kind of like, this is
Speaker 1: not the greatest comparison, but like the Votwo Max, it's
Speaker 1: like that's the output you can point to. But the
Speaker 1: catalyst was actually the anxiety, and I was like, well, yolo,
Speaker 1: let's try it. The safety profile looks really appealing. The
Speaker 1: actual stimulation is, relatively speaking, pretty low power. It's been
Speaker 1: around for decades. It seems like mostly upside potential. There
Speaker 1: are some risks involved people should be aware of when
Speaker 1: people can search accelerated TMS and so on to find this,
Speaker 1: but all in all attractive for someone who's experiencing in
Speaker 1: my case, the amount of chronic mental anguish. That's what
Speaker 1: kicked it off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how accessible is that now?
Speaker 1: So TMS itself, let's just say conventional TMS is actually
Speaker 1: quite accessible, much like ketamine clinics. There are fly by
Speaker 1: night operations, so caveat emptor you've got to do your homework.
Speaker 1: But TMS is very widely accessible and often reimbursed by insurance.
Speaker 1: Accelerated TMS, as far as I know, is not reimbursable
Speaker 1: by insurance at the moment. So it is available at
Speaker 1: certain clinics. There's one that I've used called a Kasha
Speaker 1: Clinic or Keisha Clinics in Sunnyville, California. But it's expensive.
Speaker 2: It's expensive.
Speaker 1: It's expensive for the five day. My hope and also
Speaker 1: part of the reason why I volunteered to be like
Speaker 1: one of the first sixty monkeys shot in space with
Speaker 1: the decycle searin this very lotus antibiotic and the one
Speaker 1: day is that if you can pressed the five days
Speaker 1: into one day, suddenly the cost should be much much lower. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, dramatically lower, and it's much more accessible because
Speaker 1: not that many people can take a week off of work,
Speaker 1: completely off of work, because your brand will be exhausted
Speaker 1: when you have this treatment. I remember going in for
Speaker 1: my first day of stimulations, got like nine hours of sleep.
Speaker 1: I was feeling like a million bucks. I could do
Speaker 1: jump in jacks all day. Had my first eight minute
Speaker 1: stimulation and I felt like I had just pulled three
Speaker 1: all nighters studying for a test. I was so mentally tired.
Speaker 1: So if you do it, do not have any delusions
Speaker 1: of cranking out fifty minutes of work in between these stimulations.
Speaker 1: Ain't gonna happen. But the one day man, it's it
Speaker 1: could be the future for a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: that is not widely available, but people can do some digging.
Speaker 1: There are clinics, not a lot of them. The two
Speaker 1: main hardware companies our BrainsWay, that's one which I've used.
Speaker 1: I've used both because I'm in my whole stick and
Speaker 1: it's real. It's part of the mission for me as
Speaker 1: being the guinea pig and taking the notes so that
Speaker 1: not everyone has to right just in case there's collateral damage,
Speaker 1: but sometimes there is. BrainsWay has some very very sophisticated hardware,
Speaker 1: and then mag Venture is another one that has very
Speaker 1: well developed target right. As far as I know, those
Speaker 1: are kind of the two front runners. The other that
Speaker 1: I mentioned, which focuses specifically on the one day Ampa Health,
Speaker 1: I have not tested, so I can't speak to that directly.
Speaker 1: There seem to be credible people involved, but I can't.
Speaker 1: I haven't really done the due diligence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good to know, Good to know. I have so
Speaker 2: many friends and family that was asking and wanting to
Speaker 2: discovers a very very useful insert tim. I wanted to
Speaker 2: switch to some of the philosophical aspects you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: like the things that you're fascinated by right now. And
Speaker 2: I was thinking about even as a society, how we
Speaker 2: seem to kind of oscillate between in this work life
Speaker 2: balance to then hustle culture, and it seems that that
Speaker 2: just takes over the conversation for that period in time.
Speaker 2: So rewind back probably five to ten years, and hustle
Speaker 2: culture was the thing. Yeah, work life balance has kind
Speaker 2: of made its comeback now, And then you could look
Speaker 2: back twenty five years and we were talking about work
Speaker 2: life balance when it first kind of probably entered the zeitgeist,
Speaker 2: and it was preceded by this hustle intensity culture or
Speaker 2: whatever it is called then and you're kind of talking
Speaker 2: about this idea of this achievement mindset that you had
Speaker 2: and has been useful, and then now looking at this
Speaker 2: acceptance mindset that you know, you're almost looking at the
Speaker 2: value of both. And I think that's even this whole conversation.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the value of both, or this and this,
Speaker 2: or you know, the connection between old and new and
Speaker 2: being curious. And I've I find that with work life
Speaker 2: balance and hustle culture or achievement let's call it achievement,
Speaker 2: because hustle culture just sounds like working hard without maybe
Speaker 2: any direction. Yeah, but achievement culture and acceptance culture, which
Speaker 2: feel like together they're so synergistic, yet we tend to
Speaker 2: just go between one or the other in different phases
Speaker 2: of our life. Yeah, where are you at with making
Speaker 2: sense of that for yourself and thinking about it for others?
Speaker 1: I'll say something might surprise people. So the first thing,
Speaker 1: as the guy who wrote a book called the four
Speaker 1: hour work Week, I have no problem with eighty hour
Speaker 1: work weeks if they're good reasons behind it. So let me.
Speaker 1: I'll just let that settle for a second, and I'll
Speaker 1: add something that normally I wouldn't add to that, which
Speaker 1: is like read the serenity prayer, the actual serenity prayer.
Speaker 1: Acceptance across the board for everything is effectively becoming a
Speaker 1: cow standing in the rain. That's just complacency, passivity, and
Speaker 1: then completely unrestrained. Achievement is just a greyhound running around
Speaker 1: a track chasing a rabbit. And those dogs can't run
Speaker 1: very long, but they can sprint. So Number one, if
Speaker 1: you can't control or affect something, that probably lands in
Speaker 1: the acceptance bucket, right, which is why I've not had
Speaker 1: social media on my phone for three or four years.
Speaker 1: Doom scrowling not helpful for a million different reasons. I
Speaker 1: know people probably agree with this a face value. Nonetheless, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like let's look at behavior, right, like show me what
Speaker 1: you do and not what you say kind of situation.
Speaker 1: It's like my friends, even some of my most accomplished,
Speaker 1: cheaper friends, these are like megastars within business. I know
Speaker 1: one guy in particular, such a smart guy. He's so good,
Speaker 1: he's got a wonderful family. And he took X off
Speaker 1: his phone a few years ago and it's like he
Speaker 1: went through twenty years of therapy, right. It was like
Speaker 1: a month later, like everything's better. And then I'm in
Speaker 1: a group thread with him and a few months ago
Speaker 1: he started sending links to things on X and I
Speaker 1: was like, uh, oh, you're back on the sauce.
Speaker 2: When did that happen?
Speaker 1: And he's like, oh I got dragged back in this
Speaker 1: says but it's the worst. It's like he's been. It
Speaker 1: just came out of pow camp. Like he's a mess.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're listening, sorry, I'm not a mess.
Speaker 1: But it's just like it's not an improvement it's a
Speaker 1: worsening of psychological state. Right, So that stuff, it's like,
Speaker 1: if you can't act on it, or if you're not
Speaker 1: going to act on it, that has to go in
Speaker 1: the acceptance bucket or in the ignore button on the
Speaker 1: selective ignorance bucket. Then on the achievement side. For me,
Speaker 1: I would say that as a way of kind of
Speaker 1: setting the table. One of my friends, Josh Waitskin my
Speaker 1: second ever podcast, by the way, he was the basis
Speaker 1: for searching for Bobby Fisher. He's considered a chess prodigy.
Speaker 1: He hates that doesn't really describe him well either, because
Speaker 1: he's become world class, very like top one percent and
Speaker 1: a couple of different disciplines. It's very systematic. But one
Speaker 1: of his guiding tenets maxims is avoid the simmerings. And
Speaker 1: that just means you're either off like you could be
Speaker 1: taken a nap under a set of bleachers or something,
Speaker 1: or you're on like you are the greyhound, right you
Speaker 1: are completely focused and you're in six gear. It's like
Speaker 1: avoid everything in between. Yeah, So avoiding the simmering sex
Speaker 1: and I and a lot of people I think are
Speaker 1: at risk of the gravitational pull of the default, which
Speaker 1: is the simmering sex getting interrupted by text messages and
Speaker 1: emails and responding to everyone else's manufactured emergency and so on.
Speaker 1: That's the simmering sex, and that will just murder you
Speaker 1: psycho emotionally. So for me, I try to really oscillate
Speaker 1: between restfulness or sprint. The fact matter is, as much
Speaker 1: as I would like to think otherwise, Like I'm a
Speaker 1: working dog. I'm like a border collie. Right, if idle
Speaker 1: hands of the Devil's workshop, then you know, by extension,
Speaker 1: it's like you leave a border collie trapped in an
Speaker 1: apartment long enough, it's going to chew the cows, the
Speaker 1: couch to pieces. Yeah, turn into an Eurotic mess. It's
Speaker 1: like a lot of people are like that. I'm like that,
Speaker 1: it's good for me to have a mission a project.
Speaker 1: Me too, Yeah, it's just and I don't think anyone
Speaker 1: needs to apologize for them. Yeah. So for instance, it's
Speaker 1: like with this, I have an eight hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: page draft of a book and it's like, all right,
Speaker 1: well what am I going to do with that beast?
Speaker 1: I'll probably do a retreat where all I do is
Speaker 1: eat a sleep exercise, Right, That's it. And it will
Speaker 1: be full on as many hours a day as I
Speaker 1: can handle every day for a few weeks. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not going to be the four hour work week, but
Speaker 1: it was with a It's with an end point, with
Speaker 1: a very precise purpose that I feel good about, that
Speaker 1: I feel aligned with, and that's fine. And then after
Speaker 1: that I will probably bookend it by a book something
Speaker 1: like three to seven days with a handful of close
Speaker 1: friends doing something to just park it in zero. And
Speaker 1: I recognize that exact sequence of events will not apply
Speaker 1: to everybody, But if you just use the mantra of
Speaker 1: avoid the simmering sex, I think you can get a
Speaker 1: lot of mileage out of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that too. I think you sport on.
