Talking to Tim Ferriss about how to live a dope life

we have a bunch of friends not gonna name names but they've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life and so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars which is like such a wake up call of a bad trade to make once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit i feel like i could rule to word to i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days off on the road you wanna back yeah we're to start yeah it's so funny i did a pod with tim i don't know last year or something like that and i hyper prepared for it because i was like oh my guys tim ferris this is the guy this is the reason i did a podcast in the first place i wanted to be at tim ferris that was a was like that was part of the north star this time i had the exact opposite opinion i was like i don't have any agenda coming into this meaning like i just wanna know what's up i wanna know what's new what's exciting what are you nerd out about i just kinda wanna hear what's going on like what is tim ferris up to nowadays and i have your game here and actually you told me about this even when we were doing that last podcast you said i just spent a few days with one of the world's best game designers i didn't realize that was our mutual friend elon and yeah he's the man he came on this podcast guest too recently he he's the man so you went and did you went and made a game with him maybe just i don't know let's start there why did why'd did you make a game yeah two years in the making believe it or not so i grow up with d and d i still have all my original modules stunt the dragons and played a lot of video games and as i was looking at what to potentially experiment with next because every few years i try something that's very much off menu or unrelated to what i'm currently doing right so there was the first book and then the angel investing was sort of a waiting into identity diversification so i wouldn't get pigeon hold in one place as a business author for instance and then the podcast after for our chef and there have been a number of other examples some out some don't in the case of the game this came about i think pretty naturally because as i was kinda late to therapy in life but better late than never i guess and when people do a lot of therapy or they do psychedelic experiences or when they've just had a couple of glasses of wine with friends at a certain point what comes up a lot is yeah you know i just take stuff so seriously and it's so heavy and i'm constantly doing ab or c i just need to have like more play more play or play and it's several and if i look back at the books sever it and it's like yeah okay productivity efficiency effectiveness learning there is a serious ting to it if that makes sense but i feel like analog getting off the screens and play is more important than ever and trying to find something that's a lighter lift than dungeons and dragons seemed like a fun challenge and i love a the guy such a poly of epic proportions and worked on the first x xbox halo is created entire genres of gaming has not just one hit but it has a track record of creating hit after hit after hit with tabletop games and love the guy he's just a sweet soul awesome hilarious guy so to be able to develop a friendship with him i was like alright if i'm choosing projects as i usually do based on skills i'll develop knowledge i'll learn and relationships i'll build that could translate outside of that project because a lot of projects are gonna fail so if it's setting it up in a how do you win even if you lose i was like this seems like a very good bet it's something that's kinda near and dear to me something i want more of in my life so if you're gonna make a game what you have to do you have to play a lot of games so also way just forcing myself to get off of laptops and phones spend time with my friends and here we are it's it's it's landing in like eight thousand retail locations walmart target everywhere it's been exclusive to walmart for a few months has been a best seller three hundred million plus social views of gameplay which is nuts and we'll see by the way you in two thousand and fourteen you had a guy working with you named charlie home that i talked to a little bit charlie is really cool yeah i am great and i remember he wrote a blog post on play yeah do you remember that i did i absolutely do yeah and the whole point of the blog post i was like these guys idiots they don't know how have fun you can't go out and play and then as i've gotten older and i take things way more serious i it's very strange that i have empathy for that now and i feel that where i'm like oh my god like i need to go out and have fun it just like not everything needs to make money or not that everything needs to have a purpose or be an ice plunge that helps me optimize the morning and i just need to do stuff just because it's fun that's what i used to do oh totally and it's made all of i shouldn't say all but a lot of the sort of socially reinforced drivers and behaviors and so on are around this they're orbiting around this emotional surveillance of taking things seriously and there's a place for that there are a lot of places for that but what i've also realized if if you're serious all the time you're gonna burn out or imp or just wear yourself out before you get the truly serious stuff done right so it's like right now i'm dealing with family medical crises and i don't wanna get into but i'm dealing with that there's a bunch of harry's shit going on and obviously the state of the world is pretty exciting to put it one way and having some type of recreation play for plays sake with social interaction right it have to be a gay it doesn't have to be a a card game or a table game could be playing tennis could be anything watching you seen with your friends doesn't it doesn't really matter right i think as a psychological release valve and as a way to recharge your batteries so that you can get back into the fray fully charged and resilient is super super super important so for all those reasons and frankly it's like look i wanna have a family i wanna do all that a my top priority and the short things you wanna practice before you need to have them right and i feel like getting back into exploring some of the things that made me so happy and gave me so much joy as a kid makes some sense and and the older i get the more i realized how reliable a lot of that stuff is right i wanted to be a colorful pencil forever and just getting into digital painting on an ipad and taking walking through some tutorials on youtube with pro create it's like oh wow how did i forget about this this is just so nourishing for me is this gonna be like a good money maker for you like is this a good business decision in addition to a good kinda life fun creative quest that you went on a creative side quest i think it could be if it's successful a nice little annuity that rolls in that is reasonably passive if it hits escaped velocity if i were just trying to make money this is not the way to like a low priced physical product that is shipped from overseas particularly with tariffs and everything like this is not if you if you're trying to make your riches i i would put this kind of in the same category as like streaming music on spotify water writing books do care about making money like are you motivated for more not really what when did do you remember when that happened or you're like i my cup is full yeah it was probably when i had my first one or two real startup up exits which was what that's that's shopify well what what was the where were there were a bunch the first few hits that were meaningful were like shopify uber both of which were were were sizable right for me for me it's not big blood i'm not gonna be subs a presidential campaign or buying buying a mega but i don't i don't wanna do any of this are you comfortable saying publicly a number where you're like you know i don't i'm not motivated by more because a lot of people will listen to this pod and they're like when will i feel that and and i'll give you an easy pass if you don't wanna say that number yeah i don't wanna say it what i will say is that the number for most people will move and i think that's both un unsurprisingly and dangerous so a lot of my friends were like once i have five million i'm gonna create a woodworking shop in oregon and just do the things i really enjoy and then they get to five and then it goes to ten then it goes to fifty then it goes to a hundred then it goes it just keeps going in part because they haven't developed other gears and other interests the only thing they know how to do well where they feel confident and furthermore they have their self worth wrapped up in is putting points in the score board in the in the form of money and that's why i think identity diversification and trying other things where you can feel good about yourself in sharp progress whether that's piano archer any number of other things doing complete off menu weird stuff like making a board game or a card game it is also insurance against having a fixed gear cycle fixed gear psychology right that is a risky risky risky place to be and but for me i've i've i think i'm maybe fortunate and that i was raised in a family didn't have a lot of money we were always looking for interesting adventures it that didn't cost very much and as i've gone older when i block out say a week to do stuff with my friends these are my very old friends in some cases and some of them do not have or make much money and that's totally fine i mean i pay for stuff or in some cases it's not always but the stuff that we actually want to do together is some type of activity right it's doing wilderness training in the rockets which i'm doing in two weeks it's going on a ski trip doesn't have to be to ae in japan you can do it you can go to colorado utah whatever it doesn't need to be crazy or it could be back country skiing where you're touring in which case you have many more options does not have to be expensive and this stuff that we talk about the whatsapp groups that started for an event that are still active are always some activity like that so the stuff that i spent my money on is stuff like that it's like i'm not afraid to spend money only money is evil equal i think it's a great tool but it took me a while to psychologically get comfortable with a bunch of other gears it wasn't the number right like i passed my number and i felt like i needed more i didn't have a fixed number but i felt like i needed more to have some degree of psychological safety and then everything will be okay right and then my problems would go away and then you realize that's bullshit like money solves money problems like you got plenty of work to do alright i read a ton i would say almost a book a week and the reason i read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is i wanna see what works for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then i wanna see what mistakes where did they all make where were the common flaws that they all had and i just wanna avoid that and so