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

over a billion downloads. If you're someone who wants to learn how to make better decisions, overcome fear, and design a life that actually works for you, you won't want to miss this. Please welcome to On Purpose. Tim Ferris. Let's dive in. There's so much to extrapolate today with you, and I wanted to start off by asking you, like,

what's a thought that reappears in your mind often today? Or what are you fascinated by today? That kind of steals your attention and gets you excited because you've done so many things, You've accomplished so many things, You're so active in so many ways. I wonder what fascinates you now.

or otherwise, what can you do now? Assuming a lot of these conditions take decades to fully develop, how can you intervene early. So that's a question that's occupying my mind. And have found I think some very very compelling options that are not new to me. But if you go through the scientific literature and you talk to people on the front lines, you do find some interesting options. So

we can talk about those. I would say bioelectric medicine, which ties into this in other words, microchips and electricity over pills. A lot of medications have off target effects. So you have a problem, or you want to prevent a problem, you take a drug. Very often it is not as specific as we would like. There are side effects. There's a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine that can be applied to a million different ways. We probably should talk

about it, but I'll give you an example. Here's a crazy example. There's a technology called TMS transcranial magnetic stimulation that has existed for decades and it's basically using a magnetic f field to affect brain activity. So they put a paddle close to your head. There are different ways to do it, might be a cap with a few other things, and you can either excite or inhibit different parts of the brain. Slightly more complicated, but let's just

assume that's the case. And a scientist Daan Nolan Williams out of Stanford along with others, developed something called the Saint protocol, which is an accelerated version. So instead of taking let's just say TMS treatments that you would do once or twice or three times a week over five months, they can press it all into one week, five days, and you're getting zapped ten times a day on the hour,

every hour each of those five days. And what they end up seeing in many instances, and there's good published, pure reviewed studies, people can look at seventy percent remission of treatments is in depression that is durable. You start to see impacts on things like OCD generalized anxiety disorder. But one thing that I experimented with recently, this is maybe four months ago, because I have diagnosed pretty severo CD, which I think can be a superpower but can also

be a super handicap. Also, just look at my family, who knows how much of it is nature versus nurture, but generalized anxiety disorder pretty high. And that can be a helpful monkey on the back for getting a lot done. But there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage. So I wanted to see if I could dial back both of those. Would I lose my edge or would I actually improve my edge? I just wouldn't be holding

onto the blade of the knife, right. And I went through this experimental protocol which is one day, so instead of taking a week off of work, one day where you preload and there's science behind this with something called decyclisarian. It's an antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis, among other things. Put in a lozenge in your mouth,

and then an hour later you start these stimulations. You do one day, three minute stimulations on the hour, and I have gone from basically like an eight or nine of tense severity with generalized anxiety to like a zero or a one for four or five months. Now you cannot that one day from that one day, it is incredible. Does it help? Does it hurt? The dose does matter? Right, you can overdo it, but this is a combination of pharmaceuticals to help with neuroplasticity and then brain stimulation. So

I've been looking very closely at bioelectric medicine. I think this is and if I try not to do it too much, but pat myself on the back a little bit, say look at the four our body. And then the subsequent ten fifteen years, a lot of that played out and ended up being very very highly reinforced by science. I'm placing a lot of my bets attentionally and then on the more philosophical side, but intensely practical. I don't think philosophy can be inert and kind of flaccid if

you choose the wrong approach. But ultimately, if you're trying to decide on values, you're not going to do a randomized control trial in them, right. You have to find your way. Fortunately, people have been attempting to do this for millennia, and I would say that in the last

few years especially. There's a great book called Already Free I think it is by Bruce Tift that discusses kind of two complimentary approaches, which are the let's just say, developmental achievement approaches that Western psychotherapy might take, or self help broadly, how do I improve myself? How do I change my circumstances. But then on the opposite side, a perhaps let's call it more Buddhist approach, although it's not unique to Buddhists or Buddhism alone, the acceptance peach, recognizing

what is, allowing what is. It's a balancing act to do both. But I've been so, I would say for decades most of my life focused on the achievement piece, and there's a lot to be said for it, a lot of upside. Paying also attention to the approaches the practices that cultivate the other side, because guess what, none of us have as much control as we might like to think, so especially once you add in other humans. Yes, sorry, guys,

that's an illusion. So I would say those are a few of the things that are very very present for me.

what do we currently do or what do we currently know that we use for cognitive fuel? And then the new approaches that you're looking at, how are they so different? As you said, they have less side effects. We're talking about potentially.

it doesn't actually help you solve the edge cases. All right, So if we look at let's just say Alzheimer's, some people, some scientists and doctors refer to Alzheimer's as type three diabetes. Why because the brain and there are many factors go into this can end up in a state where it's very bad at utilizing glucose insulin insensitivity. You're basically diabetic in your brain and I'm simplifying here, but for instance, and I have done this with relatives of mine with Alzheimer's.

You give them an exogenous ketone supplement of the right kind, give them a little shot, and I'll do it with them so they're not freaked out. Within twenty minutes, their sentences are longer, their rate of speech is faster. In some instances, there's something called the clock test, for instance, where you can look at the severity of Alzheimer's or other conditions by having someone attempt to draw clock and they just can't do it, and boom, like some type

of stage magic. Thirty minutes later, they can draw clock.

I'm like, ah, okay, that helps connect some dots. Lactate If you ever have done a bunch of cycling, or you go in the gym and you get that burn. All right, Well, a big part of that is lactic acid lactate. Turns out the brain can really use that not only as a fuel, but it's also a signaling. It's almost it's a signal or messenger that can produce all of these changes in the brain. And there is for instance, Tommy would introduce me to this, the Norwegian

four by four. People can look this up. Norwegian four by four is a fact in effect doing it's view T max training. We can explain what that is, but it's not really important right now. Basically, four minutes of incredibly hard let's say stationary biking, you're getting up to eighty five ninety percent of your max heart rate in the last minute of those four you don't think you're gonna make it right, Basically you're running away from wolves, okay, and then you take three to four minutes off and

you repeat that again and you do four cycles. So you're doing four minutes on. Let's just call four minutes off four minutes on a data for four rounds. If you do that, there's there's a study conducted three times a week, and I think it was for six months.