Speaker 2: I think that's probably where I've netted out too, because
Speaker 2: I think that simmering six is the distraction and isra
Speaker 2: all the stress and the tension comes from where you're
Speaker 2: trying to balance both at all times perfectly, or get
Speaker 2: distracted by I'm trying to spend time with my family
Speaker 2: but I'm still on my phone, or I'm at work
Speaker 2: and I'm trying to make sure everything's okay at home, right,
Speaker 2: And you're never going to win that way, ever, and
Speaker 2: you have to have these really clear. I was invited
Speaker 2: yesterday was Sunday, and I was invited to a work
Speaker 2: thing like last minute on a Saturday night, and like
Speaker 2: years ago, I would have said yes immediately because I
Speaker 2: thought it was extremely valuable and I needed to be
Speaker 2: there and if I wasn't there, then I'd miss out
Speaker 2: on opportunities. And it was I was saying to my
Speaker 2: wife and I had to say to her only to
Speaker 2: make myself feel better about myself. I was like, I'm
Speaker 2: so proud I said no, because I've like really promised
Speaker 2: myself that my weekends are off time, and that wasn't
Speaker 2: the case in the beginning. And I'm glad it wasn't
Speaker 2: the case because I was sprinting and I needed that
Speaker 2: extra work and that was important and I don't feel
Speaker 2: bad about it. It was the right thing to do. But
Speaker 2: at this point, this was the right thing to do
Speaker 2: to be able to say, well, no, I really want
Speaker 2: a Sunday off. I don't want to run to a
Speaker 2: work thing in the middle of the day, which will
Speaker 2: probably take four hours, and I don't need to. It's
Speaker 2: not an emergency. I'm not solving anything, and yeah, what
Speaker 2: do you think is the biggest Obviously the simmering sixus
Speaker 2: is the obvious answer, But what do you think is
Speaker 2: the biggest thing people come up against when they're trying
Speaker 2: to do on and off, Like, what's the hardest part
Speaker 2: of that? Your friend, for example, who quit X felt
Speaker 2: the benefit, saw the growth, and then gets.
Speaker 1: I think he had too much time on his hands. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: he's sort of post economic and border Collie. He has
Speaker 1: a lot of time for unusual, rare reasons, right. But
Speaker 1: I would say that if you do not have a
Speaker 1: primary project or mission, and it doesn't mean your job
Speaker 1: has to be something you love twenty four to seven,
Speaker 1: working to live and just having a job that you
Speaker 1: can tolerate that you're good at great Like I actually
Speaker 1: think that's fine. But if, on the other hand, let's
Speaker 1: just say you're an entrepreneur and you're kind of floating around,
Speaker 1: like maybe you have a few cool things you're pursuing,
Speaker 1: but there's no hell yes, kind of along lines of
Speaker 1: Derek Sivers, you're going to be tempted to wander and
Speaker 1: that's how you end up sitting on the toilet looking
Speaker 1: at Instagram and they're like, I can't feel my legs. Oh,
Speaker 1: I've been here forty five minutes, Like that's how that
Speaker 1: that's how that happens. And I've been there, and it
Speaker 1: means you don't have a big enough yes. You need
Speaker 1: a bigger yes yes. And I would say that the
Speaker 1: avoid the simmering sixth though, is unhelpful insomuch as it's
Speaker 1: telling you what not to do, but that doesn't really
Speaker 1: give you a whole lot of directions. So another way
Speaker 1: to frame it is actually quoting a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: Chris saka phenomenal of incredible guy, just like one of
Speaker 1: the best investors I've ever met, his stories and nuts,
Speaker 1: and his question is effectively like, are you living offense
Speaker 1: or defense?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: So if you're responding to everyone else's agenda for your
Speaker 1: time in email defense right? If, for instance, I don't
Speaker 1: know when this happened, maybe you've experienced this, but I
Speaker 1: guess people feel so stressed out and short on time
Speaker 1: that a lot of very busy friends of mine are
Speaker 1: now catching up on Sundays. Sundays is like their catch
Speaker 1: up on email day. So all I get texts that
Speaker 1: are like about business stuff, and I just and my
Speaker 1: response has to be for sanity because if I respond,
Speaker 1: if I engage with that, I'm playing defense and breaking
Speaker 1: my own roles in boundaries. So I'm just like, hey, Bud,
Speaker 1: exclamation your point. Sorry, don't do business on weekends, like
Speaker 1: text me again on Monday, Tuesday, whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, doctor Sus has this amazing Ted Geisel
Speaker 1: has this amazing quote, those who matter don't mind, and
Speaker 1: those who mind don't matter. Right, It's like, if somebody
Speaker 1: gets pissed off about that, yeah, guess what, you let
Speaker 1: them opt out. And with all my friends, they're like,
Speaker 1: love that cool. Yeah, talk to pass wages. They're fine.
Speaker 1: So I would say aim for offense, not defense. Offense
Speaker 1: means you're deciding on what you want to do, and
Speaker 1: you're applying a certain amount of time or energy towards
Speaker 1: that before you're reactive. You know, Jim Collins, the writer
Speaker 1: of author of Good Degrades and Built to Last and
Speaker 1: these iconic books, he tracks his creative hours and I
Speaker 1: think for every three hundred and sixty five day period,
Speaker 1: he's got to have one thousand and something hours and
Speaker 1: he tracks it daily, and if he's running behind in
Speaker 1: the county, he's like, oh, something's going to change. I
Speaker 1: don't take it to that level, but I try to
Speaker 1: make before I manage in sense, I really try to
Speaker 1: reserve the hours after I wake up for creative work
Speaker 1: to the extent that I can. I actually think I
Speaker 1: do my best creative work incredibly late at night, but
Speaker 1: that is socially incompatible with any type of partner, So
Speaker 1: I've had to switch things around a little bit.
Speaker 2: You have you really, Oh, yeah, that's impressive.
Speaker 1: I mean, for our work week, for our body, for
Speaker 1: our chef, all written between like nine pm and four am.
Speaker 1: I would do research during the day, but the actual synthesis, writing, etc.
Speaker 1: Was all done very very late at night.
Speaker 2: So how have you managed to change yourself to a
Speaker 2: morning person?
Speaker 1: I don't think I am a morning person, right. I
Speaker 1: would say that there are a few things. So one
Speaker 1: is recognizing relationships. Of them are the meat of life.
Speaker 1: If you're vegan or something, it's the sustenance apply. I
Speaker 1: wrote this blog post just went up like five days ago.
Speaker 1: I spent so long putting it together. Called the self
Speaker 1: help trap. Like what I've learned after twenty plus years
Speaker 1: of quote unquote optimizing myself talking about some of this,
Speaker 1: but basically re orienting Maslow's higher give needs, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, Abraham himself never made a pyramid, and he
Speaker 1: added an update to that people are accustomed to thinking
Speaker 1: about self actualization at the top. He actually added self
Speaker 1: transcendence later, and it was always something that was moving
Speaker 1: and shifting. But I have recognized for myself for quality
Speaker 1: of life, for the experience of time dilation, just getting
Speaker 1: more life out of your years, right, not just adding
Speaker 1: more years to your life. We could talk a lot
Speaker 1: about that, relationships, close, friends, family. It sounds so self evident,
Speaker 1: But how many people do we know? Maybe you look
Speaker 1: in the mirror and you see them, who at the
Speaker 1: end of a year, If you ask them, did you
Speaker 1: spend as much time as you would have liked this
Speaker 1: last year with your ten most important relationships, Almost everybody's
Speaker 1: gonna say no. So really taking that on as a
Speaker 1: challenge means if I'm sacrificing twenty percent of my output
Speaker 1: because I'm forcing myself to pretend to cosplay as a
Speaker 1: morning person, Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, Now one could make
Speaker 1: the argument and it's not totally off base that well,
Speaker 1: that's convenient for Tim to say, because you know, you said,
Speaker 1: decades of putting things out that have. Luckily, you've done
Speaker 1: well enough. But I don't think that does hold some water.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't. It doesn't really hold all the water.
Speaker 1: That's not I don't think of real expression. But the
Speaker 1: point is I have through sprinting, right, not ending up
Speaker 1: at the simmering sex over many decades, right, or like
Speaker 1: the simmering seven or eight, which is even worse you're
Speaker 1: running hot. I have burned out so many times that
Speaker 1: coming back to the meditation, right, do less than you
Speaker 1: think you can do. If I dial back, Let's say
Speaker 1: I lose quote unquote lose twenty percent and I don't
Speaker 1: burn out. Well, that's like playing sports and not getting injured. Right.
Speaker 1: If you get injured, you're out for two months, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you have three months of rehab. You didn't
Speaker 1: save any time by being intense, Totally, you lost time.
Speaker 1: So I feel like also not being a morning person
Speaker 1: like some folks. I have so many friends they're just like,
Speaker 1: I wake up, I'm on fire, so jealous. Now playing
Speaker 1: with your fuel source can help this, actually, but I
Speaker 1: feel like if even if I have less energy, what
Speaker 1: that means is I just have to be very smart
Speaker 1: and selective about what I apply myself to. So it
Speaker 1: makes me more selected with projects, more focused on what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to because I'm like, all right, friend X
Speaker 1: gets four hours of lightning in a bottle every morning.
Speaker 1: I probably get, yeah, maybe ninety minutes, depending on how
Speaker 1: much cafe and I've had. So I need to make
Speaker 1: those ninety minutes count. Yeah, and that's actually a helpful
Speaker 1: forcing function for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah. I think going back to
Speaker 2: what you were saying about doom scrolling and screendim I've had.
Speaker 2: I mean, this sounds again so basic, but it is
Speaker 2: the stuff we will struggle with. Like I had to
Speaker 2: really make a commitment that if I was on a screen,
Speaker 2: that I was only on one screen at a time,
Speaker 2: because what I would find was sometimes my wife and
Speaker 2: I would sit down to watch a show in the
Speaker 2: evening and I'm like, there's very little TV that gets
Speaker 2: my attention enough to really commit. Yeah, and I'm not
Speaker 2: someone who generally loves using their time to do that.