hubspot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five and i did that so i listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and i explained what the difference that they had on me or what actions i took because of the book and then also i listed out my very particular ways of reading because i'm pretty strategic about how i read and how i read so much and how i remember what i read and things like that and so i put this together in a very simple guide it's seven books that had a huge impact on my life and you can scan the qr code below if you wanna read it or there's a link guys know what to do there's a link in the description just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guy that i made so it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life this year so far and then also how i'm able to read so much so check it out below well have you guys read that i think bloomberg has a great article where they had high ultra high net worth bankers survey their clients and it was fairly consistent at fifty thousand dollars in net worth all the way up to fifty million dollars in net worth the answer to when do you think you're gonna have enough was almost consistently always two times more than what they currently have so if you have fifty thousand you think when i have a hundred i'm gonna be a little breathe i have a million when have two i can breathe yeah so when i'd had heard that i i was like yeah that makes sense relatable i've been there and i could see that but it would also left me defeated it like okay so then what is there is there simply no answer is that the right answer and i think what tim is saying is kind of where i've landed which is for most people it's an imagination problem they haven't spent the time to think about what else they want in life and therefore they just move the goal post a little further on the on the money game or the the success game that they are super familiar with and so it's not even a question of hitting a benchmark it's simply like you have you have not put sufficient resources into thinking about the other things that will give you that same sense of purpose of progress of a of achievement of fulfillment you know what framework sean do you use because like i i mean i i struggle with that or i'm like well i don't know what to do i've been doing this this is i've got one i've got one okay that's maybe a little less visible which is the the social traps involved with making more money and here's what i mean by that as people make more money sometimes end hanging out with people who have more money and a lot of humans if they have enough wherewithal to make like a hundred grand or they wanna make two grand a year now they start hanging out people who make two fifty a year k and now those people have new toys new goals more ambitious film in the blank and it becomes this social relative wealth slash competition and i've seen this over and over again then people kinda trade up again in a sense they start spending more and more time in wealthier circles and now people are comparing which jets they have and oh really you have that place in fill the blank state oh yeah well if you ever were interested right i think there might be one lot left at the yellowstone club or fill in the blank right and there's a there's a social risk of having people who are at your level of wealth or above because the natural inclination is gonna be to roll uphill and for that reason i try to spend a lot of time around people and with people not just old friends because some people are like hey where i up it's like we diver diverse so so far in our paths i don't have those friendships anymore that's fine but spending time with like some of the world's best fill the blank right archer swimmers super high level piano players who make next to no money but who you can respect really really really deeply who are fun to spend time with who seem to have in many instances great lives and are more content than the rich people who are chasing the next the next phantom whatever that happens to be and there are well adjusted awesome people with wealth who don't suffer from this keeping up with the jones but they are actually very few in my experience so the social piece is really important i query spending time with and if they're all at your level of of income net worth were higher the very natural evolved instinct is i think gonna be to roll uphill into more a more and more expensive and money dependent path yeah what's your answer to that sean that do you have a framework or or or anything to say about it well the first was kind of the wake up call right like i would say like beginning a career twenties it's i don't even have the ability to get what i want regardless of what i wanted it didn't have the skill i was too feeble i was too passive i was too dumb i was too un skilled i didn't have the you know the the hustle i didn't have the marketing chops i didn't know how to get even what i wanted the first part of my career was just to actually figure out how to even get what you want and i started with a very simple want which is like oh i wanna be successful i wanna make money i wanna be financially independent right and i looked around and i saw that okay most people those people are you know on a bit of a financial treadmill they're never gonna make enough where they can be financially free to have total freedom to choose what they want and they seem to be dread going to work they didn't seem to be enjoying the thing they were doing either now so they couldn't get out and they didn't like where they were then you saw you know a few people made a lot of money but they didn't really like the way that they had to make the money these are the bankers the consultants and the people who were you know they were maybe traveling a lot maybe it low creativity type of jobs but hey paid paid really well and then there was the lucky few who seemed to have both right it's like they're were making go money doing creative work that they loved and they forgot what day of the week it was because they were just so excited to get get it get up and do their projects and i just was like okay cool that's kind of the first thing i've that's the first thing to want and when i when i got to that point then i realized and looked around me you and a bunch of our mutual friend sam like you realized that some people never re never went back and asked the question what do i want now so that maybe that was the right to want when i twenty years or is my best idea then but when i turned thirty that wasn't the best idea anymore of what to want and we have a bunch of friends not gonna name names but like they just keep putting points up on the score board they've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life i think and so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars which is like such a wake up call of a bad trade to make and you know at least they have fun doing it and they do feel like a sense of you know power and autonomy and you know creativity making it happen but it became pretty clear that once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want right or are you you believe in yourself to be able to make it happen then then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit you what do do you actually want and you know i looked at myself and was like cool my bank account got fat but then so did i so a new thing to want i wanna i wanna not be embarrassed at how i look i wanna feel proud of myself for you know having self control and like break some of these terrible habits that are gonna cut my life short and you know make me sort of you know i mobile you know as the older i get and so that became a thing to want and then why did i pick the piano this year because i was like i don't know what are the what are the real joys that make me happy i love playing basketball of sport the other i think thing that like people really can get lost in and like get into a flow state and just truly enjoy themselves as music and like one is either either i'm gonna go to a bunch of concerts but i got three little kids it's probably not in the cards for me to go on tour and go go to a bunch of festivals this year what if i played music but what if i made a little dad garage band that seems like fun and and i stole the word from tim on this he i think was talking apology he said he he called him post economic and i don't know if tim i don't think you you'd ever used that before at least i hadn't heard anyone use that before did you make that up no i didn't make it i heard it from somebody in silicon valley oh we see we totally so we stole it from you and sort of almost like as a joke like it's just like a cool it's like people who are instead of being you know investors they're capital all are like you know but the aioli of versus mayo so i was like post economics because it's great way to sam rich we had an an m t shirt that's that's post economics i kinda laughed about it has centric versus fucking crazy yeah right it's so then i was like well what does that actually mean what the definition of it is isn't that you have all the money you ever want it's that you no longer need to make decisions based on money as the primary like motivator which is how i had made a lot of decisions so sam to answer your question i think it's what all of that getting to the point of realizing that the most important question now is what are the right things to want realizing that the decide of what to want isn't money anymore and may maybe that was right when i was my twenties maybe it was wrong but at least it's no longer needs to be the case and now pick a new word mine is fun so i wanna do the things that i enjoy active of doing them not like doing them for some future payoff and i i told you this you know piano is a great example of this because i thought man it's so cool to be able to play the song and i realized nobody gives a shit if you could play the piano like if anyone could play the piano they just are they sort of nod like oh you could play the piano cool they've moved on they don't wanna sit there and listen to a seven minute you know beethoven you know second menu like they don't care about any of that so you literally can't show it off even if you wanted to it's only fun because it's really fun to play and it's a great like you know so pick things that are in that category another other thing sam the other trick is writing it out so like i think when you're write you you force in a level of honesty in yourself if you do it right if you write something that doesn't feel true it stands out to you as soon as you set it as soon as you put it down on paper and then you can you know sort of edit that and i find that most people do not edit their thoughts very much right they they're only the author they're rarely the editor and i sort of just take most of the things i think and do as first drafts that need a really great editor come back in and tried to make this good and so i try to edit it like i have a post on medium i don't even use medium anymore but i wrote what i want out of life age twenty eight and i wrote like a stream of