The effects on your brain, which includes some plausible volumetric changes like certain structures in your brand like the Hippi campus actually grow right, one of the primary rs affected by Alzheimer's, Those effects extend out for five years from six months of training three times a week. What is going on?

to have a little bit of extra energy. So I did a weight training workout where each of my sets with leg press or leg extension or whatever large muscle groups. I just turned on a music track that lasts four to five minutes, and I was like, all right, I can't stop for forty five minutes and it's going to be really painful. And that's it. Because I think that the cycling itself doesn't necessarily have any magic to it, like you could use it grow it's the lactic acid,

it's the actual concentration in the blood. Those, I would say are three interesting fuels to consider. And I'm sure we'll come back to this. But like sometimes you don't have a problem solving issue. Sometimes you don't have a quandary in your life that you can think your way out of. You have a fuel issue. So before you try to riddle yourself with journaling out of all of your issues, maybe you're just starving. Yeah, and that could mean you need food, could mean you need to improve

your insulin sensitivity. Maybe look at intermint fasting, which completely blew my mind with how it changed my insulin sensitivity and biomarkers over the course of four weeks. It really shocked me. And or when these are actually compatible looking at building up your keutogenic machinery, which you can do in a whole bunch of ways.

to this work, I had a really strong mind because of my previous work, but I hadn't really worked on my body. And it was when I married my wife, who's a nutritionist and a dietitian. Yeah, very useful, extremely useful for many of itsh But the body became a part of the conversation because she was so much about

physical health as well as mental and emotional health. And I think I was so in the mental emotional sphere that I kind of disregarded the body to some degree, only to realize how much I was limiting myself based on this fuel point, and even to speak to a very recent occurrence, probably a few years back, I was experiencing fatigue and low energy. Although I was positive and living my purpose and felt meaning in my life and

had beautiful relationships, but I was just tired. And I remember getting my biomarkers done and everything, and it turned out to be something really basic, but they were just like, your vitamin D is out of ten. It should be at a sixty to one hundred. I'd like, you know, for the optimal, but you're at ten. Like, how did I not understand that something as small as this could be affecting my energy? It wasn't just about meaning, And I think you're so right. People are journaling really hard

to on their purpose. They're trying to do this thing mentally, and half the time it's like you're not giving yourself enough fuel to even be able to have that breakthrough.

they're like, I have of energy. I'm like, well yeah, okay, great, Well then you can check off the selenium. So which I think can be very reassuring for folks, right, because if they've been banging their head against the wall trying to quote unquote figure out X and they're just not making progress, it's not necessarily because your brain isn't working, you're not smart enough. Well, maybe it is because your brain isn't worrying, but you can fix it holistically through

looking at your mind and body as one thing. Certainly through say meditation, right, you can have you can exert all sorts of interesting effects on your body right through the breath as this sort of interface with the autonomous autonomic nervous system. So it stands to reason you can do the other. It's bidirectional, like if you want to, you can improve the mind by working on the body, and you can improve the body by working on the mind. They go together absolutely, So that's that's a lot of

what has my attention. I mean, there's a lot of nonsense floating around out there about vegas nerve stimulation, but if you talk to certain scientists like doctor Kevin Tracey, who wrote a great book. I think it's a great book called The Nerve, all about the vegas nerve, which is really like two Transatlantic cables on either side of the neck with roughly ninety two hundred thousand fibers on

either side. He's got a great story in the book where he's discussing all of this research related to in effect, activating something called the inflammatory reflex and preventing overwhelming cytokine storms for covid, for you name it, and you can stimulate the vegaus nerve a bunch of different ways. You could have an implant. There's actually something called femodidine over the counter. Talk to you doctor, don't just start taking this. But it's an ant acid, I believe, and that actually

has some incredible effects related to that. But he was on stage talking about this at one point and the Dalai Lama and the Dialama's contingent happened to be at the same event, and the Dalai Lama got up afterwards because Kevin was talking about the vegas nerve right just for simplicity singular, and the Dialloma asked a question after the presentation. The translator translated and said, you know, his Holiness would like to know are there two of these

that run down the neck? And he said, yes, actually there are two, and the dialogum kind of chuckled, and there's a practice that they have that involves meditating on these two channels that run down the neck and then basically innervate the rest of the body, including the abdomen, And it's like, hmm, that's interesting.

like so fascinating, and how the science is being able to prove these ancient techniques. I remember when I was talking to someone else on the show. It was that idea of them talking about circadian rhythms and looking at the sun first thing in the morning, et cetera, which of course you've talked about as well. And I was talking about how in the monastery in India it was

always about sun salutation. So Suriya namashkar is the Sanskrit version of sun salutations, and that was the because you woke up in the morning and you paid respects to the sun, which meant making you know, eye contact with the sun and allowing the sun rays to enter. And I'm like, all of these technic they didn't have the language that we live, but the technique existed far back then. Talk to me about the did you call it the

bioelectric bioelectric medicine medicine? Yeah, because you're talking about chips. Where's is pilled?

and it is used for utoia furnace. It gives some people incredible relief where they might have been incapacitated laying on a couch, can't get up, have to elevate their legs, can't walk more than a few steps. They get this implant and then boom, like two months later, they're running upstairs on a tour through Europe with their husband. I mean, that's a real example.

Some of them you may be predisposed to those things genetically, but I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start with acute infection. Much like long covid or long lime disease. There's some acute immune system insult, often an infection that

leads to then chronic neuroinflammation. And when you address that neuroinflammation, a lot of the symptoms can abate, which is why there have been studies looking at just giving people who are depressed anti inflammatoris And I'm not saying, by the way, anyone listening or watching that you should go gobble anti inflammatories their side effects. Don't do that. But maybe there are other ways to address excessive inflammation. And it turns out vegas nerve stimulation could be one of those. There

are other approaches. I can't recommend any current device out there. I'm interacting with. This Scandinavian researcher is amazing. I'm hoping that at least in the US, maybe in the next six months, something will be available that people can grab. I'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight being corroborated by science, because there's a really cool tie

in breathing. Do breath work. There are different types of breath work that absolutely seem to have an effect on the inflammatory reflex, and that's actually part of the reason why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice, especially if they do it twice a day, like ten

to twenty minutes percession. After about two weeks, it's so consistent, right, It's like for the first week they're like, I don't know if this is doing anything, and then after like seven to ten days, there seems to be something that happens, and people are like, I'm so much calmer. I'm sorry

to this all right. There are million different ways you could explain it, but let's throw one out there that doesn't really I haven't really heard discussed that the rhythmic breathing that you and train when you're doing that kind of sitting activates the vagus nerve. If you use a stimulator guess what, you use it five minutes in the morning save for the year, five minutes in the morning,

five minutes at night. Because the effects last about twelve hours, okay, and it takes about two weeks for most people to notice everything settle. Yeah, well that's a strange coincidence. And if you do box breathing or something like that, for people who are maybe tuning in, we're like, oh, meditation, God, Like, if I have to sit and focus on my breath one more time, or you know, imagine a candle or whatever it might be. It's not necessarily for everybody. I

get it. I mean, my monkey mind is on like high octane fuel. I get it. But you could use an app that just helps you breathe right, or something box breathing or whatever it might be. Try that ten minutes twice a day for two weeks. See what happens. I think most folks will be very pleasantly surprised. On the ancient wisdom side, I've always been interested, but skeptical, interested in, but skeptical of acupuncture. Skeptical because, as with

many modalities, practitioners sometimes oversell it panacea for everything. It's true, psychedelics, it's true, massage, it's for pet it's true. For surgery, it's I can fix all your problems, all right. Probably not. However, there are a few aspects, and I went to two universities in China. I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin. In this case, I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture on animals. How does that work?

for the time being, Let's say maybe it is. And I know a few traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and they have walls of photos of babies, and I'm like, that's interesting.