Speaker 2: But at the end of a long day of work
Speaker 2: and it's been busy, and we've had dinner together, we've connected,
Speaker 2: and you just kind of want to zone out. I
Speaker 2: don't have the energy. I'm more the other way. I
Speaker 2: have lots of energy in the morning and the evening
Speaker 2: I can hang out with friends or family, but I
Speaker 2: don't do creative work in the evening. I never have,
Speaker 2: and so mine's the opposite where I have less energy
Speaker 2: at that time, and so kind of switching off is
Speaker 2: kind of nice, But switching off and feeling like I
Speaker 2: wasted my off time is not a fun feeling, like
Speaker 2: I enjoy that feeling. So we'd watch a show and
Speaker 2: I wasn't committed, and then I'd be on my phone
Speaker 2: or i'd kind of be on my laptop too, And
Speaker 2: now I haven't achieved anything at work, I haven't doom
Speaker 2: scrolled well enough, and the screen is boring me. And
Speaker 2: now I'm feeling like I'm wasting days. In the evening,
Speaker 2: I'm like adding all these hours up and going, God,
Speaker 2: I wasted like three hours in front of the TV
Speaker 2: and I didn't do anything, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: a there was a show selection problem. So we sawted
Speaker 2: that where it was like, Okay, let's find something we
Speaker 2: actually care about watching. But the other part was just Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm going to leave my phone in another room where
Speaker 2: I just can't get it. I don't work at this time,
Speaker 2: so the laptop can't be near me, and I have
Speaker 2: to do this old school thing of like sitting in
Speaker 2: a thing to in my own house, like saying, okay,
Speaker 2: I'm at the movies now, Like what does it feel
Speaker 2: like to go to the movies and watch a movie
Speaker 2: which we all used to do, and go to the
Speaker 2: theater without any other distraction and actually enjoy your experience
Speaker 2: it And it's it's been huge for unlocking presence and
Speaker 2: enjoyment and entertainment even even from a stillness point of view,
Speaker 2: for sure, because I feel like we're not even doing
Speaker 2: rest properly, which is why we can't work properly.
Speaker 1: God. Yeah, well, I was just going to say, I
Speaker 1: mean I am very plugged in to technology in digital right.
Speaker 1: I mean my main business per se is actually angel investing,
Speaker 1: which I've done since two thousand and eight. Like that
Speaker 1: that's actually the larger piece of my professional life from
Speaker 1: like an economic perspective. So I'm constantly involved with tech.
Speaker 1: I lived in the Bay Area for almost twenty years,
Speaker 1: and the people who created these tools, a lot of them.
Speaker 1: In the social dilemma, people can check out, treat it
Speaker 1: like smoking. It is incredibly bad for you, even in
Speaker 1: moderate doses. So what I would suggest to folks, and
Speaker 1: I mention all of that being plugged into text simply
Speaker 1: because if I were amish and I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: have any social apps on my phone, people are like, well,
Speaker 1: Tim can do it, but that's nonsense. Yeah, because he's
Speaker 1: an edge case like no, no, no. A lot of
Speaker 1: what I do is predicated on knowing what is happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Same, And I still have no social media apps on
Speaker 1: my phone. And what I would say to folks is,
Speaker 1: even if the counter argument is, well I need it
Speaker 1: for my business, Okay, fine, you can still access through
Speaker 1: a laptop. And guess what. You can still record videos.
Speaker 1: You just have to batch upload them later or schedule
Speaker 1: them in advance. You just can't be self interrupting with
Speaker 1: these apps on your phone. If that is within the
Speaker 1: realm of possibility, pry for two weeks. And my feeling is,
Speaker 1: if you can't do that, if your entire livelihood does
Speaker 1: not depend on it, you're addicted, just like an alcoholic,
Speaker 1: just like a smoker. It means you have a problem, right,
Speaker 1: And I would say, look, I can talk about meditation
Speaker 1: and bioelectric medicine and this and that and the other thing.
Speaker 1: If you just get off of social media for two weeks,
Speaker 1: just like my friend, I think it will basically do
Speaker 1: the same amount of good for a lot of folks.
Speaker 1: It's ten years of therapy if you're constantly tapping a
Speaker 1: vein with social media as you're doing the therapy. Also,
Speaker 1: feelings on caffeine, I think that's also true for cutting down.
Speaker 2: A caffeine Talk to me about that.
Speaker 1: People are like, I'm anxious. I'm like, howmuch coffee you direct?
Speaker 1: They like three to five cups. I'm like, that's liquid anxiety.
Speaker 1: Of course you're anxious. So coming back to the fuel thing,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not a problem solving problem. Yeah, maybe it's
Speaker 1: just a biological issue. H right, Yeah, And caffeine is
Speaker 1: not a fuel, right, It's it's forcing you to use
Speaker 1: your fuel faster. And look, guys, I understand actually how
Speaker 1: chemistry works and the dentizine and so on, but let's
Speaker 1: keep it simple, right, It's not adding fuel to the system.
Speaker 1: It is burning fuel faster. Also has some pretty profoundffects
Speaker 1: on glucose levels too. I fear for we're a CGM
Speaker 1: and you have a bunch of coffee, it's like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: I'm suddenly way out of range. So when people have
Speaker 1: a caffeine crash, it's not necessarily because the caffeine is
Speaker 1: wearing off because you still have trouble sleeping at night.
Speaker 1: It's because your glucose spikes and then crashes. Oh we're
Speaker 1: back to the fuel problem again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the fuel problem, all roads, all roads, fuel to fuel.
Speaker 2: We're looking for the four hour fuel, but.
Speaker 1: That's got a thousand page.
Speaker 2: Monsters told me that the acceptance piece, like what's been
Speaker 2: the what's been the hot? This thing to wrap your
Speaker 2: head around with acceptance, the idea of acceptance.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll give two examples. The first is that personally
Speaker 1: doing any type of meditation that involves observing rather than
Speaker 1: suppressing or fixing. Right, So, if you have frustration coming up, restlessness, aversion,
Speaker 1: just labeling it and allowing it to be like a
Speaker 1: mother consoling a crying child. That's hard. It's hard, but
Speaker 1: I think it's a valuable practice. So, and that that's
Speaker 1: something that I've explored. There are lots of good apps
Speaker 1: out there. You know. I'm involved with the way so
Speaker 1: and I used it. But prior to getting involved with
Speaker 1: Henry Shuckman. But there are many good options, right, there's
Speaker 1: call nos heads basically lots of different options. But I
Speaker 1: would say that specifically exploring something that cultivates your ability
Speaker 1: to observe things that you would call uncomfortable or negative
Speaker 1: without trying to change them is valuable, all right. The
Speaker 1: second in terms of acceptance is relational humans are crazy, man,
Speaker 1: Like every human's nuts, Like, like irrationality is just table sticks,
Speaker 1: Like we're not, which is why any of them like
Speaker 1: the if the efficient market theory stuff where it's like
Speaker 1: we're all rational agents acting in our own best interest.
Speaker 1: I'm like, have you met have you actually walked out
Speaker 1: economists in humans?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: What are you talking about? So in relationships, I'll give
Speaker 1: a resource. There's an audiobook, there's no print version, called
Speaker 1: Fierce Intimacy by Terry Reel, who is an amazing therapist.
Speaker 1: You should have him on the show. That guy's incredible
Speaker 1: and very opinionated, very he does. He's not one of
Speaker 1: those therapists who just echoes questions back and forth. You're like, Terry,
Speaker 1: you know, what do you think? He's like, what do
Speaker 1: you think? Like he doesn't do that. He's like, let
Speaker 1: me tell you like you're being an idiot for these reasons,
Speaker 1: and like you need to grow up because of these reasons.
Speaker 1: He's not exactly like doctor phill or anything, but he's
Speaker 1: he's very very good at what he does and fierce
Speaker 1: intimacy along with his other materials, and he's not the
Speaker 1: only person. The Goatman's are pretty interesting as well. But
Speaker 1: Terry Reel specifically has a number of principles that undergird
Speaker 1: his entire approach, and one of them is, when it
Speaker 1: comes to relationships, objective reality doesn't exist. So, for instance, right,
Speaker 1: he gives this example, I'm gonna butcher it. It's very
Speaker 1: funny when he sells it. He's like, all right, let's
Speaker 1: say husband and wife are out to dinner. Waiter comes over,
Speaker 1: takes the arder walks away, and the husband says to
Speaker 1: the wife, honey, you don't need to yell. And she's like,
Speaker 1: I wasn't yelling, and he's like, yes, you were. And
Speaker 1: you see where this is going, right, And let's just
Speaker 1: suppose and he gives his example. The husband says, well, honey,
Speaker 1: you know, I thought this might come up, so I
Speaker 1: actually hired professional audiologists and brought in recorders and based
Speaker 1: on the level let me show you, in fact, based
Speaker 1: on any conventional definition. You're yelling like, is that gonna help?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Of course it's gonna be disaster. So in terms of
Speaker 1: interacting with the significant other, as this context is describing,
Speaker 1: accepting that we, for each of us, our interpretation of reality,
Speaker 1: our experience of reality is real, and if you try
Speaker 1: to fix it or win the situation by arguing over
Speaker 1: objective reality, it is just a dead end.
Speaker 2: That is what we all do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what we all do.
Speaker 2: All we ever do.
Speaker 1: I think I think men are not to get too gendered,
Speaker 1: but let's call spade a spade. Guys like men are
Speaker 1: particularly bad in terms of habitually doing this. Women do
Speaker 1: it too, but in effect accepting, for instance, someone's upset,
Speaker 1: all right and trying to be curious. And this is
Speaker 1: going to sound like some hand wavy you know, and
Speaker 1: buy us stuff, But it's like trying to be curious
Speaker 1: before you react, right, That is sort of the key piece.
Speaker 1: It also ties into all the productivity. All everything is
Speaker 1: so related, right, It's just like, do you have the
Speaker 1: space to think or are you just reacting to that text?
Speaker 1: On a Sunday, you need the space, and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of ways to cultivate it. One is meditation, sure,
Speaker 1: but it's not the only tool in the toolkit. Right.
Speaker 1: If you're by the way, if you've had three cups
Speaker 1: of coffee and your sympathetic system is an overdrive, what
Speaker 1: are you gonna do. You're gonna bite someone's head off. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So that's another lever you can pull. Okay, fuel are
Speaker 1: you depleted? Okay, well let's fix that. And then on
Speaker 1: the relational piece. You gotta practice in the messy reality
Speaker 1: of relationships or it just doesn't count. You can read
Speaker 1: all the relationship books in the world, you gotta practice it.
Speaker 1: And historically, I did not put it mildly. Grew up
Speaker 1: in a household that modeled conflict resolution very well, mind
Speaker 1: lots of yelling and screaming. It was I didn't If
Speaker 1: I learned anything, it was all of the most under
Speaker 1: productive ways to handle conflict, and I carried that into
Speaker 1: my relationships. Surprise, surprise didn't produce miracles of positivity, But
Speaker 1: in the last I'd say ten years have become much
Speaker 1: much better. Oh, Terry real deta gratitude and one of
Speaker 1: my exes who introduced me to Terry, Terry's work, and
Speaker 1: my friend Kevin Rose for that matter. Not to say
Speaker 1: Terry is the end all. Peel just resonated with me,
Speaker 1: just like different people have different parenting styles. Some people
Speaker 1: love doctor Becky Kennedy. I tend to resonate with her stuff,
Speaker 1: but other people resonate with other things. But for me,
Speaker 1: when it comes to to return to your question acceptance,
Speaker 1: man oh man, does that matter a lot in relationships?
