#704: Q&A with Tim — New Religions, AI Companions, Longevity Levers, Resurrecting “Forgotten” Languages, Stress-Testing Cherished Beliefs, Tactics for Writer’s Block, Low-Back Pain, and Much More - podcast episode cover

#704: Q&A with Tim — New Religions, AI Companions, Longevity Levers, Resurrecting “Forgotten” Languages, Stress-Testing Cherished Beliefs, Tactics for Writer’s Block, Low-Back Pain, and Much More

Nov 14, 20231 hr 30 minEp. 704
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Episode description

Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating; Cometeer delicious hyper-fresh, flash-frozen coffee; and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own life. 

This time, we have a slightly different format. I’m the guest, and you asked the questions. 

I recently sat down with subscribers to my email newsletter for a fun and live Q&A on YouTube.

To join these exclusive Q&A sessions in the future, it’s simple. Just sign up at tim.blog/friday

Every Friday, you will receive my free 5-Bullet Friday newsletter—a short email of five bullet points. It’s one of the most popular newsletters in the world.

Each newsletter describes the five coolest things I’ve found or explored that week, often including books, gadgets, tech workarounds, tricks from experts, strange experiments, and weird stuff from all over the world. My subscribers have seen many, many things at the edges before they’ve gone mainstream. 

In this episode, I answer questions on resurrecting “forgotten” languages, dog training, writer’s block, reducing alcohol intake, AI companions, training the “good enough” muscle, low-back pain, the importance of weight training and muscle mass, travel recommendations for Japan, managing fear of death and the descent to death, breaking negative self-talk, and much, much more. 

Please enjoy! 

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This episode is brought to you by Cometeer! Cometeer is hyper-fresh, expertly brewed, flash-frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup. Cometeer lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, and no bitterness. Cometeer sources high-quality beans from the country’s top roasters. The coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor compounds and antioxidants. It’s then flash-frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in that incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty brew. Simply add hot water and you’ve got a game-changing cup of coffee. It’s easily customizable in seconds for iced coffees, lattes, espresso martinis, and more.

Order today at Cometeer.com/TimTim and listeners of this podcast will receive $25 off your first order.

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This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.

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This episode is also brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. 

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry SeinfeldHugh JackmanDr. Jane GoodallLeBron JamesKevin HartDoris Kearns GoodwinJamie FoxxMatthew McConaugheyEsther PerelElizabeth GilbertTerry CrewsSiaYuval Noah HarariMalcolm GladwellMadeleine AlbrightCheryl StrayedJim CollinsMary Karr, Maria PopovaSam HarrisMichael PhelpsBob IgerEdward NortonArnold SchwarzeneggerNeil StraussKen BurnsMaria SharapovaMarc AndreessenNeil GaimanNeil de Grasse TysonJocko WillinkDaniel EkKelly SlaterDr. Peter AttiaSeth GodinHoward MarksDr. Brené BrownEric SchmidtMichael LewisJoe GebbiaMichael PollanDr. Jordan PetersonVince VaughnBrian KoppelmanRamit SethiDax ShepardTony RobbinsJim DethmerDan HarrisRay DalioNaval RavikantVitalik ButerinElizabeth LesserAmanda PalmerKatie HaunSir Richard BransonChuck PalahniukArianna HuffingtonReid HoffmanBill BurrWhitney CummingsRick RubinDr. Vivek MurthyDarren AronofskyMargaret AtwoodMark ZuckerbergPeter ThielDr. Gabor MatéAnne LamottSarah SilvermanDr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.

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Transcript

This episode is brought to you by Cometeer that's spelled C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R. Cometeer is hyper fresh, expertly brewed, flash frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup. Now, I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of flash frozen coffee and I thought, at face value, this is probably just a gimmick, yada, yada, yada, but as you know, I am an avid coffee drinker. I talk about caffeine and coffee a lot on this show.

And when it landed on my doorstep, when I first started testing it, I thought to myself, this is actually incredible. It is locked in at peak freshness and you can sample coffee from some of the top roasters, not just in the US, but around the world. And I went in with one eyebrow raised and I'm sure some of you have one raised right now, but the coffee is absolutely delicious. It's pretty incredible. And I'm able to avoid bitterness completely.

Cometeer lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, no bitterness, whatsoever. It's a fast and foolproof way to a truly delicious cup of specialty coffee. They source high quality beans from the country's top roasters and some outside of the country that includes counterculture, bird rock, George Hell, equator coffees, which I used to have.

I used to drive 45 minutes from my house in San Francisco to have a quater coffee just to give you an idea and you can get it through Cometeer. Search, Joe Coffee, Red Bay, go get him to your Clatch Onyx, Squirmile, Black and White and Telle Genzia, which was in the four-hour chef as an example in Chicago and on and on. So you can get all sorts of coffee you wouldn't otherwise be able to get because it is frozen using their process.

Their coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor compounds in antioxidants. Then it's flesh frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in the incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty. I already mentioned this, but it's worth reiterating. Cometeer ships to you in 100% recyclable capsules that you store in the freezer. If you were to walk into my kitchen right now and look in the freezer, it is chock-full of Cometeer coffee.

Simply add hot water and you've got a game-changing cup of coffee, liquidy split. It's very fast. It's easily customizable. In seconds for ice coffees, lattes, espresso martinis and more if you've never had an espresso martini. I recommend it. It's a great opportunity. Game-changing. We'll cover that another time. Cometeer is also great to travel with when you need a cup and don't want to sacrifice quality. Their capsules are TSA approved.

So order today at Cometeer.com slash Tim Tim and listeners of this podcast will receive $25 off of their first order. So visit Cometeer.com slash Tim Tim to learn more and get $25 off of your first order when you join the future of coffee with Cometeer. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and seat is my personal nemesis.

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With the pod covers dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. Also stop fighting this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the pod cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wakeups and increase your percentage of deep sleep.

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8 Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. 8 Sleep.com Hello boys and girls, ladies and gents, I'm recording this from Seoul Korea. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of Tim Ferris Show where it is usually my job to sit down with world class performers of all different types to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This time around, we have a slightly different format. In fact, it's the inverse. I am the guest and you guys asked the questions. I recently sat down with subscribers to my email newsletter for a fun and live Q&A on YouTube. That was a private YouTube Q&A. To join these exclusive Q&A sessions in the future, it is very simple. Just sign up for my newsletter at Tim.blog slash Friday.

And after you sign up, every Friday, you will receive my free five bullet Friday newsletter, a very short email of five bullet points. It is one of the most popular newsletters in the world and I love doing it. It is basically like my diary of cool things.

Each newsletter describes the five coolest things that I have found or explored or experimented with that week, often including books, gadgets, tech work around, tricks from experts, including a lot of podcast guests who send me amazing things, strange experiments. Of course, that's what I do. It is a human guinea pig and weird stuff from all over the world. My subscribers have seen a lot of things at the edges before they have gone mainstream.

I mean, dozens and dozens of things way out at the edges. It's a lot of fun. But back to the intro for this episode. In this episode, I answer questions on resurrecting quote-unquote forgotten languages. So languages you've studied a really long time ago. Dog training, writers block, reducing alcohol intake, AI companions, training the good enough muscle, low back pain and different tools for that.

