00:00:00
every mental health complication or diagnosis is increasing and I've worked with different scientists and done a lot
00:00:06
of experimentation on myself having grown up with multiple depressive episodes every year to see if there are
00:00:11
root causes that we can address and so I'll just throw out a few things that have been very very helpful first
00:00:17
there's brain stimulation when I did this I had months of no anxiety then
00:00:22
there's something called Vegas nerve stimulation and one of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years has seen a wild collection of benefits
00:00:29
So, let's talk about that. Tim Ferris has become a performance hacking expert after speaking with over
00:00:35
800 influential voices on his podcast. Now, he's taking the most valuable frameworks and techniques to help you
00:00:41
optimize productivity, health, and performance. Tim, the variety of things
00:00:46
that you write about, talk about is so wide. So, what is the question that most people should ask you?
00:00:52
How do you break down complicated subjects and accelerate your ability to learn? because time is one of our most
00:00:59
valuable non-renewable resources. And so I have a framework that you can apply to any subject matter which consists of the
00:01:05
80/20 principle which is picking the 20% to focus on that will give you 80% of what you want. For instance, there's
00:01:11
hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish. But with the most frequently used500, you can get to
00:01:17
reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks. And if you figure that out, you're ahead
00:01:22
of 99.9% of the world. And what do you think is the question most people want to ask you? So there's a lot of questions around
00:01:29
mental health and I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people because
00:01:34
I was uh sexually abused by a babysitter's son on a weekly basis. I
00:01:41
was this close to killing myself. And it can have a lot of effects, but these are
00:01:48
things that you can slowly chip away at. and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can take
00:01:55
the pain and make it part of your medicine. So,
00:02:02
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:02:07
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:02:13
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:02:20
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history
00:02:26
and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you
00:02:33
Tim. You're a remarkably interesting individual in part because the variety
00:02:39
of things that you write about, talk about clearly have deep curiosity in is so wide that you're you're hard to to
00:02:47
put into any particular box. So I my first question to you is how do you think about the work you do and how do
00:02:53
you sort of like self-define if you do at all who you are and what your mission is. I think of myself as a
00:03:04
self-experimenttor student and teacher in that order. The purpose though ultimately is to try to
00:03:10
find simplicity through complexity or topics that can be complicated and then
00:03:16
provide some type of recipe or algorithm that people can test with low risk and
00:03:22
hopefully a decent amount of upside. We're going to talk about a lot of different things today. So it probably a good place to start which is learning
00:03:28
how to learn and especially in a world that's changing at such speed. There's a lot of people that are being forced into
00:03:33
relearning of some sort whether it's professionally or in other domains. So metalarning, I've never heard this term
00:03:39
before. Mhm. How how do what is metalarning and how do I learn how to learn better? I would love to cuz I spend so long as you do
00:03:46
speaking to really interesting people and I sometimes worry that some of that information is being wasted.
00:03:51
Yeah. The basic idea is this that rather than treat different
00:03:58
subjects or fields as these silos that need to be figured out independently, how can you develop just a broad
00:04:05
framework that you can apply to any subject matter? And the acronym that I generally recommend folks, DSS,
00:04:13
deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. There's deconstruction, which is
00:04:19
taking a fairly ambiguous goal like learn to swim
00:04:25
or learn Japanese. None of those are actually very descriptive, right? So deconstructing
00:04:32
any one of those is taking let's just use the learn to swim as an example and
00:04:37
breaking it down into constituent parts right and you can you can do that very effectively with the help of an expert
00:04:44
you can try to do it yourself but for instance I mean if you want to find a silver medalist from the Olympics two
00:04:50
Olympics ago you can probably get on a Zoom call with them for
00:04:56
$100 an hour maybe $50 an hour like you do have access to world class talent.
00:05:02
Then they would help you figure out all right there all these different possible components. When you get to the next
00:05:08
part which is selection, you're picking the 20%. This is the 8020 principle,
00:05:14
right? Prao's law. So you're picking the 20% that will give you 80% of what you want. Let's just use language learning
00:05:20
in that case. Well, you can very easily find word frequency lists. So for any
00:05:26
given language like Spanish, sure, or in English, hundreds of thousands of words you could learn. But with the most
00:05:33
frequently used 1500, you can get to reasonable conversational
00:05:38
fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks without question if you approach it methodically. But you need
00:05:44
the right material first. And then the next S is sequencing. Putting it in the
00:05:50
right order. And I feel like this is the magic sauce that gets lost a lot, which is what is a logical sequence for
00:05:58
learning any given skill. What do you practice first? So in the case of swimming for instance, forget about
00:06:04
breathing. Like you need to figure out like fuselage right, fuselage left, and gliding, kicking off a wall in the
00:06:11
shallow end of a pool before you ever think about breathing and getting comfortable putting your head under water, etc., etc. So, so
00:06:18
there's the deconstruction, selection, sequencing, and then the last S stands for stakes, which means incentives. So,
00:06:25
how do you ensure that you will do actually what it is you say you're committing to doing? If more information
00:06:31
were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six pack abs. So, information is clearly not sufficient.
00:06:37
It's necessary, but not sufficient. Incentives drive behavior change. So, you need good intentions are not enough.
00:06:45
Even a system is not enough. You need strong incentives. So, right, you could give uh 500 bucks to a friend or 100
00:06:53
bucks, whatever. Does the amount doesn't really matter. And if you don't do what you say you're going to do, they donate it to like your most hated political
00:07:00
candidate in your name, right? That's another one that I've seen work really well. That's it. That DSS,
00:07:07
deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. And if you just check those boxes moving that order,
00:07:14
uh, your ability to learn will hockey stick in a really meaningful way. And what's also important to realize when
00:07:21
you're trying to tackle any new skill, doesn't matter what it is.
00:07:26
There will, it will not be just a linear climb from, you know, bottom, left,
00:07:31
upper, right. But if you know in advance that those are coming, then you can have a plan for it and weather the storm. So
00:07:37
that's also very important. If people expect some kind of like linear incremental progress, it just ain't
00:07:43
going to happen. And so most people quit before they hit any real inflection points. And how does one know what to pursue?