Speaker 1: And there are many different iterations of it, so those
Speaker 1: would be two. Right, There's the how do I sit
Speaker 1: with uncomfortable feelings without the necessity of fixing them or
Speaker 1: suppressing them, which, by the way, ties into workholism and
Speaker 1: hustle culture and social media use, compulsive social media use.
Speaker 1: You're like, Hm, I'm bored. I don't like it. I
Speaker 1: need to do actually, yes, yes, Now some people might
Speaker 1: get a little pedantic and say bored isn't a feeling.
Speaker 1: You get the idea, it's an experience.
Speaker 2: You don't like that highlighting and that connectivity that you
Speaker 2: just put together. But the main piece on how the
Speaker 2: objective reality is what we always debate, is fascinating because
Speaker 2: it's the simmering six of relationships like it's the distraction,
Speaker 2: it's the focal point that steals everything away, because that's
Speaker 2: all we ever think is the thing to solve is
Speaker 2: objective reality. When if you accept that that's how that
Speaker 2: person felt in that moment, regardless of whatever objectively you experienced,
Speaker 2: you think objectively you experienced. And that's really hard to
Speaker 2: do because we're so wired to be like, but this
Speaker 2: is the truth, and in relationships there's almost very little truth.
Speaker 1: If perhaps like me, it sounds like like you, you didn't.
Speaker 1: You grew up in a household where like unflicked Haymakers
Speaker 1: were modeled really well, resolution was not modeled well. I
Speaker 1: think his name is Marshall Rosenberg might be getting the
Speaker 1: name wrong. But nonviolent communication, Yeah, read the book. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is schlocky in the sense that there's a format
Speaker 1: and it can feel a little repetitive, but guess what,
Speaker 1: in the beginning, if you're coming from an upbringing that
Speaker 1: didn't teach you anything helpful on the conflict resolution side,
Speaker 1: you need a format, you need a template, and it's
Speaker 1: incredibly incredibly helpful, if only for there's a whole process
Speaker 1: to it. People can just look it up. I'm sure
Speaker 1: Chatgypt or anything else will give you a good overview.
Speaker 1: But at the end, make a request. Don't just bitch
Speaker 1: and moan about how you feel what your partner did.
Speaker 1: Have a request, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, don't just
Speaker 1: tell them what not to do. That's actually not helpful.
Speaker 1: And I had this driven home. Part of the reason
Speaker 1: I like exploring all these weird different nooks and crannies
Speaker 1: is you realize how much you can copy and paste
Speaker 1: to other places.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a friend of mine, Jason Niemer, he's the co
Speaker 1: creator of something called acro yoga. You know, we're in
Speaker 1: southern California. It's everywhere. So you go to a park
Speaker 1: and you see like people with other people on their
Speaker 1: feet and they're doing all sorts of cool stuff and
Speaker 1: in those circumstances it's basically partner acrobatics. So well, it
Speaker 1: can be pretty chill. If somebody is, say, like standing
Speaker 1: on your hands, saying don't push your heel down is
Speaker 1: very unhelpful and actually kind of dangerous. So instead of that,
Speaker 1: you say more tow more tow right. It's you always
Speaker 1: want to give them direction for what to do, not
Speaker 1: what not to do. And it applies to conflict resolution
Speaker 1: as well, so that the nonviolent communication. And also sometimes
Speaker 1: you can talk about the objective reality, but you can't
Speaker 1: do that when one or more people are dysregulated.
Speaker 2: Yes, you just can't.
Speaker 1: It's not going to work. And that also counts for yourself.
Speaker 1: So sometimes right I'm in a great relationship right now,
Speaker 1: my relationships have never been better like the last few years.
Speaker 1: Every one of my relationships there as they are as
Speaker 1: good as they have ever been better. If I am
Speaker 1: feeling just regulated, maybe I had too much coffee, maybe whatever.
Speaker 1: It might be not to throw coffee into the bus,
Speaker 1: but it is the world's most consumed stimulant. Too little sleep,
Speaker 1: a bunch of bullshit going on on the business side,
Speaker 1: somebody dropped a ball, whatever, And my partner wants to
Speaker 1: talk to me about something. If I'm not resourced, I'll
Speaker 1: just say, babe, I'm happy to talk about this. Let's
Speaker 1: do it at dinner. Yeah, I am really unresourced right now.
Speaker 1: I'm just not in a place to have a good
Speaker 1: conversation about this, and I'm pretty pissed off about a
Speaker 1: few things. Has nothing to do with you, And she's like, okay, cool.
Speaker 1: So you also on either side need to be able
Speaker 1: to agree that that's an option.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and the productivity with that. Sometimes I find,
Speaker 2: like I said to my wife, like I've got a
Speaker 2: crazy week coming up to just in advance, I'm just
Speaker 2: letting you know that this week I may not have
Speaker 2: the same space and stillness that I usually have or
Speaker 2: presents that I usually have to deal with something because
Speaker 2: I can prehend how I'm going to feel, yeah, based
Speaker 2: on you know, and luckily, you know, I have a
Speaker 2: partner that understands that. Where I'm like, hey, I'm traveling
Speaker 2: this week. I'm only literally back home for like three
Speaker 2: hours and then I'm back out, and it's like just
Speaker 2: people being aware of what you're weak even looks like
Speaker 2: because we kind of walk around thinking our partners should.
Speaker 1: Know, Well, what does this sound like? God, this sounds
Speaker 1: a lot like what we were talking about with how
Speaker 1: do you get someone to do the two weeks of meditation? Yeah,
Speaker 1: setting expectations. You can have almost anything that you want
Speaker 1: in life if you manage expectations early.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, exactly. And I think we assume that we
Speaker 2: know our schedule and that our partners should somehow know
Speaker 2: that we have a busy week this week because we're
Speaker 2: coming home like huffing and buffing, or we're like, you know,
Speaker 2: whatever is we're on our phone, We're like, oh god,
Speaker 2: I got to do you know. It's it's almost like
Speaker 2: we're trying to send all these cues without just out
Speaker 2: and just saying, Hey, this is what my week looks
Speaker 2: like and what does yours look like? And I try
Speaker 2: and do that a lot as well. It's fascinating you
Speaker 2: said that we've been asking these questions about life and
Speaker 2: relationships and philosophy, like you know, thousands of yeah, forever,
Speaker 2: but at least documented thousands of years at this point,
Speaker 2: and I feel like we are still somewhat answering asking
Speaker 2: some of the same questions we were mentioning this earlier.
Speaker 2: And I know you actually have a blog that a
Speaker 2: website that allows people to ask these questions. I want
Speaker 2: to ask, what are the questions that are worth answering?
Speaker 2: Because I feel like we ask a lot of questions,
Speaker 2: and now with AI, we're asking more questions than ever before, which,
Speaker 2: by the way, I think is better than the answer
Speaker 2: generation that we grew up in, which was having the
Speaker 2: answer was smart, when we both know that asking the
Speaker 2: right question is smarter, which hopefully AI can help us
Speaker 2: get better at because we all have to get better
Speaker 2: asking questions. But what are the questions that are worth asking?
Speaker 2: Because I just feel like we're just tracked in by
Speaker 2: a set of questions that are not valuable.
Speaker 1: The questions that I keep returning to a lot of them.
Speaker 1: I've borrowed from different sources, right, And I pointed out
Speaker 1: you a book right behind me, Letters from a Stoic
Speaker 1: Seneca the Younger, that's the Penguin's Classic edition. I've probably
Speaker 1: given away one hundred copies of that book. Stoicism and
Speaker 1: Buddhism also a lot of parallels, a lot overlap, one
Speaker 1: would be. And this is actually borrowed from politics. Someone
Speaker 1: who co ran the war room for Bill Clinton put
Speaker 1: this in one of their books bought. I was on
Speaker 1: a road trip and I just grabbed it from you
Speaker 1: his bookstore. But the question stuck with me, which I
Speaker 1: think they got from Newt Gingrish and it's like they
Speaker 1: also are diametrically posed to new politically, but they're like
Speaker 1: he was ruthlessly efficient and effective gaining control of the
Speaker 1: house and blah blah blah. And the question was are
Speaker 1: you hunting antelope field mice? And the story behind it
Speaker 1: is effectively, Like if you're a lion, sure you can
Speaker 1: keep yourself alive by hunting field mice and just eating
Speaker 1: like one hundred a day. Or you could put in
Speaker 1: the energy and the focus to kill an antelope and
Speaker 1: then that lasts you a day or two or three
Speaker 1: or whatever the number might be. And that's a metaphor
Speaker 1: for an effect coming back to what we're talking about, like,
Speaker 1: are you doing a bunch of little micro projects putting
Speaker 1: out fires, living on defense, juggling ten different kind of
Speaker 1: cool projects instead of one big yes? If so, you're
Speaker 1: eating field mice, and it's like that's no way for
Speaker 1: a line to live. You can survive, that's not really living,
Speaker 1: like you need to hunt antelope. So to encapsulate all
Speaker 1: that into one question, so are you hunting antelope art
Speaker 1: or are you hunting field field mice?
Speaker 2: Do you ever hear people who just say, whoa tim jay?
Speaker 2: I don't want to be a lion? You know you
Speaker 2: guys like being lines? You want to be lines? You
Speaker 2: want to go chase antelo Like I don't want to
Speaker 2: be a line. I just want to chase film mice
Speaker 2: like you know, like yeah, and what do you say
Speaker 2: to that? Because I always find it interesting. I feel
Speaker 2: like again, mentally, as a society, we go between you know,
Speaker 2: type A winners. This west is Hey, I just want
Speaker 2: to have my lot in life and be happy.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you Actually you're asking about this because I
Speaker 1: think lion, okay, king of the jungle, et cetera. It
Speaker 1: implies almost that person using the metaphor might want to
Speaker 1: be an apex predator, king of the hill whatever. That's
Speaker 1: an unfortunate side effect maybe of the picture that it paints.
Speaker 1: But the point is coming back to people falling apart
Speaker 1: when they have too much free time. Right. This is
Speaker 1: a huge reason why most retirements fail and people have
Speaker 1: their health go off a cliff as soon as they retire.