consciousness as a ramble but i write that like i kinda wrote that over year even in in the post i wrote i wanna rewrite this every year so i could see myself evolving and figuring out what i actually want out of life right like i think being intentional in that way has helped trade great hours for useless dollars that's great that's cool cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow sam you said this on last pod you go i've been i've met enough ulta of people to know it's like food you know you could be starving you can eat you can eat till you're full you can eat till your stuff you can eat till you make yourself sick you know it's not my money isn't the answer it's sort of obvious you know once you say it like that yeah let me i'll just rip on that too because as as you were mentioning how you think about this and approach it a couple things popped to mind it's just having seen i mean dozens and probably a hundred plus people go from not having money to having more money than they'll ever need and also just seeing people do well they don't have to be millionaires but it's like they've they've done really well for themselves right they have enough is the the the first i would say is much like you hear it's the economy stupid see it perfect does the economy stupid i think it's it's the relationship stupid let me explain what i mean by that if you want to be everybody wants to be happy that's a very old defined term sometimes times but it's like spend try to spend your time around happy happy people that's it i mean it sounds so dumb and obvious but it's like took me while to figure this out it's like the most reliable way to make yourself happier more upbeat is to spend time around default upbeat people right it's like it works all the time and similarly it's like if if you don't wanna complain don't like spend time around people who don't really complain right if you wanna be around people if you want to make a lot of money sure you can spend time around people who make a lot of money but those are often not the same people and for me when i'm booking these trips every year i'm blocking out time to be with those types of people because my default historically are like hyper vigilant super focused obsessed with detail i generally i would say like a lot of humans don't love the overwhelming uncertainty of the world so i like to exert control on something to feel like i have a toll hold and if i can't find anything else it's probably gonna be investing making money who knows right for lack of a better option and so blocking out that time where it's like gets the relationships stupid if you wanna have a low conflict life spend time around low conflict people have you because of your job and i mean we experienced this to a minor a bit but because of your job you're able to meet like you you have the best fame which is you're still famous mainstream but the famous people the cool people the experts like you they they they love you which is really neat who would you put in like the top three of like your best buddies that are from your podcast oh good question well i mean just because it's top of mind honestly it becomes super close and that is hard for me as an adult i've also been very i've always been very guarded and slow to trust so even when i was in college i didn't make a lot of friends i mean i was very hesitant so the fact that we held so well and have become really close is just awesome because excite i if you had ask me like you think you're gonna make any super close friends right if you had a parking lot of twenty spots of your absolute closest friends in the world does anyone new gonna potentially take one of the spots be like absolutely no way so elon was on the our pod probably six months ago so if you're listening to this go back and listen do and it out he's the man he's awesome so he would be one i would say there are a lot of friends with whom i've just deepened relationships and the podcast has been a pretext to just hang out right and like in person will have dinner the night before hang out do a podcast but there's all of this social interaction around it that's true for a lot of my friends i mean i will use the podcast just as a way to ensure that too busy friends actually remain friends so on your list oh there's so many i mean josh wade would be one people don't know who he is they should check him out absolute masterclass and just about every type of skill acquisition i mean just the people who come to mind like someone like a scott be maybe like a you know having chase jarvis kevin rose doing the random show on a regular basis which is this format where we just catch up i mean kinda like we're catching up right now talking about what's new what's going on what's on our minds new technology whatever that we come across so doing that regularly with kevin is like a a foundational way that we actually keep connected in real time right because we can i mean i probably text with kevin every other day but it's not the same it is not the same as like sitting in person or even on video and having a real conversation long form it's not the same so i'd say i use the podcast for that try to think of of some other folks i think rick rubin first long form podcast ever was all my podcast we did it in his son at s lab before it burned down in malibu and i had met him prior to that a bunch but you know we became pretty close so we're not in touch all the time but like we're we're definitely friendly people like lair hamilton the surfer and gabby reese i'm just thinking of malibu now the list is really really long it's like if you look at the people who i initially met during the launch of the flour hour workweek week i try and i mean i'm borrowing from naval here but it's if you're not gonna work with someone i think he says for a lifetime don't work with them for five minutes or something like that and neville nevada i i would trust to actually stick to that i think mine is is a little softer around the edges but it's like if you can't see yourself spending real time with someone for five years doesn't have to be personal but like professional personal or combination like don't spend five hours with that person or five weeks that person and they're gonna be exceptions of course that you have to make just to make life work but i really try to i really try to select my guests that way when possible you also one that you just said about like you do the podcast but you get dinner the night before you hang out maybe you just work out together you do go for a hike whatever those types of things one of the great i think hacks is you had this term lifestyle design but there's sort of like lifestyle sampling when you go hang out with somebody you go into their world for a little bit yeah totally you could just see like you know what are they thinking about all the time what do they do how do they interact with their family like how do they shrug what is their day today because i think from the outside it's pretty easy to see what somebody's accomplished after like a ten year arc or like what they have versus like how they live and i think how they live is much more informative to picking up like you know they're sampling at costco like oh i like that actually i wouldn't have ever really thought of it i couldn't have really experienced it but once i saw it i couldn't really un it and so i think like figuring out how to sample from other people does a lot for that like imagination does a lot for you figuring out what you really want or or a contrast it's like oh my god i thought that what this guy's done is so respect respectable and admirable but i would not wanna live this day this is his day he lives this three hundred days a year i would not want this day for three days but that he does sure great for him but i now know with absolute clarity it's not a intellectual exercise like i felt it i know it visceral doubt that that's not what i want yeah yeah the the sampling and window in is incredibly helpful also for deciding who you actually wanna model also who you might wanna imitate because it's very easy to look at such and such and i know some amazing awesome say hedge fund managers but they're also a lot of very very wealthy miserable concept there and you know like one guy carries divorce papers in places brief briefcase around just in case yeah and it's like wait what yeah incredible yeah yeah yeah and and was like okay you could look at the yeah i know but you could look at the score right if you just read the profile on the midas list or whatever and you'd be like oh my god i want like i wanna get that guy's playbook i wanna imitate it but there might be side effects to that playbook right like sure maybe the guys that do shout out of the box but it could be also that the behaviors and the habits and the way here she has built their company and manage their people also directly contribute like all of the family strife and multiple divorce and disasters right it could be that they're actually there's a causal link not just a correlation so if for that reason i mean i really do try to spend time getting into the personal with a lot of my guests and i spend a lot of people who have cross functional ability professionally and personally so when when so people for instance like i mentioned layered and gabby like amazing parents really tight family and i i really like their dynamic as a couple and their parenting style i've seen it i've i mean i've seen a lot of it kelly star at and his wife juliet star at who's like a powerhouse behind in the scenes with everything the way that they've raised their kids at who i've known since they're really small now and they've turned out like they're in college and like okay they've shipped a fully awesome human and they have a very tight relationship with them that is not the standard at least in the united it's from what i've seen and for that reason like okay we might as well take whatever their professional accomplishments are and i mean i i if they had ten twenty times as much money it would not shame it would not necessarily increase the amount that i want to emulate them sean in my i reference this whole like who's live do we admire like all all facets of it if as a whole my answer was lair did you have an answer sean jesse is yeah jesse is would also be yeah you just say a name because it's like dumb i'm not i i don't know the guy that way you know and i'm not trying to like he's my friend i'm not trying to make him a god but like but if i think about blueprints he has this you know he has this approach to like just adventure that i didn't have in my game so you see it and you're like oh wow this guy's really try got just more unforgettable days and so i i have this like this is cheesy but i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna debut this i'm gonna take this out of the closet alright sam but this is how i've been living my year okay sam you're not a you're not a real sports guy you're like skateboarding and like just like only lifting weights like but in in real sports where people play games and there's you know like the guys who who who are famous that