00:07:49
Like how do you decide what's worth pursuing? Is there a framework for knowing what should be on the Sunday shelf and what should be today today's
00:07:56
work? I do think about this a lot and I've used this for a very very long time and
00:08:02
I don't see it changing anytime soon. I refined it here and there. Almost everything I do is a 6 to 12 month
00:08:07
project. with lots of 2 to four week experiments within that 6 to 12 months. I do not
00:08:14
have and I've never had a long-term career plan 5 years, 10 years. If you have a reliable 5 to 10 year plan,
00:08:20
you're going to be playing so safely within the bounds of your capabilities that I feel like you're selling yourself short. So for me, it's projects and just
00:08:28
going 100% into those projects. But how do you pick the project? I pick the projects based on relationships and
00:08:36
skills. So new relationships or deepening important relationships and my
00:08:43
learning curve skills I'm going to learn and there's a condition though those
00:08:48
relationships and those skills have to be able to transcend that project. I'll give you an example. If I have a project
00:08:54
which is working on a startup as an adviser that startup was stumble upon. Okay so I'm working on Stumble Upon. Way
00:09:00
back in the day Stumble Upon was a huge deal. It delivered a lot of web traffic to various websites. It's kind of like a
00:09:07
Pandora for websites. A year or two into that didn't go anywhere. But who was it? I spent all my time with it. Stumbled
00:09:14
upon. It was the founder named Garrett Camp and I became really close friends. I learned a ton about web traffic. I was
00:09:20
also able to use my own website and blog as a experimental destination. Right? So
00:09:26
there was upside even if it went to zero for me. And few years later I get a text
00:09:32
from Garrett. we meet up to talk about this new idea which is solving the taxi problem in San Francisco. And then
00:09:38
shortly thereafter it was called Uber Cab LLC and I became advised to that. And I could give you 12 more examples
00:09:44
like that where like the first project failed but I became friends with with
00:09:49
person A or B learned C and D and those were applied two projects later to something that was a home run. And
00:09:55
should everybody at every stage in their journey have the same brainwork or you know because if you think about the
00:10:01
different things one could acquire from like resources, reputation, knowledge, skills,
00:10:06
um network. If I'm 18 and broke, should I be aiming
00:10:11
at the same things as if I'm Tim Ferrris? My instinct is to say yes.
00:10:17
And the reason I say that is that Lady Fortune has a lot to say about what
00:10:23
happens. There are so many things outside of your control that whatever game you choose to play
00:10:31
requires a system that allows you to survive a a string of very bad luck.
00:10:37
Everything snowballs over time and compounds and it's really hard to lose long term as long as you're not
00:10:45
overindexing and betting too much on any one project say financially.
00:10:51
It's like you need to be able to withstand as a team or as an individual a period of
00:10:57
very bad luck in order for the law of big numbers and statistics to work in your favor with a
00:11:03
system that gives you a slight edge. Um so that's just my lens on the world in
00:11:09
general at least professional choices and I would say you mentioned a couple of
00:11:14
other things right like reputation and so on. I feel like a lot of those are
00:11:21
second order effects. They happen automatically if you are optimizing for the relationships and skills.
00:11:27
So, uh this comes back to the sequencing, right? So, it's like which which is the lead domino. So, if you
00:11:33
have 12 dominoes, you kind of have to decide in which order you're going to stack them so that you knock over the
00:11:38
small domino, knock over the bigger domino, then the bigger, then the bigger, then the bigger. And over time,
00:11:45
if you're thinking about doing two projects a year, let's just say if they're 6 months each,
00:11:50
that's going to add up. It's going to add up. So, you can afford to be long-term greedy
00:11:57
instead of short-term greedy. Is that what people call passion? Is are you using the same
00:12:03
I uh I like energy over passion for a couple of reasons? Because you could
00:12:08
have passion between the bed sheets. You could have the passion of the Christ. You had a different type of passion. I
00:12:13
don't like imprecise terms. Energy for me, very simple. It's like, are you more awake or are you sleepy? Right? Do you
00:12:20
feel like you can do this for another 5 hours? Do you feel like you want to stop in 15 minutes? These are almost
00:12:26
biological questions, like biological state questions. So, it's it's pretty
00:12:31
intuitive for people to get to a yes or no. One of the subjects I've been thinking a
00:12:36
lot about recently, why have I been thinking about this more recently? Don't know, just a series of conversations
00:12:42
I've had on the show which make have kind of pushed me closer to trying to answer this question is about
00:12:48
about meaning and purpose and I guess religion because actually it's only in
00:12:54
recent history that we've had so many answers to some of these bloody questions like the the solar eclipse. We now know what's going on there. It's not
00:13:00
God testing us. So the the Vikings are throwing like their spears at it. We know what it is now. So not believing
00:13:08
atheism, agnosticism, is that a fairly new construct? And are we not meant to
00:13:13
know so much? Well, I I think that humans need certainty. They need something to
00:13:21
believe. And if your belief is that non-belief is the way, well, guess what?
00:13:26
I mean, that's a belief, right? Okay. So I would say that my experience
00:13:31
is if you want to experience self transcendence which I think is
00:13:36
critical for mental health you don't need religion per se.
00:13:42
What you you can have I think a very
00:13:48
wonderful life without religion. I don't think it's possible to have a wonderful life without awe and wonder. And those
00:13:55
are things you can architect. Those are things you can very much architect and engineer and schedule in
00:14:02
your life. Why have veganism and CrossFit done so well? They're
00:14:09
religions. I mean, effectively, they may not have a god, per se. Yeah.
00:14:14
But certainly they have thought leaders, they, you know, glassmen before his fall from grace
00:14:21
and so on. Uh various athletes and so on. But it's like clear rules,
00:14:26
community, self-inforcing and describing life sports.
00:14:32
Yeah. I mean, it's like this is religion just goes by another name. It's a lot of
00:14:37
the behaviors, collective behaviors and tenants of religion just lacking the
00:14:42
rword. What you worship? Yeah, I knew that was coming. Yeah, you uh I think the risk for me is that I
00:14:48
feel like I have a moral obligation to help people which can turn into a bit of
00:14:54
a savior complex because of a lot of the pain that I've suffered in the past. Uh
00:15:00
I feel like I am not necessarily uniquely suited, but I have the the
00:15:07
experience and the perspective that allows me to be credible when talking to people who are experiencing certain
00:15:12
types of pain. And that can become a huge unhelpful self-imposed burden where
00:15:18
I feel a moral obligation to do things at the expense of my own mental health or physical health. So I would say
00:15:27
that's something that I have very clearly on my radar as of a few years ago. Uh
00:15:32
when did the first domino fall in that regard? In terms of uh you mean just general
00:15:39
challenges personally? Uh well, I was uh might as well dig into it. So I I was uh
00:15:48
sexually abused by a babysitter's son from 2 to four on a weekly basis, I
00:15:54
would say. Very clear memories of all of it. And that will shape you. I mean,
00:16:00
that will definitely shape you. And it can have a lot of effects. It can rob
00:16:06
you of agency. it can certainly make you or contribute to me being hypervigilant.