Speaker 1: In many cases, it's about knowing what your big thing is,
Speaker 1: having a focus.
Speaker 2: And that's just what we need as humans, planning.
Speaker 1: Psycho emotionally, philosophically, humans are in the meaning making business.
Speaker 1: You can't do that with triaging email. You cannot fool
Speaker 1: yourself into thinking that that is deeply meaningful. There's a
Speaker 1: part of you. They will know it is not, and
Speaker 1: you will suffer accordingly. So that's how I would answer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I'm glad you went there, because I think
Speaker 2: sometimes achievement mentality gets mixed with meaning making in that
Speaker 2: people assume that, oh, you just there, And there are
Speaker 2: some people who just want to win, right, And that's
Speaker 2: not even to do with meaning. So you could go
Speaker 2: kill a big antelope and still not win because you
Speaker 2: didn't have meaning as a human.
Speaker 1: Well, let me give I'll give a it's not even
Speaker 1: a counter example, it's a compatible example. Let's just say
Speaker 1: it's a kindergarten teacher and her north star is like,
Speaker 1: I'm I want to put as much time as possible
Speaker 1: into whatever makes the lives of these kids better. That's it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that is doing is managing the bake sale for
Speaker 1: the PTA. Adding to that, if those aren't the parents
Speaker 1: of your students, No, it's not therefore to know. Right,
Speaker 1: is responding to email from friends or texts from friends,
Speaker 1: or are asking you to go out to have drinks
Speaker 1: on Wednesday night going to contribute to that? No, it's
Speaker 1: actually gonna be kind of productive. No, Right, you can
Speaker 1: still have fun. I'm not saying don't have fun, but
Speaker 1: you can have a north star. By the way, it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be one thing forever. That can be
Speaker 1: very intimidating, like what is my purpose in life? What
Speaker 1: is my what is my mission? It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be this permanent thing for me. It generally isn't for me.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, I mean, I do have overarching things
Speaker 1: that guide in my behaviors values, but I will just
Speaker 1: go completely immersive into filling the blank bielectric medicine for
Speaker 1: six months. That's it. That's all I care about. How
Speaker 1: do I translate that into something usable in the real
Speaker 1: world or you know, for like supporting science related to
Speaker 1: psychedelic assisted therapies and starting twenty fifteen, like for a
Speaker 1: long time, that was it. And if people are like, well,
Speaker 1: I want you to do policy work or this that
Speaker 1: related to it, I'm like, nope, it's not my power zone.
Speaker 1: Like I am focused on the science, okay, And I
Speaker 1: made it's supporting the science, not capitalizing on it. So
Speaker 1: I had to rule like no investing in for profit
Speaker 1: companies related to psychedelics. Not that that makes someone we
Speaker 1: need those, But I was like, for me, that's a
Speaker 1: hard boundary, right, Okay, Great, I feel like I've kind
Speaker 1: of done what I set out to do in that world.
Speaker 1: So I've largely stopped I'm out. I passed the baton.
Speaker 1: Let other people do it. So it doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be forever. It doesn't have to be some grand giant thing.
Speaker 1: It could be teaching your kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's focused, it's central.
Speaker 1: It could be for instance, for me, now, if I
Speaker 1: consider doing adding, I mean, I'm a promiscuous activity adder.
Speaker 1: I love hobbies and I'm just all over the place.
Speaker 1: And now that really focused on my current relationship that's
Speaker 1: going incredibly well, thankfully right fingers crossed. And I borrowed
Speaker 1: this from a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett, who's an
Speaker 1: amazing performance coach and PT. But at one point he
Speaker 1: told me, because he also does tons of activities, he said,
Speaker 1: he's only adding new activities that consumed time, physical activities
Speaker 1: that he can do with his wife or kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it, no solo activities. It's like, wow, what a
Speaker 1: great forcing function. Okay, cool. So with my partner, that's it.
Speaker 1: It's like what can we do together? And you can
Speaker 1: change your mind six months later it's like, Okay, for now,
Speaker 1: that's it. Only adding new time consuming hobbies if I
Speaker 1: can do them with her, that's that's a great question.
Speaker 1: That's it that I think counts as a big yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, so that's a great question. Yeah, yes, that's one.
Speaker 1: You know. Another one which I think about and have
Speaker 1: been thinking more and more about, is what if I
Speaker 1: could only fix this? Only fix this is even tricky
Speaker 1: with achiever types. What if I could only subtract instead
Speaker 1: of ad All? Right, So I'm sure this is true
Speaker 1: just about everywhere with humans. But you have some type
Speaker 1: of medical issue where you're trying to achieve X. You
Speaker 1: want to add things. What new software can I use?
Speaker 1: What new magic supplement can I take? Ad ad ad?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: What books can I read? Well? What if you turn
Speaker 1: all that around? You're like, what if I could only
Speaker 1: achieve whatever the goal is, or solve the problem by
Speaker 1: stopping reading certain categories of thing, example, given getting rid
Speaker 1: of your social media? Right? What if this is not
Speaker 1: medical advice, just informational example. But I am incredibly I
Speaker 1: think intermittent fasting and fast mimicking diets are incredibly undervalued,
Speaker 1: incredibly undervalued, So.
Speaker 2: Cutting food out could be better than figuring out the
Speaker 2: right thing.
Speaker 1: This is a harder conversation to have with doctors because
Speaker 1: they're generally in the business of adding. Because I only
Speaker 1: get eleven minutes on average propatient the US. Right. But
Speaker 1: for instance, you know I've seen it's like I could
Speaker 1: take trizepetite or GLP one to try to and there
Speaker 1: might be some reasons for it neurow protection and so on.
Speaker 1: But I could do that to try to get my
Speaker 1: metabolic health under control. But I could also do intermittent fasting,
Speaker 1: which is portable proven right. Humans have been going periods
Speaker 1: of that food for a very very long time, since
Speaker 1: since before we were humans so to speak, Homo sapiens.
Speaker 1: And the changes that you see with something like and
Speaker 1: just to defy what I'm talking about specifically, in my case,
Speaker 1: intermittent fasting would be sixteen hours of fasting, eight hour
Speaker 1: feeding window, and generally within that eight hour feeding window,
Speaker 1: I'm having two big meals. That's it, and it's Mark
Speaker 1: Mattson is a scientist, m attsn who's done a lot
Speaker 1: on this. But you want to have at least sixteen
Speaker 1: hours so that you deplete your liver of glycogen and
Speaker 1: then your body develops the machinery to turn on key
Speaker 1: tones more effectively. Right, But you do that. I mean,
Speaker 1: my entire family has insulin insensitivity. We have a lot
Speaker 1: of wonky genetics for this stuff. And if you're getting
Speaker 1: regular testing, don't just do fasting glucose, get your insulin measured,
Speaker 1: and also do an oral glucose tolerance test. There's a
Speaker 1: lot more it should test, but at least hit those
Speaker 1: three And after four to six weeks of interrint fasting
Speaker 1: number one, all of my energy dips that I used
Speaker 1: to remedy with caffeine gone, like completely gone, but just
Speaker 1: sustained energy. And when I woke up, I was awake,
Speaker 1: all right. One of the benefits of ketones and my
Speaker 1: lab work the oral glucose tolerance test. My doctors are
Speaker 1: like a plus plus four to six weeks. It's nothing
Speaker 1: is nothing. It's also well we can come to we
Speaker 1: want to talk about asceticism, and just like the actual
Speaker 1: I think values that are a little more esoteric, like
Speaker 1: fasting and stuff abstaining. I think there's a lot to it.
Speaker 1: Q Seneca. It's got a lot on that. But what
Speaker 1: if you could only subtract And you could do that
Speaker 1: also by looking at what you're spending your time on,
Speaker 1: like do an A eight twenty analysis, but identify the
Speaker 1: peak energy drainers in terms of activities people et cetera. Okay,
Speaker 1: what if you jut you could only remove you can't
Speaker 1: add more stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1: Right, So how do you develop a system to block
Speaker 1: or say no to these things?
Speaker 2: Totally?
Speaker 1: Okay? Subtraction, subtractions, sub question. As a flip, I would
Speaker 1: say on the default, very helpful. Similarly, you could ask
Speaker 1: whatever your common practice is or whatever rule you have
Speaker 1: in place, like what if I did the opposite for
Speaker 1: forty eight hours or a week? This? What if I
Speaker 1: did the opposite? I think is very powerful.
Speaker 2: Give me an example of something that you could flip
Speaker 2: that way.
Speaker 1: My first job out of college was as a technical
Speaker 1: sales guy at a mass data storage company. So we're
Speaker 1: selling at the time. I mean, it's laughable now, but
Speaker 1: you know PATA bytes, Oh my god, of these network
Speaker 1: storage systems to movie studios and National Geologic Survey and
Speaker 1: so on. All of the experienced sales guys got in
Speaker 1: the office. Whenever they got in the office, it's called nine,
Speaker 1: and then from nine to five they're sending emails and
Speaker 1: making cold calls, right trying to reach CTOs and CEOs mostly.
Speaker 1: And I was having terrible results doing this, and most
Speaker 1: of them were having terrible results, but that's how they
Speaker 1: did it. So what do I know. I'm fresh out
Speaker 1: of college, so I was just copying them. And at
Speaker 1: some point I'm like, this sucks and I'm almost I
Speaker 1: was one of the lowest paid people in the company.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm living in a very expensive part of
Speaker 1: the country. This is in the Bay Area, Like I'm
Speaker 1: eating a jack in the box for God's sake, like
Speaker 1: through the drive through, Like I need to if I'm
Speaker 1: going to make more money with commissions, I need to
Speaker 1: solve this. So I was like, all right, what if
Speaker 1: I did the opposite. What's the opposite? Don't make any
Speaker 1: calls between.
Speaker 2: Nine to five?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay? And I started making calls between seven and
Speaker 1: nine and then from five to seven. And what I
Speaker 1: figured out very quickly is that part of the reason
Speaker 1: the results were so bad between nine to five is
Speaker 1: CTOs and CEOs are busy. Of course they are, so
Speaker 1: they have gatekeepers, they have bulletproof vests in the form
Speaker 1: of people who say no, and those people are usually
Speaker 1: gone before nine and they've gone after five. And so
Speaker 1: I had multiple experiences of calling pretty large companies and
Speaker 1: literally the person who answered the phone like a receptionist
Speaker 1: was the president or see of that.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: Within the span of I want to say, two or
Speaker 1: three months, two very large competitors who had New York
Speaker 1: and LA offices, I sold. I outsold all of our
Speaker 1: large competitor, which I think it was publicly traded even
Speaker 1: then outsold their entire offices combined well by doing what
Speaker 1: just by doing the opposite?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because if it's not working, yeah, it's not working,
Speaker 2: try the opposite.