we all admire there's these stat there's these statistical clubs so like in in baseball there's the thirty thirty club which is like you hit thirty home runs and steal thirty basis two things that usually don't go together power and speed and this year like i haven't even cared about baseball for you know ten years but s time i'm like this japanese guy hit fit he at the fifty fifty club first guy ever oh and he's actually a pitcher too like babe ruth i gotta who is this guy i i must know who has put this like on these things that each individually are great but it's like am extremely great right he could do it with those hands type of thing and so basketball there's the fifty forty ninety club it's like who's truly an elite shooter you can measure it statistically and so i created the twenty twenty twenty club for myself and it's basically hold on you're gonna make fun of me for exercising but you could have your own twenty twenty club that you've written down come on yeah these are of similar levels of nerd ness of course if you if you spot it you got it baby so like twenty twenty twenty plan here is it's lose twenty pounds that's the fitness side of of where i'm trying to be greater than i was last year there's twenty which is like a business term is add twenty million of equity to the to me and ben's like small boy portfolio and then there's twenty off script days and this is what i really stole from jesse and got me like excited about doing this which was he basically just i i love my routine i love my normal day but it's like you said like what any extreme strength carries with it in extreme weakness i can just live a routine life and all my days blend together and i just do the same shit i really have low adventure because i'm so i'm so comfortable and so so pleased with my so content with my day to day so creating these like twenty off script days where i'm like no i'm gonna throw away the routine and i'm gonna plan out twenty off days this year and i've doing it and i'm like this has led to a a a a a different like i don't know level of intentional of how to live life that that's been been good for me this year but i felt so easy about it i didn't tell anyone that's pretty good it's how do you have an un script today what does that look like it's off of my normal script you know it's it's so you you what i mean it's like i have a script i wake up i go workout i do this i do that and i like that day that i've architect yep but i need some serendipity i need some forced adventure and but i it's not just gonna happen by default by default i won't do it so i have to like block out the but like that's me on the calendar it's blue i know what a blue day is blue is i gotta do something i totally wasn't gonna do totally never do so what's an example of so that's every two weeks basically or something like that roughly two weeks yeah yeah give me what was your last three okay so my last three my last one was on friday i i hired a professional basketball trainer to take me through a workout that he puts pro basketball players through so i woke up cool and i cleared the calendar this is why i missed the pie podcast guys by the way i cleared the calendar i woke at six am and i went and trained for three hours seb like you said you're were sick with yeah like i was late because i was doing this and i lost track of time because i'm so like en gross in it you know what i mean another one i again cleared the whole calendar and i just read all my favorite fiction books as a kid i read two two harry potter books basically in a two day span to totally just get let myself indulge in something that's fun that's kinda like nostalgic i would never have the time to go do this but oh my god i had i had such a blast doing it another one i tried to make a song i've never made a song before i was like today i shall try to make a song and and some inspired by tim i when when we were hanging out you said something like i was like so what you do today like what what's a day in the life and you had told me you had i think you had been painting or like archer or something like that some like totally random fun pursuit but the way you said it in like classic tim ferris fashion where it's not just like yeah i just did this because i liked it it was like well if you think about it sort of systematically here and he was basically like have like a creativity gym it's like a place i go for an hour or forty five minutes and i get creative reps and it just helps me be more creative and i thought well that's kinda sense i kinda like that i i like that justification you know i'm good with that i and so i started doing a creative gym tim this year i picked i you know mis so jesse it's came on here and talked about the concept of facility one in a challenge that sort of defines the year and i should have done it in something that was practical i think when i sat down with the pen and paper i was like this is definitely gonna be something about getting in shape or it's gonna be something about making money it's just gonna be something about growing the podcast it's gonna be something like that and then i just and then somehow thirty minutes later i was like i'm gonna learn to play the piano and suddenly i'm going to piano lessons i think that's gonna be so much better for you what it already is i mean i'm six months in now but i've been going to these lessons i go to my teacher i walk in with my beginner one day book i'm like giving brandon like you know a fish punch if fist pound on the way in like you know everyone else in the room is seven years old it you know there's other parents there but they're with their kids and they're like where's your kid and i'm i'm the kid here and i just gonna take in this philosophy you know more and more seriously my my trainer says this great thing he goes kids dogs and dead people i was like what what does that mean he goes that's who you wanna like spend your time with he's like dogs haven't it figured out dude dogs that you know dogs are unconditional lovers they're you know they're here for play they're they're they're loyal there's so much you can learn from a dog kids you know like our kids my kids coming in and interrupt our workouts all the time and they wanna play obstacle course they wanna play this they wanna play that and like and we actually integrated it into our workout but because my trainer wants to spend more time with kids and the last one is dead people which is like you know the wise people who've written books over time like how do you spend more time with with the time list versus the time lee and so you know it's easy to get caught up at the news versus you know go read seneca or something like that so you know those have been a little i don't know parts of my compass of like where where do i put my focus where do i put my attention yeah yeah totally i've just a quick side bar story that's similar to your piano story whether like where's your kid so i have as you alluded to been taking archer super seriously i mean it's fun it's definitely not practical and i also like trying to figure out a system for training and all of these things right so they're not mutually exclusive and i just love archer tree and i've had the the opportunity to train with some amazing folks like jake ka two times silver medal and i've trained with a number of kinda legendary folks in short short stint right so i flew to california i trained with one such person and he invited me to his house he's like come right in my house alright so i show at the house and every single person shooting on the line is somewhere between i would say six and twelve right every single one asian right because a lot of the asian countries especially south korea just dominate everyone historically there are just many many standard deviations beyond anyone else it's it's pretty phenomenal south korea million levels is an interesting case study kinda like singapore anyway and at one point i'm doing my thing like off to the side because i'm still very remedial i'm like the shirt school bus version and these kids are just slang they're all training to compete and stuff and at one point the coach pulls me over and he's like join the circle turn the circle i'm like okay and so he pulls all the kids together and he's giving them that's motivational speech but it's a very like tough love east asian motivational speech anyone who's listening who has like first generation paragon or parents who are born in like cr japan channel know what i'm talking about and he's given this sort of tough motivational speech and then he and then he turns to me and he goes he goes this is tim he is an old man very old man but he is taking this very seriously in training art and i like oh i see the the case study old guy and i was like i'm good with it i'm totally good with it and i find that freeing though right because it's like i'm not competing against these kids these kids gonna grow up to be far better than i am and so that kind of i need to do this to be the best is something you just can't even justify as a delusion or an session do know what i mean so you have to just figure out how to enjoy it for what you're able to do i i i still haven't left like the uncle rico phase where i'm like you know i was pretty fat i i could still i might be able to make the olympic team in the bobs blood like i still like you know like am i like it's i'm not old i'm getting to the point now where i'm about phased out of that where it's like dude your past prior not a chance but i still i'm like i could i think i i can probably do that you know what mean yeah and it makes exercise not fun sometimes because it is like because you are always so serious i need to but in about two years it's gonna be like well past my prime with like you have a chance but i do find it hard and i you you did something funny one of the first times we hung out i asked you it's very similar to what sean just said about how he had a very specific reason about something i said you know that's a cool dog leash and you're like oh this dog leash you see this dog leash it's made of horse hair and it's perfect because it it has doesn't have any all there's like a you had a very specific reason for like something like relatively small and i was like that's exhausting have you had to tell yourself sometimes like i need to be it's hard the reason you are where where you are is because you are so precise and so exact which i don't think people know this like i've worked with you and i've quoted you i'm like in the hustle before and i think i messed up in a pasta free and you got on me and you're like no i set it this way and i was like you you're totally right and you are this is why you are so who you are is because you are so precise some and also that can wear you out sometimes right it yeah yeah it it can be exhausting i mean i have i think a certain unusual endurance for that type of thing and i mean i'll read legal documents that three or four lures have comb over and like within thirty seconds all spot stuff it's just i an eye for that which is a blessing and a curse right it will go like if i walk into a room and something