00:16:12
I'm very slow to trust and so on and so forth, right? like that is
00:16:18
a formative experience at a formative time and then later
00:16:24
had I think number one a genetic predisposition if you just look at my family to major depressive disorder
00:16:32
and that showed up as let's call it on
00:16:37
average starting in early adolescence like three to four
00:16:43
multi-week or multimonth depressive episodes per That is
00:16:50
half of your lived time. And for people who may have experienced
00:16:56
something like this, I will say that there are tools at work. So now, never thought it would be
00:17:02
possible, but I would say now I have one depressive episode of a few weeks at
00:17:09
most every 2 to 3 years. Now the juxtaposition between those two
00:17:16
people is hard to overstate, right? Those are those are two fundamentally
00:17:21
different experiences of being a human. And um a lot of it ties back to some of
00:17:26
the levers I was talking about, right? Metabolic psychiatry, psychedelic assisted therapy,
00:17:32
bioelectric medicine, including accelerated TMS. Like these things for certain people really work and can be
00:17:38
durable. They're not one and done. Very few things are, but uh these are things
00:17:45
that you can slowly chip away at and become familiar with and
00:17:51
instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like
00:17:57
you can mold the experience into something that is at least not
00:18:04
disabling. Sometimes you can make it enabling. I remember a psy very good psychotherapist
00:18:10
said to me maybe five years ago, six years ago,
00:18:15
take the pain and make it part of your medicine. And it was basically like all that stuff is horrible. Nothing can
00:18:21
excuse it. Take that pain and made it make it part of what you offer the world. And there was I would say the
00:18:28
combination of that statement and also COVID during which my girlfriend at the
00:18:34
time because she knew about my history very few at that time there were maybe two people in the world who knew about
00:18:40
it. Wow. Two long-term ex-girlfriends I'd been with for like five to six years each and
00:18:46
parents didn't know parents didn't know. Really? Yeah. And
00:18:52
I was sitting with her during COVID just as it was getting fully ramped.
00:18:59
And I had always planned on writing a book about it or like my healing journey
00:19:05
after my parents passed away cuz I didn't want them to blame themselves. And my girlfriend at the time over a
00:19:13
meal said something that had a huge impact, which was, "Have you ever thought about how many people are going
00:19:18
to pass away from natural causes or from COVID or anything else before you ever
00:19:24
have a chance to write this book?" Cuz you're probably not going to write that book for 10, 15 years.
00:19:29
Think of all the people you could have helped that you didn't help. And I was like, "Okay, maybe I should workshop it
00:19:36
on a podcast." But keep in mind, none of my family knew. And so I was very fortunate to have a
00:19:43
very close friend who's based here in New York City, Debbie Milman, Design Matters Podcast, one of the longest running podcasts in the world, wonderful
00:19:50
human. And she disclosed to me a number of years back for the first time in full
00:19:56
fidelity extended childhood sexual abuse. and we talked about it
00:20:03
and I came clean with her after that conversation with my girlfriend and I
00:20:08
asked her if she would be open to having a conversation with me that we could record but as a conversation because I
00:20:14
knew I couldn't do it as a monologue. I just knew I couldn't do it and I told her in advance I said I have no idea if
00:20:20
I'm ever going to share this but I feel I feel compelled to at least record it.
00:20:27
And so we did and ended up publishing that I want to say in September 2020,
00:20:32
something like that. And uh holy [ __ ] I
00:20:38
would say the most shocking thing about that to me. I knew the statistics, right? But statistics are very
00:20:43
impersonal. Like these these these types of abuse, this type of sexual abuse is
00:20:49
incredibly prevalent. not just uh involving young girls but also
00:20:56
involving a lot of young boys. I probably had a quarter to a third of my
00:21:03
close close friends reach out to me for the first time to talk to anyone and
00:21:08
confess that they had had some type of similar experience. I I mean the percentages were staggering.
00:21:15
Um that was really hard. Um I was willing to absorb it. I have a lot of
00:21:20
capacity for absorbing that type of thing, but it was hard because I would get these tearful voice memos from guys
00:21:26
who had never told anyone, giving me graphic details of everything that happened. It's just gut-wrenching. I
00:21:32
mean, I remember walking up and down my driveway just like tears running down my
00:21:38
face and like I don't cry much. that's not really a thing for me, but just the brutality of it
00:21:45
and uh then in retrospect seeing so many things coales where I'm
00:21:51
like oh that explains all of these unanswered questions I had about that friend and also for me looking back
00:21:58
again hindsight being 2020 for a long time I had let's just call it to pick a number out of thin air it's like okay I
00:22:04
have seven mental health psycho emotional challenges I need to address and I was viewing them as independent
00:22:10
problems to address. But when I was willing to reopen the door and look at
00:22:16
the childhood abuse, everything was tied to that. And
00:22:21
sometimes you just have to, you know, put on your gas mask and go into the cellar and contend with that. And
00:22:28
there's no one right way to do it. Psychiatry is still in the dark ages. It's where surgery was 300 years ago.
00:22:35
But still there are certain things that work often without knowing the mechanism
00:22:40
seem to help a lot of people. So there there are tools I think internal family
00:22:46
systems created by Dick Schwarz is very interesting. The MDMA assisted
00:22:51
psychotherapy certainly for PTSD very interesting and generally well tolerated not right for everybody. And then a
00:22:58
number of the other things that I mentioned uh family constellation therapy also quite helpful for a lot of
00:23:04
people but uh it's not insurmountable.
00:23:09
What I would not say is that some people and I think that I would love to be able
00:23:16
to do this but I just can't get there or who would say like I don't regret it. I'm glad it happened because here's the
00:23:22
silver lining. No. Like if I could control Z and remove that stuff 100% I would I mean it did a lot of damage but
00:23:30
it gives me a credible voice when I am talking to people who have had these experiences and that is valuable.
00:23:37
Can you explain to me what you've learned about how how you were 2 years old at the time. Yeah. Between the age of two and four you
00:23:44
said. What what is I'm I'm kind of asking about the mechanism here. what is happening in a 2 to four year old
00:23:51
child's brain that causes the damage cuz presumably at
00:23:58
2 years old you don't understand what's happening. You don't understand what this individual this person who's older
00:24:03
than you is doing and the context of it. Yeah. So I'm I'm I'm trying to understand how
00:24:08
what the mechanism of harm is to a to an innocent child who doesn't understand
00:24:13
understand the context of what's going on here. Yeah. I I don't think anyone can really
00:24:20
answer that particularly well with high conviction. But what what I'll say is that
00:24:26
uh I am blessed and cursed with a near photographic memory for some things.
00:24:31
Mhm. So you have the original injury, you have the original insult,
00:24:37
but if you have, as I do, which is weird, but like I can draw the floor
00:24:43
plan of almost any building, any restaurant I've ever been in, that's crazy. Even once, I don't know why that is, but
00:24:49
I can do that. Now, there are upsides to that. There are a lot of downsides, too, in the case of abuse.
00:24:56
And as you have greater and greater
00:25:03
ability to navigate the world and realize what has happened, what is happening, what might happen, and you
00:25:10
can recontextualize highfidelity memories. Well, then you realize
00:25:17
that that thing that was very weird at the time was a lot more than just weird,
00:25:23
right? It was just straight exploitation and abuse. So
00:25:33
that's the best answer I think I can give to that question. It's similar to what Lisa, Dr. Lisa Feldman told me. She's a neuroscientist
00:25:40
who said she told me this story. It's obviously an anecdote, so it's an N of one. Um, so obviously taken with
00:25:46
caution, but she she told me the story of a young woman who was abused by her
00:25:51
uncle and um lived a normal life. Everything was fine, slept well,
00:25:57
then watched Oprah and Oprah had on there an array of women that were abused
00:26:02
when they were younger and she recontextualized what happened to her and from that day onwards she had
00:26:07
all the symptoms of someone who was abused. She was had sleep disruption, health disruption, all these things.