It's very very specific, and then you need another probe to ground or complete the circuit effectively. That would be the five minutes of stimulation. You can also do it the neck, but the next quite uncomfortable. The placement of those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners put the needles. No way, and electricity is not the only way you can do it right, and it's not

the only way. I mean, there was a physician in France who experimented with taking ballpoint pens and pressing on different parts of the year, which, funny enough, that was in the nineteen hundreds ended up getting retrofitted and adopted by a lot of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China. But the overlap's interesting, right, Like, that's very interesting, and it's also you have to wonder, it's like, man, how many thousands of years of trial and error does that take to figure out?

can't avoid it. And there is a place for drugs. Look, I take prescription medication right, It's like there is a place for but it's in at least the US, where it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through. You can advertise on television directly to patients selling drugs. It's outrageous. The pharmaceutical and you know, industrial complex is a very real thing, and the incentives are very perverse in a lot of cases. So we are overprescribed, over medicated.

meditation twice a day to feel the benefits. What I find more and more fascinating even in myself and what to speak of our community and the audience that tunes into shows like this, is we know that everyone struggles with that initial discomfort. Like you said, you have to do it for two weeks to start feeling the benefits and noticing that that calm or letting things set, or

you have to do something for six months. What have you found to be the best startup strategy to a new habit to unlock its potential when it may take

two weeks, don look, it's benefit.

PTSD about learning languages. Right, But if you tell them like, hey, here's what the graph looks like as you you're going to have this type of experience, and then once you add this new grammatical construction, like you're going to have a bit of a trough of sorrow. Don't worry about it. Right, You're gonna plateau, but you're not actually platauing. Your mind is adjusting to involve this additional complexity. And then then you kind of explain what the stock chart of your

brain is going to look like. Then people don't freak out and the abandonment rates can be less, and so I think with something like meditation, saying you may see benefits sooner, but experience seems to indicate that a switch is flipped around two weeks. So commit to two and a half weeks and do less than you think is necessary. Do less than you think you can do. This supplies

to any new habit as far as I'm concerned. If you think you can do twenty minutes, but that's pushing it into redline territory, do ten, do less than you think you can do, because that is going to contribute to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm. Don't bleed the stone. There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic and YadA YadA YadA, rugged individuals stuff that we find in many parts of the world. This is not a place to show how much you can do if you're

trying to adopt a new behavior. So with the meditation, I would just I think it is undervalued how setting expectations can be the missing ingredient. It's just like, Hey, if I were trying to sell one of my friends, which I do often, I would just say, look much like katosis or a ketogenic diet. It's pass fail, it's binary. You can't do it fifty percent. The good news is you're going to know after two and a half weeks, in the case of meditation, whether this works for you

at all or not. And if it works, it could be pretty dramatic. But if you give up after a week, the whole thing is wasted. So just commit to it and a half and you know, if you need to do a bet with a friend or something to set steaks and incentivize yourself so you'll be embarrassed if you stop, Like guess what that's useful too. Yeah, I've talked a lot about that in the four Hour Shaft, Like how do you actually set up incentives so that it's harder

to quit? These are very you know, have your friend take some photos of you and your tidy whities and unflattering light and that'll get released into the wild if you don't do it for two and a half weeks or it's like one hundred dollars bet and your buddy, your friend is going to donate that to your most hated play medical candidate in your name. If you don't do it for two and a half weeks, Okay, great, you're more likely to do it. Everyone needs reasons, so

so good. I think that's the biggest one. Honestly, it's just setting expectations. And in the case of the Norwegian four by four this is a quirk of science and interpretation of science. So they did do the six months, and the effects seem to extend out to five years. But that doesn't mean that you need six months. That was just the study design, So who knows. I would imagine that it's not all or nothing. That is cumulative, And that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood

about today. I said, well, like, what do we know and what do we not know? Because that was the study design and that's I'm sure since been replicated and people are modeling that. But is it possible that instead of say four by four, so you know, six minutes of this potwo max training, is it possible that less time would work as long as you hit certain peak levels of lactate? Could a ten minute could a five minute session of weight training work if you hit a

certain minimum threshold? Question mark?

be a smaller minimum effective dose for that stuff. We'll see. Yeah, fascinest it's the business of science, right, Yeah, absolutely, trying not to fool yourself, setting things up so it's very hard for you to fool yourself or a bias.

and it will calm you down. And we know that isn't true because it's going to take a practice in a discipline, and it might.

who I believe is the chair of psychiatry at Yale or he was at the time, and he did a lot of along with his colleagues, a lot of the seminal work on ketamine as an antidepressant in humans, and I think it was zero point five milligrams per kilogram over X period of time, and it showed these amazing effects. But now the point five milligrams per kilogram has become this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners, including some scientists or are like, this is the protocol, and I

was like, well is it. It's one protocol.

that for different applications. I think it's very interesting for suicidality. It's one of the few things that I've seen if someone is acutely at risk of hurting themselves in some cases, with an infusion or an injection, a few hours later, they go from I'm going to kill myself today too. I don't know what I was so upset about. That's crazy that. Yeah, I've seen that multiple times and so

of other clinicians. It's that's one of the few interventions I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario. That's pretty interesting. So, and I guess I'll stop there for the.

people have different ways of manifesting. For me, it's all internal. Yes, it's all internal. What if this I should have said that loop blup loop loop loop imagining outcomes, et cetera. Perseverating on some conversation that I wish had gone a different way, and it's exhausting. It's really exhausting, and interest in peace. Nolan Williams and certainly passed away. But I was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because he pioneered at Stanford. Also, he was a real polymath.