The importance of weight training and muscle mass travel recommendations for Japan, managing fear of death and the descent to death. Oh boy. Speaking negative self-talk and much, much more. We really cover a lot of ground and I had a blast doing it and I hope you enjoy listening to it. Thanks for tuning in. We have questions that were pre-submitted and then we have questions that are coming in on the live feed and I will do my best to answer a whole bunch of both. So why don't we dive in?

The first question I'll answer is from the live feed. This is from Zheherar, are you actively taking any actions to reduce your carbon footprint? Yes, I am. There's certainly a number of different steps you can take in terms of funding new technologies. A lot of my investing over the last, I would say three to four years has been in various types of tech, different products and services that I think will overall help people to reduce carbon footprint.

I also donate money monthly to different causes and companies including Charm Industrial, which puts oil back underground. People can check that out at charmindustrial.com and that I believe is now funded through as it stands for me. Terrorist set, I believe that is how I'm going about doing this terrorist climate. So people can look at that as a means, for instance, to hopefully offset some of the carbon footprint of my travel and other things.

I am intensely aware of individual action but also the necessity in a sense to number one, not try to consume our way out of this problem but also simultaneously to recognize that we do need better technology. So it's a combination of different things. This is a question from the live feed. What classical career are you in in a parallel reality? This is esponial 327. I would say neuroscientist or marine biologist.

Those were the two professions that I most wanted to pursue after age, say 12 or 13 prior to that, it was comic book pencil. So I would say those are my classical careers as such that might exist in some parallel set of universes in the multiverse on other tracks that are running parallel to this one. Let me go to the questions that were pre-submitted and I will answer a number of those and we'll bounce back and forth. So the next question is going to be from Lucas.

Hey, Tim, you mentioned in an interview that you allowed yourself to live your life unoptimized. Are you still living an unoptimized life? I would say that there's optimizing and de-optimizing happening simultaneously in the sense that there's certain things that I am optimizing to define that simply tweaking variables to, say, improve certain outputs based on the inputs.

So looking for an elegant refinement in so much as I might approach something like Occam's protocol in the four-hour body, which I've ended up following again. After the same as it was published in 2010 in the four-hour body, this is a strength training and resistance training program. It's a very minimalist. But in the last four to six weeks, I've probably gained 10 to 15 pounds of muscle and lost a decent amount of fat in the process. That's more diet dependent than anything else.

Fat loss side. That would be slow carb diet. But when you're approaching, say, progressive resistance, you want to follow the metrics very closely, have some type of plan in advance. So one could argue that's optimizing. But then there's de-optimizing. And if you look at my kitchen table and the books strewn about including this one, Masterpiece is a fantasy art. This is a Tashin book, or a Toshin book, Diane Hansen. This is a gift that was put in front of me to my glee about two weeks ago.

But I've been digesting that very slowly as I have been digesting different types of philosophy and poetry, which certainly I'm not trying to speedread in any sense whatsoever. And went for a long, meandering, relatively unplanned hike. That is, the path itself wasn't predetermined with my dog Molly earlier today. So those are all the examples in my mind of unoptimized living. But they go hand in hand.

I don't think you can really optimize any facet of your life without perhaps strategically de-optimizing or neglecting other aspects. I think it's beyond the reach of most mortals to optimize everything. So it becomes a question of trade-offs and picking and choosing. Question from Zane, who has someone you've been impressed with lately that people may not know of and why? I would say one that comes to mind is an oldie but a goodie.

This is a Chinese photographer named Fan Ho, a.m. last name, H.O. Incredible photographer, director, multi-hyphenate, long since past, as I understand it. But Fan Ho's work is truly spectacular in terms of the composition of the images. I think all visual artists could learn a lot from Fan Ho. So Fan Ho would be what comes to mind. I'll do one more on the questions that were pre-submitted. Can you all, this is from Yavur. Do you use personal coaching and how?

I have used a lot of personal coaching throughout my life. Certainly for sports, for dance, for, let's just call it executive coaching. I would also check the box. I've worked with Jim Deppmer at conscious.is. That's the conscious leadership group and I recommend their book, the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, I believe it is, which was initially recommended to me if I'm recalling correctly Dustin Moskivitz and there are many others that I have used over time. So the short answer is yes.

In terms of how or why, I would say there are many different breeds of coach. Some focus on offering strategic advice. Others act as therapists in a sense, ask you a certain set of questions. They tend to each have their toolkits and they sort of elicit different types of thinking by asking questions that you would not be inclined to ask yourself or perhaps respond to differently when you're in a conversation.

Then there are still others who simply hold you accountable, or I should say not so simply in all cases, hold you accountable. They have other types of value that they offer, but predominantly say for someone in my position right now in this chapter of my life as it's unfolding, I think that the greatest benefit is having someone to stress test my narratives and beliefs, which are sometimes so ingrained that you simply see that as reality.

But to have someone who can identify perhaps the beliefs that you haven't stressed tested to really break assumptions that need breaking or rewrite narratives that need rewriting. Number one, number two, to ask uncomfortable questions.

Number three, to act as an accountability partner because if you're at the top of the pyramid, organizationally speaking, or if you're a solo printer or anything like that, even if you're the CEO of a really large company, if you're at the top and perhaps you don't have as much accountability in certain respects as you would like, I think a coach can add a lot of value in that capacity. So those are three of the questions.

I'm going to jump back now to the live stream and see what else we have going on here. All right, this is a question from Reed. I'm getting that right. How have you been working on your good enough muscle? Good enough, good enough as in quotation marks here. And I suppose that's meant to underscore my predisposition to being a perfectionist and having some degree of OCD to contend with.

The good enough muscle is actually I would say relatively easy to exercise if you recognize you cannot optimize all things as I mentioned earlier and that it's a question of trade offs. And much like some friends of mine have said, you should be or strive to be world class in one or two things. And for the vast majority of other things, except that good enough is plenty good enough. And I would say that I'm trying to make faster decisions if those decisions are reversible or very low cost.

And then you can sort out the details often later. So rather than waiting or hoping or searching for an additional 20% of information, let's just say you're at 60% and you think you could make a better decision at 80. Well, if it's very low cost or reversible or both making a fast decision and approaching it in more of a ready fire aim sequence, I think makes a lot of sense. So that's part of how I am approaching things if that is helpful.

Somebody asked about the video quality and the cam mic lighting details of my current setup. Logitech Brio webcam, reasonably inexpensive, I'd say it's 70 or $80 connected to my MacBook Pro. This is an ATR. I want to say 2100 microphone, but it's probably the later gen. So an ATR, maybe 2300 USB-C mic from AudioTechnica. This is probably also 70 to 80 bucks.

And then in terms of light, there is no special lighting aside from the ceiling lights and the natural light coming through very large windows in front of me. So that is my fancy, fancy setup that fits in a back back and often travels with me in a back back. All right, this is a question from cranberry leadership. High-tim of force, how much your success can you directly attribute to studying overseas?