00:26:12
Yeah. Because she had suddenly, as you used that term, reconceptualized actually what had happened there. Yeah.
00:26:17
It's made, you know, Yeah. I mean, look, I think people who have been abused are
00:26:26
those who survive and do well afterwards in some way are become very good by
00:26:34
force, by necessity at compartmentalizing. And uh if you look at some of the very
00:26:42
very top tier military um
00:26:49
special forces units and so on, the percentages of those guys who have been abused very high. Now, why why would
00:26:56
that be an asset? Well, if you're in battle, if you're in a chaotic environment where
00:27:03
people are dying or at risk of dying and
00:27:08
you need to act effectively and calmly in the most
00:27:15
disruptive, unpredictable environment imaginable. Compartmentalizing is a superpower, right? where you can
00:27:21
basically detach and take this observer status almost as if you're watching yourself
00:27:28
doing, you know, kill and capture raids or whatever it might be. Uh
00:27:34
but when some of those folks come back to civilian life, the
00:27:39
compartmentalization is a severe handicap and disruptor in family life, right? So that superpower becomes a
00:27:46
super weakness. And I think that that is true outside of
00:27:51
the military for people who survive abuse. They may bury it completely, put
00:27:56
it under lock and key subconsciously. So they don't even have explicit recall of the event until perhaps there's some
00:28:04
trig triggering catalyst that brings it back up. They might just say, "Hey, look, that happened. It's terrible. Like
00:28:11
no need to dwell on the past. I want to move forward." which I think frankly is a viable
00:28:16
strategy. I don't think everyone needs to go, you know, put on their hazmat suit and unearth everything bad that has
00:28:23
ever happened to them. I don't think that is automatically productive or helpful. Uh can make people really
00:28:30
despondent because you can't fix the past, right? Mhm.
00:28:35
Uh so I would say that in in my case that compartmentalization
00:28:41
was uh on some levels very enabling, right? Like I could outlast out endure
00:28:50
a lot of people in sports, in work. My pain tolerance was incredibly high. Uh
00:28:57
but there's a there is a price to be paid when you cauterize certain aspects of yourself and disallow
00:29:05
certain types of emotions. Like there are prices to be paid. And um I will say
00:29:11
that I think the potential and promises of psychedelics by and large are overstated.
00:29:18
But in terms of bringing emotions back online, that was almost entirely due to
00:29:25
psychedelic experiences for me. Bringing emotions back online. Yeah. So, I hadn't cried in like 20
00:29:31
years. Couldn't remember the last time I cried. And then I'd be like on a plane watching a really compelling kind of
00:29:37
heart-wrenching documentary and just start crying on the plane. What the [ __ ] is going on here? The [ __ ] And uh
00:29:44
certain emotions just came back online. And I think that once those were online,
00:29:51
that is in part what then pulled along with it, this revisiting of these
00:29:57
highfidelity memories. And then um
00:30:02
I had a very rough period because of that and ultimately decided, you know what, like this is the lead domino that
00:30:09
has already been tipped over that has affected so many things. I can continue to do patchwork
00:30:16
like remediation with band-aid solutions for various things, but I'm just I'm plugging holes in the side of the boat,
00:30:23
not asking why it's filling with water in the first place. And I just decided, you know what? I'm just going to take 6
00:30:28
months. And I know psychiatry is pretty messy, but priority number one is to try
00:30:35
to find some resolution with this. And that's what I did. I I canceled everything because I was having
00:30:41
basically like a nervous breakdown and wasn't sure I would be able to sort of function in a business capacity anyway.
00:30:49
Um so yeah, quite the adventure, quite the
00:30:54
misadventure, but you know, you play your hand the best you can. Uh so having
00:31:01
a podcast, having the books, having a blog has actually been incredibly
00:31:07
therapeutic for me in finding some way to extract value from those experiences.
00:31:14
And let me just mention this because I don't make anything from it. If people are going through any experience like
00:31:22
this or if they've had a history of trauma, uh you can just go to tim.blog/trauma blog/trauma and it's got
00:31:29
the conversation with Debbie. It's a hard conversation, but it also has a
00:31:34
list of resources because what I used as a toolkit and what Debbie used are
00:31:40
completely different. So, you get two very different perspectives on things.
00:31:45
And uh I would say if I had to pick one other blog post in this case that I am
00:31:51
was the hardest to put out and also that I think I'm proudest of it would be some
00:31:57
practical thoughts on suicide. There's a post called some practical thoughts on suicide and um I know that has I know directly
00:32:05
that has saved a few hundred lives and it it details my personal experience of
00:32:11
almost killing myself in college coming very close like I had a date on the calendar and the only reason it didn't
00:32:17
happen is because I lucked out this is luck so at the time
00:32:24
I was taking a year off of uh college to
00:32:29
work in a few different jobs and ended up being very isolated because my whole
00:32:34
class was graduating. My roommates at the time had full-time jobs. So, I was just kind of stuck at home working on my
00:32:40
senior thesis. Not a good recipe for mental health. And
00:32:45
I reserved a book from the Princeton University Library about assisted
00:32:51
suicide. And the book was out, popular book it would seem. And back in the day,
00:32:58
the way the system worked is they would mail you a physical postcard to your address that was at the registars's
00:33:04
office. I had not updated my address to my off-campus apartment. So, the card
00:33:11
that said, "Good news, your book on assist suicide has arrived at Firestone Library got mailed to my parents."
00:33:19
And that's what snapped me out of it was realizing, "Oh, this isn't just about me." right now. I don't have the
00:33:25
plausible deniability. I was going to make it look like an accident. It's like now I don't have it. That's been taken away. Retrospect, thank God. And so, it
00:33:32
didn't happen. But the reason I wrote that post is because I was at an event. It's actually being interviewed by Jason
00:33:39
Calcanis on stage at this live this weekend startups event.
00:33:44
Few hundred people in the audience and stuck around afterwards and a bunch of people came up and wanted books signed
00:33:51
and things like that. And there was one really nice guy, well-dressed, had had himself put together, who asked me to
00:33:57
sign two books, one for himself, and then he asked me to sign a book for his brother. And I said, "What would you
00:34:03
like me to say to your brother?" And he just kind of froze. And I was like, "Huh? Okay. Well, I don't want this guy
00:34:08
to feel stressed out." I was like, "I'll tell you what, we can figure it out or you can just leave it to me. There's no rush. Like, we can do this after the
00:34:15
event." All right. Took care of everybody else. And then the guy walked me to the elevator and he explained, he
00:34:22
said, "Yeah, sorry about that. I froze because my brother committed suicide and we kept his room exactly how it
00:34:29
was." And he was a huge fan of your writing. And so I wanted to get a book
00:34:34
signed by you and put it in his room. And
00:34:39
he said, "Have you ever thought about talking about mental health because you could really help a lot of people? A lot
00:34:45
of people listen to you." And unbeknownst to him, I had all the history with coming this close to
00:34:52
killing myself. And uh I sat with that and I was like,
00:34:57
"Yeah, he's right. He's really right. I have a responsibility to write about it." And that blog post took me at least
00:35:05
a month to write and rewrite and rewrite and have proof read consider deleting.