A lot of very compelling research related to I begain So I began as an alkaloid derived from Iboga taberneth, which is a psychedelic plant. In this case, the Whiti tribe and others are using the root bark for these very long, super intense mount everest of psychedelic like experiences. It is not to be trifled with. There are some very significant cardiac risks for certain people. You can die

taken this unlike most psychedelics. And he was the first to really put under a fine scientific lens some of the neuroanatomical changes, specifically in veterans. And I began is It's a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans, and specifically in cases a traumatic brain injury. That's strange. This is not really something you see. It's not something that people

that have observed with other drugs, including other psychedelics. And it seems to relate to something called glee ol derived neurotrophic factor. But suffice to say, I connected with him about that, and then it turned out this guy's not a one trick pony. He also is one of the world leaders in brain non invasive brain stimulation and accelerate TMS. And I started looking at the literature and the result and I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I mean,

this reads like science fiction number one, number two. It seems unbelievable, like a total scam. But I know it's not a scam. Like these are very, very top tier scientists. And when I realized that it could be applied to well a few things backstore, I always had self described as someone who struggled with depression. When I actually was able to address it most successfully, I realized that the depression was born of fatigue, which came from anxiety which

interrupted my sleep. So the Dominoda tip was actually the anxiety piece. Much like it's kind of like, this is not the greatest comparison, but like the Votwo Max, it's like that's the output you can point to. But the catalyst was actually the anxiety, and I was like, well, yolo, let's try it. The safety profile looks really appealing. The actual stimulation is, relatively speaking, pretty low power. It's been

around for decades. It seems like mostly upside potential. There are some risks involved people should be aware of when people can search accelerated TMS and so on to find this, but all in all attractive for someone who's experiencing in my case, the amount of chronic mental anguish. That's what kicked it off.

when you have this treatment. I remember going in for my first day of stimulations, got like nine hours of sleep. I was feeling like a million bucks. I could do jump in jacks all day. Had my first eight minute stimulation and I felt like I had just pulled three all nighters studying for a test. I was so mentally tired. So if you do it, do not have any delusions of cranking out fifty minutes of work in between these stimulations.

Ain't gonna happen. But the one day man, it's it could be the future for a lot of people, and that is not widely available, but people can do some digging. There are clinics, not a lot of them. The two main hardware companies our BrainsWay, that's one which I've used. I've used both because I'm in my whole stick and it's real. It's part of the mission for me as being the guinea pig and taking the notes so that not everyone has to right just in case there's collateral damage,

but sometimes there is. BrainsWay has some very very sophisticated hardware, and then mag Venture is another one that has very well developed target right. As far as I know, those are kind of the two front runners. The other that I mentioned, which focuses specifically on the one day Ampa Health, I have not tested, so I can't speak to that directly. There seem to be credible people involved, but I can't. I haven't really done the due diligence.

So rewind back probably five to ten years, and hustle culture was the thing. Yeah, work life balance has kind of made its comeback now, And then you could look back twenty five years and we were talking about work life balance when it first kind of probably entered the zeitgeist, and it was preceded by this hustle intensity culture or whatever it is called then and you're kind of talking

about this idea of this achievement mindset that you had and has been useful, and then now looking at this acceptance mindset that you know, you're almost looking at the value of both. And I think that's even this whole conversation. We're talking about the value of both, or this and this, or you know, the connection between old and new and

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

cow standing in the rain. That's just complacency, passivity, and then completely unrestrained. Achievement is just a greyhound running around a track chasing a rabbit. And those dogs can't run very long, but they can sprint. So Number one, if you can't control or affect something, that probably lands in the acceptance bucket, right, which is why I've not had social media on my phone for three or four years. Doom scrowling not helpful for a million different reasons. I

know people probably agree with this a face value. Nonetheless, Yeah, like let's look at behavior, right, like show me what you do and not what you say kind of situation. It's like my friends, even some of my most accomplished, cheaper friends, these are like megastars within business. I know one guy in particular, such a smart guy. He's so good, he's got a wonderful family. And he took X off his phone a few years ago and it's like he went through twenty years of therapy, right. It was like

a month later, like everything's better. And then I'm in a group thread with him and a few months ago he started sending links to things on X and I was like, uh, oh, you're back on the sauce.

selective ignorance bucket. Then on the achievement side. For me, I would say that as a way of kind of setting the table. One of my friends, Josh Waitskin my second ever podcast, by the way, he was the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher. He's considered a chess prodigy. He hates that doesn't really describe him well either, because he's become world class, very like top one percent and a couple of different disciplines. It's very systematic. But one

of his guiding tenets maxims is avoid the simmerings. And that just means you're either off like you could be taken a nap under a set of bleachers or something, or you're on like you are the greyhound, right you are completely focused and you're in six gear. It's like

avoid everything in between. Yeah, So avoiding the simmering sex and I and a lot of people I think are at risk of the gravitational pull of the default, which is the simmering sex getting interrupted by text messages and emails and responding to everyone else's manufactured emergency and so on. That's the simmering sex, and that will just murder you psycho emotionally. So for me, I try to really oscillate

between restfulness or sprint. The fact matter is, as much as I would like to think otherwise, Like I'm a working dog. I'm like a border collie. Right, if idle hands of the Devil's workshop, then you know, by extension, it's like you leave a border collie trapped in an apartment long enough, it's going to chew the cows, the couch to pieces. Yeah, turn into an Eurotic mess. It's like a lot of people are like that. I'm like that, it's good for me to have a mission a project.

Me too, Yeah, it's just and I don't think anyone needs to apologize for them. Yeah. So for instance, it's like with this, I have an eight hundred and fifty page draft of a book and it's like, all right, well what am I going to do with that beast? I'll probably do a retreat where all I do is eat a sleep exercise, Right, That's it. And it will be full on as many hours a day as I

can handle every day for a few weeks. Yeah, it's not going to be the four hour work week, but it was with a It's with an end point, with a very precise purpose that I feel good about, that I feel aligned with, and that's fine. And then after that I will probably bookend it by a book something like three to seven days with a handful of close

friends doing something to just park it in zero. And I recognize that exact sequence of events will not apply to everybody, But if you just use the mantra of avoid the simmering sex, I think you can get a lot of mileage out of it.

you have to have these really clear. I was invited yesterday was Sunday, and I was invited to a work thing like last minute on a Saturday night, and like years ago, I would have said yes immediately because I thought it was extremely valuable and I needed to be there and if I wasn't there, then I'd miss out on opportunities. And it was I was saying to my wife and I had to say to her only to

make myself feel better about myself. I was like, I'm so proud I said no, because I've like really promised myself that my weekends are off time, and that wasn't the case in the beginning. And I'm glad it wasn't the case because I was sprinting and I needed that extra work and that was important and I don't feel bad about it. It was the right thing to do. But at this point, this was the right thing to do to be able to say, well, no, I really want

a Sunday off. I don't want to run to a work thing in the middle of the day, which will probably take four hours, and I don't need to. It's not an emergency. I'm not solving anything, and yeah, what do you think is the biggest Obviously the simmering sixus is the obvious answer, But what do you think is the biggest thing people come up against when they're trying to do on and off, Like, what's the hardest part

of that? Your friend, for example, who quit X felt the benefit, saw the growth, and then gets.