Speaker 1: And if that doesn't work, okay, you try something else.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean with the podcast for instance, like everybody, almost
Speaker 1: everybody even still today offers advertisers net thirty terms net
Speaker 1: sixty terms. For people who don't know what that means,
Speaker 1: that means that you run the ad, they don't pay
Speaker 1: for it for thirty to six days, and that can
Speaker 1: create a lot of complexity because you need someone to
Speaker 1: chase them down. There are going to be people who relate.
Speaker 1: There are lots of invoices and accounts, payable accounts, receivable,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of shenanigans that goes on. And I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, well, what's the opposite prepayment? That's
Speaker 1: it everybody papas, Yeah, what does that look like okay.
Speaker 1: And another maxim I guess of mine is like, try
Speaker 1: the ideal thing first. Yeah, you can always do the
Speaker 1: standard later, or you can do the complicated thing later.
Speaker 1: But like what would my dream be. My dream would
Speaker 1: be people pay in advance and was able to make
Speaker 1: it work, And I was like, wow, well I'm glad
Speaker 1: we tried that first.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of examples like that.
Speaker 2: These are great questions and everyone can find them.
Speaker 1: That Tim dop blog is the website. There are literally
Speaker 1: thousands of pages of free stuff. If you go to
Speaker 1: Tim dop blog slash seventeen however you want to spell
Speaker 1: it the number or spell it out, and that there's
Speaker 1: a PDF with like seventeen of these questions. And I
Speaker 1: use them all the time. I still use them all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: When you say older, do you have a regimen of
Speaker 2: how often you reason or just whenever it feels right?
Speaker 1: Like it's it's more when they feel right, So I
Speaker 1: would say most most frequently. It's like if if I'm
Speaker 1: starting to gry my teeth or just wake up and
Speaker 1: I've got the type of grown like, probably time to
Speaker 1: break out the tool. Something is not something shafing, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: or on the flip side, for instance, I have one
Speaker 1: or two startups that I'm going to be getting involved with,
Speaker 1: and they're going to be very exciting, big commit projects,
Speaker 1: and it's like, Okay, these are going to be very
Speaker 1: fast moving, very competitive. Let me test a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of assumptions about these industries, because I'm advising typically to
Speaker 1: be helpful, and I will pull these questions out, like
Speaker 1: what does everyone say you need to do? Okay, is
Speaker 1: there anything to support that? Or like science, is it
Speaker 1: just that somebody did that first and then everybody else
Speaker 1: copied and they're like, well, that's just how it works,
Speaker 1: which is usually the case. Yeah, okay, you know what
Speaker 1: is doing the opposite? Look like what might that look like?
Speaker 1: And eighty percent of it's going to get thrown out,
Speaker 1: But you don't need one hundred percent. Yeah, you just
Speaker 1: need one or two little levers. So I use it
Speaker 1: for the good stuff too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I love that. I love having a core
Speaker 2: base of questions to come back to rather than just
Speaker 2: reminders or reflections or yeah, questions just great because you
Speaker 2: can you can usually tell straight away that you've been
Speaker 2: chasing too many field.
Speaker 1: Mice exactly, and what I like about that is it's
Speaker 1: you know, I've tried for myself over time to make
Speaker 1: these questions like tighter and tighter. Yeah, and tighter, because
Speaker 1: when I'm running around, even if I'm not journaling, if
Speaker 1: I'm just sitting on a train ride or a plane
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking to myself, Man, why am I so
Speaker 1: stressed out?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I have other tools that I'll use. People might be
Speaker 1: from some of them from the four hour work week,
Speaker 1: and I didn't create them, like eighty twenty analysis, et cetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: calendar reviews, passed your reviews, all that stuff. Fear setting.
Speaker 1: But you can just sit there and look out the
Speaker 1: window and ponder some of these questions and then you're
Speaker 1: like mmmmm yeah, too many field mice. Yeah, too many
Speaker 1: field mice. I'm always slightly hungry. Why right, Existentially there's
Speaker 1: some malais why I'm eating field mice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's when we're when we were walking over
Speaker 2: to the studio and we were talking on the way
Speaker 2: and I was saying, yeah, like I feel like this
Speaker 2: is finally a year where I'm know what to say
Speaker 2: no to, what to say, Right, It's it's that I
Speaker 2: didn't ask you in that way, And I love that
Speaker 2: language for it because it was that I was. I
Speaker 2: spent years over committing, under committing, not no, you know
Speaker 2: all that kind of all the all the versions of it,
Speaker 2: like you just said, like do the ideal, do the opposite,
Speaker 2: and figure it out and then and then you start going, Okay, no,
Speaker 2: I'm finally found a flow through asking these questions, and yes,
Speaker 2: what the flow will be just disrupted again by something else,
Speaker 2: and those questions will become valuable again, and.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you're never it's set it and forget it exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's why.
Speaker 1: It's like meditating or weightlifting or whatever. I guess it's
Speaker 1: a practice, so you come back to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I also find like if you just get good
Speaker 2: at what if you can figure out the process of
Speaker 2: doing one thing, well, that process usually helps you do
Speaker 2: multiple things. Well, that's all the same, right as far
Speaker 2: as I don't feel that way, Like, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: It's easy to lose sight of that, right, Yes, Like
Speaker 1: I was just in New Mexico doing a short meditation retreat,
Speaker 1: which I find helpful. Nothing like what you've done, but sure,
Speaker 1: sure A little check in with some teachers and one
Speaker 1: of the meditation teachers. Valerie at Mountain Cloud in San Fe,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, used to be a very high level, like
Speaker 1: world class player.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: She and I were comparing notes on, in her case, flute,
Speaker 1: and then I used to compete in archery, and we're
Speaker 1: comparing notes, and I realized, holy shit, I totally I
Speaker 1: was having some challenges with meditation. I was having a
Speaker 1: really hard time at this treat I was just like,
Speaker 1: really frustrated a lot of the time. And I thought
Speaker 1: to myself, Oh wow, her discussing flute made me think
Speaker 1: of archery, and they are all of these things from
Speaker 1: archery that I can just copy and paste directly into meditation. Yes,
Speaker 1: and then literally right after that the next three sits
Speaker 1: totally different world. And I was like, Wow, how funny
Speaker 1: it is that even at this point, after making a
Speaker 1: career of drawing parallels between fields, I had sat there
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I need to get better at meditating
Speaker 1: and hadn't even looked in other areas of my life
Speaker 1: to copy and paste.
Speaker 2: Literally, Yeah, I love a dummy.
Speaker 1: God, come on, Faris.
Speaker 2: I got like that all the time I was. I
Speaker 2: was this recently I got I mean not that I
Speaker 2: I'm not even sure if I'm going to do it
Speaker 2: for real. But it was like I got sent an
Speaker 2: audition for an acting gig and it was interesting, the
Speaker 2: role was interesting, and I was like, oh, this is
Speaker 2: a bit of flaring, this is a bit of fun,
Speaker 2: like let's see and then like all the like fear
Speaker 2: came in around, like what if I do and I fail,
Speaker 2: and like what if I send an audition tape and
Speaker 2: I look like a fool and what if someone like
Speaker 2: sees this and then thinks all my other stuff isn't
Speaker 2: you know what all the stuff that And I was
Speaker 2: like wait, ant, like why am I And I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: of course I'm scared because I haven't got a coach
Speaker 2: and I haven't done any classes to see if I
Speaker 2: even enjoy it or like it. And I haven't even
Speaker 2: done the scales version of like you know, making different faces.
Speaker 2: And then and then I got a coach and it
Speaker 2: was like within hours, I was like, oh, I could
Speaker 2: do this. I could give it a go if I
Speaker 2: wanted to, Like I could give an audition, not saying
Speaker 2: I could get the role. I could do the audition
Speaker 2: with a little bit of confidence because now I had
Speaker 2: a system and I had tools and the coach woul
Speaker 2: talk about how like he was like, you know, if
Speaker 2: you're doing theater, you've got to be able to like
Speaker 2: be big, and he goes, so I always try and
Speaker 2: get everyone to be a ten. And so you started
Speaker 2: a ten and then for TV you rolled that emotion
Speaker 2: back down.
Speaker 1: I'm so intro of this is like my nightmare. Well
Speaker 1: I remember doing a little bit of TV way back
Speaker 1: in the day and they're like, okay, just more energy,
Speaker 1: more energy, and they did. They kept telling me more energy,
Speaker 1: and I'm just like, bro, maybe this isn't for.
Speaker 2: Me, but for me it was the technique. It was
Speaker 2: like really helpful to go. He's like acted as a ten,
Speaker 2: and then for TV you'd roll it back into a temple.
Speaker 2: And I was like, what a cool like technique. And
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And I
Speaker 2: was like, you going to ask you if you read
Speaker 2: the book The zenov Archery. Yeah yeah, yeah, I thought so.
Speaker 2: I was like, I was, I've been some favorite stories
Speaker 2: from that books. Book.
Speaker 1: It's kind from another one because I was talking about
Speaker 1: music and it ties into a lot of what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. One of my favorite short books. I can't
Speaker 1: remember who recommended this to me might have been seth
Speaker 1: goodin it's called The Art of Possibility. Bye, I want
Speaker 1: to say Benjamin Xander blanking his wife's name, which is embarrassing.
Speaker 1: But and Z and deer And it's a conductor, very
Speaker 1: high level orchestral conductor. And it is a wonderful book.
Speaker 1: It ties into everything that we're talking about. So for
Speaker 1: folks who want I think it's one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: pages or something really really exceptional book.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I love it. Tim, You've
Speaker 2: been so fun to talk to us always.
Speaker 1: This is like, yes, pleasure.
Speaker 2: You're such a fascinating individual, truly, and I'm so grateful
Speaker 2: that you've always been the human guinea pig because it's
Speaker 2: fun being in your mind and talking to you just
Speaker 2: about things you're exploring. Because I think it brings back
Speaker 2: a zest for life. Naturally, it's contagious. It creates this
Speaker 2: curiosity in everyone. And at the same time, I think
Speaker 2: we've talked about so many practical things that people can
Speaker 2: actually apply in their lives. I wanted to end with
Speaker 2: two segments. One of them is a bunch of questions
Speaker 2: that we just got from our audience that we love
Speaker 2: that I wanted to throw it you for.