00:35:13
And uh because that was also something that my family didn't know about. I mean they they knew about the book but they
00:35:19
didn't they didn't realize how close it was. So um that was also another
00:35:25
wonderful call with family to be like so there's this thing about to come out.
00:35:31
Should probably give you a heads up so you don't hear about it from everybody in the extended family. But uh
00:35:36
when your parents received that that thing in the post y that slip the library slip. Yep.
00:35:42
Did they call you? My mom called me with this very shaky voice being like, "What is what is what is this? Why did you
00:35:48
reserve this book?" And I lied, you know. I said, "Oh, well, I have a friend at Ruters and he was trying to get this book for a research project and they
00:35:55
didn't have it at their library, so he asked me to get one from through Firestone." But I was just lying. But I
00:36:01
knew the the jig was up, right? And uh
00:36:06
that was that was the turnaround point. And that was also because this was in 1999 where I just decided to go 100%
00:36:12
into physical training. U and there's a lot of backstory behind it. People can read about it if they
00:36:19
want on that post. Some practical thoughts about suicide. But
00:36:24
this is not it is so [ __ ] common. It's very disturbing like when you
00:36:30
realize it's disturbing and reassuring. It's disturbing because you realize how prevalent it is and how close so many
00:36:36
people have come. It's reassuring because you realize also
00:36:44
very quickly that you are not alone. You're not uniquely flawed. This doesn't
00:36:49
need to be personal and permanent. People have solved for this. Looking at
00:36:55
my audience over the last 10 years,
00:37:00
every mental health complication or diagnosis that I can think of is up and
00:37:06
to the right. Just hockey stick. So, chronic anxiety, treatment resistant depression,
00:37:12
you name it, right? Obesity, loneliness, which can take many different forms,
00:37:17
usually self-imposed. And when I see a constellation of issues
00:37:24
like that, I try to identify if I can, not just the symptoms because then you
00:37:30
end up putting band-aids on things that are interrelated but treating them as silos, but looking underneath it to see
00:37:38
if there are root causes that we can address. So
00:37:43
let me speak to that first. So on the mental health side, I'll just throw out a few things that have been very very
00:37:50
helpful. There are the behavioral questions and I would agree that
00:37:56
at its simplest level, you can just look at what we're evolved for, right? Just
00:38:01
take a close look at evolutionary biology. Independence lone wolf is not
00:38:06
in our programming. It just is not. So I would say when in doubt
00:38:12
revert on some level to what people were doing a few hundred years ago at the
00:38:17
most recent right and that would be sort of assumption number
00:38:24
one. Then I would say to people who are suffering right now,
00:38:31
the social interaction, analog human interaction, I would just say is the is
00:38:38
the the one target when hit that solves a multitude of other problems that
00:38:44
otherwise you'll be playing whack-a-ole with. But if there are then remaining
00:38:50
problems with say chronic anxiety, OCD
00:38:56
when we get into some slightly trickier terrain, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, etc. There are a
00:39:02
few things that I have found in the course of doing a lot of work with
00:39:08
different scientists and also a lot of experimentation on myself having grown
00:39:14
up with multiple long duration depressive episodes every year
00:39:21
and those are a short list of different types of brain stimulation specifically something called accelerated TMS. The
00:39:28
before and afters that I've seen with that are beyond incredible and equal or
00:39:34
surpass in some cases the amplitude of effect and the durability of effect of
00:39:39
psychedelic assisted therapies. Accelerated TMS, so transcranial magnetic stimulation. And Nolan
00:39:46
Williams, Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford is is a good person to look up for more on that.
00:39:51
What exactly is that? Is that putting something on your head? M there are different ways to do it depending on the hardware that you're
00:39:57
using but in effect accelerated TMS refers to a new protocol with better
00:40:03
hardware and software of a technology TMS that has existed probably for 40
00:40:09
years if not more on some level and you will instead of doing two or three
00:40:17
sessions a week for many months you do 10 sessions a day for 5 days straight.
00:40:25
So you are getting stimulated on the hour every hour for about 8 minutes
00:40:31
and you do that for 10 hours straight and then you compound that over 5 days
00:40:39
and you see for instance uh to give one example a friend's child very terrifying
00:40:47
story uh but uh he was a cutter this this 14-year-old self
00:40:54
harming. Yeah. And the parents were just waiting for the call that their child had
00:41:01
committed suicide. And this went on for two or three years, I want to say. And
00:41:06
then within 3 days of accelerated TMS treatment, it was like reversion back to
00:41:11
old self. And then with boosters every say 3 to 6 months, that has been
00:41:17
durable. It's the before and after is impossible to overstate. It's pretty
00:41:23
wild. What are they doing to the brain? Is it electrodes or is it music or it's magnet? It's magnets.
00:41:29
Magnets. Yep. And the what it feels like is is someone kind of like flicking the side
00:41:34
of your head. It's sort of the sensation. It is from a safety profile perspective really compelling. Like the
00:41:41
downside risk is very very minimal. And me with the most recent sessions that
00:41:47
I've done myself, I had probably four to five months of no anxiety. Like all of that
00:41:55
stuff vanished as if by magic wand and I felt like I'd been meditating twice a day for a year. I mean it was it was
00:42:04
incomprehensible. Uh it was it was really really really uh remarkable. And there's there's good clinical evidence
00:42:10
for this. It's not just end of one anecdote. So, so that's one is the kind
00:42:16
of neurostim piece and there's a lot more that's going to happen in that space. But bioelectric medicine, that
00:42:21
would be one big lever that I think is worth investigating if people are suffering with any number of different
00:42:28
conditions. Then you have metabolic psychiatry.