just say you're an entrepreneur and you're kind of floating around, like maybe you have a few cool things you're pursuing, but there's no hell yes, kind of along lines of Derek Sivers, you're going to be tempted to wander and that's how you end up sitting on the toilet looking at Instagram and they're like, I can't feel my legs. Oh, I've been here forty five minutes, Like that's how that that's how that happens. And I've been there, and it means you don't have a big enough yes. You need

a bigger yes yes. And I would say that the avoid the simmering sixth though, is unhelpful insomuch as it's telling you what not to do, but that doesn't really give you a whole lot of directions. So another way to frame it is actually quoting a friend of mine, Chris saka phenomenal of incredible guy, just like one of the best investors I've ever met, his stories and nuts, and his question is effectively like, are you living offense or defense?

up on email day. So all I get texts that are like about business stuff, and I just and my response has to be for sanity because if I respond, if I engage with that, I'm playing defense and breaking my own roles in boundaries. So I'm just like, hey, Bud, exclamation your point. Sorry, don't do business on weekends, like text me again on Monday, Tuesday, whatever.

that before you're reactive. You know, Jim Collins, the writer of author of Good Degrades and Built to Last and these iconic books, he tracks his creative hours and I think for every three hundred and sixty five day period, he's got to have one thousand and something hours and he tracks it daily, and if he's running behind in

the county, he's like, oh, something's going to change. I don't take it to that level, but I try to make before I manage in sense, I really try to reserve the hours after I wake up for creative work to the extent that I can. I actually think I do my best creative work incredibly late at night, but that is socially incompatible with any type of partner, So I've had to switch things around a little bit.

help trap. Like what I've learned after twenty plus years of quote unquote optimizing myself talking about some of this, but basically re orienting Maslow's higher give needs, which, by the way, Abraham himself never made a pyramid, and he added an update to that people are accustomed to thinking

about self actualization at the top. He actually added self transcendence later, and it was always something that was moving and shifting. But I have recognized for myself for quality of life, for the experience of time dilation, just getting more life out of your years, right, not just adding more years to your life. We could talk a lot about that, relationships, close, friends, family. It sounds so self evident,

But how many people do we know? Maybe you look in the mirror and you see them, who at the end of a year, If you ask them, did you spend as much time as you would have liked this last year with your ten most important relationships, Almost everybody's gonna say no. So really taking that on as a challenge means if I'm sacrificing twenty percent of my output because I'm forcing myself to pretend to cosplay as a

morning person, Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, Now one could make the argument and it's not totally off base that well, that's convenient for Tim to say, because you know, you said, decades of putting things out that have. Luckily, you've done well enough. But I don't think that does hold some water. But it doesn't. It doesn't really hold all the water.

That's not I don't think of real expression. But the point is I have through sprinting, right, not ending up at the simmering sex over many decades, right, or like the simmering seven or eight, which is even worse you're running hot. I have burned out so many times that coming back to the meditation, right, do less than you think you can do. If I dial back, Let's say I lose quote unquote lose twenty percent and I don't burn out. Well, that's like playing sports and not getting injured. Right.

If you get injured, you're out for two months, Yeah, and then you have three months of rehab. You didn't save any time by being intense, Totally, you lost time. So I feel like also not being a morning person like some folks. I have so many friends they're just like, I wake up, I'm on fire, so jealous. Now playing with your fuel source can help this, actually, but I feel like if even if I have less energy, what that means is I just have to be very smart

and selective about what I apply myself to. So it makes me more selected with projects, more focused on what I'm trying to because I'm like, all right, friend X gets four hours of lightning in a bottle every morning. I probably get, yeah, maybe ninety minutes, depending on how much cafe and I've had. So I need to make those ninety minutes count. Yeah, and that's actually a helpful forcing function for me.

my attention enough to really commit. Yeah, and I'm not someone who generally loves using their time to do that. But at the end of a long day of work and it's been busy, and we've had dinner together, we've connected, and you just kind of want to zone out. I don't have the energy. I'm more the other way. I

have lots of energy in the morning and the evening I can hang out with friends or family, but I don't do creative work in the evening. I never have, and so mine's the opposite where I have less energy at that time, and so kind of switching off is kind of nice, But switching off and feeling like I wasted my off time is not a fun feeling, like

I enjoy that feeling. So we'd watch a show and I wasn't committed, and then I'd be on my phone or i'd kind of be on my laptop too, And now I haven't achieved anything at work, I haven't doom scrolled well enough, and the screen is boring me. And now I'm feeling like I'm wasting days. In the evening, I'm like adding all these hours up and going, God, I wasted like three hours in front of the TV and I didn't do anything, and all of a sudden,

a there was a show selection problem. So we sawted that where it was like, Okay, let's find something we actually care about watching. But the other part was just Okay, I'm going to leave my phone in another room where

I just can't get it. I don't work at this time, so the laptop can't be near me, and I have to do this old school thing of like sitting in a thing to in my own house, like saying, okay, I'm at the movies now, Like what does it feel like to go to the movies and watch a movie which we all used to do, and go to the theater without any other distraction and actually enjoy your experience it And it's it's been huge for unlocking presence and

enjoyment and entertainment even even from a stillness point of view, for sure, because I feel like we're not even doing rest properly, which is why we can't work properly.

In the social dilemma, people can check out, treat it like smoking. It is incredibly bad for you, even in moderate doses. So what I would suggest to folks, and I mention all of that being plugged into text simply because if I were amish and I'm like, I don't have any social apps on my phone, people are like, well, Tim can do it, but that's nonsense. Yeah, because he's an edge case like no, no, no. A lot of what I do is predicated on knowing what is happening.

realm of possibility, pry for two weeks. And my feeling is, if you can't do that, if your entire livelihood does not depend on it, you're addicted, just like an alcoholic, just like a smoker. It means you have a problem, right, And I would say, look, I can talk about meditation and bioelectric medicine and this and that and the other thing. If you just get off of social media for two weeks, just like my friend, I think it will basically do the same amount of good for a lot of folks.