i remember this is gonna be this isn't really selling it but i remember at one point did this renovation in a bathroom and i walked in and it's my girlfriend at the time loved how everything turned out and i walked in and i was like mirrors off center and she's like what are you talking about like how you can't even tell that it's up to stand like fifteen feet away and was like no it's an eighth of an inch too far at the left and and then frame we measured in as an eighth of an too far left but it's so the downside is that kind of stuff can drive you crazy and exhaust you you also copy with the dog training that would have been right in my like obsessive period of trying to figure out dog training with my first first dog adults so yeah i would have had a reason for everything and and what might be unexpected for folks is like i actually as a kid and certainly with my friends if i just had a gathering friends five days ago like a couple of my oldest friends like i'm a goofy motherfucker but it doesn't come out that much and i subconsciously or consciously don't let it come out a whole lot and when i've asked for instance something i've done with friends in the past is we we don't do a whole lot of new year's resolutions and stuff like that but occasionally for new year's resolutions and also if there's a word to focus on for the year we'll be like okay to assign each other those things right like i'll give you a new year's resolution you give me one you give me the board to focus on i'll give you one and two one of my friends is just like goofy that's your word for the next year he's like i see that side to you and nobody really sees that side of you he's like for for get not just other people but especially for you you need to do more of that and so i have really tried to block out time especially weeks with friends or a long weekend with friends that's one of the first things i do every year i block that out i reserve something i pay for it and i'm just like you guys have to show up and it's a sunk cost it's the right kind of sunk cost right so i do think about this and yes the precision and the and attentive and all that can be exhausting you know i at least what i like about you is you don't do the elon musk thing where he's like you don't wanna be me it's painful being me right he like almost like marty it up where he's like you know yeah hey he like looks off into the distance and pauses dramatically and then just sort of you know really ham it up about that stuff or anything yeah a more balanced thing like well it really serves me in this way yeah and it's not fully true i also do these other things and i'm working on that it's like i don't know just a much more human way to deal with it yeah yeah it's a useful tool i mean it's like a really sharp knife but imagine if you had a really sharp knife there's was all blade no handle right it's like if you squeeze that too tightly you're gonna hurt yourself and i feel like that's true with a lot of super superpower like when you find somebody who seems to have a strong power whether that's nature nurture or some combination the the biggest weaknesses or the biggest curse are typically sitting right next to it or just the other side of the same coin they're they're typically very very closely related what do you think was there super superpower because you you you for anyone listening i i assume you're definitely still a big deal for the twenty somethings but when sean and i were twenty somethings you are the guy you still are the guy you inspired all of us to do this and it sounds funny to say it because what you were doing now or then it's so common now but it was it was so weird that when you wrote you wrote some these things that were like oh that's so obvious you taught all of us how to it and you sort of coined lot of terms you invented a lot of the stuff what do you think was your superpower to if you had to pick one that allowed you to kinda be i mean you're you tim ferris is like a noun that you're the tim ferris of this i mean what that allowed you to become that i think there are a few things i mean one that comes to mind is i was born premature at a lot of health issues the kid so when my mom put me in to say kitty wrestling i couldn't thermo regulate i would overheat and that's still true to this day so i started trying to experiment with different ways to train different ways to compete didn't do that seriously until maybe like twelve or thirteen but wrestling has weight cutting so you sort of have an in built experimentation at a certain point and then i was like oh okay well how can i wake up more effectively i need to figure out how to lose water weight okay the things that you do tail with water loss are called diuretics what are the risks of diuretics okay let's figure out are there anything over the counter that i as a high school student can get that acts as a potassium spa diuretic blah blah blah by the way guys don't do that terrible for your body but i i think that that experimentation became a habit really early on and then for for instance for the four hour work week i mean i wrote and tossed a lot of that book multiple times and the only way i was finally able to write it and feel good about it was to sit down and write it as if i was writing an email to two very specific friends one friend who felt trapped in a job that he didn't like which was like a finance job and he was had gold handcuffs basically i mean at the time it wasn't a lot of money for a recent grad it was it was not bad and he felt like he was he knew he was going down a path that he didn't wanna travel but he couldn't himself and then the other one was a friend who had started those his own business and felt the same way he's like i've created this thing i can't just quit like an employee now what now what do i do and i sat down and basically wrote the book as if i had two glasses of wine and was emailing two friends which meant like all the war all the worries all the petty concerns and the weirdness that they would be familiar with they would know all of that about me i just put it out there and i think that that contributed another another p i think that contributed a lot frankly like the personal being the most universal if you're writing and you try to sound smart you're you're almost i mean i i think it can be a huge handicap like big possibility of dead on arrival is high for something like that so embracing your weird self i think can go a long way and then the last piece is i am naturally very very very curious and i do have that tolerance for mono monopoly and repetition that a lot of folks have trouble with whether that's language learning our tree or just in the early days before or before whoop before any of this like my patients with doing something like trying to find first generation continuous glucose monitor which was in the four hour body which came out two this intense so i probably started messing around two thousand and eight two thousand nine as far as i know i may have been the first non diabetic to use one of those and then to deal with all the pain and frustration using this basically beep side h to like capture data export the data and comb through it it was so manual but for whatever reason that kind of stuff doesn't bother me so i was i was able to run experiments i think other people would find torture and then i'll add one more thing and like i'm guessing to the best of of my ability right it's hard to say exactly why things turned out the way they turned out the last one is i do think i'm pretty good at identifying trends and also identifying trends that are gonna converge in interesting ways i don't know why that's the case but i i do think that i'm pretty good at it being in silicon valley or ball to my generation certainly like relatively early getting there in two thousand and staying through two thousand seventeen also allowed me to just have a very very very high density of serendipity and seeing technology even if you're not a venture capitalist for an angel vest it's like if you live right there in switch box it's in the air right you just hear conversations you bump rand at cocktail parties or whatever so you you if you're really paying attention and taking notes you can sometimes figure things out so i'd say those are a few that come to mind running my company hampton it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses and i'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets emails and clunky tools that do not talk to each other it's like watching someone build a house with duct tape so here's my take custom software the acts actually fits your needs isn't just convenient it's a competitive advantage should transform the way you do business and that's why you need to know about a no code platform called bubble with bubble you can build powerful web and mobile apps by literally dragging and dropping different elements out of screen no coding required by the way i use bubble on a ton of different apps including hampton and if you want help building something complex on bubble you have to bring in zero code they're the top bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plugging creator for the platform bringing they can build anything custom portals saas products and they do it about ten times faster and cheaper than traditional development zero code is also all about ai business automation transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones so stop cobb together different tools and solutions and head to zero code dot com that's zero code as in the word zero and then code q o d e again code is with a q and tell them that sam sent when you create content are you blog write you podcast it seems like you make a you make a decision and that decision is about what you're interested in but also kind of who would be interested this is kind of baked into it so for example there's things you can do that might get more views on youtube but it might be views of people who are not that interested in attracting right like whereas i've seen that for you the people that probably you respect and i respect they respect your work and then you've gotten to this like wonderful outcome there of what i like sort of like i don't i wanna call it like luxury content but it's definitely like up market in a way right it's not kinda just lowest common denominator content is that were you intentional about that or like i guess how do you think about that because i don't think this is a bit of content nerd but like you know from one kind of creator to another like how do you how do you balance those trade offs or think about that those those opportunities those options those forks in the road of like i'll give you an example we just had alex for mo on the podcast and i think he's doing a great job on youtube but there was a season where if you looked at his youtube like thumbnail history his title history it was like if you're broke and do this if you're totally stuck and like you know do this and every single title had if you're broke do this and then he was like surprised that you know he was attracting a bunch of people who were broke to you know