Direct attribution is hard, but I would say that certainly I do not think I would be sitting here today with the train ability. I don't think it's a need to ask questions about basic assumptions to poke at conventional wisdom and quotation marks and convention overall had I not spent time abroad, especially my first year abroad as an exchange student in Japan, given how alien and unlike the US Japan is an almost every respect.

So I think that that is directly contributed to my ability to operate in the world and the way that I do. And I'm very grateful for that. Can we get a part three with Todd McFarling? Quite possibly. Todd is always good. That's from Moby. And I certainly wouldn't mind. Hopefully in person, I think that would be better. What would I add to for our body if I wrote it today from a name that I cannot pronounce?

I would probably add a chapter on fasting and I would say tools of titans really was intended to be almost an addendum to the four hour work week, the four hour body and four hour chef in terms of say healthy, wealthy wise, not necessarily in that order, but the fasting

chapters and also segments on mental health and psychoemosional health and psychedelics that were added to tools of titans, I would say probably with some tweaks and updates would have been added to the four hour body or if I revised it today, those would be added. Here's a question from Antius if I'm saying that correctly. Your vibe in this place seems very intentional. That is the vibe behind me. Can you tell us more about why you chose that vibe?

Yeah, this is a very rustic country feeling and it's also a place that is intended to be lived in. So if you look at, for instance, this wood behind me, this is going to be 20, 30, 40 years old, maybe 50 years old, the floor is same and I've made a few tweaks, few upgrades here in there, but by and large, this is intended to be used, possibly abused, there's scratches

all over the table that I'm sitting at with wine stains and so on from heavy social use with friends and family and this particular spot where I'm spending time is intended to be restful and easeful and part of that is not looking like or being treated like a museum. Also very sensitive to color palette and natural light. So there's a lot of natural light here and I love the colors of fall.

So you'll notice the backsplash behind the range has a very autumn themed palette to it and that is also very much deliberate. This is a question from Pristina. Have you ever had imposter syndrome with a podcast guest? If yes, who and why? So I wouldn't say that I've had imposter syndrome. I would say that their times when I have felt very nervous and insecure and have been very worried about stumbling and making mistakes, I think there are a few guests who come to mind.

Certainly my first episode with Arnold Schwarzenegger, that was 2015 and that took a year, year and half to set up. Jamie Foxx similar.

That took a year and a half or two years to set up and I put incredible extended preparation into both those episodes to give an example that may not be as obvious as an a list celebrity Ed Katmell who at the time I think was president of Pixar, he may have held some other official title, but Ed was the first person I had on the podcast who was both high profile and someone I had never spoken with before.

So we had no pre-existing rapport, no pre-existing friendship and I was incredibly nervous about that which is evidenced, we may have cleaned it up, but as he spoke, I was so nervous every time he said something, I did what in Japanese I guess would be an I'd sit you, which is like a confirmation.

I like, hmm, hmm, hmm, so this, hmm, hmm, hmm, like someone who's hungry and looking at a plate full of delicious hot food, drove people nuts and it was a nervous tick which we almost certainly ended up editing out significantly, but I've never felt like an imposter and I'm

not sure why that is, I know imposter syndrome and that term get used a lot, the idea that you're going to be found out as a fraud or something like that, but I've always tried to be very transparent with my weaknesses and where I am in the learning curve with everyone including my audience and I think that prevents that or avoids it at least.

So if I am on the stage telling people that I have abnc weaknesses or that I lack DE and F experience and sometimes I say that explicitly in my conversations it's almost like preemptive body armor in a sense, not only against external criticism but self criticism, I don't need

any additional fuel on the fire for negative self-talk so that could be viewed as a way of sort of bolstering my confidence in whatever skills I might have or in the skills that I'm developing by laying it all on the table if that makes any sense. Why do I have a washing machine in the kitchen? That's a damn fine question. It was in here when I bought the house and I think it's ridiculous but it doesn't really fit anywhere else so that is why I have a washing machine in the kitchen.

I'll do a few more in the live stream and then I'll go to the presubmitted. From Joseph any plans to go back country skiing this winter absolutely lots of plans to go back country inside country skiing this winter since that is one of my absolute favorite activities. So ski touring probably on DPS touring skis which I bought last season and I am extremely excited. I'm more excited to get out and get amongst it. This is a question from Aaron.

If you were to start your podcast slash brand over today what would you do differently? These questions, this type of question is always challenging to answer because the times, the conditions have all changed and I have changed.

What I would say is I started my podcast almost 10 years ago, this upcoming April it will be the 10th anniversary of the podcast and when I started I would say podcasting was attractive for the same reasons that angel investing were attractive to me and say the 2007-2008 period and a few of those ingredients are number one. It wasn't cutting, cutting, cutting edge. I wasn't the first person to podcast.

There was a certain critical mass of say a thousand true fans many more certainly for shows like Rogan or Nerdist or Mark Marin. So there was a proof of concept already in front of me. I saw that something was happening and gaining in momentum and power. With the angel investing very similarly there were a lot of venture capitalists, a handful of angel investors were doing well.

There was this burgeoning new species of investment vehicle or person let's call it who were demon themselves micro VCs at the time but it was otherwise pretty uncrowded, ditto with podcasting, relatively uncrowded, easily to differentiate myself and to establish a podcast that would stand out from the crowd and be appealing to my audience and the ability to become the signal above the noise was very very high.

Is it stands right now podcasting has become much more crowded and I think that it is something I would not pursue with the same degree of conviction or at least it wouldn't seem obvious off the bat. Alright, this is a question from Chris. How is cutting back on booze going any advice on how to set expectations with friends who are particularly fond of drinking cutting back on booze is going really well.

I haven't had any in I don't know a week or two and I'm planning on doing no booze for all of October and the first half of November so it will be minimum of six weeks with no booze whatsoever. In terms of setting expectations it's I would say number one being upfront if I'm ever invited to go out that I'm not drinking and I don't want to have a big conversation about it I don't want to feel pressured I'm just not drinking right now and you could

use an athletic goal as a pretext for that say you're trying to cut down on weight say you're trying to see how it affects your HRV you could certainly use anything like that you could say that you're taking medication or supplements that might be contraindicated

with alcohol which is pretty much everything by the way so it doesn't need to be a lie it can just be maybe an overemphasized minor truth in this case so all of those approaches I think could work pretty well all right here's a question I get a lot actually this is

from Bronislove your face is so smooth no wrinkles do you use any particular skin products or have you had any beauty treatments like Botox or anything like that no I have not had any of those enhancements whatsoever and I have used Dr. Bronners unscented Castile

soap so large containers of Dr. Bronners unscented soap for pretty much everything for years now so I refill my hand soap with Dr. Bronners and there are these devices you can get on Amazon with Mason jars that help you to basically create foams doing this so you can put that

in your bathroom or anywhere else and that is effectively all I use for both my face my head and my body and my general approach with self care is the fewer chemicals the fewer ingredients the better and this has been my policy for a long time it's also why I tend

not to use sunscreens occasionally I'll use something that is predominantly say zinc oxide if I'm going to be in a very harsh set of conditions for instance especially if a month's snow or anything that's going to be reflective where I might get incredibly burned then I might