It's ten years of therapy if you're constantly tapping a vein with social media as you're doing the therapy. Also, feelings on caffeine, I think that's also true for cutting down.

your fuel faster. And look, guys, I understand actually how chemistry works and the dentizine and so on, but let's keep it simple, right, It's not adding fuel to the system. It is burning fuel faster. Also has some pretty profoundffects on glucose levels too. I fear for we're a CGM and you have a bunch of coffee, it's like, oh wow,

I'm suddenly way out of range. So when people have a caffeine crash, it's not necessarily because the caffeine is wearing off because you still have trouble sleeping at night. It's because your glucose spikes and then crashes. Oh we're back to the fuel problem again.

mother consoling a crying child. That's hard. It's hard, but I think it's a valuable practice. So, and that that's something that I've explored. There are lots of good apps out there. You know. I'm involved with the way so and I used it. But prior to getting involved with Henry Shuckman. But there are many good options, right, there's

call nos heads basically lots of different options. But I would say that specifically exploring something that cultivates your ability to observe things that you would call uncomfortable or negative

without trying to change them is valuable, all right. The second in terms of acceptance is relational humans are crazy, man, Like every human's nuts, Like, like irrationality is just table sticks, Like we're not, which is why any of them like the if the efficient market theory stuff where it's like we're all rational agents acting in our own best interest. I'm like, have you met have you actually walked out economists in humans?

you think? Like he doesn't do that. He's like, let me tell you like you're being an idiot for these reasons, and like you need to grow up because of these reasons. He's not exactly like doctor phill or anything, but he's he's very very good at what he does and fierce intimacy along with his other materials, and he's not the

only person. The Goatman's are pretty interesting as well. But Terry Reel specifically has a number of principles that undergird his entire approach, and one of them is, when it comes to relationships, objective reality doesn't exist. So, for instance, right, he gives this example, I'm gonna butcher it. It's very funny when he sells it. He's like, all right, let's say husband and wife are out to dinner. Waiter comes over, takes the arder walks away, and the husband says to

the wife, honey, you don't need to yell. And she's like, I wasn't yelling, and he's like, yes, you were. And you see where this is going, right, And let's just suppose and he gives his example. The husband says, well, honey, you know, I thought this might come up, so I actually hired professional audiologists and brought in recorders and based on the level let me show you, in fact, based on any conventional definition. You're yelling like, is that gonna help?

It also ties into all the productivity. All everything is so related, right, It's just like, do you have the space to think or are you just reacting to that text? On a Sunday, you need the space, and there are a lot of ways to cultivate it. One is meditation, sure, but it's not the only tool in the toolkit. Right. If you're by the way, if you've had three cups of coffee and your sympathetic system is an overdrive, what are you gonna do. You're gonna bite someone's head off. Yeah, right,

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

lots of yelling and screaming. It was I didn't If I learned anything, it was all of the most under productive ways to handle conflict, and I carried that into my relationships. Surprise, surprise didn't produce miracles of positivity, But in the last I'd say ten years have become much much better. Oh, Terry real deta gratitude and one of my exes who introduced me to Terry, Terry's work, and my friend Kevin Rose for that matter. Not to say Terry is the end all. Peel just resonated with me,

just like different people have different parenting styles. Some people love doctor Becky Kennedy. I tend to resonate with her stuff, but other people resonate with other things. But for me, when it comes to to return to your question acceptance, man oh man, does that matter a lot in relationships? And there are many different iterations of it, so those

would be two. Right, There's the how do I sit with uncomfortable feelings without the necessity of fixing them or suppressing them, which, by the way, ties into workholism and hustle culture and social media use, compulsive social media use. You're like, Hm, I'm bored. I don't like it. I need to do actually, yes, yes, Now some people might get a little pedantic and say bored isn't a feeling. You get the idea, it's an experience.

you think objectively you experienced. And that's really hard to do because we're so wired to be like, but this is the truth, and in relationships there's almost very little truth.

name wrong. But nonviolent communication, Yeah, read the book. Yes, it is schlocky in the sense that there's a format and it can feel a little repetitive, but guess what, in the beginning, if you're coming from an upbringing that didn't teach you anything helpful on the conflict resolution side, you need a format, you need a template, and it's incredibly incredibly helpful, if only for there's a whole process

to it. People can just look it up. I'm sure Chatgypt or anything else will give you a good overview. But at the end, make a request. Don't just bitch and moan about how you feel what your partner did. Have a request, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, don't just tell them what not to do. That's actually not helpful. And I had this driven home. Part of the reason I like exploring all these weird different nooks and crannies is you realize how much you can copy and paste to other places.

very unhelpful and actually kind of dangerous. So instead of that, you say more tow more tow right. It's you always want to give them direction for what to do, not what not to do. And it applies to conflict resolution as well, so that the nonviolent communication. And also sometimes you can talk about the objective reality, but you can't do that when one or more people are dysregulated.

but it is the world's most consumed stimulant. Too little sleep, a bunch of bullshit going on on the business side, somebody dropped a ball, whatever, And my partner wants to talk to me about something. If I'm not resourced, I'll just say, babe, I'm happy to talk about this. Let's do it at dinner. Yeah, I am really unresourced right now. I'm just not in a place to have a good conversation about this, and I'm pretty pissed off about a

few things. Has nothing to do with you, And she's like, okay, cool. So you also on either side need to be able to agree that that's an option.

this week. I'm only literally back home for like three hours and then I'm back out, and it's like just

people being aware of what you're weak even looks like because we kind of walk around thinking our partners should.

and do that a lot as well. It's fascinating you said that we've been asking these questions about life and relationships and philosophy, like you know, thousands of yeah, forever, but at least documented thousands of years at this point, and I feel like we are still somewhat answering asking some of the same questions we were mentioning this earlier. And I know you actually have a blog that a

website that allows people to ask these questions. I want to ask, what are the questions that are worth answering? Because I feel like we ask a lot of questions, and now with AI, we're asking more questions than ever before, which, by the way, I think is better than the answer generation that we grew up in, which was having the answer was smart, when we both know that asking the right question is smarter, which hopefully AI can help us get better at because we all have to get better

asking questions. But what are the questions that are worth asking?

Because I just feel like we're just tracked in by a set of questions that are not valuable.

this in one of their books bought. I was on a road trip and I just grabbed it from you his bookstore. But the question stuck with me, which I think they got from Newt Gingrish and it's like they also are diametrically posed to new politically, but they're like he was ruthlessly efficient and effective gaining control of the house and blah blah blah. And the question was are

you hunting antelope field mice? And the story behind it is effectively, Like if you're a lion, sure you can keep yourself alive by hunting field mice and just eating like one hundred a day. Or you could put in the energy and the focus to kill an antelope and then that lasts you a day or two or three

or whatever the number might be. And that's a metaphor for an effect coming back to what we're talking about, like, are you doing a bunch of little micro projects putting out fires, living on defense, juggling ten different kind of cool projects instead of one big yes? If so, you're eating field mice, and it's like that's no way for a line to live. You can survive, that's not really living,

like you need to hunt antelope. So to encapsulate all that into one question, so are you hunting antelope art or are you hunting field field mice?

think lion, okay, king of the jungle, et cetera. It implies almost that person using the metaphor might want to be an apex predator, king of the hill whatever. That's an unfortunate side effect maybe of the picture that it paints. But the point is coming back to people falling apart when they have too much free time. Right. This is a huge reason why most retirements fail and people have their health go off a cliff as soon as they retire.