his content well you kind of that was the mag that you created for whereas i think other people do do it slightly differently he's made adjust by the way that's not yeah yeah his whole thing but as just an as an example yeah yeah so it has been super super deliberate on my side not to aim upscale but never to deliberately dumb things down or pretend to be interested in things that i'm not interested in i would say also one thing i left out of maybe that prior list of factors is i took and still take but especially during the let's just call it kind of nineteen ninety eight even prior to that but especially like nineteen ninety eight to the publication of the first book i took writing incredibly seriously incredibly incredibly incredibly seriously mean i i don't think that is a skill that is gonna go out of style even with ai i i really feel like and part of that is the practice of writing makes you a cleaner thinker a crispr thinker a more capable thinker even if you never share what you're writing what is taking it seriously look like on a daily basis well taking it seriously for me looked like at the time you know i was in school and i took the hardest writing classes i could find and took one class by john mc one pulitzer surprise and it's just this legend and non fiction writing and that was an ass kicker of a class and just to just to make it really concrete what can happen i was shocked by this didn't expect it this was as a kid a college kid this was in college yeah this is my senior because it was my senior in college and the the class consisted of like twelve students he had to apply was hard to get into and then there's a three hour seminar hour a week where he would talk about john mc would talk about structure he's he's very well known for how he structures different pieces of writing and then you'd have a writing assignment and then he would do a one on one with you to review your writing assignment which let's just say it's like a three to ten page piece and he would always hand edit those pieces and give them back to you beforehand and you might have let's just say three pages of typed out writing so right printed out writing and you'd get it back in his red ink would be it would seem like it's the same amount of ink as your black ink and most of it was like this word makes no sense you have no idea what this man's this is pea soup which means just like word salad he's like this is redundant and he could make the piece fifty percent shorter without losing anything and as i got trained to be more concise and just have higher kind of density of of meaning without the fluff my grades and all my other classes went up even though that class took a ton of time which is wild and and then taking it seriously otherwise means that i'm reading books writing so anything i can get a ahold of like writing by stephen king favorite which is not even my genre right bird by bird by angela mo also not my genre these are both mostly focused on fiction books on screen writing irene reed screen reilly to try to understand story arc by the way you can apply to non fiction now you can get all sorts of other books draft number four by john mc fee which is based on the class that he taught at princeton for ages and talks a lot about structure i think it's writing well or something like that it's by william z but i just devoured all these books and kept my notes i still have a three ring bite with my notes from john mc class from college i still have all of my notes and also paying people to review your stuff or asking people to review stuff so even before i had published anything when i would write something if you have friends who are in law school or went to law school even if they don't practice law great pro perpetrators because what are they paid to find anything that's ambiguous anything that's redundant if they're a accustomed to doing contractor review like lawyers or people who are trained to be lawyers great at proofreading is this only non fiction stuff that you like to that you were referring to i was i was exclusively non fiction what does that mean like a advice i mean you're only twenty one were you giving advice or is it just like no no it could be it could be not not necessarily advice actually most of it would not be most of it would be something like for instance a writing assignment might be really broad so he would say there's a statue in this courtyard a mile from here right three write three pages and it has to have as a theme that sculpture and so the students in the class would come at it from every possible angle like you could you could take it anywhere you want you could it could be like the grandson of the person who made it and you tell the story of the grandson and the you know the the the mother or yeah it could be the aesthetics anything so he would deliberately keep it pretty broad or he you would say have an assignment that's like interview someone and i'm making this up because i i remember how i executed on it but he'd be like go interview someone you would normally never ever reason to talk to right was like okay so like find somebody who's like sweeping the floor so like interview them for an hour or two and write your entire piece on that person again keeping it pretty broad so you'd get a lot of different types of pieces and so i would have something like that that you could you could get proof and then as when i graduated i was still practicing writing but i didn't have a class right so i would i would try to write pieces for at the time you know like black belt magazine or maxim magazine even as even as a student just for fun i was trying to get stuff published in in big magazines didn't always succeed but occasionally got something in fortunately now i mean you can find the curriculum of so many good classes online from so many amazing universities and teachers it's like just get a couple of friends and go through it together and then proof for each other stuff ko critique each other stuff i mean it it's like you can do that now it takes some planning but you could certainly do it and then to come back to your question sean i figured out pretty early on and i'm not sure when i first read it but reading kevin kelly's one thousand true fans i mean my philosophy was always pretty tightly aligned with that because when i lost when i launched my sports nutrition company way back in right the for the first real company that i launched i tried various things before that when it finally worked is when i applied very tight constraints and i said okay i'm not going after x market which is huge i'm not going after why market like sports performance which is too still too big and too expensive for me to reach with paid marketing for instance i mean this is before effectively all social media i was like okay i'm gonna focus on certain powers sports like power lifting olympic way lifting i'm mean gonna focus on boxing but particularly mma which was very early days i mean to give you an idea like it was it was affordable for a startup up to sponsor the you see and beyond pay view right it was early early days and i'm just gonna go after these very small segments with the idea that and matt cuts at the time of google had a great presentation on this i think he called it kat mad which was a video game reference but basically start with something he was talking about it in the context of a blog you start very very narrow and then over time as you build an audience you can broaden you can broaden and this you're sort of rolling a ball that collects more and more until you have a lot of latitude to write about or do kinda whatever you want which is fortunately where i feel i am now more or less right but in the beginning it was very tightly constrained and i suppose if you're honest with yourself and you're your weird self the stuff i already talked about and if the personal is most universal and you're kinda scratching your own itch because the four hour workweek was the book i couldn't find for myself right you'd would go to the bookstore and either it was like had to run a fortune five hundred company by jack welch or it was like the minimalist guide to convincing yourself that money doesn't matter and it was like okay well i'm not gonna like recycle my lint and do help make my own sheets and do all this stuff i'm not i'm not that person right i don't wanna be that person with super extreme reality and sort of living a purely aesthetic lifestyle but i'm i also have no desire to be jack welch it's just like well where is the often in between that i actually care about and there were some books on small medium sized businesses but i couldn't find it so when i scratched my own itch did all these experimentation and then wrote it if you are sufficiently often authentic yourself and that word is so overused but if you if you actually are truthful in how you represent yourself at all the quirks it's not gonna resonate with you know eight billion people at least not off the bat right your early adopters are gonna be pretty tightly confined and i think there was an element of luck in so much as i was in silicon valley i was tech forward i was focusing on new tools some of that some of that ended up after the fact being deliberate with launch strategy for the four hour workweek week but they also happened to have incredible capability of broadcasting right and and that that also contributed but my feeling is and when i put up a blog post or i put out a podcast episode and you know i've i i've my team has also been sort of ind into this just because i've been doing it for so long is i don't want a hundred percent of my audience to like any episode i want ten percent of my audience to love each episode or each blog post i want a very very strong reaction positive like i'm i don't i don't i don't fully subscribe to the pt barn you know just measure the value of p r by the end and kind of thing i i don't totally subscribe to that and i assume over time people are too busy to read all my stuff or listening to all my podcast podcasts anyway but it's like over time if one out of every ten is like a holy fucking shit this is for me then if you have the endurance part of that is scratching your own itch i don't i think it's very hard to sustain something over the podcast is ten plus years now if you're not scratching your own edge that you end up just occupying a very unique type of mind share for your audience and they are much more interesting much more powerful as a result of that one thing i wanted ask you is you know this is we're we're sometimes we ask you about stuff like basically for our workweek week which is i don't know how many years old at this point but like almost twenty years old twenty years old what's crazy yep and that's like what you were interested in learning out about then right you were interested learning out about like how do i free myself how do i dis my time and my money how do i automate things how do i delegate things how do i do fear settings that i can live a a rich life that i wanna live right now i'd be really intentional about it i'm sure some of those things just things are still interested but