use something like that but otherwise I will use long sleep shirts hats etc to minimize my sun exposure or take breaks I'll be exposed for 20 to 30 minutes and then I'll take a break and I'll slowly acclimate over time as opposed to putting sunscreen with 30 ingredients on my skin

and we've seen recall after recall after recall for instance of sunscreens based on different carcinogens and so on so not sure that's helpful but I will say that there is such a thing as over applying chemistry and enhancements to your body and your face so I really try to use

a light hand and the less the better I would also say that your external condition I think is often a reflection of your internal condition so I do consume a lot of healthy fats I take Nordic Naturals omega-3 supplements I alternate between fish and algae which has completely eliminated any

type of nausea that I have felt from other omega-3 supplementation as an example I pay a lot of attention to diet so I would say I'm working from the inside out as opposed to trying to address sort of the cracks in the veneer with topical treatments but I get this question a lot so I

wanted to take a stab at answering it I also think that the lighting in the camera are very flattering at the moment I do have crows feet large crows feet I have a question from big dog do you notice pattern in your happiness levels in regards to different types of social activities parties night

clubs events hiking etc I would say definitely I do and for this reason I try to schedule two guys trips for me so two guys trips per year at least which are generally in the six to eight person range doing something active the last trip was back inside country skiing I could certainly see

another option being hiking or fishing or something that involves movement and group dinners group could be two or three I think the ideal number for me is probably three to five maybe even three to six as long as people don't split off into side conversations ideally when I am in a city that

makes that easy to organize or a place where that is easy to organize I would say two to three times a week seems to be the magic number but even once per week honestly ideally say Wednesday something like that or during the week which gives me a booster shot of well being from a mental psych

emotional perspective to carry me then through the rest of the week Friday Saturday Sunday kind of take care of themselves especially Friday Saturday so those are a few things will had a good answer for the alcohol and what to say to your friends I just tell them I'm allergic to alcohol I break out

in handcuffs when I drink that's pretty good question from we got lots of questions now okay that's because we have one thousand three hundred eighty two people now instead of thirty one who do you want to interview you have an interview yet there are so many people who come to mind

Ryan Reynolds would be very high on my list I would really love to have him on the podcast but TBD all right this is from Hungarian language and culture have you ever thought about interviewing dan John I have thought about interviewing dan John and thank you for the reminder so I'm going to

write that down I'm a big fan of dan John and easy strength in his work with povl tutsulin and certainly he would be an interesting addition to the roster so I will put that down this is from PJ where in your creative process do you feel the greatest friction today and what strategies from

the top one percent of creatives you've interviewed have worked for you to help overcome them I would say the friction honestly is feeling fear around delving into new formats that could be screenplay could be comic book writing which I think is the most likely next step for me I think comics and I

have the DC Comics guide to writing comics something along those lines let me grab it the DC Comics guide to writing comics right here by Dennis O'Neill which is a great book by the way and the challenge for me is getting started it's also delivering something by a specific deadline so

in terms of the top one percent creatives and what I have borrowed or find useful that I think could help me get over this hump frankly it's being accountable to other people so I've brought in others to help me with creative concept art pushes and I'm in the process of reviewing

various types of environmental and backgrounds for instance right now and there are deadlines for that that helps push the ball forward with something like comics I think having if for instance an accountability partner or a coach to focus on things like this so that if I do not deliver

it's a matter of a very uncomfortable conversation where they say Tim you committed doing this by this point in time you didn't do it you've hired me to help you with accomplishing these things what are we doing here honestly and one of the questions I get a lot is when you're getting this

advice from four or five people per month what do you pay attention to do you have FOMO about doing certain things and not other things how do you incorporate all the advice and frankly there times when I experiment with new types of advice and then there are times when I hit pause and I say

if I were to assume I know what to do what are the things I know I should do what are the things I know work cold exposure resistance training very basic meditation 20 minutes twice a day there are certain ingredients that are easy to neglect because they don't have the newness they aren't the

shiny objects that have been put in front of me by a guest who I admire and aspire to be more like oftentimes it's not a question of figuring out what to add it's rather a question of looking very closely at why you are failing to implement the few things that you know reliably work and then

removing those impediments so all right you have resistance there are certain obstacles or things that are preventing you from re-engaging with these things you're doing them consistently what are those how can you make them automatic how can you look at the work of say BJ Fog and perhaps James

clear right atomic habits so that you can build these things into automatic behaviors like brushing your teeth and those are phases that alternate for me right now I'd say I am not in the new habit accumulation phase but rather looking back over my experience over the last five to ten years what are

the things that consistently work that work almost every time I implement them consistently and how can I return to those things a couple of other questions Yitzhak I apologize if I'm not pronouncing that correctly have you ever learned about or studied the Talmud I haven't directly I'm very

interested I'm interested in holy scriptures overall and I'm actually going to be taking time over the next month to read a lot of these holy scriptures I think that it is probably impossible to understand humanity as it has evolved or changed over certainly the last two thousand

years three thousand years without depending on whose scriptures we're referring to without having some at least basic passing familiarity with these texts so I will be taking that time over the next three to four weeks here's a question David this is about language learning Tim you've talked and

written so much about language learning but not as much about maintaining and revamping your languages I'm tri-langual and working on language number four thanks in no small part to resources like for our chef and feel that keeping up with all my languages often just as much work is acquiring

them in the first place what practices or processes if any do you have for keeping up with your Japanese Spanish and other languages I do have some approaches here so number one is something that's become much easier in the last handful of years and that is movies watch movies not only watch

say for instance movies in Japanese so Japanese movies with English subtitles watch English language movies with Japanese subtitles and diddo for Spanish right so watch English language movies you know well ideally could be something you've seen a hundred times like die hard or whatever doesn't

really matter with Spanish subtitles and then conversely watch Spanish language movies with English subtitles preferably that's something that is say a series or a television show I just find there's a little bit more grist for the mill and you can get used to the speech patterns

of various protagonists and actors within a given series so I've done that with Spanish multiple times another approach is linking them together so linking languages together and what I mean by that is if for instance you have learned in my case Japanese first when I wanted to learn