00:42:33
Primarily that would be dietary intervention. Chris Palmer at Harvard is is someone who's popularized this in the
00:42:38
last handful of years. metabolic psychiatry specifically putting people on a ketogenic diet. You have folks who
00:42:44
have been treated with 15 different medications for schizophrenia for a decade who get off all of their
00:42:50
medications within 3 to 6 months and stay off simply by
00:42:57
stabilizing a handful of things in the brain including adding a very beautiful
00:43:04
clean energy source which is ketones. There are also a lot of possible
00:43:09
applications of the ketogenic diet or modified ketogenic diets, exogenous
00:43:14
ketones meaning supplemental ketones for neurodeenerative disease. So I have three relatives right now who have
00:43:21
Alzheimer's and genetically I'm very predisposed. So I'm thinking a lot about
00:43:26
this also from a preventative perspective. So can I potentially
00:43:31
bolster mitochondrial health, cellular cleanup, reduction of plaque
00:43:38
buildup, etc. by doing strict ketosis for a month a year, fasting for
00:43:45
a week, perhaps once a year, water only. I think there's actually pretty compelling evidence that those are all
00:43:52
worthwhile interventions to consider if you're very highly predisposed as I am. And then I would say the last one I'll
00:43:58
mention now the psychedelic assisted therapies for various conditions. I do think that psychedelics and this is to
00:44:04
quote a very famous psychotherapist named Stannisl Grath Stan Grath what the
00:44:10
telescope did for astronomy what the microscope did for biology psychedelics will do for the mind. I don't think
00:44:16
that's an overstatement because a lot of the the clinical outcomes that we're seeing with treatment resistant PTSD,
00:44:23
people who've had an average diagnosis duration of like 14 to 17 years, nothing succeeded. They do two to three sessions
00:44:30
and then you see like a 50 plus% complete remission of PTSD. I mean, what
00:44:36
is going on there? I think in a very productive way leading us to question some of the very fundamental assumptions
00:44:41
that are made in the world of psychiatry particularly with pharmaceutical interactions or pharmaceutical
00:44:47
prescriptions and that's really exciting to me because
00:44:52
I think there is an argument to be made that you can address certain root causes
00:44:58
and there are different explanations for this ghoul Dolan who's now at UC Berkeley she was at Johns Hopkins talks
00:45:04
about the reopening of critical periods for development. So you could potentially use psychedelics for
00:45:12
stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor control. So I would say that those are are broadly kind of the
00:45:18
the three pillars. There's one other that I'm digging into that I think could end up
00:45:24
being very very interesting overall. This is one that is sort of TBD. Personally I am experimenting with it
00:45:31
but Vegas nerve stimulation. There is a sea of [ __ ] floating around related to Vegas nerve stimulation. The vast
00:45:37
majority of what you'll bump into is pseudoscientific nonsense. So, if I'd never heard about Vegas nerve
00:45:43
stimulation before, how would you Yeah, I can explain it. Yeah. All right. So, the Vegas nerve is a bit of a misnomer because they're actually
00:45:50
two bundles of nerves that travel down from around your brain stem down either
00:45:55
side of the neck, kind of where you would feel your pulse. It's right alongside the corateed artery.
00:46:00
Mh. And you can think of them as almost transatlantic cables. So you don't have
00:46:06
you have two primary vag nerves, but there are about a 100,000 fibers in
00:46:12
each of them. And we only know what a tiny fraction of those do. They then travel down and they intervate and touch
00:46:19
pretty much everything you can imagine, including your gut. And there's some
00:46:24
very interesting communication between the gut microbiome and the brain. visa v
00:46:30
the Vegas nerve. It's wild. And the most credible voice that I found in
00:46:37
the world of Vegas nerve stimulation or VNS for short science is a guy named
00:46:44
Dr. Brian Tracy, T R A C Y. He wrote a book called The Great Nerve, which is a very good introductory read on all of
00:46:51
this. One of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years. He's incredibly credible. and
00:46:59
he co-founded a company I want to say at least 10 years ago or 11 years ago was involved at least as a as a primary
00:47:06
scientific adviser for an implant. The implant is about the size of a omega-3
00:47:11
fish oil capsule gets implanted right in the neck. So surgical procedure but pretty minor and that has just been
00:47:19
approved. It was the cover of the New York Times a few weeks ago for rheumatoid arthritis. And the before and
00:47:25
after that you see in some of these conditions again is something straight out of science fiction. You see someone
00:47:30
who's been mostly bedridden, chronic fatigue, can't hold a job, struggling to
00:47:36
interact with their kids, has this procedure, and then like two weeks later they're running up a flight of stairs to
00:47:42
catch a train on a trip to Europe and have the problem of too much energy. It
00:47:47
seems to have broad potential application to autoimmune conditions. So
00:47:53
you might think of say a Crohn's disease or IBS. It seems to have applications
00:48:00
to significantly enhancing HRV heart rate variability. So I have a
00:48:07
friend who for the longest time he's former tier one operator military. He's
00:48:12
got a lot of sympathetic overdrive. So he had trouble sleeping and he tried
00:48:17
all sorts of sophisticated breathing programs which can help. He tried cold exposure which can help but those were
00:48:23
all incremental gains on his HRV maybe improved 10 to 15% lots of meditation
00:48:29
twice a day 10 to 15%. Used vag nerve stimulation for
00:48:35
somewhere between two and four weeks tripled his HRV. What? Yeah, tripled. How did he stimulate his vag nerve? Was
00:48:42
it like this? This is where we get into some controversial territory. All right. So, the device he used is
00:48:52
it is a device. It's called Gamma Core. It's by prescription. It is applied to the neck. It provides
00:49:01
electrical stimulation for 2 minutes at a time. I believe it's very
00:49:06
very minimal. It's 2 minutes twice a day. I want to say maybe it's 5 minutes twice a day. And that seems to have just
00:49:14
a a downstream collection of benefits or potential benefits. Most of the research
00:49:21
for gamore is for I believe migraines andor cluster headaches in terms of
00:49:27
published literature or option B which has a lot more in terms of published
00:49:33
studies would be uh oricuricular so ear stimulation
00:49:39
uh and that's stimulating something called the simba conscia right here this very particular location and so you
00:49:45
apply stimulation to the ear I'm experimenting with both the ear and also
00:49:51
the neck. I would say Vegas nerve stimulation has top of mind
00:49:57
access right now for me in terms of interest. I bought this Bond Charge face mask,
00:50:02
this light panel for my girlfriend for Christmas and this was my first introduction into Bon Charge and since then I've used their products so often.
00:50:09
So when they asked if they could sponsor the show, it was my absolute privilege. If you're not familiar with red light
00:50:14
therapy, it works by using near infrared light to target your skin and body non-invasively. And it reduces wrinkle,
00:50:20
scars, and blemishes and boosts collagen production so your skin looks firmer. It
00:50:26
also helps your body to recover faster. My favorite products are the red light therapy mask, which is what I have here
00:50:31
in front of me, and also the infrared sauna blanket. And because I like them so much, I've asked Bon Charge to create
00:50:37
a bundle for my audience, including the mask, the sauna blanket, and they've agreed to do exactly that. And you can
00:50:42
get 30% off this bundle or 25% off everything else sitewide when you go to bondcharge.com/diary
00:50:49
and use code diary at checkout. All products ship super fast. They come with a one-year warranty and you can return
00:50:55
or exchange them if you need to. And I'll tell you what, it scares the hell out of me when I look over in the office late at night and one of my team members
00:51:00
is sat at their desk using this product. I asked my assistant Sophie to find me a reliable security system for my new
00:51:05
place in LA. What she discovered is that most available options have the same issue. They're reactive and only take
00:51:11
action after someone has broken into your house. Simply Safe, who sponsors this show, has a completely different
00:51:17
approach. If someone's lurking near your home or office, their AI powered cameras detect them. Then human agents who act
00:51:24
like a remote security guard take action, speaking directly to the intruder, letting them know they're
00:51:29
being watched on camera, and if necessary, triggering a siren or spotlight to scare them off. Or they can
00:51:35
call 911 for police dispatch. This immediate response is why I went with Simply Safe. No one else approaches
00:51:41
Security in the same way that they have no long-term contracts or hidden fees, so you can cancel at any time. They also
00:51:48
have a 60-day money back guarantee. Right now, my audience can save 60% on a Simplysafe home security system at
00:51:55
simplysafe.com/doac. That's simplysafe.com/doac.