some of them you're probably like cool thus a mountain night climbed ten years ago and i'm you know less interested now so i'm curious what what are what of the things you're just most interested in right now like what are you learning out about what you obsessed with what do you find yourself drawn to right now yeah we can go in all sorts of weird directions so i'll i'll also say for people who might be curious like i still use almost everything in the four hour workweek week minus the tech tools obviously like go to my pcs not something people are gonna default to but i still use all that stuff but it's necessary not sufficient right for our body same story like a lot of that stuff is in the news now cannot two thousand ten right like exercise micro snacks and glucose transporter on muscle cells like that's in the four our body it's it's making the news rounds now because there's more a scientific literature to to support it but i still use all that stuff like the kettle swings slow carb diet added crunch and all that stuff i still use it all so as i've progressed i think i've identified more and more for me and maybe for other people missing pieces right in the game right coyote is a good example of that right it's like okay yeah sure you can be the the this the most incredible productivity machine of all time and still be miserable and make your friends and family miserable right it's actually more the rule than the exception i mean it's like there are a lot of people who fit that bill and a lot of my exploration these days i would say since two thousand fifteen when i started tsa foundation for funding science related to mental health therapeutics primarily and huge chunk of that was sign psychedelic assisted therapies starting with like the earliest dedicated centers imperial college london johns hopkins etcetera but it's a it's it's not just that it's brain stimulation of different types it's some longevity research for instance related to rap mice and canine all sorts of stuff and i'd say these days i am spending a lot of time on the a lot of it is science and specifically what i have is a working hypothesis not not the only person but i think i'm looking cross disciplinary at a number of different areas and they they seem to resonate with the same possible commonality which i'll say and that's looking at m adaptive or chronic inflammation as a shared underlying driver of a lot of problems that are solved with different tools so for instance psychedelics are now topic azure heavily des a lot of experimentation on state and national levels being done some super fascinating stuff happening on the scientific front and some people say well it's because of the content other people are like nope it's because it hits the serotonin type 2a receptors for certain types of psychedelics blah blah blah and you know there a lot of incentives involved like some people wanna strip it out because it makes for an easier business model if people aren't tall saving but it turns out that a lot of these compounds have profound very very strong and in some cases durable anti inflammatory effects okay so let's put that aside for now but i do think some of the anti inflammatory effects of psychedelics could account for a lot of what we see that is now often explained by other means for instance if you give people with depression just straight up anti inflammatory and and you can find this on pub pretty easily frequently you will see an anti depress effect or reported improvements so what's going on there right if you look at long covid you look at lyme disease if you look at alzheimer's if you look at certain neuro diseases so alzheimer's often referred to as type three diabetes but there are elevated levels of certain inflammatory cytokines each the list goes on and on and on so i'm i've been doing a real deep dive on different means of safe anti inflammatory approaches to address chronic conditions right so that could be for instance sam already mentioned it but something like cold plunge i i do think there's a place for that i am looking really closely there's a lot of bullshit floating around about this but i'm gonna interview who i consider to be the most credible scientist in this domain shortly but vagus nerve there's a lot of charlotte action in this particular subject there's a lot of questionable devices being sold but i do think there's something very very interesting with vegas nerve stimulation which is actually two basic basically transatlantic cables running down either side of your neck with like a hundred thousand fibers on each side and some of the effects that you can see with respect to autoimmune disorders by the way some psychedelics seem to help with that so what the hell's going on right also inflammatory conditions of of different types depression anxiety etcetera etcetera etcetera etcetera so when you look at say the effects of psychedelics on inflamed micro p cells in the brain which they do a bunch of things where but they're kinda like the cleanup crew in the brain well what happens if they're not functioning properly interesting you know i have bunch of neuro disease in my family and the more you look at this the more it seems and inflammation i'll shut up in a second it's kinda like it's kinda like saying oh do you do business well you're like what kind of business there a million types of business same thing with inflammation there are so many different markers so many different inputs and outputs that's currently what i'm going full return on like i've i've just been going into all the science calling calling scientists emailing scientists reading books going through all the dense stuff the other piece that i've that that maybe something people are immediately interested in and again i think some of the pathways are the same is fasting yet again i mean i've paid a lot of attention to fasting wrote about it in tools of titans and kinda gave some of my protocols that i tend to follow for many many years i was doing a three day water fast every quarter and a week long fast every year and then i lapse and i stopped doing that but intermittent fasting is i think more easily comp with experiment that people can run so looking at sixty eight fasting and there's there's a lot of good science out out there about this i've relate to this and to the person who popularized it is really martin bi who's swedish body builder he is a he's a pretty abrasive personality but he's quite smart and i love that guy's blog yeah since and starting back in the day lean gaines he had one of the largest cohorts of people who were experimenting along with him on these protocols combining weight training with sixteen eight fasting sixteen eight fasting just means sixteen hours of fasting eight hours as a feeding window so could be like noon to eight or two to ten and so credit where credits do he did he he had for a long time maybe still one of the most interesting cohorts and datasets sets of real world results with this and for instance i mean i have i've done all sorts of extended fasting three days seven days ten days i don't recommend people just hop into that without proper medical supervision because you can get yourself into some trouble if you're doing that degree of pure fasting but with the sixteen a as i mentioned my my family's got a bunch of health stuff going on at the moment and there's a lot of metabolic dysfunction in my family just writ large across the board and a lot of it seems genetically driven right so i can try almost any dietary intervention i can try almost any exercise intervention really doesn't seem to move the needle much and i get i get comprehensive like the most comprehensive draws and your analysis and everything you can imagine probably every three months and after doing not very long four to eight weeks of intermittent fasting my results on an oral glucose tolerance test just to look at insulin sensitivity and so on remarkable like the turnaround was just absolutely incredible and if you do it right then let's just say you follow something like what martin does and you're you're combining weight training properly you can gain muscle mass and not lose muscle mass let me ask sean real quick have you do you know who he's talking about with this guy martin no i've never heard of this person oh my gosh this is like if you're listening to this and you're below the age of thirty you guys go watch learn about this person so this was like right when tim was in like coming up martin was a blogger this was sort of like around like the pickup artist days with the game and things like this and he was a guy who taught you how to get ripped and look good but it was sort of like he was everyone's father and he had this really fame and and it was called lean gaines lean games dot com by the way tim the the website sent it around but he had a cult following and it was mostly sent around this one attitude he had a very he had a strong and he had this famous blog post called fuck around titus yeah fuck titus yeah and it was this his whole philosophy on life was most people have fuck around titus which is you just go on the gym and you're gonna lift a little however you feel you're gonna do this maybe you'll eat a little food you'll get a little protein but like you know we're just gonna do everything average and his whole thing was nope that's fuck around titus and that's how you live a life of mediocrity and if you wanna get after in the gym you gotta get rid of fuck around titus this guy's copy on his stuff is great is instagram bio the high priest of intermittent fasting then on his website his book i think is the lean gaines method the art of getting ripped research practice and perfect and then he said i'm martin bi the thinking man's muscle hut not my words but hey it's true yeah you he's he's not gonna die of lack of confidence if anyone is reading this or listening to this and you want inspiration on like how be a great creator go back it's been a long enough time that most people have no idea who this guy is just steal a lot of his stuff i mean he was he was really good he was ahead of his time he was also a massively prolific and thoughtful contributor on some of the very very early message board stuff yeah alongside lyle mcdonald and other folks and because this is around the same time that i was getting online you know in college and then just post college so i was a lurk on a lot of these message boards and he was very very very productive and to always tried to cite research when possible to his credit and also got very strong right i mean he he also demonstrated some real strength so the point being intermittent fasting for a lot of people i think is not just something that will be easier to adhere to the first week is gonna suck i'm just gonna tell you for most people you're gonna be grumpy you're gonna be piss you're don't send too any sensitive emails because you're you're definitely gonna regret it and then after a week or so your body adapts and you really start feeling very very sharp at least that's true for me and it affected me in a way that the three days once a quarter or one week once a year which i