Speaker 1: Me to keep my answers short or what do you want?
Speaker 2: Know? These ones? You can flow a bit, Yeah, you
Speaker 2: can riff a bit the questions kind of what you
Speaker 2: were saying, Questions that you asked repeatedly. There are certain
Speaker 2: questions that we found out. Audience loves knowing the answer
Speaker 2: to from different people, and so we throw them out
Speaker 2: to you. So this one is what makes a good friend?
Speaker 1: What makes a good friend? That is a damn good question.
Speaker 1: I would say it's someone who says what they mean,
Speaker 1: means what they say. Who's reliable, you know, someone you
Speaker 1: can share your joys and sorrows with over time, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's about it. I would say that over time this
Speaker 1: applies across the board. Intelligence in quotation marks, because what
Speaker 1: does that even mean has become less and less important
Speaker 1: to me, Like trustworthiness and reliability come way before that. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not to say my friends are stupid, like my friends
Speaker 1: tend to be, you know, they tend to be pretty smart.
Speaker 1: But I'm not sorting first by that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love everyone who's made it. Now I's wondering,
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, and then that makes sense. What's the
Speaker 2: difference between being efficient and cutting corners.
Speaker 1: I mean, what comes to mind for me is cutting
Speaker 1: corners implies aiming for short term gain, but long term
Speaker 1: side effects or consequences. Right, cutting corners implies you're not
Speaker 1: doing something you should do. And I would expand that
Speaker 1: further just to say that I do not focus on
Speaker 1: efficiency as much as people think efficiency. And I'm borrowing
Speaker 1: from Peter Drucker here also The Effective Executive. Everybody, Holy cow,
Speaker 1: what a great book. But Peter Drucker paraphrasing, effectiveness is
Speaker 1: doing the right things, and then efficiency is doing things right.
Speaker 1: The way I would reframe that is like what you do,
Speaker 1: like picking your big yes, matters a lot more than
Speaker 1: how you get there. It's kind of like if you're
Speaker 1: starting in Kansas and you're intending to be a California
Speaker 1: be car pointed towards New York. It's like you could
Speaker 1: be Mario ANDRETTI doesn't matter, you're going the wrong direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the what matters a lot more?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What advice has made you the most money?
Speaker 1: These are a good question. I like these. It's hard
Speaker 1: to attribute to one person. I wish I could, but
Speaker 1: it's from a couple of different folks. Well, I'll actually
Speaker 1: give a nod to some folks who have informed the
Speaker 1: thinking aiming to be a category of one. So don't
Speaker 1: aim to be the best, although I think that's fine
Speaker 1: once you do what I'm about to describe, aim to
Speaker 1: be the only right. We were chatting a bit before
Speaker 1: we started recording about how the podcast landscape has changed
Speaker 1: and it would be very hard to start my show now.
Speaker 1: Absolutely you would need to be more probably narrowly focused
Speaker 1: and differentiated in a bunch of different ways. So for that,
Speaker 1: there's a great essay if you can find online at
Speaker 1: kk dot org. Kevin Kelly wrote one thousand true fans.
Speaker 1: I think it was true ten years ago, and it
Speaker 1: is going to become ultra ultra true as AI starts
Speaker 1: to gobble everything. One thousand true fans. You got to
Speaker 1: read it. The Law of category as a chapter from
Speaker 1: the twenty two Immutable Laws of Marketing. I think I
Speaker 1: put it. I think I excerpted it in Tools of
Speaker 1: Titans or Tribal Mentors, because that chapter had a huge
Speaker 1: impact Blue Ocean Strategy. Also, those are all related. So
Speaker 1: the advice to basically aim to be the only definitely one.
Speaker 1: Another one would be this relates to I guess the
Speaker 1: angel investing and so on is too. And Mark and
Speaker 1: Dreesen very famous entrepreneur and technologist and investor, but also
Speaker 1: the late Scott Adams controversial guy, but certainly was very
Speaker 1: good at what he did with Gilbert had had similar
Speaker 1: echoes of this, basically talking about two things. The first
Speaker 1: is that trying to become top one percent, and this
Speaker 1: relates to the first point, like Michael Jordan in basketball,
Speaker 1: very hard, Yoyoma, very hard. Almost everybody is going to
Speaker 1: get cut. But if you can be top say twenty
Speaker 1: five percent in two fields that are rarely combined, right,
Speaker 1: software development, although yeah, is going to kill that, but
Speaker 1: software and let's just say debate or a law degree. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. So I tend to think about combining top
Speaker 1: twenty five percent of fields that are rarely combined. And
Speaker 1: then the last one would be choosing projects based on
Speaker 1: acquiring skills and either building or deepening relationships that transcend
Speaker 1: that project, because a lot of my projects fail by
Speaker 1: any external metric. But if I'm building friendships with very
Speaker 1: interesting people who are smart, and I'm developing skills that
Speaker 1: are kind of transferable over time, you just win. It's
Speaker 1: very hard not to win.
Speaker 2: That's great advice. That's huge. There's so much in the
Speaker 2: huge advice. Thank you this one. What's something that the
Speaker 2: top one percent obsess over that most people never even
Speaker 2: think about?
Speaker 1: I mean, this is going to sound self serving because
Speaker 1: my eight hundred fifty face book is about this, saying no,
Speaker 1: the absolute sacredness of focus. They are all I mean,
Speaker 1: some people are better at this than others, but in
Speaker 1: their own way, they are very very militant about that,
Speaker 1: in a way that's very different from say the top
Speaker 1: forty percent. Yeah, yeah, right, Like the top one to
Speaker 1: five percent, even if they don't realize it, have set
Speaker 1: up systems, or they have employees, or they have you know,
Speaker 1: no available email address or whatever, or unusual ways to calendar.
Speaker 1: Even if they don't realize it, they're very very good
Speaker 1: at firewalling their attention.
Speaker 2: What's the allure of yes, Like, what is the allure?
Speaker 2: Is it people pleasing? Is it distraction? Is it busyness? Like?
Speaker 2: What have you found to be there?
Speaker 1: I think those are all good answers, right, So, I
Speaker 1: think there's fomo because everything in modern marketing is intended
Speaker 1: to foster fear of missing out. But if you only
Speaker 1: have one good idea or one good chance, it's your screwt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you need to develop and you only do this their
Speaker 1: experimentation and time on the field, the confidence in your
Speaker 1: ability to generate or capitalize on opportunities. Right, this is
Speaker 1: incredibly important. And I mentioned angel investing a bit for
Speaker 1: people who don't know that just means investing, in my case,
Speaker 1: in companies very very early. So when two people and
Speaker 1: an idea on a napkin investing in those people, if
Speaker 1: you don't have the ability to say no, you run
Speaker 1: out of money, your debt game over. That's the end
Speaker 1: of your angel in this day, right, because most of
Speaker 1: them are going to go to zero. And I would
Speaker 1: say that that seems like something that doesn't apply everywhere else.
Speaker 1: But guess what, you can make more money later, As
Speaker 1: far as we know, you can't create more time later.
Speaker 1: Back to Seneca on the shortness of life, and people
Speaker 1: are really burning time in ways they will realize they're
Speaker 1: pretty terrifying. But Fomo's use of it. People pleasing is another,
Speaker 1: which generally is short term nice, long term mean you
Speaker 1: always end up panning the piper with that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like you're gonna have to have an uncomfortable conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you want to have two years of pain before
Speaker 1: that or do you want to just do that now?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, then I would say field mice. Right, if
Speaker 1: you don't have an antelope and someone else is like, hey,
Speaker 1: come help me with my antelope. Hey, why don't you
Speaker 1: come to my party about my antelope? You're like the
Speaker 1: antelope sexy? Yeah, all right, Sure I'll say yes to
Speaker 1: your party. Sure I'll come to your you know, bought
Speaker 1: mits and magic show. Sure I'll do this. Sure I'll
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, you know, and before you know it,
Speaker 1: your calendar is full of field mice.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those are some of the pieces. You can spend
Speaker 1: quite a lot of time on that diagnosing it, but
Speaker 1: those are a few of the big ones.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, A ground says, uh, what's the emotional cost of
Speaker 2: constantly trying to improve yourself?
Speaker 1: The emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself in
Speaker 1: a vacuum without the acceptance piece is that you always
Speaker 1: think you're broken, and that is too high a cost
Speaker 1: for anyone to pay. It's an expanded discussion and the
Speaker 1: self help trap blog posts that I wrote. By the way,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably now within twenty four hours, I
Speaker 1: knew it was going to be my most popular blog
Speaker 1: posts of the last ten years. Probably. Wow, it's wild.
Speaker 1: I didn't know if it would resonate, but holy shit.
Speaker 1: So the cost to constantly improve yourself almost by definition,
Speaker 1: you have to constantly be looking for ways to fix yourself,
Speaker 1: which means you're looking for ways you're broken, and that
Speaker 1: means you're always in the red. Right, there's always one
Speaker 1: more problem, and so the feeling of peace eludes you
Speaker 1: by one more workshop, one more book, one more retreat,
Speaker 1: one more psychedelic, whatever it is, you're always going to
Speaker 1: be one step behind. If that's the only lens through
Speaker 1: which you're looking at them. Yeah, achievement self improvement sign.
Speaker 1: If you have the acceptance side, then you can start
Speaker 1: to balance out the wobble board. So I would say
Speaker 1: that's that's what comes to mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's almost like the old idea of climbing the
Speaker 2: mountain and pausing to look at the view, and then
Speaker 2: climb some more and looking at the view. And yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, you'd never go on a hike and not
Speaker 2: stop and look at the view. It's a ridiculous idea.
Speaker 2: You'd never just go, well, I'm just gonna I'm only
Speaker 2: gonna look at the view when I get to the top,
Speaker 2: and then there is no top, because you just keep
Speaker 2: discovering a new top, and it's like, no, I grow.
Speaker 2: We got to a flat piece of land, and then
Speaker 2: I stopped and we had a little you know, sandwiches
Speaker 2: and had some lunch and looked at the view and
Speaker 2: had a bit of piece and appreciate how far we'd come.
Speaker 1: And furthermore, I'll just add to this, the hyper individualism
Speaker 1: of most self help I think is very problematic, and
Speaker 1: I want to keep this and not prevent it from
Speaker 1: becoming a ted talk. But Pema Children has a really
Speaker 1: great poem who Henry Schuckman introduced me to actually, and
Speaker 1: I won't be able to recite because it's pretty long,
Speaker 1: but it effectively it's from when Things Fall Apart and
Speaker 1: talks about ascending the mountaintop, just as you were describing.