In many cases, it's about knowing what your big thing is, having a focus.

of your students, No, it's not therefore to know. Right, is responding to email from friends or texts from friends, or are asking you to go out to have drinks on Wednesday night going to contribute to that? No, it's actually gonna be kind of productive. No, Right, you can still have fun. I'm not saying don't have fun, but you can have a north star. By the way, it doesn't have to be one thing forever. That can be very intimidating, like what is my purpose in life? What

is my what is my mission? It doesn't have to be this permanent thing for me. It generally isn't for me. It's it's like, I mean, I do have overarching things that guide in my behaviors values, but I will just go completely immersive into filling the blank bielectric medicine for

six months. That's it. That's all I care about. How do I translate that into something usable in the real world or you know, for like supporting science related to psychedelic assisted therapies and starting twenty fifteen, like for a long time, that was it. And if people are like, well, I want you to do policy work or this that related to it, I'm like, nope, it's not my power zone. Like I am focused on the science, okay, And I

made it's supporting the science, not capitalizing on it. So I had to rule like no investing in for profit companies related to psychedelics. Not that that makes someone we need those, But I was like, for me, that's a hard boundary, right, Okay, Great, I feel like I've kind of done what I set out to do in that world. So I've largely stopped I'm out. I passed the baton. Let other people do it. So it doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be some grand giant thing.

It could be teaching your kids.

amazing performance coach and PT. But at one point he told me, because he also does tons of activities, he said, he's only adding new activities that consumed time, physical activities that he can do with his wife or kids. Yeah, that's it, no solo activities. It's like, wow, what a great forcing function. Okay, cool. So with my partner, that's it. It's like what can we do together? And you can change your mind six months later it's like, Okay, for now,

that's it. Only adding new time consuming hobbies if I can do them with her, that's that's a great question. That's it that I think counts as a big yes.

which is portable proven right. Humans have been going periods of that food for a very very long time, since since before we were humans so to speak, Homo sapiens. And the changes that you see with something like and just to defy what I'm talking about specifically, in my case, intermittent fasting would be sixteen hours of fasting, eight hour feeding window, and generally within that eight hour feeding window,

I'm having two big meals. That's it, and it's Mark Mattson is a scientist, m attsn who's done a lot on this. But you want to have at least sixteen hours so that you deplete your liver of glycogen and then your body develops the machinery to turn on key tones more effectively. Right, But you do that. I mean, my entire family has insulin insensitivity. We have a lot of wonky genetics for this stuff. And if you're getting regular testing, don't just do fasting glucose, get your insulin measured,

and also do an oral glucose tolerance test. There's a lot more it should test, but at least hit those three And after four to six weeks of interrint fasting number one, all of my energy dips that I used to remedy with caffeine gone, like completely gone, but just sustained energy. And when I woke up, I was awake, all right. One of the benefits of ketones and my lab work the oral glucose tolerance test. My doctors are like a plus plus four to six weeks. It's nothing

is nothing. It's also well we can come to we want to talk about asceticism, and just like the actual I think values that are a little more esoteric, like fasting and stuff abstaining. I think there's a lot to it. Q Seneca. It's got a lot on that. But what if you could only subtract And you could do that also by looking at what you're spending your time on, like do an A eight twenty analysis, but identify the

peak energy drainers in terms of activities people et cetera. Okay, what if you jut you could only remove you can't add more stuff.

And I was having terrible results doing this, and most of them were having terrible results, but that's how they did it. So what do I know. I'm fresh out of college, so I was just copying them. And at some point I'm like, this sucks and I'm almost I was one of the lowest paid people in the company. I'm like, I'm living in a very expensive part of

the country. This is in the Bay Area, Like I'm eating a jack in the box for God's sake, like through the drive through, Like I need to if I'm going to make more money with commissions, I need to solve this. So I was like, all right, what if I did the opposite. What's the opposite? Don't make any calls between.

gone before nine and they've gone after five. And so I had multiple experiences of calling pretty large companies and literally the person who answered the phone like a receptionist was the president or see of that.

there's all sorts of shenanigans that goes on. And I was like, all right, well, what's the opposite prepayment? That's it everybody papas, Yeah, what does that look like okay. And another maxim I guess of mine is like, try the ideal thing first. Yeah, you can always do the standard later, or you can do the complicated thing later. But like what would my dream be. My dream would be people pay in advance and was able to make it work, And I was like, wow, well I'm glad we tried that first.

would say most most frequently. It's like if if I'm starting to gry my teeth or just wake up and I've got the type of grown like, probably time to break out the tool. Something is not something shafing, Yes, yes, or on the flip side, for instance, I have one or two startups that I'm going to be getting involved with, and they're going to be very exciting, big commit projects, and it's like, Okay, these are going to be very

fast moving, very competitive. Let me test a whole bunch of assumptions about these industries, because I'm advising typically to be helpful, and I will pull these questions out, like what does everyone say you need to do? Okay, is there anything to support that? Or like science, is it just that somebody did that first and then everybody else copied and they're like, well, that's just how it works, which is usually the case. Yeah, okay, you know what

is doing the opposite? Look like what might that look like? And eighty percent of it's going to get thrown out, But you don't need one hundred percent. Yeah, you just need one or two little levers. So I use it for the good stuff too.

field mice. I'm always slightly hungry. Why right, Existentially there's some malais why I'm eating field mice.

language for it because it was that I was. I spent years over committing, under committing, not no, you know all that kind of all the all the versions of it, like you just said, like do the ideal, do the opposite, and figure it out and then and then you start going, Okay, no, I'm finally found a flow through asking these questions, and yes, what the flow will be just disrupted again by something else, and those questions will become valuable again, and.

archery that I can just copy and paste directly into meditation. Yes, and then literally right after that the next three sits totally different world. And I was like, Wow, how funny it is that even at this point, after making a career of drawing parallels between fields, I had sat there and I'm like, I need to get better at meditating and hadn't even looked in other areas of my life to copy and paste.

role was interesting, and I was like, oh, this is a bit of flaring, this is a bit of fun, like let's see and then like all the like fear came in around, like what if I do and I fail, and like what if I send an audition tape and I look like a fool and what if someone like sees this and then thinks all my other stuff isn't you know what all the stuff that And I was like wait, ant, like why am I And I was like, oh, of course I'm scared because I haven't got a coach

and I haven't done any classes to see if I even enjoy it or like it. And I haven't even done the scales version of like you know, making different faces. And then and then I got a coach and it was like within hours, I was like, oh, I could do this. I could give it a go if I wanted to, Like I could give an audition, not saying

I could get the role. I could do the audition with a little bit of confidence because now I had a system and I had tools and the coach woul talk about how like he was like, you know, if you're doing theater, you've got to be able to like be big, and he goes, so I always try and get everyone to be a ten. And so you started a ten and then for TV you rolled that emotion back down.