00:52:00
To save 60% on a simplysafe home security system, there's no safe like Simplysafe. Before the Diary of SEO was
00:52:07
what it is today, it was just an idea. And it started with me, a cheap plug-in microphone, and my Mac right here. And I
00:52:15
have to say, when I first had the idea for the Diary of a CEO, my thinking was that the world might want to see into the diaries of some of the most
00:52:21
interesting, successful people really in high places that were doing interesting things. So, after recording that first
00:52:27
episode under my duvet, I sat on my Mac, which is from our sponsor Apple, and spent hours editing and eventually
00:52:33
uploaded it. And honestly, I thought that would probably be it. But a couple of my friends said they enjoyed it. So,
00:52:38
I kept on recording. And over time, the microphone has changed and we now have this incredible setup here. But the
00:52:44
thing that has stayed the same is I'm still using the Mac. Even today, my
00:52:49
entire team across our studio still uses the Mac. Our first few episodes maybe had tens of people listening, but now
00:52:56
tens of millions of people tune in all over the world, which is still absolutely crazy to me. So, if there is
00:53:01
an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, this is your sign to start. Your great ideas start on Mac. And you
00:53:07
can find out more at apple.com/mack. Because of what you do and because of
00:53:12
the way that you are in terms of your broad curiosity and the way that you think and the way that you learn, I have
00:53:18
to ask you the question, what is it that you see coming down the pipe? Like coming down the line in terms of macro
00:53:24
trends in it's probably makes sense for us to just stick with health for a second, but you've talked about Vegas enough. Is there anything else that you
00:53:30
think 10 years from now everybody's going to be doing but they're not currently doing
00:53:36
or thinking about? One of them I'll throw out there is something I've been thinking about is air quality. I think I see a rise in people's concern about CO2
00:53:43
levels and also outside air quality. So I imagine I'll be wearing some kind of device or my iPhone will be telling me
00:53:49
about the air quality in the room or outside. Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. I think bioelectric medicine is a big category.
00:53:55
So whether it's accelerated TMS or focused ultrasound
00:54:00
uh where you might take something that looks like a hockey puck and put it over your your liver for instance or
00:54:08
spleen uh to affect various things. uh using microchips over pills I think is
00:54:16
is is a is going to be a huge growth area and that we'll realize more and
00:54:24
more how much is dependent on the immune reflex and different types of
00:54:29
communication mediated by electricity uh that can be affected by external or
00:54:35
internal devices like an implant. So for instance, I'll give you a wild factoid which is people may have heard the story
00:54:43
which is based on real science where you transplant the microbiome from say obese
00:54:49
mice into lean mice and those lean mice then become obese just by transplanting
00:54:56
m the gut microbiome. If you sever the vagus nerve before you
00:55:01
do the transplant that doesn't happen. They don't become obese. So what's happening there? It would seem that the
00:55:09
microbiome is communicating with the brain viv the vagus nerve. And when you
00:55:17
sever something experimentally in that way or bladed or whatever, often times this might seem paradoxical,
00:55:25
but you can achieve similar effects with stimulation that you can with severing.
00:55:31
And I think many of the assumptions that we have currently which form the bedrock of
00:55:37
our quote unquote understanding of mental illness and so on are just going to be completely false. They're going to
00:55:43
be completely untenable within 10 years. A lot of that I think is going to be
00:55:50
driven by a better understanding of the body electric. It will be driven by better understanding of
00:55:58
how fuel utilization in the brain drives
00:56:04
many different psychiatric conditions that can be mitigated or completely
00:56:09
addressed by say providing an alternate fuel source instead of glucose ketones, right? That would be just kind of a
00:56:14
simple example. But there's a huge huge compliance issue with the ketogenic diet, right? People don't want to do it
00:56:20
for a lot of good reasons. So, how do you get people to stick with it? Well, maybe there are other options
00:56:26
for achieving ketogenic like effects such as systemic anti-inflammation with
00:56:33
the use of electricity instead of diet. Right? I think that's possible and I've
00:56:39
invested in a few companies that are aiming to do that. uh which is very exciting because it means that you might
00:56:46
have options for affecting brain function that do not require you to take
00:56:51
molecules that get into your brain directly. Mhm. That's really exciting. So bioelectric
00:56:56
medicine I think is going to be a very exciting space to watch and there are a
00:57:02
lot of researchers doing some wild stuff with bioelectric medicine. So we'll see
00:57:08
where it goes. Where are you today in terms of your what's guiding you at the moment in this season of your life? Do
00:57:15
you what are your big goals? Are you are you aspiring towards anything in particular? It's relationships. It's uh looking
00:57:21
forward to the next big chapter for me which would almost certainly it not
00:57:26
almost certainly be partner, family, all of that. I mean another startup's not
00:57:33
going to make any difference to my life. You know, another podcast. I love all those things. I love startups. I love
00:57:40
the podcast. I love the books. But we're at the
00:57:46
squeezing out of marginal gains at this point. Are you married or I'm not married. Don't have any kids
00:57:51
that I'm aware of. You're aware of But uh dating a lovely woman right now.
00:57:57
Very excited about it. Do you think it's quite strange that a lot of podcasters don't seem to be like I'm not married. Yeah. And I don't have any kids yet.
00:58:03
Yeah. Um I've just turned 33. But so many of the big podcasters don't seem to have kids or be married other than really
00:58:10
Rogan. Yeah. Yeah. Someone tweeted about the other day. I was like, "Oh, fuck."
00:58:16
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that I'm not I'm not pointing fingers at you, but I but I know quite a few of these
00:58:22
guys. If we're talking about guys, u I I mean, I know a bunch of female podcasters as well. Um quite a few of
00:58:29
which are married. Uh, but on the male side, I will say, you know, if you're a
00:58:34
good-looking guy and you're putting videos on YouTube, your DM inbound and your plethora of
00:58:44
temptation that you need to resist is going to make remaining single very attractive. And
00:58:52
that's true for a lot of these guys. So, I don't think there's a mystery to be solved. In other words, it's like if
00:58:58
they go on the dating apps, it's just like shooting fish in a barrel. And
00:59:03
I I don't think ultimately that the dating apps, despite what they might say, are designed to be deleted. I do
00:59:09
not believe that. They are casinos intended to keep you in the casino. Yeah.
00:59:14
It's just follow the money. Follow the subscription plans. Well, you talk about the paradox of
00:59:19
choice. Yeah. And so there are times and I think this is
00:59:24
probably misplaced envy where I'm like, you know, maybe there was something to arranged marriages, you know, and this
00:59:31
whole idea of like soulmate romantic love driving everything is a relatively new invention.
00:59:36
Mhm. On the scale of human history. Uh now would I want someone deciding who I
00:59:44
marry and have kids with? Not particularly. But there is a certain simplicity to it that I find enviable
00:59:52
when you end up in the modern digital casinos of dating apps where
00:59:58
yes, that person was an eight out of 10, but man, that nine or 10 is just right around the corner. I know it's just a
01:00:04
few thousand swipes away. Yeah. And and you get the variable reward at
01:00:09
least if you're like a a healthy, sexually vigorous male.
01:00:17
I'm sure for women as well. I just think that men tend to think with their smaller head a lot more often. Uh you're
01:00:23
going to get these incredible dopamine hits of variable reward. It's just like
01:00:29
dog training, but you're training yourself with the dating app to continue using the dating app by getting these Scooby snacks in terms
01:00:36
of, you know, fill in the blank with your imagination. Uh,
01:00:41
I don't meet all I have not met a single person who is like, I love dating apps. No one. I have not met a single person. And yet,
01:00:49
right, what does the crack addict want? More crack. And they might say, I just need one more hit. That's not how it
01:00:55
works. Yeah. So, there is, I think, a lot to be said for applying positive constraints,
01:01:02
right? Scared to be single again. I just the way I look out at the the current mechanism of finding someone these
01:01:07
dating apps and I just think and also I do understand it would be a significant
01:01:12
distraction from whatever I'm doing here. Oh, for sure. Can you imagine me being in New York City tonight single and like uh and
01:01:20
having the evening off and what what would go through my head and and then you'd have to go on a date with someone.
01:01:25
You've got to do all the small talk stuff. I got out the game before the game like began. Yeah. Like seven years ago I the game. I saw
01:01:32
this this tweet from this I think it was a Vietnamese woman who said, you know, I
01:01:37
wonder if it wasn't Gen X, it was like, I wonder if X, Y, and Z people of this
01:01:44
generation are looking at dating apps and thinking, wow, we got the last chopper out of N. Literally, literally.
01:01:50
And oh my god, that's not far from the truth. Uh, paradox of choice is a real problem.
01:01:57
People think it's a quality problem of abundance. I'm not convinced that that's true. No way. It's not poss I have so
01:02:03
many clo My friends that struggle with dating the most, date the most. Yeah, sure.
01:02:09
I've got two or three friends that I can think of. I won't name them, but two of them are women and one of them is a guy.
01:02:14
They do 50 between 50 and 100 dates a year. Yeah. And they're just convinced that it's
01:02:19
through lack of lack of option. And I just it's impossible. But, you know, yeah, I'm uh very happy to be off the
01:02:27
dating apps. I was on the dating apps for 2 or 3 years and it was just it is a part-time slash full-time job.
01:02:34
We have a a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And your you
01:02:40
know the person who wrote your question sat there I kid you not for 30 minutes
01:02:46
in total silence thinking about these two three four five six seven eight
01:02:51
words. Oh wow. They sat there for I've never seen anything like it. All right. and the eight words that they
01:02:56
wrote. Oh man, I know, right? That's nine words. What is your favorite color today?
01:03:02
Can you imagine? Yeah. What's your favorite sandwich? No, I'm joking. Um, how would you spend your
01:03:10
final day on Earth? With my closest friends and family? No
01:03:16
doubt. It wouldn't be pizza. It wouldn't be I mean maybe it involves pizza, but it
01:03:22
would be telling the people I love that I love them and spending time with them.
01:03:28
Doesn't need to be anything fancy. Could be sitting on a porch on a rocking chair. And that might seem like a trit
01:03:35
answer, but I am putting that into practice every year with periods of time that are blocked out for this. So, I'm
01:03:41
not waiting until my last day, but last day certainly wouldn't be dating apps.
01:03:47
wouldn't be an opium bender. Uh it would be it would be time with my
01:03:54
my absolute closest friends and family. And I'll add uh elaboration on the past
01:03:59
year review when I'm looking at relationships before investing in new relationships. I
01:04:06
look at my top say five to 10 relationships and ask myself did I spend the amount of time I would want to spend
01:04:11
with these people last year? And if the answer is no, I always reinvest in those
01:04:17
people and only the overflow gets allocated to new relationships. I
01:04:23
really focus on the tried andrue proven relationships with deep levels of trust
01:04:28
over long periods of time. In terms of systems, you've put have you put a system in place to make sure that life doesn't get in the way of those
01:04:35
people coming together? Yeah. I mean, for 25 plus years, I've had a
01:04:42
annual reunion around my birthday every year in the summer where all of my or
01:04:48
those who can make it, but incredibly old friends show up. They know it's on the calendar. It's roughly the same date
01:04:55
every year. And they fly in from all over the country, all over the world. And it has nothing to do with my
01:05:01
birthday. It's just a reunion of friends. Tim, thank you. Thank you for several reasons. I think the first reason is
01:05:07
you're one of the I said to you before one of the founding fathers of what we do here and if it wasn't for people like yourself and Joe there is a 0% chance I
01:05:15
think that people like me would be doing what we do now and that's given us so much there's really really like a very
01:05:21
extremely low chance that if people like you hadn't taken the risk and created a blueprint and shown that it was like an
01:05:27
effective medium and the long form was interesting and everything that you you guys proved there's no chance that
01:05:33
people like with me would exist and So I whenever I meet people like you that I I consider to have to be standing on the
01:05:40
shoulders of on or have stolen a blueprint on I feel like I am obliged to say thank you because you've created but
01:05:46
it's true. It's true. Yeah. And I was inspired also by people who preceded me right when I did the
01:05:51
launch for the 4-Hour chef in 2012 with going on Joe Rogan and Mark Marin and
01:05:57
Nerdist and so on. Like those guys also showed me that something interesting was a foot. So uh you're 33 you said
01:06:04
33. Yeah. You got a lot of runway, man. You're in a good position. We'll see. We'll see what happens. I'll
01:06:09
add one last thing that I neglected to mention earlier, but in terms of
01:06:16
productivity, and we're talking about weekly architecture, I think everyone should put as a challenge for
01:06:21
themselves, particularly if they're an entrepreneur, a 4-week mini retirement once a year
01:06:29
where you are unavailable. you are off the grid. No laptop, no phone outside of
01:06:35
maybe Uber and Google Maps and Open Table where you are literally completely
01:06:41
unavailable. And the reason I recommend that there are a few. Number one, it's going to allow you to play the long game
01:06:49
at high intensity having that de loing phase. The second is it will force you
01:06:54
to improve all of your policies, rules, guidelines for autonomous decision-m by
01:07:01
employees, etc., etc. It'll force you to clarify all of that on a regular basis. So, when
01:07:07
you come back, all of those systems improvements will endure beyond the mini retirement, but it's a forcing function.
01:07:14
Mhm. Uh it also forces you to take a very close look at the non-b businessiness
01:07:21
interests that you have either maintained or cultivated or let atrophy
01:07:26
in complete disuse. And if you end up having a slight panic attack because you
01:07:32
don't know what to do with your time, that's a great wakeup call. You need some other things to offset the type A
01:07:39
maniacal focus on chasing that rabbit around the greyhound drag.
01:07:44
Amen. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, man. Thank you so much.
01:07:51
If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in today. And that is
01:07:56
exactly why we created these conversation cards. Because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and
01:08:01
have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to
01:08:08
each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we've
01:08:14
turned them into these conversation cards, and we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more
01:08:19
interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand
01:08:24
new edition and for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card which is an exclusive question from me.
01:08:31
But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So
01:08:36
get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the description below.