German I bought both Japanese language versions of one piece which is a very famous manga very famous comic book I bought German language versions of the same one piece comic book which is a global phenomenon many people know it now but certainly back in 2005 this would have been less

common in German and then later in Spanish so I could read the same series and if I'm reading the German and I don't understand a section rather than going to an English German dictionary or a German English dictionary I'm going back to the Japanese and I'm using the Japanese to learn the meaning of

the German and by doing that I'm reviewing my Japanese while acquiring the German and then later for instance when I did Spanish I used the German language version of one piece as my safety net for the Spanish language version of one piece so I'm reading it in Spanish if I don't understand

something I'm not going to English I'm not going to Japanese I'm going to my most recent language which is going to be in that case German if that makes any sense and what's beautiful about these comic books is they are laid out page by page pain by pain typically in exactly the same way so the

dialogue should map really cleanly and another benefit which I just alluded to for the comic books is that they are almost entirely dialogue rather than exposition dense prose that is very literary in nature almost all of it is dialogue and granted they might be talking about pirates or

something else it's not going to fall into your daily conversation all the time but a lot of it will and certainly the grammar will all right that is language learning just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by AG1 the

daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1 it simply covers a ton of bases I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel

packs with me on the road so what is AG1 AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins probiotics and whole food source nutrients in a single scoop AG1 gives you support for the brain gut and immune system so take ownership of your health and try AG1 today you will get a free one year supply

of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase so learn more check it out go to drink AG1 dot com slash Tim that's drink AG1 the number one drink AG1 dot com slash Tim last time drink AG1 dot com slash Tim check it out this is a question from Krishna Molly pup

it's Molly pup right there my dog can you please share more on your daily care and routine for Molly we have puppy and want to incorporate best practices and diet plane training big thanks for everything you do thanks for the question so I do have some videos on YouTube related to

basics of dog training I am not the world's greatest dog trainer but I did spend a lot of time looking at different types of training as far as books go I would strongly recommend don't shoot the dog by I believe it's Karen prior to popularized clicker training using clicker training which she

had initially I believe refined with aquatic mammals who really don't respond to negative reinforcement right if you're training a dolphin and they don't do what you want them to do you can't really fold up a newspaper and smack the dolphin on the butt with bad dolphin they just

swim away you then in turn get much better at positive reinforcement this is also true if you're say trying to train a chicken which is something I still want to learn how to do I want to do a weekend course in training chickens and one of the quotes of the book I remember I can't remember

the attribution but it was no one should be allowed to have a child until they've been forced to train a chicken and there's a lot to it so if you want to learn about conditioning overall and certainly as it relates to a dog I think clicker training and Karen prior and don't shoot the dog

are a great place to start there are some fantastic YouTube channels which I believe at least last I checked I referred to in the description in some of my videos on the Tim Ferriss YouTube channel so you can take a look at those but there are various types or categories of training they're safety

which should take precedence over say kind of vanity tricks right dogs spinning around less important than the dog staying say in the back of the car and not jumping out until you've issued a command that sort of releases the dog jump out because they could get hit by passing car or

something like that in terms of routines lots and lots of walking read by breed different breeds will have higher demands if they're working dogs like a border collie you really shouldn't have that dog in an apartment in the city for instance there they just require way too much exercise

for it to be compatible with most people in a heavily urban environment but really big dogs and really little dogs do pretty well in those constrained environments Molly is kind of like a old man me former athlete not great endurance very heat intolerant so her enthusiasm outstrips

her capacity for work which is great for me because I can take her for an hour long or two hour long walk and I can either do that in the wilderness or do it leashed usually attached around the waste and listen to an audio book if that's something that I want to do but I just swam laps in the pool

before jumping onto this q and a in freezing cold water as a way to wake up and that is one of her favorite activities and she'll run around the pool from end to end and and basically doing a shuttle run for the entire time that I'm swimming so a tired dog is a happy dog it's also true for

humans by the way like a physically exhausted human is generally a happy human and a well trained dog is a happy dog now well trained could be substituted with a dog with clear rules is a happy dog and I think that also applies to parenting and kids right how consistent are you how predictable

are you and therefore perceived as stable I think all these things apply so those are a couple of recommendations but certainly when you look at Karen prior and clicker training I also think if your puppy is young enough crate training is one of the greatest gifts you can give your dog

do not give your puppy the opportunity to make mistakes it's harder to remove behaviors than it is to prevent them in the first place so if you don't you're dog to chew on shoes just get shoes out of their range get them off of the floor so they don't develop that habit and they get past

that teething phase and then you will never have a problem with your dog chewing shoes here's one Mary do you batch cook yeah I do especially if I'm by myself I'll batch cook and then I'll eat meals for a while so I have been following the slow carb diet as described in the for our body

you can find it online if you just search how to lose a hundred pounds following the slow carb diet there's a blog post that I wrote that lays out all the basics and you you don't need the book for that I've been cooking for instance chili I have chili in the refrigerator then I cooked up

some 95 so 95% ground venison 5% ground organs Maui newy venison ground meat which is the most nutritionally dense meat you can buy in the United States as far as I'm concerned and they have the analysis on the website to demonstrate just how incredibly nutrient rich

their meat is and their blends especially with a bit of organ meat so I'll cook that and the combination of that plus the chili plus a little goat cheese because you got to have a little goat cheese plus some sauteed spinach which was cooked at the same time that'll feed me for

three or four meals and as someone who's currently flying solo I'm about to leave the country that is a fantastic go-to meal that I can just recycle over and over again all generally I would say cook batch cook enough to feed me for four to five meals and then I'll go out at least once

a day to have the social interaction this is from lafe alieff are there any global or national trends the next five to ten years that aren't talked about enough or you believe more people should be paying attention to if applicable how are you personally preparing for this or these shifts

I would say one that comes to mind is for lack of a better term digital emotional surrogacy I'm sure there is a sexier or more elegant term for this but the inevitable development that we will have I would say within the next probably two years photo realistic

avatars that we can interact with through say virtual reality and if you haven't seen the demo of the meta metaverse with Zuckerberg with Lex Friedman on his recent podcast on YouTube that showcases what this can look like I would encourage everybody to at least watch the first five

minutes to get a taste of things to come with the ability to interact with photo realistic avatars furthermore with the ability to interact with photo realistic avatars who might be your favorite celebrity like a Taylor Swift with very convincing facial expressions we are getting to

appoint or companies like replica for instance replica with a K at the end K a instead of C a where digital companions are going to become for many people not just a supplement to human interaction but a replacement for human interaction so I would say that the loneliness epidemic

from my perspective is probably only going to get more nuanced more complex and more challenging to address in some respects because especially for people like myself who are introverts I'm taking active steps all I answer that second part of your question to maybe preemptively gird myself for

this but for those people who are already intimidated or taxed by going out and interacting with one person or groups of people you could see the case of for many of them opting out completely and I think we already have problems with declining birth rates and there are many countries that are

below replacement rates at this point so I am very curious to see what's the side of impact that will have the way I am counteracting that for myself is booking things on the calendar in advance and by in advance I mean at this point I'm probably six months out booking trips booking time with

friends booking time with family getting it on the calendar putting money behind it doesn't have to be a lot of money but enough money that you can benefit from the sunk cost fallacy and feel invested so you won't cancel things and really giving myself very few options for opting out of

social interactions that I've proven to myself over time are always in my best interest even if I will drag my feet to get there in the first place I will leave being better off so those are a few thoughts in terms of trends people are paying a lot of attention to say

AI and broad strokes or machine learning in broad strokes but my interest and certainly what I'm also watching in my audience are some of the societal implications and these psychological sort of mass psychological implications of these things so you will be able to take steps

to perhaps put a moat around yourself to minimize the damage but this is something to pay attention to and I would also say that as these tools become more and more convincing we've blown away the turning test it's already been beaten or passed so as these tools and machines become more and more

convincing more and more appealing I think that there will be the very natural impulse to offload more and more of the things that we currently handle in our own heads or manually and if you want to preserve some of those abilities you're going to have to decide to be

perhaps a selective bloodite or at least for periods of time be a selective bloodite for instance how many people here would say their parents are better at directions offline not using google maps than the younger generations and I would imagine a lot of people would raise their hand

and this is perhaps not controversial because people have decided to embrace something like google maps or many other competitors to help them with convenience and accuracy and so on however if you don't use it you lose it and it's easy to embrace convenience and not recognize

this severe atrophy of capabilities until it's very hard to reverse so I think that that is a meta awareness that needs to be developed as we are interacting with these increasingly seductive and powerful tools so long answer but these are things that I think about all right here's a question

from Andre I'll go on a longer trip to Japan next year and I would love to know one of your favorite secret spots in the country for a visit all right here are a couple of recommendations and one will be not so secret but a lot of foreigners don't visit it and that's the jibli museum

they call it mitaqa forest but it is basically in i don't want to park you know i don't want to coin you can get the tickets or at least you could at loss in convenience stores you could ask hotel concierge to also try to help you with this I believe there are now two locations so jibli is ghi bli

it is effectively the Disney of Japan Miyazaki Hiyao is the figurehead behind jibli and my favorite movie spirited away is I think they're crowning achievement but I am biased jibli museum and it'll cause your park is also tremendous I would say if you drink Genyama moto so jian yama moto

Genyama moto is this tiny tiny I think it seats six to eight people bespoke cocktail bar where you sit down and it's basically omakase and the bartender serves you drinks you don't get to request things you don't get to object you just get served like a master sushi chef would put things

in front of you various drinks and you have this experience which is tremendous and I actually first met think it's gang or yama moto anyway at brushstroke I think was the name of the restaurant New York city where I bumped into him at the time I was doing the food marathon from the four-hour

chef for the people who remember that where I had whatever it was 26.2 dishes and 24 hours walking around New York City and he was sitting there with this ice pick and a number of tools shizzling huge blocks of ice into perfect spheres to make his cocktails and we struck up a conversation so

when a friend of mine invited me to this place in Tokyo I was sitting there and after the first or second drink we both looked at each other at the same time and we're like I know you I know you where do I know you from and we put it together so there's that I would say there is a semi underground

whiskey bar that is quite well known in Niseiko up in the north so if you go skiing I would certainly take a minute and check that out there can't be too many of them and it's a husband and wife team the husband is Japanese and the wife is I want to say Australian or British I apologize to her that

I'm probably not getting it right should be pretty easy to spot and then if you can get to Nikko so Nikko NIKKO in the fall especially but higher elevation beautiful rural area if you can get there it's amazing for sightseeing but they also have occasional demonstrations of Japanese horseback

archery which is Yabu Samay why a B.U.S.A.M.E and if you have the chance to see that you should definitely see it it will blow your mind question from Jane at one point you talked about making the improvement of education in our country of focus is that still an interest of yours and if so

what are your thoughts at this time about how to do that yes it's still of interest I did shift my focus to mental health therapeutics including psychedelics for the last let's call it eight years but education is always close to the front of my mind and I would say that I've shifted my focus

in that arena to not necessarily trying to fix policy and so on because it's beyond my capabilities and above my pay grade it's just not the arena where I can make the most impact by focusing on talent sourcing because there are often huge surpluses of scholarships and funds that are

made available by giant foundations but go unclaimed because it is challenging in time to find the most promising under-resourced kids in the country period it's a talent sourcing problem so there are organizations like Questbridge which I've supported a lot in the past and feel very

strongly about there are others do a lot of good in public schools with various core materials and so on like donors choose dot org which I've been involved with as well and then there are new startups that are doing very interesting things with accelerated learning and harnessing

technology for that purpose certainly Khan Academy is interesting Maintava is a very new startup that I have backed and fingers crossed that they do a lot in that field this question from Andy Arthur C. Brooks episode had an immediate impact on my life philosophies was curious

whether it did the same for you if it had a big impact you too seem to become fast friends thanks yes episode with Arthur was a real delight and I appreciated his ability to spin many plates very well so he is from a secular perspective very dedicated to studying the science mostly on

the social science side but certainly tries to tie that together with neuroscience in the fields that he's exploring he is deeply religious and I find that very interesting and I think the question of how to create meaning more so than fine meaning but you could use both

how to create meaning in a world of pessimism and nihilism where in many countries religion has fallen away at least in some of the more urban environments is going to become an increasingly pressing question so I am personally focused on that for me individually but also as I just look

at the different state changes in various demographics in my audience it's very concerning so I do think about this a lot and I predicted a few years ago and we're already seeing this but it will continue to be the case and will accelerate dramatically I think there will be an explosion of

what you might consider new religions some of them will masquerade as other things crossfit veganism whatever it might be but very strongly held belief systems that are defended with religious fervor where people who are heretics from within are certainly ostracized these types of groups some

of them with overt spiritual overtones or laws slash commandments slash intentional living rules whatever you might call it but I think we will see a vast proliferation of these things as well as more uptake with the sort of Judeo Christian or Abrahamic religions I think all of

those things are going to become more and more appealing to humans who love it or hate it seemed to be inextricably combined with religion or the seeking of this thing called God and even in the most secular of societies people worship something and I think the people who are at most risk

of self deception and societal problems for those people aren't clear on what they're worshiping and this is barring from it might have been an infinite jest but everyone worships something so it's just a question of knowing what you're worshiping so that has certainly become of greater

interest to me this is a question from Reese wait lifting for longevity what are your thoughts what are you doing differently I think if you're going to choose one type of exercise and one type of exercise only a resistance training which can sometimes take the form often takes the form

of weight training would be the best investment for longevity and health span certainly for combating age-related decline of muscle mass and so on and so forth there were a lot of questions that have come up in the precipitant of questions around say the slow carb diet weight loss how do

you make weight loss sustainable and a lot of people have the experience of losing weight and then regaining that weight for instance I'm helping my dad right now with slow carb diet in the last I want to say three months he's lost 53 pounds so he's doing really well but those gains meaning

those losses are hard to hold on to unless you upgrade your underlying machinery and what I mean by that is increasing muscle mass sort of your mitochondrial engine so to speak such that you have greater ability to dispose of glucose you have better ability with this enhanced machinery to

generate heat to manage your insulin and glucose response to food so weight training really we could look at the mortality rates associated with broken hips and so on in elderly populations there's so many different outputs from pulling the one lever of consistent progressive resistance with say

weight training that for me it's just a no-brainer yes there are other things that you can do and should do probably like zone two training is described by Peter Tia but for me based on all the data based on certainly surveying my audience seeing what works what doesn't who's able to keep

weight off who's able to sustain their progress over time the common factor that I've identified is weight training now why do I say weight training yes I said resistance training because you can use something like gymnastic strength training GST which is fantastic but it is in some cases more

challenging to quantify the progress whereas if you're lifting dumbbells 10 pounds is 10 pounds 12 pounds is 12 pounds 15 pounds is 15 pounds and in such a case it's really basic and very straightforward to track your progressive resistance where you are increasing the amount of weight

or the number of reps and increasing the productive stress that you are applying to your system over time and I should note that that is another reason why if you have proper instruction very very key underlying underlying if you have proper technical instruction that free weights are often

superior to machines if you're in one place and you always will have access to the same machines feel free to use machines but otherwise in my case when I am traveling a lot of the year dumbbells are for instance barbells are easy to use anywhere I find them and a pound is a pound or a kilogram

is a kilogram so that's a long answer to a short question but if I had to pick one tool for longevity in the exercise bucket not on the diet side of things or in other categories I would choose for myself weight training all right this is a question from Natalie hey Tim what have you learned

from years of interviewing around asking the right questions and enabling meaningful conversations so I would say I've learned a whole bunch and I'll probably do a recap if such a thing is possible around the 10 year anniversary of the podcast because I feel like I've learned a lot in terms of

asking questions I would say that an interview is very much like a conversation if you meet someone at a cocktail party and your first or second question is tell me about the most traumatic experience of your life they're gonna think you're a crazy person because nobody communicates that way

and there is a rapport building feeling out process so I plan for that and I often will spend say 10 minutes five to 10 minutes before we record having a conversation so that the guests can feel more at ease with me so that we can then get into some other corners and I will also set the

expectation in advance that they have final cut they have final edit they will get a transcript they can remove anything they want to remove I will also look out for them and for that reason we should really explore the edges we should really push and let it fly because I can always cut things out later but we can't add the interesting or the unexpected back in later so that effectively buys both of us permission to go places that might not be typical for a conversation I always tell

them where I'm gonna start so they build confidence in the beginning and no one stumbles out of the gates and I also I would say look for the side alleys realizing that my podcast is not live for instance sometimes the digressions don't work sometimes the exit ramp that I think could take us somewhere interesting don't work but other times they really end up being incredibly important and one example that hops to mind is my conversation with Debbie Millman my first interview of Debbie

Millman and some of you will recognize that name also because she and I had a conversation around childhood abuse and our respective healing journeys from early childhood abuse and the reason I felt comfortable going there with her personally for my own story was that when I first interviewed her

the list of questions all the prep was intended to focus on her background and graphic design and her career trajectory but I had noticed that whenever she was asked about her childhood or her parents she would generally answer in one or two very vague general statements and move on and I thought

that was curious and I wanted to learn more about it I didn't suspect what was coming but I felt like at least we could cover some new territory and I asked her if she would be comfortable this is part of my five to ten minutes before we hit record with me asking her about her childhood and she

said well maybe we'll see you can try and then I'll answer if I feel comfortable and I asked her about this and this was pretty early in the conversation I would say in the first half hour and it ended up being the first time she'd ever spoken publicly about childhood sexual abuse and

this incredibly traumatic period in her life and everything she'd done to try to recover from that and that was the rest of the interview so I always try to take a shot at the odd question or topic maybe it comes up in my research maybe it comes up in the conversation where there's a throwaway

comment that might not be a throwaway comment and then I ask well let's come back to that for a second you know how did that make you feel some very very basic follow-up questions often to the trick what did you learn from that walk us through that moment what was your internal experience what

was your self-talk when a happened or when you did be these very basic follow-up questions that take you off script often lead to the most fertile ground and also in the first I would say 10 minutes or so I try to ask questions that they've never been asked before simply to show

based on my research with say some very arcane point in Wikipedia that links to another thing that links to another reference that links to another reference and I get a quote from I'm making this up but the second boss they ever had when they were working at an ice cream shop and I ask them

what their interaction was like with so and so or who was so and so and how did they fit into your life and they go oh wow okay you really do your homework and that snaps them out of any autopilot dream state they might have accidentally slipped into or deliberately slipped into people who get

interviewed a lot have their 60-minute set just like professional comedians because they learn what works and I don't blame them I can do the same thing so those are a few thoughts on things I've learned about interviewing I could go on and on and on but those are a handful that come to mind

this is from Lexi 30 grams within 30 minutes a la the slow carb diet or intermittent fasting I'm still a 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes but I will say that that doesn't mean an entire meal necessarily so I've been waking up in the mornings for instance I'll show you what I've

been having I'm gonna sound like a bit of a broken record here but these are venison sticks peppered and they have between nine and 11 grams of protein each this is with 100% wild harvest advenison from Maui Newi like Maui is in the island Newi and Ui and full disclosure I mean I ended

up loving these guys so much that I invested in the company but that is not why I consume this three of these I can stick them in a backpack that's my 30 grams and I will have these first thing in the morning then go for a walk with Maui for about a half hour that's when I will have my first

caffeine I will sit down with the five minute journal which is something I have reintegrated into my life referring back to what I mentioned earlier about taking the things that work and reapplying them ensuring you are doing them as opposed to constantly adding the new the new the new so three

these sticks go for a walk for half hour half my first caffeine sit down five minute journal get up half hour back and then by that point I will probably have some type of small meal this will likely be around 10 a.m. let's say maybe a little bit earlier and then I'll postpone that's probably on the

order of 400 calories to 500 calories and then I will have my first real meal per se as lunch let's call it at 1 p.m. something like that but I have just seen better results for people with 30 grams within 30 minutes waking up it's very straightforward it's very clear there's no gray area

and it seems to kickstart the metabolic machinery in a way that is very helpful for cognition for sustained energy for a million different things and there are if you follow the letter of the law per se very few ways you can screw that up with intermittent fasting there are a lot of ways

you can screw that up and we don't have to get into all the ways there are many people who thrive on intermittent fasting but there are a lot of ways you can screw it up and if you look at for instance what I wrote in the four hour chef and the four hour body but especially in the four hour

chef is it related to accelerated learning failure points identifying the failure points and removing as many failure points as possible 30 grams within 30 minutes waking up avoids dozens of different possible dietary failure points and body recomposition failure points as well if you're

trying to maintain muscle mass and decrease your fat mass then I simply find this to be more consistent for more people in what I've seen this is from a drummer what's your approach for managing fear of death I loved your practical thoughts on suicide article from years ago it helped me

through some tough times thank you you're very welcome yeah if people have not read that if you're in a dark place certainly call a hotline a suicide hotline if you need to but I do have a blog post about my darkest period called some practical thoughts on suicide if anyone might find that helpful

right now terms of managing fear of death I think that my fear I need to manage is not fear of death it's fear of the descent to death so losing my health span my cognition my physical performance and I haven't really figured that out fully to be honest and maybe I never will but in terms of

fear of death I find stoicism very very helpful and show you an oldie here this is literally again harkening back to rereading or reintegrating the things that have worked this is a book from the Harvard classics with Plato epic teedis and Marcus Relius I would say Seneca certainly is a fantastic addition in terms of memento mori remembering you are going to die I find and I'm not recommending this to all people at all but if you have what would be described as mystical experiences and you

can in a sense assess these things with questionnaires as they have done at Johns Hopkins and so on with celisibon assisted therapies when you have these transcendent experiences where your ego seems to dissolve that could be through psychedelics it could be through any number of different spiritual

traditions and practices could happen spontaneously could happen in meditation and it often does and experience meditators or in some people the very first time they try a new type of meditation they will have this experience of vanishing having the self vanish for a brief period of time that

was my experience of very first time I did transcendental meditation and then I spent the next 10 plus years trying to get back to that state which turns out to be pretty common but once you've tasted that for me at least it begs the question is that so different from lights out

is it possible to then also be the observer even when the self is extinguished is it possible to experience what we consider consciousness even without any identity to point to and I think the answer is yes also as nivalrava kunt I guess has said before he's like you remember what it was like before you were born it's like yeah like that so since sitting here right now I can't say I was terrified before I was born maybe it is very much the same and of course there are infinite possibilities

and every tradition we can imagine has come up with some working theory of what happens in the afterlife but for better for worse that is our sense as humans is to be aware of mortality but those are a few things that I found helpful myself very kind words in the comments thank you guys I

really enjoy doing this um thrill that I get to do it and really appreciate you all being here all right this is from Carlos what exercises slash techniques work to get rid of your back pain after the podcast episodes with Shirley Sarmann Ptphd there are a number of things that have been very

helpful I'm still working on it is the short answer but there are some portable traction devices that I found quite helpful let me grab it it's right next to me so I have been going to a sports doctor who uses a very sophisticated traction device but I travel so much I don't always have access to this so this right here is called Fisher traction and it basically wraps around a door handle and then it goes around your waist and you lay on your back and scoot yourself away to apply traction

and then you relieve the traction every five minutes or so and you do repetitions of this I just listen to an audiobook or hop on the phone and do that I found that incredibly helpful for gapping a bit especially on my my low back right side say between l4l5 where I have some stenosis

and nerve impingement because of a bulging disc I have found focusing on internal rotation and external rotation very helpful that's something that's Shirley underscored for me definitely focusing on terminal hip extension when walking so ensuring that I am pushing off of my toe in

other words ensuring that I am pushing off and getting that last bit of the stride as opposed to pulling my leg forward with the hip flexor instead of pulling it forward stop pull it forward stop I'm trying to push off and make sure I feel that in my toe on each foot and then have that

leg swing through and on top of that there are any number of different things I could add to this of course but foam rolling the performis and the IT bands and TFL I've found incredibly helpful I use a hyper ice vibrating foam roller which seems to relieve spasms much more effectively than

other things and then avoiding certain things so if I sit on a very hard wooden chair my QL my quadratus lomborum and external obliques and so on will spasm to try to support that area because of the compression sensitivity so I just have a small pillow that I throw in my car so if I go to

a restaurant I'll just bring that in sounds ridiculous but for right now it really really helps also having proper chair ergonomics setup so even at this kitchen table where I'm doing this recording right now I'm sitting in an air on chair with lumbar support with some foot elevation

on the floor so that I have support instead of say leaning forward on my elbows the whole time and fidgeting back and forth in such a way that causes the stabilizing muscles to light up and then ultimately spasm hopefully that is helpful and yes to everyone who's asking I have read the

sarna books I'm going to reread them but not all back pain is emotional or psychological some of it is absolutely I'm going to reread these things the last year of my life has been incredibly stressful from a relationship perspective especially having a five year relationship and

roughly one year ago and all of the shifting sands that have come about after that has been very very challenging and I think I doubled down on a lot as a way to occupy myself to whether that's storm which I don't actually view as a bad coping strategy but it wouldn't surprise me if

there are emotional components and I have very clear structural biomechanical issues that also have some explanatory power and I do know doctors including the sports doctor I referred to earlier who are very close with sarna and constantly debated with him about these types of thing

if somebody gets in a car accident suddenly they have back pain they never had before maybe it's the car accident not just their emotional response to the car accident and it's kind of insulting to the patient I think to always insist that it is in their head per se at the same time I would say

that pain perception of pain pain patterning and psycho emotional health and the stories we tell ourselves are seemingly very intertwined so I don't want to dismiss that and a lot of pain I think can be at least partially explained with a lot of what sarna describes we take a look at a few more

and then I got to go because I'm actually talking about back pain I'm going to a Pilates class and for those people who poo poo Pilates if you work with someone who is very very very technical and they're very good at addressing the core maintaining proper pelvis position it makes everything better I'm just going to say it makes everything everything better and that goes for top athletes as well even if I were at the peak of my competitive powers one of the things I would have said to myself

30 years ago was do Pilates two or three times a week it is going to check a lot of boxes and cover a lot of bases you are not covering and it will minimize the likelihood of chronic pain and injury later a lot of people ask me for dating advice I don't think I'm in a position to give

dating advice I'm not bad at dating I'm actually good at it but ask somebody who you know dated around and then met the love of their life now they have three kids and they've got all that shit figured out it's like don't go to the morbidly obese guy and ask him how to lose weight

I'm in a month saying that's who I am equivalent wise in the relationship realm but like the proof is in the pudding so I would say maybe listen to Arthur C. Brooks and other folks on that more although I will say that in this modern age it is uniquely bizarre to date with digital tools and apps and

also all of these social dynamics that play especially in the United States it is fucking insane so there is that but I am not overly concerned about it I will figure it out my favorite movie the last two years you know I'm thinking about rewatching actually one of my favorites

two spirited away which I mentioned already and then also a profit or unprofit to French film I won't ruin it by telling you anything about the story but it is beautifully shot also quite brutal but it is a heroes journey par exit alls in a very modern setting so people can check that out if

they would like to check it out this is a precipitant question from Chris what is one book you love that was better the second time around and why there are many but I would say that on writing by Stephen King you really can't read about fiction until you've tried some fiction so once I

tried my hand at more fiction in the form of the legend of cockpunch if you guys have no idea what that is you can google it then it meant a lot more to read say and Lamont's writing or the writing of other writers on the craft of fiction also the moral letters to Lucilius the letters of

Seneca if you want to find those for free you can just search the Tao of Seneca and I put together a bunch of PDFs with fantastic artwork and calligraphy and so on because there's a lot of overlap in the the stoic and Buddhist philosophies and belief systems and I wanted to highlight that so

if you just google Tao of Seneca you will find a bunch of PDFs for free here's one more from Shelby how do you break negative self-talk I would say gratitude practice easy way to embrace that is using something like the five-minute journal and a DBT dialectic behavioral therapy I think is

undervalued underutilized and very impressively systematized in a way that lends it to scientific study which is incredibly rare and impressive in a world where psychiatric tools are notoriously squishy and hard to evaluate so DBT would also be on the short list and I would say if you wanted

something that is very graspable the work by Byron Katie and turn around she has worksheets available for free online is incredibly incredibly helpful continues to be helpful for me personally as well all right guys I'm going to go do some exercise and create everyone to do the same and I

appreciate you all tuning in hopefully this was helpful and I recognize that a lot of people are feeling the specter of uncertainty doom scrolling certainly does nothing but poor gasoline on the fire of fear and doubt so monitor your information intake consider a low information diet and

recognize as well as evidenced by the live chat here and a lot of the patterns in the live chat you are not alone every human is uniquely endowed with superpowers and super weaknesses and everyone is fighting a battle fighting struggles that you know nothing about so rest assured

that you are not alone in experiencing those things so kia kaha I would say say strong and I will talk to you guys soon thanks for tuning in guys hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me

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