think has some benefit with respect to possible purging of pre cancer cells and things like that which is not pure speculation or something to it but the purpose is in in some census are different and i would say very much complimentary so the intermittent fasting rhonda patrick has had a number of scientists on her show found my fitness related to this that i think are are worth checking out it's easy to test along with that i've been geek out on exogenous ketones that you yet again so supplemental ketones to make the transition periods a little easier so so sometimes i'll just not eat for a day and then eat the next day or in the first week of that transition to boost cognitive performance especially looking at supplemental ketones there's one that's pretty easy to find called i think it's just ketone q i t o n e that you can add into your coffee in the morning and treat as creamer if you've never had this stuff before i would recommend us most people are fine i would say stay close to a bathroom you may have a rapid onset of possible disaster pants and you'll wanna be close to a bathroom so don't have it for the first time as you're driving to the airport for an international flight talk do that hey have you ever heard this idea there's like a a funny like phrase where it's like whatever the silicon valley nerds are doing on their weekends that's gonna be mainstream treatment five years hundred a percent you're who they were talking about like you know like the many of the things that you are writing about in four hour workweek week is now common and you were one of the guys and and you also said when your skill sets was spotting trends what do you think are the things now what what what are the early things now that in five years are gonna be quite common yeah i think because i think one is definitely in simple terms electricity over pills so different types of whether it's brain stimulation something like accelerated tms people should look into accelerated tms and take a look at that the interview i did with no nolan and williams of stanford is a good starting point but the results that a lot of patients are able to get from treat or is resistant in depression ocd anxiety etcetera with five days of accelerated tms rival a lot of the results that you would see with some of the best outcomes with psychedelics which are already in terms of effect size and so on well beyond most conventional treatments that's a that's a great phrase too electricity over pills like that's yeah and i think i'm borrowing because i think i think one of the many things i've been reading one is from a scientist named kevin tracy and i think he said maybe it was microchip over medications so wanna give credit work credits do but i have been looking at this very very closely because psychedelics are not for everyone let's be very clear i mean that is nuclear power within the psychiatric i and psychological realm and people there are people who should not take psychedelics there are risks very real risks and it's it's like seventeenth dimension neurosurgery there's a lot going on there's a lot to be learned and there are certain conditions that typically at this point are exclusionary criteria so if you have these conditions you cannot be part of a clinical trial taking psychedelics schizophrenia bipolar disorder etcetera etcetera etcetera right borderline personality disorder there's a pretty long list and it looks like these conditions might be treat through different types of brain stimulation and the safety profiles very very very good also separately and it's and this comes back to the anti inflammation and all all these things tied together it's not just anti inflammation to be clear but metabolic psychiatry another thing that is very inter related a chris palmer of harvard is someone to look up on this front basically ketogenic diet so ketogenic diet at that people may know the atkins diet people may have heard of the ketogenic diet a it was used very effectively i wanna see in the early nineteen hundreds with epi children for whom it was devised in in this particular way with heavy cream and similarly when people would be having like a sc or psychotic break sometimes hundreds of years ago they would just be put in a room and fasted and then lo and behold after a few days quote unquote the demons would go away okay well what's actually happening there right so metabolic psychiatry along with brain stimulation i think can address a lot of segments of the population that will not be candidates for something like psychedelics psychedelic therapy and also well i could go on and on and on but those are yeah a few examples so you have electric electric over pills metabolic psychiatry three anything else i'm very curious to continue looking at the the vanguard of exogenous ketones because getting people to follow k ketogenic diet is very difficult i have i think a lot of discipline in the dietary area and i've done i did i did cyclical ketogenic a cyclical ketogenic diet for a very very long time people that that that has gone by different names i think mar deep pas sq saying name correctly i read that book in college she calls at the ana poll diet but it it requires you to be very very meticulous and i did that for years but today at this point in my life i find the ketogenic diet not to get too technical boring is fuck it is so boring and you end up feeling like a human cheese cloth it's just it's not that fun you think it's gonna be fun you're like cheeseburgers every day that sounds awesome like yeah talk to me in day twenty and for that reason and particularly when we're dealing with let's say older people elderly patients who are not gonna change their ways is it possible to use supplemental ketones to get some of the benefits and it seems like the answer is yes there are case studies in the literature that you can find but there are some open questions that i have and this is beyond my pay so i need to talk to someone but i if you have really elevated glucose levels and you also have a very elevated say levels of b b is that good for you long term like what are the implications of that long term if any right because it sounds a lot like keto in diabetic which is not a desirable condition so elevated i i do think there's a lot to uncover here unfortunately some of the ketones higher quality mono and d can be very very expensive but been bi expensive i mean like you're spending forty bucks of serving right so tb i hope more people begin to look at this because the more demand there is the more people experimenting the cheaper these things will get with with economies of scale so that's that's what i'll throw out there i'm sure we could talk about tech stuff if you wanna talk about that actually i'll give you one more and that is i am so long analog like analog and social i'm super long analog and social i'm not sure we're gonna have like a full blown but larry and ji to refer to dune which is the the rising up and destruction of the thinking machines but i think there's gonna be a lot of pushback and blow back and kind of retro i don't wanna say retro but i think there will be a heavy shift for a lot of people in the world towards human made analog and or social interaction and you already see certain signs of that right a lot of younger people are just like fuck this dating up nonsense and social media stuff and they're they're going to running clubs for their for for trying to trying to find people to date have you seen that sean do you know about this yeah we've talked about running clubs one when i just was reading that recently was book clubs book club apparently like just on declare right now and they're doing kinda like a twist on the book club which is basically like they'll do silent reading everybody gets together you don't talk you're just reading together in the presence of each other or to be like yeah wine and reed or beers and read right like just kind of like books as an excuse to go hang out in person together they're doing yes have you guys seen that young kids like the twenty and nineteen year old kids are usually the same cameras that you and i we all used when we were seventeen so you remember when you're like seventeen and you use like a canon digital camera and you make like a facebook photo album on whatever that's what kids are doing now like yeah like they don't wanna use their phone they wanna use like there's film thirty pictures type of thing well they'll yeah but no they'll use like you remember the canons it and it has a much simpler lcd screen and there's like when you out your friends and you post like friday october fourteenth two thousand and fourteen that's like the title on facebook of like your photo album that's what kids are doing now and and i think that's just the very very very tip of the iceberg of this feeling of less connection or less yeah to digital yeah and isolation loneliness all this stuff i mean like the younger generations aren't stupid right and sometimes are these sort of commentaries from the older wiz folk they're like oh those kids don't know what they're doing themselves like oh i think they have a pretty fucking good idea probably a bit more so than you do and i other examples would be huge game nights in new york city and other cities like huge hundreds of people right started with two or three people announced that hundreds of people playing games simultaneously so i find that an interesting thread to pull on do i know how to bet on that no i'm not in a rush in tim you're i feel this way oftentimes when i get done talking with you where i'm like you are cooler than i remember it basically just means like like i we don't know each other that well but like i i read about you and i listen to your podcast then i actually hang out with you every once in a while and i'm like that's why he is who he is you know like doesn't feel like you just had a podcast guest from the future come in because he's he's saying words he's like oh yeah accelerated tms i don't even know what tms is let alone accelerated you mess i'm writing down words like i know the i know enough to know that these are gonna be a big deal in five years i should probably start going pay attention because he's done that four times already over the last twenty years i should just i should just pay attention with this this alien from the future who just came and what what i hang up you know what it's sort of like have you guys ever met so you watch professional athletes on tv and then you meet them in real life and like i remember like meeting one in real life if and he just like jumped to do his warm up and his jump in the air was like i was like oh my god like that's kinda how i feel like when i hang out with tim where you're like oh yeah that's why he's a pro thanks guys it's you know you gotta sacrifice for some hair along the way that's that's how you look great forget that thanks thanks thanks so much alright that's it that's a part thank tim i feel like got rude wear i know why could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and ph are on a mission to bridge a gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast