Tim Ferriss on Tim Ferriss (and much much more)

Welcome to EconTalk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment... on this episode and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is July 23rd, 2025, and my guest is author, podcaster, lifehacker extraordinaire, Tim Ferriss. His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has over one billion, with a B, billion downloads since he began in 2014. His books, which include The 4-Hour Workweek. Tribe of Mentors, Tools of Titans, have sold millions of copies. In 2018, he founded the SciSave Foundation to fund unorthodox research, explore treating conditions that are widely considered untreatable, and challenge existing frameworks.

and paradigms within science and medicine. Tim, welcome to EconTalk. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. Now, in introducing, I called you an author and a podcaster and a life hacker. I'm sure I could have added some things to that list, and they're all true, but what... You really are a phenomenon. You're an explorer of the world, an explorer of yourself. And you took that exploration, put it in the public eye via the Internet and became really an extraordinary brand.

And you're good at every piece of that, the exploration, the marketing. How did that happen? Was that a plan or did you just sort of stumble onto it? I think it was a lot of serendipity. somewhat engineered in a positive sense because it conforms with my personality fundamentally. But a lot of it started, and maybe this is going back too far, but I had a lot of health problems as a kid.

And some of those were a consequence of being born premature and had a lot of issues with thermoregulation and so on. But the only sport that I could... participate in really effectively was wrestling. My mom put me into kiddie wrestling because the puny kids could go against the other puny kids. And I had a lot of constraints. I would overheat quickly. and effectively had to experiment and work around a lot of limitations.

So the self-experimentation started with that and later extended to other things. And then it just became a habit. And when the first book... was a few months out from launch, there were these things you might remember that were quite big at the time called blogs. And I just decided to take my personal experimentation. and share it publicly with the hypothesis that that might spread. And lo and behold...

had a few friends, one of whom ran something called dig.com, which was gigantic. It was the front page of the internet in a sense, somewhat akin to Reddit back in the day. And I realized that certain types of experimentation resonated. So I took what I was already doing, amplified the volume on that.

And it continued to resonate, continued to resonate in different subject matter from the four-hour work week with business and entrepreneurship to the four-hour body with physical performance and interviewing coaches, running a lot of trials on myself. to cooking and to everything else that I did afterwards. So that has continued. And I'm sure you might feel similar. And I said this before recording, but congrats on a thousand shows. That is...

one heck of a milestone, that if I weren't recording the podcast, I would be having a lot of those conversations anyway. And the same is true of the experiments. If I weren't sharing them, I would still be doing them.

So it's a relatively light lift to share. What's that do to you as a person? I often wonder, when I look at you, We have very similar lives now. We both podcast. We both write books. But we're nothing alike. And that's fascinating to me. Do you ever feel you're watching your life unfold from the outside, watching yourself be Tim Ferriss? Because, you know, when you put yourself on display the way you have, and I do that too a little bit, not anything close to the level you do.

But you get advice from people who are better than I am at marketing, and they say, guys, share some personal things. People like that. People are voyeurs. They like to... And so, does that... Do you think that has changed you? And does it lead to out-of-body experiences? This is a very, very good question. I have been from the... outset. And I don't know what catalyzed this in the beginning, but certainly as I had more and more exposure, I've been very cognizant of a few different dangerous

One of which is audience capture. People can find writing on this. There are a number of good pieces. Becoming a caricature of your most extreme traits or behaviors because your audience rewards those things. And there's a real risk of becoming the mask that you wear.

for that reason, I will very often go off menu with guest choice. I might interview someone on who knows what, on any facet of, some odd facet of philosophy, which is not going to be maximizing downloads, or do something that is true to my interest, but controversial.

which will call my audience, in a sense, divide and possibly call my audience, to reinforce the driver that I think will preserve my... not just integrity, but prevent becoming an observer of a stage act known as Tim Ferriss, which is really making Whether it's the podcast or the books, the drivers, my personal fears, goals, dreams, problems. As long as I stick with that, the things that are relevant to my real life.

I feel like I'm operating with an eight-point harness on to prevent some of the dangers of the internet, or I should just say living at least partially in public to begin with.

I meet people who listen to the podcast or have listened for 10 years, let's say. And they say, wow, it must be really strange because... You don't know me at all. And I think that I know you, but I don't actually know you. And I have to be careful with this type of conversation sometimes. But I say, if you've been listening that long... you actually do know me pretty well. Which is both reassuring and terrifying at the same time because there's such an asymmetry.

So I feel like I have, and this isn't any special pat on the back for me, but I've seen what public exposure has done, and I'm not... I mean, I'm at best an F class. public figure, but what fame has done to real celebrities or people I've known who have had a lot of unexpected attention, I've seen some of the side effects and I've wanted to avoid those.

So I'll confess, a handful of times in my life, someone has overheard me talking in a corridor, in a public place, on a plane or a bus or whatever. And they've asked me, are you Russ Roberts? And when I say it, maybe six times, but I'm not counting. It's a few times. But once is incredibly exciting. Even the fifth time is still pretty exciting. And even more rare is when someone recognizes my face, which has happened maybe, I don't know, twice in my life. But that must happen to you.

Give us a feel for how often that happens, and then I want you to reflect on an incredible essay you wrote in 2020 called 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous. And before I read that, if you had asked me – and you're obviously – F might be a little harsh on yourself, but you mentioned in that essay, you're not Brad Pitt. There's some people who, when you walk the streets, everybody recognizes you. If you had asked me,

At that level and at your level, even at D or C or B or whatever it's actually, I would have said, yeah, it's hard. You can't go out in public without people bothering you in a restaurant. You might be trying to have a quiet dinner and somebody. asks for an autograph or even says once they say thank you, just not in the mood to interact with the stranger. You might be having a nice dinner. But that essay is quite haunting and it's quite.

self-reflective, and it's very informative. We'll link to it. It reminds the reader of some of the harsher burdens of success.

So, talk about how often you are recognized. I'm just curious. And then talk about that essay, which I'm sure you remember. I do. I do. Because I still think about all of the... the risks and guidelines and insurance policies that I discussed in that essay, which I wrote for myself also, in a sense. But if I am in let's say, Austin, Texas, which is home base, if I'm downtown at a coffee shop or something like that, or in Manhattan or Williamsburg or a coastal...

spot in the Pacific Northwest, like a Seattle or a San Francisco, I will, if I'm out and about, get recognized a few times a day. Do you like them? I've asked myself this question because when it happens, Sometimes people share really kind things and they mention how specific episodes or books or... Any number of things that I've put out have really helped them, or their son, or their wife, or their... fill in the blank. And that's very gratifying, but it...

If I am in one of those cities, let's just say, I will very rarely go to a coffee shop because I can't actually sit down in peace and work on my laptop or write or just screw around with a book. for an hour or two. It's actually somewhat challenging. And I've very deliberately, and this is definitely to my economic detriment, de-emphasized

and opted out of video for the most part over the last, I would say, four to five years. You and I have both seen how YouTube principally has become a massive driver as a growth engine for quote-unquote podcasts, which have more or less become fixed location television shows by this point, a lot of them. I do not want more facial recognition. So as I look at the newer or future chapters in my life with family, et cetera, I don't have family currently.

but would love to. I mean, that's a high priority for me. I don't want to compromise my own, and I much less want to compromise members of my family and their privacy when they have not... probably set out with the decision to compromise their own privacy. And there's more that comes with that, certainly. If you have enough public exposure, there are safety concerns and other things.

When I have, in the last few years, had people come up to me, and they're almost always, I feel very... very, very privileged that my listeners, let's just say in the case of the podcast, tend to be very polite and well-educated and well-mannered, and they're just great. For the most part, every once in a while, you get a wild card. But when they walk away, I wonder to myself, what would it feel like not to have that anymore? Would I really miss it?

Would I not miss it? I don't have a clear answer. There's definitely a possibility that I would miss some of it because it's gratifying to know that at least some of what you're doing in the world has an impact. But does it have to happen on the street? Probably not. If it were a blog comment, I would think I would get 90 or 100% of that gratification too. It's too bad people don't really...

The platform capture of social media, or I shouldn't say social media companies, but the larger tech companies has become so profound that it's more and more challenging to have.

sort of a private audience like that unless you're using something like a Patreon. But talk about that essay. I mean, the part that I can't forget is the insight that... In your class at school, I actually have a photograph of my first grade classroom. That's amazing. It was in Moses Lake, excuse me, it was in...

Montgomery, Alabama. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, Montgomery, Alabama. And I was there for like a year. And there were a couple of things that are obvious when you look at the picture. One is I was a really small. six-year-old. You can just look at the room. We're all sitting at desks. The second thing that you notice in Montgomery, Alabama in 1960 is they're all white.

The third thing you notice is there's about 30-something kids in that room. And in today's world, that would be considered too many kids. But you pointed out that in a class of 30, there might be a peculiar person in there. And then you think, well, what if you had a class of 30,000? Well, there'd be a few people in a small town you'd have challenges with interacting.

And when you have an audience of millions, as you do, there are going to be some flaky people in there, and they're going to interact with you. And that's hard. I just want to – let me reflect on what you said first, and then you can come back to that. Yeah, I find it deeply gratifying when people write me, and they do, and it's – for those of you listening, I can't tell you how wonderful it is to hear that I've played any role that's positive in your life.

And which what you were talking about. It's interesting how joyous that makes me for a very short period of time. I don't it doesn't. I sometimes write people, you've made my day, and that's an expression. Unfortunately, it doesn't last a whole day. It's interesting how our egos, our sense of insecurity, vulnerability, whatever you want to call it.

It's nice. You get a little bump, and then you can't savor it much. My mom, I think, gets more pleasure. I send them sometimes to my mom, and she gets a lot of thrill. She really likes it. But it's interesting. We say, would you miss it? Whenever I reflect on it, I get deep pleasure from it, but it's interesting how it doesn't come up in my mind as often as you'd think it might. Anyway.

React to that if you want and then talk about the challenges of that 30,000 or 3 million person village you're the king or the mayor of. Yeah, I'll talk about the village. metaphor and it might be helpful to people. And I think it's going to be increasingly important for even the, let's just call it average Joe or Jane, to think about these things.

as parasocial relationships become easier and easier to develop with platforms using algorithmically driven A, B, or C to keep people on platforms. I'll explain what I mean by that. I guess in a nutshell, it's never been easier for people to be micro-famous for short periods of time. I'll tell you what the risks are of being micro-famous, even for an hour, a day, or a week. And there can be some durability to it.

the let's just say the expression of the village idiot every village has its idiot and by idiot I would say historically, they mean a crazy person. It's not necessarily someone who's dumb. It's someone who is just not quite there, not quite normal. And if you then expand it to a small city, well, now you're going to have, who knows, 50, 100 of those people. expand out, you get to a New York City, which is, let's just say, New York City's probably half the size of my monthly audience.

Two New York cities. How many crazy people are in two New York cities? Well, you have quite a lot of people who may not be full-time insane, but people who are a little unstable. From a little unstable... or impulsive, too crazy, you're going to have many, many, many, many of the entire classroom you mentioned. Why is this relevant? This is relevant because...

Oftentimes when I explain to folks some of the things that have happened as a result of public exposure, I tell them about the death threats. I tell them about... The crazy stalkers, I tell them about having to escalate stuff to the FBI or law enforcement. I talk about having to have security at events because of A, B, or C people who say they're going to come and find me.

They ask what I'm doing. What are you talking about that is so controversial? What are you putting out in the world? And I say, nothing. You just need enough crazies. in your digital village, so to speak, and these things will happen. It's almost inevitable. And I'm on, for instance, a private WhatsApp group with...

a number of people who are involved with media in various ways and have public exposure. And this is a perennial topic that comes up. They all deal with this stuff on one level or another. Some of it's scarier than other pieces. Some of it is more inconvenient than other pieces. If you have sufficient exposure, you will contend with a lot of these things. For instance, this is the way I opened that piece, but I have...

fans, readers, listeners reach out continually saying something along the lines of, you're my last chance. I've tried everything. If you don't reply to me in 48 hours and help me, I'm going to kill myself. What do you do with that? And you do have to figure out what your policies are for contending with things like that, or you're going to be endlessly enmeshed with person after person after problem after problem. For people who are listening, they might think, well...

It must be interesting to have those problems as someone who has a podcast with a billion downloads. But the reason that I mentioned at the outset this is going to become more and more relevant for more and more people is that... The reason, for instance, a TikTok, one of the reasons that a TikTok gained so much traction and now the other platforms are...

creating their own versions of TikTok to try to capitalize on this phenomenon of very short-form videos. But part of the reason that TikTok succeeded was not the... brevity of the videos themselves. It was that anyone creating videos had a chance like someone buying a lottery ticket, of winning big. They didn't need a large platform to suddenly go viral and have tens of millions or hundreds of millions of views.

If you have that type of spike in notoriety, and if certainly you try to capitalize on it by sustaining it... Even if it's, again, coming back to the little village, the larger village, etc., forget about 100 million people. Even if you just get exposed to 10,000 people, but prior to that, no one knew who you were. there's a very good chance that you'll be exposed to some of these challenges on a smaller scale. And you'll need to deal with them on a smaller or a larger scale.

That's another reason why I wrote that piece, because I feel like... The technologies in place and the incentives they're creating and the capabilities they're creating are going to subject more and more people to these weirdly lopsided parasocial relationships. And most people, for instance, this is not perfect either, but have not bought their homes through an LLC or a trust or something like that. And that's an imperfect solution.

If people can find you very easily, you and your family, you need to be aware of that. And that's just a long...

I suppose, TED Talk answer to your prompt, but I'll stop there. Well, it actually makes me really sad that this is the nature of the world. This is only tangentially related, but I'll mention that I was in Venice for the first time. I'm happy to say nobody recognized me. And I should also say that... I'm surprised I got in. I was clearly the most overweight person in Venice. I am not obese by BMI standards, body mass index, but they're somehow either subsidized attractive people or...

But I got in and banned, don't attract to people. But I got in. Is this Venice, California or Venice, Italy? Italy. Just very attractive men and women dressed much better than I am. I would add that as well. But before I went and after I went, I read a few things that had mentioned Venice that were...

precious to me. One of them is a short story by Mark Halperin. It's the lead story to the Pacific. And that is an extraordinary collection of short stories. And that first story is called Il Colore Retrovato. I don't know how to pronounce it in Italian. But I encourage listeners to read it. It is a magnificent, funny, poignant story about the cost of fame. And I'm not going to say anything more than that, but in that story, giving up fame has an aesthetic component.

The thing you mentioned, which I think is very deep and true and sad and complicated, that after a while, we as performers, creators, artists, whatever you fill in the blank, cater to our audience. and seek the things that give us a rush from their approval and find ourselves in a in a very strange game. I think that's a deep, deep insight. And that's

That's what the Mark Halpern story is about. So I encourage people to read it. But it suggests that people who have something to share with the world, I'm not sure TikTok videos are the most.

The biggest loss, but that some of that is lost in a world where fame is both dangerous to your physical well-being or your emotional well-being. I. Certainly agree with that. And I can't remember the attribution. I'm not going to type on my keyboard right now. Someone, I'm sure, can find it. But there's a quote that really stuck with me.

And it was from, I would say, a credible source, whether it was a very well-known artist or otherwise. But the quote was along the lines of, the danger is not in imitating other people. The danger is... when you end up imitating yourself. And that really stuck with me. And I was like, what does that mean to imitate yourself? And then you look online.

And it relates to the audience capture that I mentioned, where your most exaggerated positions or exaggerated behaviors or fill in the blank. Things that take a few... components of your personality which may actually be true may actually exist and put them into this into these warped dimensions, almost like you're walking through a funhouse with these bizarre mirrors, and then feeds it back to you and says, do more of this.

Do it bigger. Make it louder. Make it crazier. And I'll say what I said before because I say it to myself a lot. Be very careful of the masks that you wear because... It's very easy to become that mask. And then it's no longer the real you and the stage you. They become the same thing. In any case, I do think these are worth thinking about also because it helps guide your decisions. And I remember long ago, I didn't heed this advice, but when I was in college.

One of my friends, his father was the producer of... The first successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which came out of nowhere. The story of the making of that film is just insane. It's really worth digging into. But what he said was... you want everybody to know your name and no one to know your face. And in retrospect, that was really good advice. Yeah, it's really interesting.

I have a face for podcasting, so I'm okay. Although YouTube, as you point out, I have not cracked YouTube successfully. My audio is much, much, much more successful. But I think increasingly YouTube is what people turn to for content of various kinds, and that's just a reality. We should start a... We'll start a podcast together, Tim. We'll both wear masks.

Let's shift gears. I want to talk a little bit about it. I'm just imagining you in like a Mexican Lucha Libre mask. What style of Lucha Libre mask would you have? I'm going to Venice. I'm getting a Venetian.

Oh, nice. Okay, I'll do the Lucha Libre. You can do the masquerade ball. Exactly. I want to talk about habits because you're occasionally, at least in public, a personal habit. Is every day of your life roughly the same with certain regimens that you enforce on yourself as well as your workflow? Or is every week somewhat the same? Or is every day and week wildly different? I would say probably the middle answer is the closest to the truth, which is I have...

frequently a weekly architecture of some type. And this is not unique to me. I know Jack Dorsey used to do this. I know I borrowed it from other folks in the sense that I used to have more regimented daily routines, but I found that I was doing a lot of task switching. So I would do...

this type of task with my employees for X period of time, and this type of tax, this type of task with deep work, some type of creative immersion for X period of time. And what I found to be from a, let's just say, professional productivity perspective, much more manageable and much more sustainable, much more pleasant is having, for instance,

Mondays and Fridays I do recordings at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. my local time. And I don't have to fill all those slots. Those are just the slots that are available. So my calendar doesn't have podcast recordings scattered. everywhere here and there. And then certain types of, say, physical training will be on set days. And by doing that I might have, let's just say, Wednesday for principally writing, if I'm going to be doing writing.

And then on Tuesdays, Tuesdays tend to be the admin miscellaneous one-on-one with employee day. So all of the management pieces, which... When they are scattered, I allow to drive myself crazy. I have very low tolerance for that type of thing. So it's much better to just create one critical mass where I can batch those similar tasks in one place.

On a daily basis, let's just say, because people are often interested in morning routines, If you were to take all of the morning routines I have tested and all of the morning routines of my guests and all the morning routines of some other figures out there who are well-known, and stack them together, your morning routine would last 27 hours. So I don't do all of those things, but there are, at any given time, there are a few things. that I will do. And it's, I would say, selecting...

two or three things out of a list of 10. So do I have to meditate, sauna, cold plunge, do zone two training, do all of these things before I have my first cup of coffee? No, I don't. But for instance, last night, For instance, last night, I just had some issue with the HVAC. The AC in my room wasn't working very well, so I didn't sleep terribly well. So this morning, I was like, okay, I'm going to have...

exogenous ketones. We can talk about that if you want. But just to provide my brain with some fuel and also hopefully a little bit of anti-inflammation, I'm going to do a very short cold plunge, three to four minutes. I'm going to have some... some tea, so I had two types of tea, Pu-erh tea specifically, and a little bit of breathing while I'm freezing my ass off in the cold plunge, and then straight into the game. That's it. The whole thing took whatever it was.

10 to 15 minutes. But let's just say tomorrow. Oh, I also did measure my HRV first thing upon waking up with two different devices. But let's just say tomorrow. If I'm not stiff, if I slept a little better, maybe I skip the cold plunge, but maybe I do walk with my dog with a rucksack on to go get coffee or something like that. So I would say...

The morning routine varies, but if it's helpful to people, and I originally got this from Tony Robbins, who can be controversial in his own right, but he has some very useful frameworks. The idea of keeping in mind the following progression, state, story, strategy. So if you're in a pissy mood because you didn't sleep well and you sit down with your journal to figure out how you're going to solve your problems.

you're going to have a disabling or pessimistic story which will lead you to have really suboptimal strategies. So for me, really... physiologically, neurophysiologically, how do I prime my state in the morning? First and foremost, so that the story I have is a glass-half-full, more optimistic story so that any strategies I come up with are going to be more enabling. I'm going to see more possibilities. Almost all the things I just mentioned.

from this morning and pretty much every morning are focused on state first. And then if I want to journal, if I want to brainstorm, that's fine, but that comes after I've tried to establish a helpful state. That's fantastic. I'm going to add... a 20-minute Jewish prayer service to your morning. So it'll be more like, so it could be a 27 and a half hour morning for you. But when I hear your morning, Tim, I'm a little bit embarrassed. I get your weekly email, which I enjoy.

And I'm aware that there are things in your life that I don't – not only do I not do them, I don't know what they are when I read them. So very quickly. Very quickly for listeners, because we have much more to talk about. What is an exogenous ketone? And a cold plunge, can that be done in one's own home? Without a bathtub? I mean, where do you do that? And then the tea, is there some special characteristic of the tea? I could definitely use a better state on many mornings. This morning I slept.

I did a crazy travel thing yesterday, so I got home and I slept about – I needed about 10 hours to make up for the hours I missed over the last 48, and I got four and a half. So I woke up in a dark state. I had no ketones. I did not cold plunge, and I had no tea. I did have my wife's coffee, which is exceptional, and I had her conversation, which is also exceptional. So that helped.

Give us a quick review there. And in doing so, I want to ask you, do you try to go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time every day? I try and I usually fail. Okay, I fail all the time. Carry on. Tell us what those things are. It would really benefit you for a host of different biological reasons to go to sleep and wake up at the same time. I just seem to not be able to comply with this.

Very basic demand. But to answer your questions. Animals are good at that. God bless them. But it's hard as a human. I get it. But go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, no problem. So exogenous ketones, just in brief, let me explain what ketones are. So if you didn't eat for three to four days, all of this precious body fat that we're so good at storing has a purpose. And your body would begin to shift from glucose, which is your default fuel for most people. And it would shift to breaking down body fat.

into ultimately a number of things, but including these beautiful, beautiful Things called ketones. And your brain, cardiac tissue, et cetera, loves ketones. It is a very clean fuel. If people want to dive into it, they can just consult Uncle Chat GPT and it'll tell you all about this. Ketones also, for instance, beta-hydroxybutyrate, let's just call it a type of ketone, has a lot of anti-inflammatory properties.

I'm not going to make this into a 30-minute thing, but I think the context is helpful. If you look at, for instance, the Atkins diet, some people might recognize, or the ketogenic diet, well... When did that initially get codified? I shouldn't say initially, it's been used for a long time in various traditions with fasting, but they've never thought about it as a ketogenic diet. It was developed for epileptic children, and I want to say this was in the...

early 20th century where they would use heavy cream primarily to help kids adhere to this diet. Incredibly effective for... decreasing the occurrence of treatment-resistant or pharmacologically resistant epilepsy. There's also a lot of research looking at using it for schizophrenia. And Chris Palmer at... Harvard right now has done a lot of work, and he labels this metabolic psychiatry. So the ketogenic diet and ketones in general are very, very interesting.

also for potentially addressing autoimmune diseases, autoimmune conditions. But the reason I'm taking exogenous ketones, that's a fancy word. Okay. EXO, exogenous. just like exoskeleton, just means outside of the body. So endogenously in your body, you can produce ketones, but you have to follow this very strange diet that is hard for a lot of people to follow. And it takes time to get into it.

the cheat code, and I'm not convinced that doing this all the time is good for you, but in a break glass in case of emergency situation, I've been experimenting with it, you just have supplemental ketones. So just like a dietary supplement, some are in liquid form, some are in powder form. There's one that I sometimes mix with my coffee.

called, I think it's ketone with Q-I-T-O-N-E. Just use it as your creamer. Be forewarned. Have a bathroom nearby. When you first use it, some people have a... disaster pants type response to it the first one or two times so fyi probably don't do it for the first time on an airplane and that's what I would say, in brief, exogenous ketones are. There are a lot of interesting books written about this subject, but look up Chris Palmer and metabolic psychiatry for... the state side of the story.

It also is very beneficial for some things you might not expect, like zone two training, which is a type of, let's just call it aerobic exercise, and Peter Atiyah speaks at length about that. Cold plunge, you kind of need a... bathtub for that one. There are some bathhouses that will have cold plunge available. I have something called the plunge. It's sort of the best bang for the buck cold plunge that I've been able to find.

I'm using it at 40 to 43 degrees Fahrenheit which is very cold. I don't know what that is in Celsius but I can assure you it is very very cold. And I'll typically do that for five to 10 minutes. And there's some very, very interesting effects of that, not just on the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, but after that first... acclimation period of, say, three minutes or so for a lot of folks, actually activating parasympathetic rest or digest.

which I think in some cases explains the mood elevating effects. So cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy way back in the day. This isn't entirely new. We're just getting a better understanding of the science. However, you can get... sort of the poor man's 20% of that by sticking your face in the ice or something like that. Ben Stiller actually in Tribe of Mentors talked about...

putting his face, I think it was Ben Stiller, in a bucket of ice. So you could just have a huge mixing bowl. full of water and ice if you want to get a little bit of the payoff of that, but really full body is the way to go. And then on the T side, I mentioned two types of tea. In this case, I use something called Peak Tea, P-I-Q-U-E. And the reason for that is you can instantly mix it instead of having to steep and stuff.

You can kind of use what you want. I love drinking Pu-erh tea. There seem to be a host of different benefits related to Pu-erh tea. That's a Chinese tea. related to not just microbiome, but also potential fat loss and things like that. It also just tastes delicious. It's got a very kind of peaty, if you like whiskey... Pu-erh tea. It doesn't taste exactly like whiskey, but it has that very peaty barnyard type of...

smell and almost taste to it. So that's as much for pleasure as for anything else. That's awesome. I can't help but mention my favorite description of Laphroaig. Scotch, which they had a contest. It sounds like an apocryphal story, but I think it's true. They had a contest to create a slogan for Laphroaig or a description of Laphroaig. And somebody – Lafroig is one of my three favorites with Lagavulin and Ardbeck. I like Petey. So this person wrote, drinking Lafroig is like –

kissing a mermaid after she's eaten barbecue. And I thought that is just pure poetry. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah, go ahead. No, no. How do I spell Pu-er-ti? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. PU, there's often a hyphen or an apostrophe put in. ERH is generally how it's written in English. There's another one. If you want the closest to whiskey, and I'm actually not a big whiskey drinker, but there are a lot of similarities.

A friend of mine wanted to go sober, but he just loved the taste of whiskey so much he was stuck in a conundrum. And he found a tea called Lapsang Suchong Tea. Yeah, sure. It's a classic. And that also has a...

dairy, whiskey-like flavor to it. So he would have that after dinner, and it scratched the itch. Very cool. How has Uncle Chad GPT, Cousin Claude... How have they changed your workflow, your life in any way? So I simultaneously feel like maybe at some point I'll be part of the Butlerian Jihad to invoke something from Dune.

I don't want to say Luddite, because that sounds very judgmental, but this rise against the thinking machines. I may be part of that at some point. But at the same time, I use... I use LLMs and AI dozens of times a day. And I encourage my employees to use it dozens of times a day. It's going to change everything. I don't think some of the capabilities, the current capabilities are overstated, but I don't think, I think the implications even.

12 months from now might be underestimated by a lot of people. So I use it for any type of research. And I will fact check. You need to have... You need to have models check one another. But for any type of diligence on, say, a startup or on an industry, or to find scientific literature. When I'm looking at these new experiments that I want to run, it saves...

so much time. It is impossible to overstate. I mean, what would have taken me a week or at least multiple days of fishing around, finding old people, PDFs, trying to scan those PDFs and then go to Google and then sort past all the ads to find the one credible PubMed link to do this to that. That's all done in seconds.

And there are better prompts and worse prompts. So certainly you need to get better at asking questions. But fortunately, I spend a lot of time thinking about questions. And there are still hallucinations, for sure. And there's some pretty creepy stuff about AI learning to lie, which is quite interesting. Or certainly being willing to lie. What's the pleasure? Weird. Of course, it's trained on people.

So it's not that – people say, yeah, why is that weird? It's trying to please me. Yeah, because guess what? Most of the material it reads is written by people who are trying to please other people. I don't find that – that's my take on it. Yeah, so – So we'll see. I have a lot of friends involved, deeply, deeply involved with AI. I'm involved with a lot of companies that are entirely...

focused on AI and different facets. I'll tell you what I don't use it for because I think that's maybe interesting or at least to me it's important. I don't use it for writing. I want to preserve that capability. I want to keep that muscle from atrophying. I don't want my writing and my synthesis and my ability to do things long form, to go the way of my ability to remember friends' phone numbers, or to...

chart a map to a basic location, which is now dependent on Google Maps. I don't want those faculties to disappear. If I am writing, I am writing. And I view that just like I would going to the gym. If I decide to train to run a marathon, I'm not going to take an Uber from the start line to the finish line. I'm there to do the training and to do the thing. And there is a value, I believe, at least for me, in trying to preserve it, at least until I've been able to see some of the longer term.

ramifications of becoming really dependent on these tools. So that might end up seeming very silly a few years from now looking back, but for now, I don't use it for writing.

Yeah, I mean, if you write well, it's a dangerous – it's not very helpful is the way I would say. It's not dangerous. There is a danger that you become – to use it as a crutch because it's quick. It's alarmingly good. Yeah, it's better than you'd think. I was on the trip I took to Italy where I was in Venice. I was also...

I had an afternoon off, and I was recovering. I was in the Dolomites. I was recovering from a, quote, easy walk, according to the guidebook, that I decided that the second day where I was going to do some more easy walks, I would stay home. So I took a gondola at the top of a hill of a mountain and looked around and enjoyed it. Then in the afternoon, instead of taking a hike, I wrote an essay. And the way I wrote it was I narrated it into my...

A voice memo app on my phone for half an hour. I had a pretty good idea what I was going to say, but I rambled and it didn't go together particularly well. And then I had it. transcription of that on my phone, and I asked one of the LLMs to clean it up and format. I didn't have it write it.

I've done that, too. It's really good at that for work as a work product, a memo I need to write, and I don't care how creative it is. But it's really good at formatting and cleaning up, and then I had to spend another few hours. polishing it, and I only had my phone, so it took longer. It took a couple hours instead of maybe a half an hour. But it can't, it can write beautifully, but it can't write like me.

So I'm not interested, at least for now. And by the way, I asked it, I think, I don't know, six weeks ago, two months ago, I said, told someone I would never outsource my. questions for econ talk i always read the books i always prep for the guests that way but i did ask it i said well i'm going to interview tim ferris what should i ask him and of course i had to check some of the things so tim does xyz

And I thought, I wonder if it's true. And it came up with maybe, I don't know, 25 good questions on different topics I suggested might be worth talking to you about. And two or three of them were worth... editing to put into my list. Not only would I not want to have that skill atrophy, it's not that good at it. At least for now, it might get better. I would... Absolutely, and I actually plan to use the LLMs for formatting or bullet pointing, helping to structure.

writing in the same way that you described, because I don't write as much as I would like to write. Okay, so what are the rate-limiting steps? What's the failure mode? What are the failure points? And one of them is not shocking. to, I think, anyone who writes, is just facing the blank page. But if I can ramble, much like I used to just talk through what I wanted to write with a friend, and then a lot would become very clear,

Start with voice, I think, would allow me just to write more. So is using AI to write more... better than not using AI and not writing the pieces at all? Of course. Or I shouldn't say of course, but for me, the answer is of course. it's just going to permeate everything. It's going to become kind of invisible. It's going to be the engine behind so many things. I'm excited and terrified of it. People are probably sick of hearing about it. No, they're not.

Yeah. In Austin, they are. Trust me. In the rest of the world, it's like, I've heard, I asked, I was at a meal the other day, and I asked somebody, I asked the group, you guys use that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, how often, these are people roughly my age, say 60 and up, 60 to 80. Do you use, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, how often? Oh, I don't know. I've used it a couple times. But I'm like you, I use it.

10 times a day, it's like, you're not using it. Yeah, I mean, we're going to see probably single person, single owner. billion-dollar businesses within the next few years that employ AI agents as they would employ someone they might otherwise hire as a CFO or something like that.

I would not be surprised if that's the case. I really wouldn't. Based on what I've seen doing some travel overseas and spending time, for instance, in the UAE, who is very, very, very aggressive on the AI front and what they've already done. at a governmental level. I mean, it's shocking what they are capable of doing. It's like looking into the future. And we're not even getting started yet. It's exciting. Let's shift gears. Let's talk about podcasting.

I know you've only done a mere 800. How do you prep? And do you have explicit goals? If so, what are they? Or just let the conversation go where it's going to go? Well, for me, I try to deliver on the basic premise of the show, which is deconstructing world-class performers to give you Tools, routines, habits, frameworks, technology that you can use. So that's the fundamental promise and premise of the show. So I try to deliver on that. What that means is...

There's a risk of some of these conversations, because of my own personal interest, becoming a little self-indulgent. If I want to talk to someone, as has happened, about panpsychism, it's like, okay. I can talk to one of the most cited genius speakers and professors who is a proponent of this theory of panpsychism.

But at the end of that two-hour conversation, and I do this all. So we talked about the calling of the audience and so on. So occasionally I'll do something like that, which is just purely self-interest and self-indulgent. What I try to find is the Venn diagram of things that are very personally... interesting to me. Whether I have a challenge, a problem, like right now my heart rate variability, I mentioned measuring that with two different devices in the morning, is continually low.

And we could get into heart rate variability and why that's important. But generally, for health and performance and so on, higher HRV is better. That's the very kind of simple way to put it. Higher HR or higher HRV? Higher variability? HRV. Higher rate? Higher variability. Meaning?

I'll let people look it up. It's basically the variability of... There are different ways to measure heart rate variability, but when you wear... any number of different wearable devices that are tracking biometrics oftentimes they'll give you a recovery score and they might say hey hey take it easy tiger your recovery score is really low don't do a lot of intense exercise today

Or the next day, hey, your recovery score is really high. Go for it. Go crazy. Hit the gym. A lot of that is based on heart rate variability. And the reason I'm bringing that up is that this is something that is very... present for me. And this feeds into, so that's the reason for, say, seeking someone out I can talk to about HRV or specifically what...

interventions you can use to affect HRV. And then that led me to look at any number of things. And I found credible scientist who is very well cited, who's got all the bona fides, because there's a lot of nonsense floating around out there, as you're aware. All right, so there's the reason, there's the person. Okay, now what's the prep? I listen to multiple interviews with this person. He's not overly saturated, but he does have a few long-form interviews. I listen to those.

I am about 70% of the way through a book that he wrote, which has a bunch of references that I've also dug into. And because this is... hopefully, personally valuable to me. I've also gone into PubMed and I've gone through the literature and I've reached out to friends of mine who are biotech investors to ask them about different devices. I've really done a ton.

of homework on this. And before I interview this person, I'm going to test a few different things that I'm hoping will affect HRV. I just haven't measured mine in a long time, so I'm establishing basically... a seven-day baseline before I start adding any interventions as variables. So that would be a very, very current example. And the research can take a long time.

What does that mean? Like in this case, it's going to be a week or two of prep. I can't do that for every interview, nor do I need to. So in some cases, it might be... someone I know really well on a subject I know really well. Then the question is, how do I pull out actionable details or

advice that listeners can use, that they can use, ideally test in the next 48 hours or week. And that's it. I'd say that's the way it goes. In some instances, for instance, I find it easier to interview specialists who are not large public figures if I'm interviewing someone who's an A-list celebrity. I remember the first time I... interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jamie Foxx. They've been interviewed so many hundreds of times.

I did a head-spinning amount of research because I wanted them to know that I had done my homework and I wanted to come to them from an angle that they would find interesting that would put them on notice. this wasn't going to be an autopilot interview and hopefully would make them game.

to play ball, right? Because there are a lot of guests who can be great. They can be great. But if they're like, oh God, this is just going to be the same 10 questions I always get. Of course, understandably, just as I would, they're going to go on autopilot. Yeah. So I never, interestingly, I never listen to an interview with a guest that's already been done. I always want to be fresh. I don't want to have any of that. I don't know if that's good or bad.

difference between us. I can tell you why I do it. Yeah, tell me. So, there are times... What you just said is part of it. You don't want to just mimic the obvious things that... That's part of it. Because it affects their behavior. Yeah. The other part of it, and sometimes I will ask them in advice, and I really enjoyed your pre-recording boot-up sequence.

flight safety instructions before we got started because I learned something new. You're like, if I'm leaning back, that means let it rip. And if I start to lean forward, that means make some space, I'll have an interjection. I'm like, that's so smart. It's a silent cue.

And I might not be doing a great job of dancing with that because I'm not always looking at the screen. My eyes wander around. But I was like, oh, I could definitely steal that. I could definitely borrow that. Part of the reason, I'll give you one that I often will ask. but sometimes I'll already have the answer from having listened to one or two interviews. And that is, what are some of your greatest hits? Meaning, stories? If you had a TED Talk...

What are the stories that you've told that you know stick or get a response from an audience or resonate really deeply? What are stories that you've heard told back to you? And let's just start with one or two of those. I don't always do that, but I'll frequently do that, and it's for two reasons. One, for sure, you would expect it will help hook an audience and get them to sit down and...

My objective is commit to a long-form conversation, despite all of the drive to short form. The second is to boost the confidence of the guest and allow them to hit their stride.

comfortably without stumbling out of the blocks. So that's the other reason. So you interviewed me three years ago about my book, Wild Problems. And I did go back and look at some of that before we... Did this. And I was stunned because I'd forgotten it, how you opened that interview. So here we are talking about a new book, standard thing. Tell us about your book. Why did you call it Wild Problems? What is a wild problem? And your opening question was.

about an essay I'd written for my father's eulogy when my father passed away. And it's a very – you could argue it's interesting to some people, but the more – important fact you're highlighting now is that it changed our interaction. It put me at ease because I'm talking about something that's, you know, deeply happens to be put me is a deeply personal thing that I could talk about for years.

So I'm not like stumbling. But that's a great trick. The greatest hits part. I was going to ask you later something like that. We may get to it. And I want to digress for a second away from podcasting. We'll come back to it. But I want to ask you, when you went through that list of the heart rate variability expert and the things you're going to do. So my inner Tim Ferriss.

finds that extremely exciting. You know, the idea that, more generally, that I could drink a certain kind of tea, and I'm not aware of it, but I could discover it, either through research or through talking to you. And change my mood and be a better colleague, a better husband, or that cold plunge. Those kind of things, I'm a sucker for that, okay?

But I also know I'm a sucker for it. And my inner something else, I don't know who it is, not you, is much more skeptical of, as you alluded to, and there was a little phrase you used. I'm much more skeptical of the effectiveness of many of those things. Sure. Me too. And yet, and yet, I think.

A phrase, a word that would describe your approach to life, perhaps fairly, perhaps unfairly, is the word optimizer. You're always looking for... an edge, not a competitive edge, but an edge in life, an edge, a piece of information, a habit, a supplement that will make you more effective.

And is that fair? How do you feel about that? Yeah, I would say it's fair in certain areas. And I would say I over-applied optimizing, let's just say 20 years ago. But that I've become much more surgical with where I apply it. Because I don't think life... Our short experience on this planet is meant to be endlessly optimized. You can end up with trade-offs that make it a losing trade.

And we could discuss what I mean by that. I do think there can be an optimizer's curse of sorts, and there are various species of that. So, for instance, right now with something that... let's just say HRV, if we take that as foundational on a pyramid with, I guess I'm going to be mixing metaphors here, but sort of an upstream effect on a lot of other things, in this case, thinking of the pyramid.

That's of interest to me, because if there is a simple intervention with very limited downsides, there are constraints. that I apply to these interventions, especially if I'm going to be discussing them publicly on something like a podcast. Limited known downside. So there's a cap on the downside. There's a relatively fast feedback loop, so you can determine with some type of tracking whether it's having an effect or not. And yes, N of 1, no placebo control, yada yada. I get it.

some literature support, ideally, then that's of interest. But am I going to speed read poetry? For instance, I mean, I would say 30 years ago, did I read much poetry? No. Now I read a lot more poetry. And I read a lot more fiction. And there are books I don't want to end. I will read them more slowly. I will read fewer and fewer pages each night because I don't want that book to end.

And there are a few different risks of, I would say, optimizing. And people talk about life hacking, body hacking, biohacking, this hacking, that hacking. If you're trying to optimize everything, you can't be an expert in every domain, so you're going to end up playing the sucker in some of those areas if you're borrowing conviction and throwing a lot of interventions into the soup at once.

So for me, I'm actually probably going to write a blog post about this, but how do you think about testing different interventions as an end of one, as a human? as a guinea pig who's interested in results, first and foremost, not trying to model an RCT.

a randomized controlled trial, even though those are important. But the truth is, and this is why I get very frustrated sometimes with scientists who are like, I don't believe anything but the data. And we can't know this, therefore we need to wait for... large-scale randomized controlled trials. And it's like, well, as somebody who funds science, and I know that you know that I know that you know.

that that study is going to cost at least a million dollars to run and nobody's going to fund it right so in the meantime if people are suffering You can say that on a podcast, but I'm like, Mr. Scientist or Mrs. Scientist, let me ask you, if that were your seven-year-old son, what would you do? You wouldn't wait for an RCT. So how would you actually... navigate that maze. The other optimizer's curse is that, and I've suffered from this and I think it's

If you take, for instance, some of the advice in the four-hour workweek and you take it to an extreme, you can end up in this position. The more highly you value your time... And the more that you view little time commitments slash interruptions that are panty pinches along the way as wasting your time, the more frustrated you can feel. for a higher percentage of your day or week. If that makes sense. Because if you're like, well, my time is worth $200 an hour, I'm just making that up.

I got this call I didn't want to get or I had to deal with some family drama or whatever it is. And that was 45 minutes. You start putting together this. mental ledger of how much these problems or inconveniences are burning your time. And it can really affect your quality of life, where ostensibly...

And this applies to making money, too, or making investments also. It's like, well, wait a second. If you're making an investment, if you ask why a few times, fundamentally, it's to improve the quality of life for you. and maybe your family, if it makes you a stress case, it's not a good investment. It doesn't really matter what the financial ROI is. If it makes you a continual stress case, you're sort of defeating the point.

And similarly, it's if you're optimizing, but through that optimizing, you make yourself less patient, more anxious, more reactive. I guess, missing the point. And I've ended up doing that in the past. So I try to keep a close eye on that and deliberately, quote unquote, waste time to force myself to chill. Pardon my French, but it's just like, relax. We're all going to die. We're monkeys spinning on a rock in the middle of space. It doesn't matter that much.

Let's do some cosmic insignificance therapy and just breathe a little bit. If you have to sit at the post office for an extra five minutes, who cares, right? We ask a hundred people what the full name of Alexander the Great is. No idea. So the idea that you're going to build this tremendous legacy and an extra five minutes on the phone with your mom is going to disrupt your legacy, it's just patently ridiculous. Well, we'll come back to that.

I think it was ChatGPT said that you were the Oprah of audio. I did not want to fact check that. You don't see the resemblance? But I want to give you a better compliment, much better. Oprah's a very talented woman, but I think you can do better. I think Tim Ferriss is the Montaigne of 2025. Thank you. used himself, his N of 1, to explore the human condition. And that's kind of your model. Thank you. That is a huge compliment. Thank you very much.

Let me come back to podcasting for a sec. One of the things that I am grateful for, besides the gratifying emails and... we talked about earlier, which I am very grateful for, by the way. I can't tell listeners how much they do make me happy for, I wish it was for a longer period of time, but they are really wonderful when people tell me what impact I've had, because we don't know.

It's one of the stranger things. Not only did they not know – did we not know them at all, and they've heard us for hundreds and hundreds of hours. But we – We just don't know what the impact is. Some people are listening every week, but what are they getting out of it? We don't know. So it's nice to hear. So please keep those cards and lenders coming, folks. But the other thing I'm grateful for is...

You know, my intellectual life is astoundingly better from being able to ask dumb questions to smart people every week, to read their books, to grapple with their ideas. to engage them in conversation is an incredible privilege. And, you know, when I was younger, I think I've said this maybe once before in the program, the idea that people would send me books for free would have been, I would have been...

ecstatic beyond imagining because they were the most important thing in the world to me. And that someone would send them to me for free and I could talk to them, the author, and they'd be asking me is such an extraordinary. But my intellectual life, the journey I've taken intellectually is – I'm so grateful for it, and it's changed my thinking in so many ways. So I'm curious for you.

the veteran of hundreds, 800-plus episodes, how would you say, what difference has that made in your life? It made me a better conversationalist, by the way. It's a glorious thing. That's actually a small thing compared to the rest. How about you? What has that opportunity to talk to those folks done for you intellectually? Well, it's helped me to remove... a lot of verbal tics because I listened to early episodes and they drove me absolutely insane.

So I brought my OCD to bear on trying to fix verbal tics, not just in post-production. Also, for sure, conversationally, I feel more fluid, more capable of asking, not just asking questions, but like you said, asking the dumb questions, asking the basic questions that are sometimes... the key to unlocking a different level of exploration around a topic. Yeah, it's the best.

Even among, if I were sitting at a table, I'm making, well, I guess I've done this, I'm not making it up totally, but you might have a table of eight or nine experts in a field and you ask the dumb question. the one that you're a little hesitant, embarrassed to ask, and it ends up opening, or I should say highlighting, this deep, unanswered question in the field.

that has been tabled, let's just say, because it's too challenging to kind of grapple with, like the hard problem of consciousness or something. I mean, that's an exaggerated mega example. That's a lot of fun. So playing the idiot, being the conversational court jester, in a sense, I've come to really, really, really enjoy. Now that I've had 800 at-bats, I've realized how often, not always, but how often it leads to something really interesting. Separately, I've just become more curious.

And as I've done more episodes and broadened the scope, and I feel very lucky. I don't know if you feel the same way, but I mean, you were... Early, early, early, early. I came in well after you, but 2014, I feel so lucky that I started when I did. Because at the time, interviewing world-class performers to deconstruct and tease out their routines and habits, etc., was new. If I were to start that now, it would not be new. There are 5 million of those shows on YouTube alone.

But what that allowed me is a broad enough canvas where I can really go into some strange corners and arcane subject matter. and interview those people, so my breadth of interest has expanded. I love it. I love it. I've done it for a long time, as have you. And every once in a while, I'm like, ah, this podcasting game and these young kids with their video. I'm sick of it. But the truth is...

I have these conversations anyway, right? And I already had a short conversation with the scientist I'm going to be interviewing. And I was like, we talked for a half hour, and I was like, why am I doing this? I'm like, I should just be recording this. And I was like, okay, okay, okay, pause, pause, pause. Let's keep it fresh. We'll talk next time. I figure it's so easy, technically, to record these days. There's no reason to stop doing it. And I feel very fortunate that I started when I did.

Yeah, I started in 2006, and I don't have the focus that you have, which is probably a blessing and a curse for you. And for me, again, also, it's a blessing and curse I don't have it on a particular kind of style. And I always hope my listeners learn something, but I especially like it when I learn something. And it's not a fact. It's not a claim. What I learn is I see something that connects what the guest is talking about to something else. And that's just so wonderful.