Speaker 1: The problem with that is that you leave your alcoholic sister,
Speaker 1: your schizophrenic friend behind, and then when you get to
Speaker 1: the top, you realize, oh, it just descends, and actually
Speaker 1: the mountain descends back into the messiness of human relationships.
Speaker 2: So that's yeah, well, if you want to be on
Speaker 2: the playing field, Yeah, that's powerful.
Speaker 1: I think it really Another question, like a question that
Speaker 1: I'm asking myself right now, which is not one of
Speaker 1: those seventeen, is what if almost everything you did or
Speaker 1: project you added had to improve your relational life somehow
Speaker 1: that's the criteria.
Speaker 2: Or because that's your antelope right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well it also feeds and reinforces and drenthens
Speaker 1: everything else. Or what if just to make it simple,
Speaker 1: you put you together to do list. What if for
Speaker 1: the next week two weeks, the first thing you had
Speaker 1: to do was one that was going to improve your
Speaker 1: relationships some way. By the way, it doesn't need to
Speaker 1: be a big thing. Sure could be having that long,
Speaker 1: overdo hard conversation with your parents, but that's a heavy lift.
Speaker 1: It could also be saying hi to your significant other
Speaker 1: in the morning and kissing him or her on the
Speaker 1: cheek before you jump on your phone. Right, it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be a big thing.
Speaker 2: Totally. Yeah, I lost one of these. If someone feels
Speaker 2: behind in life, what would you tell.
Speaker 1: Them, I'd say a few things. I'd say Number one,
Speaker 1: it's never too late. I've seen so many examples of
Speaker 1: people doing amazing stuff starting in their fifties, sixties, seventies.
Speaker 1: Jim Collins actually is new book. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's out yet, but What to make of a Life
Speaker 1: profiles something like thirty people and these are incredible examples
Speaker 1: of success and a lot of them did their most
Speaker 1: important work in their fifties, sixties and seventies, so it's
Speaker 1: not too late. Number one and number two i'd recommend.
Speaker 1: I'm giving so many book recommendations, just like, oh god,
Speaker 1: this so four thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkman, I think
Speaker 1: is a phenomenal book. And there's a chapter in that
Speaker 1: book specifically you can find it online called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy,
Speaker 1: and people should check this out. And this is not
Speaker 1: some people are like, oh it has becomes a nihilistic
Speaker 1: No no, no, no, no no, this isn't nihilism. But you
Speaker 1: can make your problems seem less life or death by
Speaker 1: zooming out, and Oliver does this very well. R And
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, Ed Cook, he's world class memory competitor.
Speaker 1: For a long time. He trained I think it was
Speaker 1: Joan Lair writer to become national memory champion in the
Speaker 1: US in a book called moonwalking with Einstein.
Speaker 2: I mean the guys is.
Speaker 1: Done, and Ed Cook will do the same thing even
Speaker 1: though he's I don't even think he knows who Oliver
Speaker 1: Berkman is, which is like imagine zooming out to like
Speaker 1: above his house if he's really stressed out, Like zoom
Speaker 1: above his house, then zoom out to like above the city,
Speaker 1: then the country, then out to seeing the planet, then
Speaker 1: zoom out and further looking at the solar system. And
Speaker 1: there's something to it that almost always takes some of
Speaker 1: the pressure out of the tires. And it's like, okay
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, And I don't think
Speaker 1: this is bad news, but like we are a bunch
Speaker 1: of monkeys on a spinning rock in the middle of
Speaker 1: the cosmos, right, So maybe the fact that somebody said,
Speaker 1: a you know, sent a really pissy email to you,
Speaker 1: like ah, look in the grand scheme of things, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like okay, and I need that for myself too. I'm
Speaker 1: not wagging a finger at people. I'm like, look, I
Speaker 1: can get wound up about that. I'm really good in
Speaker 1: crisis and with giant like projects and problems. It's the
Speaker 1: dumbest shit in the world. Like somebody cuts me off
Speaker 1: at the buffet line and like an airplane lounge or something,
Speaker 1: and I'm just like, really, that's what you're gonna get
Speaker 1: wound up about. Yeah, two days, For the next eight
Speaker 1: hour flight, you're think about that guy, what's wrong with you?
Speaker 1: So trust me. It's like I'm drinking the medicine too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, no, No, I can relate to both, and it's both.
Speaker 2: It's like there's times in life where thinking what you
Speaker 2: do matters is everything, and then there's times in life
Speaker 2: that embracing your own insignificance is the only way to function.
Speaker 1: There's a great Bertrand Russell quote. It's along the lines of,
Speaker 1: you know, the sure sign of impending nervous breakdown is
Speaker 1: taking one's work incredibly seriously something like that, butchering it.
Speaker 1: But it's very close like that, and the dose makes
Speaker 1: the poison, right, Like you have to believe in what
Speaker 1: you're doing. Yeah, and at the same time kind of
Speaker 1: recognize like we're all on the moment show here.
Speaker 2: Exactly, yeah, exactly exactly as the Boddo had said, hold it.
Speaker 2: You have to hold it, and you hold a bed
Speaker 2: in your hand, but not too tightly. It's like you
Speaker 2: hold it too tightly, you suffocate it and if you
Speaker 2: don't hold it at all, then you can't help it.
Speaker 2: And so it's yeah, it's that, it's it's hard. It's hard,
Speaker 2: and you're always going to go in between.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got to crush a few birds first and
Speaker 1: let a few go to figure it out.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, sadly, sadly, Tim, We end every episode with
Speaker 2: the final five. These have to be answered in one
Speaker 2: sentence maximum. So these these are sure, So Tim, these
Speaker 2: are your final five. Question number one, what is the
Speaker 2: best advice you've ever heard or received?
Speaker 1: Don't believe everything you think?
Speaker 2: Question number two, what is the worst advice you've ever
Speaker 2: heard or received?
Speaker 1: You need money to make money?
Speaker 2: Question number three? What did you used to value that
Speaker 2: you don't value anymore?
Speaker 1: Achievement without acceptance?
Speaker 2: What did you never value before but that you do
Speaker 2: deeply value now?
Speaker 1: Emotional experience?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I thought emotions were just limbic system
Speaker 1: liabilities for a long time.
Speaker 2: What changed your mind on that? Well?
Speaker 1: I few think I mean I realized you just can't
Speaker 1: get around it, like coury kidding, right, like.
Speaker 2: But I think it's a really good conversation.
Speaker 1: That's one, right, You just can't get around. It's coming
Speaker 1: back to the serenity ber. It's like, yeah, good luck
Speaker 1: with that, farish. And even if you could become Spock,
Speaker 1: you're going to interact with people who are not Spock.
Speaker 1: So we're right back at square one. And that's one.
Speaker 1: And secondly, there's quite a long story behind this that
Speaker 1: I won't get into, but you.
Speaker 2: Can if you want.
Speaker 1: If Yeah, I would just say that to experience the
Speaker 1: full richness of being human, you have to embrace being
Speaker 1: human and a very large part of that his emotions emotional.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well said fifteen. Quick final question. We asked this
Speaker 2: to every guest's ever been on the show. If you
Speaker 2: could create one law that everyone in the world had
Speaker 2: to follow, what would it be.
Speaker 1: I'd say, smile and say hi first. Yeah, and I'm
Speaker 1: borrowing that from from Gabby Reese, amazing woman who I
Speaker 1: interviewed alongside Laird Hamilton a long time ago. But yeah,
Speaker 1: go first with hers. Yeah, like, smile and say I first.
Speaker 2: It changes everything. It actually does. It actually changes everything.
Speaker 2: If you walked into a room and brought the energy
Speaker 2: you hope to get out of it, it's like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's another this isn't this isn't poetic. There's another one.
Speaker 1: Somebody told me at one point. I'm like, oh god,
Speaker 1: that's good. They said, if you walk out one day
Speaker 1: and you be an asshole, that person's an asshole. If
Speaker 1: you walk outside and everyone's an asshole, you're that you're
Speaker 1: the asshole.
Speaker 2: You know it's true. I have plenty of both.
Speaker 1: Go get some key tones from the macadamia nuts or
Speaker 1: a cold shower.
Speaker 2: I love it. Thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: the show. I hope everyone checks out Tim dot blog
Speaker 2: forward slash seventeen for the seventeen questions and people can
Speaker 2: actually read your new book kind of to get you
Speaker 2: want to talk about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, yeah, people can get if they go to
Speaker 1: Tim dop blog. That is a ural kind of confusing.
Speaker 1: We'll just type tim dop blog in. You can get
Speaker 1: I want to say, one hundred and seventy five to
Speaker 1: two hundred pages of my various books to read. Plenty
Speaker 1: of actional, tons of actionable stuff. It's not just buttering
Speaker 1: you up for the book, like you don't ever have
Speaker 1: to buy the books. I mean there's more in the books, obviously,
Speaker 1: but there's If you go to Tim up Law you'll
Speaker 1: find one hundred and seventy five plus pages. And then
Speaker 1: for the Notebook, which is kind of the codename for
Speaker 1: the book about saying no. Definitely my funniest book so far,
Speaker 1: because I did it with Neil Strauss, who acted as
Speaker 1: my student, and he was so bad, so comically bad
Speaker 1: at saying no. There's a lot of funny exchanges, real
Speaker 1: text messages and experiments and stuff you can find I
Speaker 1: want to say, fifty seventy five pages of that at
Speaker 1: timmed up log slash Notebook and yeah, so all that stuff,
Speaker 1: all that stuff is great. People can check it out.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. Well, everyone has been listening to watching.
Speaker 2: Make sure you tag me and Tim on Instagram x
Speaker 2: TikTok wherever you're viewing the show or seeing clips. I
Speaker 2: want to know what resonated with you, what you're practicing with,
Speaker 2: what you're trying, what you're exploring. I love seeing how
Speaker 2: what we discuss here turns into reality. So let us
Speaker 2: know what you're taking action on. And Tim, thank you
Speaker 2: so much. I hope you'll come back on the show.
Speaker 2: And we weren't say nine years again.
Speaker 1: You're very good at what you do. Man. It's fun
Speaker 1: to watch and it's fun to experience.
Speaker 2: Also, it's easier with someone like you. This is like
Speaker 2: a dream. It is not my favorite kind of episode,
Speaker 2: the best. Thank you, thanks, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love
Speaker 2: my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the
Speaker 2: key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.
Speaker 1: I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy.
Speaker 1: I think envy is the thief of joy. I think
Speaker 1: social comparison is invaluable