It ties into everything that we're talking about. So for folks who want I think it's one hundred and fifty pages or something really really exceptional book.

two segments. One of them is a bunch of questions that we just got from our audience that we love that I wanted to throw it you for.

to me, Like trustworthiness and reliability come way before that. Now. Yeah, not to say my friends are stupid, like my friends tend to be, you know, they tend to be pretty smart. But I'm not sorting first by that.

what a great book. But Peter Drucker paraphrasing, effectiveness is doing the right things, and then efficiency is doing things right. The way I would reframe that is like what you do, like picking your big yes, matters a lot more than how you get there. It's kind of like if you're starting in Kansas and you're intending to be a California be car pointed towards New York. It's like you could be Mario ANDRETTI doesn't matter, you're going the wrong direction. Yeah, So the what matters a lot more?

be the only right. We were chatting a bit before we started recording about how the podcast landscape has changed and it would be very hard to start my show now. Absolutely you would need to be more probably narrowly focused and differentiated in a bunch of different ways. So for that, there's a great essay if you can find online at kk dot org. Kevin Kelly wrote one thousand true fans. I think it was true ten years ago, and it is going to become ultra ultra true as AI starts

to gobble everything. One thousand true fans. You got to read it. The Law of category as a chapter from the twenty two Immutable Laws of Marketing. I think I put it. I think I excerpted it in Tools of Titans or Tribal Mentors, because that chapter had a huge impact Blue Ocean Strategy. Also, those are all related. So the advice to basically aim to be the only definitely one. Another one would be this relates to I guess the

angel investing and so on is too. And Mark and Dreesen very famous entrepreneur and technologist and investor, but also the late Scott Adams controversial guy, but certainly was very good at what he did with Gilbert had had similar echoes of this, basically talking about two things. The first is that trying to become top one percent, and this relates to the first point, like Michael Jordan in basketball, very hard, Yoyoma, very hard. Almost everybody is going to

get cut. But if you can be top say twenty five percent in two fields that are rarely combined, right, software development, although yeah, is going to kill that, but software and let's just say debate or a law degree. Oh, that's interesting. So I tend to think about combining top

twenty five percent of fields that are rarely combined. And then the last one would be choosing projects based on acquiring skills and either building or deepening relationships that transcend that project, because a lot of my projects fail by any external metric. But if I'm building friendships with very interesting people who are smart, and I'm developing skills that are kind of transferable over time, you just win. It's very hard not to win.

forty percent. Yeah, yeah, right, Like the top one to five percent, even if they don't realize it, have set up systems, or they have employees, or they have you know, no available email address or whatever, or unusual ways to calendar. Even if they don't realize it, they're very very good at firewalling their attention.

to foster fear of missing out. But if you only have one good idea or one good chance, it's your screwt. Yeah, you need to develop and you only do this their experimentation and time on the field, the confidence in your ability to generate or capitalize on opportunities. Right, this is incredibly important. And I mentioned angel investing a bit for people who don't know that just means investing, in my case,

in companies very very early. So when two people and an idea on a napkin investing in those people, if you don't have the ability to say no, you run out of money, your debt game over. That's the end of your angel in this day, right, because most of them are going to go to zero. And I would say that that seems like something that doesn't apply everywhere else. But guess what, you can make more money later, As far as we know, you can't create more time later.

Back to Seneca on the shortness of life, and people are really burning time in ways they will realize they're pretty terrifying. But Fomo's use of it. People pleasing is another, which generally is short term nice, long term mean you always end up panning the piper with that one. Yeah, it's like you're gonna have to have an uncomfortable conversation. Yeah, do you want to have two years of pain before that or do you want to just do that now?

think you're broken, and that is too high a cost for anyone to pay. It's an expanded discussion and the self help trap blog posts that I wrote. By the way, I think it's probably now within twenty four hours, I knew it was going to be my most popular blog posts of the last ten years. Probably. Wow, it's wild. I didn't know if it would resonate, but holy shit.

So the cost to constantly improve yourself almost by definition, you have to constantly be looking for ways to fix yourself, which means you're looking for ways you're broken, and that means you're always in the red. Right, there's always one more problem, and so the feeling of peace eludes you by one more workshop, one more book, one more retreat, one more psychedelic, whatever it is, you're always going to be one step behind. If that's the only lens through

which you're looking at them. Yeah, achievement self improvement sign. If you have the acceptance side, then you can start to balance out the wobble board. So I would say that's that's what comes to mind.

We got to a flat piece of land, and then I stopped and we had a little you know, sandwiches and had some lunch and looked at the view and had a bit of piece and appreciate how far we'd come.

The problem with that is that you leave your alcoholic sister, your schizophrenic friend behind, and then when you get to the top, you realize, oh, it just descends, and actually the mountain descends back into the messiness of human relationships.

It could also be saying hi to your significant other in the morning and kissing him or her on the cheek before you jump on your phone. Right, it doesn't have to be a big thing.

I'm giving so many book recommendations, just like, oh god, this so four thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkman, I think is a phenomenal book. And there's a chapter in that book specifically you can find it online called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, and people should check this out. And this is not some people are like, oh it has becomes a nihilistic No no, no, no, no no, this isn't nihilism. But you can make your problems seem less life or death by

zooming out, and Oliver does this very well. R And a friend of mine, Ed Cook, he's world class memory competitor. For a long time. He trained I think it was Joan Lair writer to become national memory champion in the US in a book called moonwalking with Einstein.

the pressure out of the tires. And it's like, okay at the end of the day, And I don't think this is bad news, but like we are a bunch of monkeys on a spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos, right, So maybe the fact that somebody said, a you know, sent a really pissy email to you, like ah, look in the grand scheme of things, yeah, yeah, like okay, and I need that for myself too. I'm not wagging a finger at people. I'm like, look, I can get wound up about that. I'm really good in

crisis and with giant like projects and problems. It's the dumbest shit in the world. Like somebody cuts me off at the buffet line and like an airplane lounge or something, and I'm just like, really, that's what you're gonna get wound up about. Yeah, two days, For the next eight hour flight, you're think about that guy, what's wrong with you? So trust me. It's like I'm drinking the medicine too.

find one hundred and seventy five plus pages. And then for the Notebook, which is kind of the codename for the book about saying no. Definitely my funniest book so far, because I did it with Neil Strauss, who acted as my student, and he was so bad, so comically bad at saying no. There's a lot of funny exchanges, real text messages and experiments and stuff you can find I want to say, fifty seventy five pages of that at timmed up log slash Notebook and yeah, so all that stuff,

all that stuff is great. People can check it out.