For people who haven't listened to your show, what would be three or four episodes that you're most proud of? The standard question would be the capture that the show's about. I don't care about that. What are the three or four that you were...

I mean, I hope you have 30, or 300, but what are a few that you think were especially interesting? So I will answer that. Before I forget, I want to offer a tool for people related to one of your earlier questions or observations, which is part of you. The inner Tim Ferriss is very interested in these things, these interventions.

And then the other part of you is very skeptical of these things, as you should be. And I just want to say briefly, the scientific method is great. It's not perfect. There are weaknesses, but it is the best.

framework so far that we seem to have come up with for not fooling ourselves. So when you're considering all these different things, when your inner Tim Ferriss is excited about like, oh my God, there are these 20 things I could try. How do you not fool yourself? There's actually one... AI based tool. And I'm sure there are many more that's pretty useful to play with called consensus.app. And consensus.app looks at scientific literature. So you can drop into the search field.

what is the evidence for or against X doing Y? And then just let it rip. And it will go through the studies, the meta-analyses, and it will give you a relative ranking. on effect, no effect, or it does X or it doesn't do X. So it's imperfect. Obviously, your mileage may vary. Do your homework. But for people who are... not going to be really digging into the scientific literature, but they want to do a 60-second check to make sure they're not going down a complete dead end, it's pretty helpful.

So there's that. On the episodes, I would say that I'll give a few for different reasons. The one episode that I would say I've revisited my own mind the most. that did not get as much attention as I would like, that I feel very proud of, was an early, early interview with a hospice care physician named BJ Miller. And BJ Miller has helped thousands of people to transition to death in non-hospital settings. He also went to Princeton after I did.

He also went to Princeton a few years before I did and was a warning to all incoming students because he had climbed up on this. commuter train very late at night, this one car train that would take students from Princeton to Princeton Junction. He had a watch on. the electricity arced, and he burned off three of his limbs. So he's a triple amputee, very handsome, very charming, incredibly smart, who's... He's witnessed the last chapters for so many people and facilitated that.

The conversation, I think, is really profound on a lot of levels. And it's one of those conversations where he'd say something that seems kind of funny and flippant, maybe. It was a joke, and it pops back into your head two weeks later, and you're like, oh my god, wait a second. There are actually a lot of layers to that.

Sort of like some of these off-the-cuff comments that the Dalai Lama Mike make, and you're like, oh, that's a funny response. And then a week later, you're like, wait a second. He's really got a lot to offer. That made me think about life and death and living very differently, especially the social components, the human-to-human interactive components. So BJ Miller, I would really recommend. Then I would say from just a pure entertainment, oh my God, how can someone be this full stack talented?

Jamie Foxx and his life story is just incredible. That was an interview that was a giant get for me at the time because it really was before A-listers did podcasts. podcasts were still kind of the backwater and radio and TV were the real media. did whatever it was, two hours with Jamie in his recording studio at his house. So he was able to hop on the piano and do impersonations. My God, what a talented human. So I would say for pure entertainment and just watching.

a performance unfold, Jamie Foxx or Hugh Jackman. It would be one of those two. Then I would say, let me come up with another one. Man, there's so many. It's a paradox of choice problem when you have as many as you or I do, you especially. But for me, let's see. I would say maybe the first, and I mentioned this one just because it really was, I think.

And I'm not pointing to my podcast as the catalyst of this, but a turning of the tide with respect to national and international conversations around and even regulation of and scientific funding of psychedelic-assisted therapies for very... Various types of primarily mental health conditions. But maybe my first conversation with Michael Pollan, the author.

around his book, How to Change Your Mind. I think it's still a very good overview of that subject matter and a lot of what Sisei Foundation has done, which is this tiny foundation you mentioned that I started quite a long time ago. Saisei Foundation, Saisei means rebirth in Japanese. I lived in Japan for a while. And a lot of the early...

science that SciSea focused on was psychedelic-assisted therapies and creating some of the first dedicated centers at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins and so on. Later, looking at things like brain stimulation and other types of tools.

But I would say those are a few that come to mind. I'm sure as soon as we stop recording, I'm going to go, oh, God, I should have mentioned A, B, or C. But I'll go with those for now. That's cool. I also interviewed Michael Pollan on that book. It's a really interesting book. And you have put your money where his mouth is, which is really fascinating. It's a fascinating thing. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out. You know, it's a lot of potential and unknown.

And definitely not a panacea. I would tell people, measure twice and cut once. You're playing with nuclear power from a psychological and psychiatric perspective, so use wisely. Don't find your shaman on Craigslist or Facebook. Work with proper clinicians. Good advice, good advice.

I want to ask you this, it's off the subject, I don't want to change gears, but we're talking about intellectual growth and we alluded to optimizing. Do you think you're more disciplined than you were 10 years ago or less disciplined? Less disciplined. Why? I would say less. Does it bother you? No, I don't think it bothers me, no. By disciplined, I would say what I mean by that is 10 years ago, I thought of...

self-control and discipline as virtues, and maybe they are, but I was much more regimented. And I relied on this highly variable factor. which is willpower. And I think that's a fool's errand for most things. I think you need systems. I think you need time blocking and routines in your calendars so that you do not give yourself the opportunity to falter when you haven't had enough sleep, when you haven't had enough caffeine.

I really think that systems be goals, which is not to say there is no place for willpower. I just think much like perhaps, at least in the U.S., Protestant work ethic gets emphasized, or something akin to that is so highly lauded that you can begin to put a lot of effort into things that do not matter in the first place. And similarly,

That's doing maybe things that should be easier, more targeted in a very difficult way. And similarly, I think you could say the same for willpower. And I still do hard things, don't get me wrong. I still have my favorite forms of suffering. Fasting, exercise, cold plunge. I still do that stuff. I try to let the systems do the work when I can. And setting incentives properly, deadlines, blah, blah, blah, getting people involved so that what I need to do, I do automatically.

So that's how I would say I'm less disciplined. And I also just don't take myself as seriously as I did 10 years ago. Because I said this before. but it's just kind of ridiculous. The more history you read, the more you look at the macro timeline of humanity and any type of... sort of astronomical level, you're looking at timelines. It's just really silly to take yourself too, too seriously. Now, you have to have some maybe

expected human level of hubris to actually get work done. You have to find meaning or think something is meaningful, even if it's a trick. That's fine. You do need to do that so you're not just like, oh, what's the point? We're all ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Why lift my finger? Why tap these little monkey hands on this keyboard? You have to find meaning and purpose in something, which I get.

But I take myself much, much less seriously than I used to. It's exhausting taking yourself seriously. Now, this idea of systems versus goals and willpower, I mean, I think the way I would... Describe what you're saying is you need to have the willpower to impose the system on yourself rather than hoping you'll just do the right thing.

Do a short, intense sprint that is front-loading the effort to create the system, as opposed to making yourself susceptible to the ups and downs of state, which will always be there. by relying on the intermittent feeding of yourself with willpower. Front-load it. Front-load it and create the systems. And how'd you come to that insight? I think you're right. And I'm 70. I'm older than you. I just figured this out about a month ago because I saw somebody write something like that.

That's a good point. Yeah. Rather than say, why don't I not use my phone that much? Maybe I should put it in the other room. Just kind of a trivial example of this. Yeah. How did you come to that? experience or somebody told you and you thought, hey, that makes sense? I would say that a lot of it comes from competitive sports. If you look at any... Any athletes or coaches who are consistently winning, doing well, they will follow this to a T, for sure.

And there's some adapting, of course, depending on recovery ability, etc. But there are plans, you execute a plan, and that's it. And certainly, if people get injured and so on, you have to make accommodations and adapt. But when I was starting my own business and reading all these business books, and for better and for worse...

A lot of the process-focused books, at least at the time that I read, had manufacturing examples. It's like, okay, well, if you're looking at the Toyota Way or you're looking at any of these things... Process, process, process. System, system, system. And then when I was writing the four-hour workweek and looking at how different people have implemented Pareto's...

Pareto's law or the 80-20 principle and looking at somewhat satirical but also actually surprisingly practical things like Parkinson's law. It's like, okay, as you add all these things together, It just seems more and more that systems, systems, systems are the, in a way, a big investment in the beginning that make everything else less energetically, financially, emotionally expensive over time. And I think I also just have a personality that likes to try.

Yeah, exactly. That strives for anything that can be said and forget it. Anything that can be said and forget it, I'm going to prefer. Look, you're like, oh, I forgot to meet with my therapist. Oh, you know, I should really reach out. It's like, why don't you just prepay so that you have the proper sunk cost? Use sunk cost to your advantage. Prepay, standing meeting every Thursday. You miss it, you pay for it.

But problem solved. When I was a little boy, I think I was probably 10. My parents had friends. We were living in Lexington, Massachusetts, and we had friends. I don't even know where they lived. They probably lived in some place like Gloucester. To my mind, it was a very long ride, and we drove.

You know, 40 minutes to an hour to get to these folks. And they lived in a house that I would have to sit in for three hours. And they were old. I think they were probably 60 or 70. They seemed to be about. And I hated it. I just dreaded going. And we'd go there, and we'd eat a meal. They were very nice people, by the way, and they had befriended her. I think their kids had befriended my parents when we were living in Iowa, where my dad was getting his master's degree.

The husband of this couple, this elderly couple, had a rule. And the rule was he only had one plate of food. Now, I just want to say. When I was in Venice, I took a picture of someone who was having... one beer. It was the largest beer stein I've ever seen. It was probably 48 ounces. And I thought, you know, my dad used to joke sometimes, I'd say, Dad, how many beers did he have? He'd say one. And I'm thinking, how big was the glass, Dad?

And so when you say you're only going to have one plate, there is a certain ambiguity about it. But he would only have one plate of food, meaning he would not take seconds. And as a 10-year-old, and even as a beginning... my early interest in rationality, I thought, this man is a moron. I mean, why would you have a rule that constrictive? I mean, restrictive. It's absurd. He's a fool.

Now I look back and I think he's a genius. I'm thinking of that. I mean, that rule, other than the embarrassment of how high I would have to pile the food if I implemented that rule, which is one of the problems with systems, there's certain legal. way, I think he was a very wise man. Yeah. I know the feeling. I'm looking back at me like, oh my God, that idiot was a genius. Yeah. Okay.

I'll throw this out there for people who might be interested. Just one of the, at least initially, what I thought was strangest patterns that I've observed among A lot of the highest performing, let's just say 50 plus males, I've not seen this in women for whatever reason, on my podcast after 800 of these things, is... Skipping breakfast. A lot of them skip breakfast. And I have, yeah, there you go. And I've also just in the last, because my family has a lot of...

metabolic syndrome and diabetes and cardiac issues, or cardiovascular issues, which are pretty interrelated. So I've been only for the last month. doing 16-8 intermittent fasting, so eating within an eight-hour window, so typically like 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., let's just say. And my lab work, and this is not limited to me. There's some pretty good data on this.

but is the most immaculate it has ever been. Even after or just after four weeks of doing this, my oral glucose tolerance test and my stability. looking at glucose metabolism, so on, insulin sensitivity, I suppose. Fascinating. So interesting. So now, I just turned 48, and I'm like, you know what? I think it's time to skip breakfast, at least for a while.

You might wait till you turn 50. But I'll tell you on the breakfast thing, as soon as someone tells me it's the most important meal of the day, that's just reason number two not to eat it. There's nothing that bothers me more than that attempt to browbeat me with an empty scientific fact that's not true. What would the evidence for that be? Other than people who grow eggs. There's so many of those. Drink eight cups of water a day. Eight glasses a day, 10,000 steps.

Where is that from? And some of these are just like, okay, they're helpful because they get you to stay hydrated. But some of the stuff you hear, like you only use 10% of your brain, there's no evidence for that. Zero. Why would you be so evolutionarily? incompetent to have just this empty luggage that you're dragging around. That's not true. The 10,000 steps a day thing is a total fraud. There's nothing to it. However...

I am extremely excited. I have fooled myself, and I pretend that it's important, and I think it's good for me. That's my process trick. Oh, for sure. Try to take 10,000 steps today, even though I know it is scientifically meaningless, because otherwise I take none.

Or maybe 12 back and forth to the fridge. I have to imagine movement is meaningful. I think so. I'm good with that. Now, shifting gears again, you have a new project. Which is surprising when I heard about it. It's a game. It's called Coyote. Yeah. Why did you do this? And what kind of a game is it? I have tried it. I have tried it because I wanted to prep for the interview. But I want to hear from you. What's the idea of it? And why is Tim Ferriss producing this kind of game?

Every few years, there are a number of reasons for it. So every few years I like to try a project. I tend to view my life in terms of six to 12 month projects that is completely off menu. So after the first book. Angel investing was that for a while, and that ended up sticking. And then after the third book, which just about killed me, I decided podcasting. I'll do 10 episodes, see what happens. That was the experiment.

That became a thing. That stuck. And I used to use the blog for this, but I used the podcast to also dip my toe into different worlds. to see, is this energy in or energy out? Does this get me excited? What are these people like? Oh, interesting. This person's actually very, very, very fascinating, very soulful, and I think I could be friends with them. And one such person was Alon Lee of Exploding Kittens. I had him on the podcast. He's created a...

the dozens of mega hit games. He worked on the first Xbox and Halo and stuff, but he's also invented whole genres of gaming. Amazing guy. And his team at Exploding Kittens is just incredible. And the name of the company is... referring to their still hit game exploding kittens which at one point i think was the largest kickstarter of all time mega mega successful and

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention as a subject area, first, I grew up playing games, still have all my original Dungeons & Dragons stuff, literally downstairs from where I'm sitting. And games were really, really meaningful to me. when I was a little runt kid nerd because I didn't feel safe on the playground. And the way I developed social skills deep in my friendships was with games.

Part of the reason for the timing for me with making a game, I've always wanted to do it, but if you look at the anxious generation, Jonathan Haidt type of stuff, if you look at recent articles from The Atlantic looking at... social interactions and planned social outings. I think the rough approximation was one in every 25.

households have some type of in-person social gathering planned any given weekend in the United States, and the decline is precipitous if you look at, say, the last 10 to 15 years. If I look at the digital malaise and chronic anxiety in my audience, which I can, it's very palpable and included and also nihilism over time. I feel like screen time and digital.

can be so compelling and so useful, but the dose makes the poison. And that a lot of these issues are directly related to too much screen time, fixating at something that's 18 inches away from your face. all day long. Very little real in-person analog social interaction. So I want to create a fast game that's fun, entertaining, makes the players entertaining.

Hopefully hilarious. I have seen enough footage that I think it can be very hilarious. We playtested the hell out of this thing. And it's 10 minutes. It's something that is a light lift for people getting their foot back in the door. for in-person social interaction that is analog. And that's not me being a Luddite. I am heavily involved with tech. I am still...

angel investing and advising startups. I'm really involved with this stuff. And I think that for that reason, I, in a sense, much like people who work at these companies have been canaries in the coal mine. I'm like, look, guys, problems are coming. And they're going to be big. They're going to be very serious. And you need to offset that some way. So also as someone who has just been involved with mental health therapeutics for so long, I'm like, sure.

You can take drugs, sure. You can use something like accelerated TMS, which is a type of brain stimulation, sure. There are all these other tools, but maybe part of the answer is a lot simpler.

It's just like, do what we're evolved to do. Spend time with people. And I think games are a great way to do that. So that's why Coyote is everywhere now. We'll talk about the game itself in a second. I tested it with my staff to prep for this, doing my homework. But I'm curious about the actual process. Sure. How did that work? Did you... How much was brainstorming? How much was a...

prototype that you rejected. I'm just curious about how that process worked. And then you can tell me if you think this is going to be like podcasting. Are you going to do more or are you going to... It's just a one-off. Yeah. Okay, so let me start with the beginning of that question. Game development. I choose my projects also based on how much I'm going to learn.

what types of skills I'm going to develop, and the relationships I'm going to develop. With the assumption that even if any project fails, if those things can snowball over time and transfer to other areas, that is intrinsically really valuable. And that's worked out so far. So I continue to do things that way. So part of this was learning about game development and mass retail and all these other things. This took about two years. And the vast majority of that was...

playtesting prototypes, trying to come up with concepts, and rejecting a lot of things. Playing tons of games, doing two- to three-day sprints where we're playing games all day long, prototyping different things. Because I am not hiding behind a company name, much like if Simon & Schuster puts out X number of books per year, well...

The people, let's just say the head of publicity within an imprint at Simon & Schuster, their personal reputation is not on the line with their name on the front of the book for all of those books. But if you're the author... It matters a lot. You're going to have to live with that book forever. So for me, to put my name on something, I felt like I had to be excited.

to stand by this thing and talk about it and to live with it for a very long time. So to get to a game concept, the kernel of an idea or a game mechanic that... i felt like i could really double and triple down on that took at least a year uh which is i would say Not that crazy. Some people figure out games quickly, but some games, you look at like Settlers of Catan or any of these, they could take a really long time to figure out. And then from that point...

I remember we were in Toronto. I was walking around with Alon Lee and Ken, who's a spectacular game designer, drinking tons of coffee in the sun, just spitballing ideas, ideas, ideas. I threw out one idea, which was basically like a rock, paper, scissors on steroids that you can play as a group. What might that look like?

because I want to expand the question of what games have I liked, what games have they liked, or I should say tabletop games, to expand it to what types of games of any type have you enjoyed. We started playing with that, and within, I would say, an hour, we had headed back to this Airbnb where we had a kitchen table and decks of blank cards, and we just...

unpacked these markers and started making cards and playing the game as we thought of it in our initial conception. Didn't work, but there was this tiny seed of something. So tossed a bunch of cards, scratched out a bunch of other ones. And literally just prototyped the very, very, very basic way this could work in a couple of hours of sitting at the table with blank decks of cards and markers.

I could go step by step, but there's a lot of playtesting. Just figuring out the deck composition, this card deck has 66 cards. Ten of them are blank, because I want to invite everybody to become a game designer, which is shockingly easy if you do it within the context of Coyote and a couple of blank cards.

Just winnowing down the 300 different card options to the right ratios and the right number of cards so that you would have a... let's just call it a balanced deck, where statistically certain cards show up with certain predictability. is shockingly complicated. It is shockingly complicated. So to create a simple game can be just as hard, if not harder, than coming up with very sophisticated, they are sophisticated, complex games.

Yeah, it's been a hell of a journey. And then also figuring out how do you put this thing at mass retail, learning to navigate the targets of Walmarts of the world. It's its own education. Yeah, I think... I think it's going to do okay. It's very inexpensive, which is interesting. I was surprised at how inexpensive it is.

Yeah, $9.99. It's $12.99 on Amazon. Which includes shipping. Yeah. If you have Prime. So give us a rough idea of what the game is. Yeah. So yeah, I think the game is going to do well. I mean, it has 300 million plus social views of gameplay so far. So I do think it's going to do well. People are enjoying it. But the way the game works is you have...

stick a cards, sit around a table, and we can talk about this also, but it's like age 10 or up, I think younger kids can play it too. Three to eight players, let's say. And the backbone of the game is these action cards. So you deal out these cards or pictures of salamanders making these various gestures with a word. So you might have someone holding up.

index finger at their nose and mustache. That's the word that you would say. Or you might have something like moose, where you're putting your hands on either side of your head and making yourself look like a moose, and you say moose. And the simplest form of the game is as these cards are put out in a lineup, you go around clockwise and each person performs one of these gestures and they say the word at the same time. And you're keeping a rhythm like I will.

We Will Rock You from Queen. Boom, boom, moose. Boom, boom, mustache. Boom, boom, whatever. So far, so boring. Okay, fine. And some of the gestures are more... more entertaining than others. Yes, they are. So you might have to lean and make a fart noise or something like that, which... I got to tell you, cheap applause. It always works. I mentioned to my staff we would take that card out, but there was a revolt. We had to keep the card in.

There were also cards that I had to remove, much to my protest. Tim, this is a G-rated program, so just be careful. Yeah, exactly. So there were cards I had to remove. I didn't think there were that... controversial, but if you want to have them at mass retail, certain rules must be followed. So you get it. You're going around keeping a rhythm. Everybody has to keep the beat. They have to do the gesture and say the word at the same time.

Then you have these coyote cards, so named because of trickster mythology and the associations that coyote has in a lot of different cultures. Spider and others, or Raven. I mean, Loki, they're different trickster gods in many, many different mythologies. Coyote happens to be sort of a very North American. It's a very American thing. Just a fascinating animal, too. So anyway, you have these coyote cards and attack cards. The coyote cards you can play, which modify the game in some bizarre way.

So you might have to skip a player. You might have to beat the table three times instead of two. You might have to duplicate a card. It all makes it harder, which is why the Trojan horse on this game is I wanted to create something that was a great workout for your brain.

And I may actually try to run a scientific study on this game at some point in the not-too-distant future. I've already talked to some researchers about it. But brain training. But you don't sell it that way. It's got to be just fun for the sake of being fun. So the coyote cards mix things up and make things harder.

Then the attack cards you can use to attack other players and make their game harder. The reason that's relevant is if you're playing competitively, each player gets three lives and the last person standing wins. That's it. So if you mess up, if you beat the wrong way, if you do the wrong card, if you say the wrong thing, if you take too long, you lose a life. And last person standing wins. That's it. It takes 10 minutes or something like that.

maybe less. And you're in control of how hard you make the game as the players. You can also play collaboratively, which just means it's all of the players. versus the game. So if you have someone who's a particularly sore loser, I'm thinking one of my friends who's a former Olympic competitor, so bad. Oh my God, he's so bad. He just gets so petulant and pouty. It's unbelievable. Then maybe you play cooperative. So immature to care who wins. I don't get that at all. Do you?

Do you get that? I don't get it. I'm very, very, very competitive. I mean, occasionally I let my wife win a word game we play together just because out of familial... well-being, but I really don't care. She says she doesn't care either, by the way, which is interesting. I heard this apocryphal story. I don't know if it's true, but I hope it's true, that Peter Thiel...

famous entrepreneur, investor, et cetera, who likes playing chess. And he was playing chess with someone, and he lost. And he just swiped all the pieces off the board. His opponent said, Peter, you're a really sore loser. And he says, show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser. I think it was Vince Lombardi who said, if it's... Not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. Why do you keep score? You know? I'm pretty competitive. Yeah, so the competitive version of the game...

is my favorite way of playing. There's a lot more smack talking and the attack cards are fun to play with. Now, this ties into the game development. Why do the attack cards exist? They didn't originally exist. The attack cards exist because in the process of having this game playtested with whatever it was, 100 plus families, and with friends, and my employees, I had everybody playtest this thing. We realized very quickly that there are certain people...

much like with any game, who are very, very, very good at this game. And mathematicians, musicians, slaughter people. And if the same person wins all the time, that is boring. At least for me, I don't want to play that game. And I wanted to make it a game. And this was actually one of the criteria from the very outset. That's closer to backgammon than chess.

It's not a game of complete information, or maybe poker, closer to poker than chess, where someone who is a new player or not as good still has the chance to win. They still have a chance to win. That's why we have the attack cards, so people can handicap the strongest players. So I want to just say, I played it with three of my staff to see how it would play. And I had seen...

Some of the videos online where people laughing and hooting it up and just getting goofy. And I thought, well, that's not going to happen to me. But it did. So I will tell you, Tim. We laughed a lot. And I also want to add that I let one of my colleagues win. rather than winning myself. Very generous. Yeah, it was just for staff morale. But the other piece of this that I think is kind of interesting...

as a work environment or a family experience. And we only played it once. So I think it would be even stronger if you played it many times. How many gestures are there in the game? They're probably, if I had to guess, I should know this, but it's probably around 15 or 20 because they're color-coded. Yeah, I'd say it's 20. 15 to 20 sounds right. And they're all...

Most of those gestures are standard. There's hello, and then there's jazz hands where you flick your hands in the air. What's interesting about it as a staff activity is that... you can then riff on it after the game's over. You can use some of those gestures with each other, and it's kind of sweet. So I'm not a big game player. It was not relaxing for me because...

Spoiler, I am competitive. And if I just said, ah, we'll see how it goes. So it is a brain. It is a brain workout. It's a little like rubbing your stomach and patting your head while whistling. And then balancing, probably keeping a soccer ball in the air as the game goes on. As it goes on. Yeah, so let's close. I want to close with...

Something you've sort of alluded to already, which is a number of times you've talked about yourself as a monkey or us as monkeys on a rock. When I went back and looked at the episode of your show where you interviewed me, yeah, I remember it was about my book, Wild Problems. And yet... The video of it was titled Journey to Transcendence. And in the course of that interview, besides talking about my father's death and his impact on me and what kind of a parent he was,

We talked about prayer. We talked about my Jewish practices. It was really a very wide-ranging and, not surprisingly, a very nice conversation. But I was surprised that's what you called it. You didn't call it wild problems. You didn't call it the decisions that define us, which is the subtitle of my book part of it. called it A Journey to Transcendence. And what I want to close with is, is there anything transcendent in your life? If you think of yourself as a monkey on a rock,

Not very transcendent. Do you have moments or ways that you tap into some sources of meaning, which, again, you pretended like it's like, you know, on Tuesdays, sometimes I... I'll run a little farther, faster. No, you said, yeah, of course, meaning you try to find something. Of course, there isn't any. The implication was, of course, there isn't any. Is there anything in your life?

practice habits that get you in touch with something more like transcendence instead of just being a monkey on a rock.

Sorry to pick on you there. Oh, no, I love it. So I would say short answer is yes, and I'll elaborate on that. I'm not convinced that monkeys aren't. somehow tuned into the 17th dimension, just like reading the source code of life. Who knows? We have no idea. So maybe they're just sitting there with the keys to the kingdom. But separately...

When I was talking about no one knowing the full name of Alexander the Great, which is, of course, there are some people who do it. Most people don't. One of the greatest conquerors the world has ever known. So the idea of legacy, I was within the context of legacy.

talking about taking oneself too seriously, I think perhaps what I was trying to emphasize there is the impermanence. Not necessarily the meaninglessness. For me, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how to architect awe and a feeling of transcendence into my life. Two weeks from now, I'm going to be at high altitude in Montana and Idaho doing wilderness survival training completely offline, no devices.

Immersive nature for me is one of the places where I feel I encounter those human experiences. And I think that... As squishy as this might sound, awe and a sense of wonder are deeply therapeutic to...

human mind body and, dare I say, soul in ways that we really can't currently begin to understand. You do see, certainly, In the literature related to, for instance, some of the earlier studies with principal investigator Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins and psilocybin as used with... patients with terminal cancer or major depressive disorder, the therapeutic effect and durability of the therapeutic effect seemingly directly correlated to how highly they rated.

themselves on the mystical experience questionnaire, which directly asks questions about meaningfulness, awe, wonder, et cetera, and not necessarily in those terms. So I do think about this a lot. I don't subscribe to any Abrahamic religion or anything like that, but I feel like the... The experience of transcendence, however you get that, whether it's playing the piano, walking down the street, looking at ducks in a pond, writing, is incredibly valuable.

certainly for myself. The more that I am... And I poke fun, and I talk about the monkeys spinning at a rock. I mean, in part because I think it's true, but... Separately, because the more I, I, I, me, me, me your story is, the thought loops are focused, the more miserable and anxious and unhappy. people tend to be. That's true for me, certainly. And the broader the vista is, the more diffuse, perhaps, my awareness. And the awareness of my awareness, the better everything is.

It just seems, at least personally. So I do spend a lot of time thinking about that. I hesitate to mention it because I think it's over-applied. and used in the wrong context, and you can do a lot of damage with psychedelics. But I will certainly mention that one of the defining characteristics for the...

stronger psychedelic experiences is almost always ineffability. And that, I do think, is often a gateway experience for people to realize just how powerfully That type of deepening can affect your psyche and your experience of reality and how you relate to yourself and others. Didn't expect to uncork all of that, but I really do think about transcendence in the context of transcending the self.

the experience of a skin-encapsulated ego as actor in an objective reality. I do think about that a lot. I guess that has been Tim Ferriss. Tim, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Thanks for having me. This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to econtalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette.

I'm your host Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.