#266: Favorite Books, Supplements, Simple Technologies, and More

In this episode, I answer the most up-voted questions from subscribers to 5-Bullet Friday https://el2.fourhourmail.com/c/gku7zn6m8t5hlognk/opfkhq/aHR0cHM6Ly90aW0uYmxvZy9mcmlkYXkv, the free newsletter I send out every week. In this Q&A, I reveal: My 3-5 favorite books of the past year. Technologies and apps that have made my life easier. How to build a new network from scratch. My top five supplements for longevity and well-being. The exercises and self-talk I use for avoiding (or minimizing) depression. Want to ask me your own questions? Just subscribe to 5-Bullet Friday, which -- every Friday -- sends five bullet points of cool things I've found that week, including apps, books, gadgets, albums, articles, new hacks or tricks, and — of course — all sorts of weird stuff I dig up around the world. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can check it out here: tim.blog/friday https://el2.fourhourmail.com/c/gku7zn6m8t5hlognk/zvtghn/aHR0cHM6Ly90aW0uYmxvZy9mcmlkYXkv. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now -- this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/timand using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. This episode is also brought to you by LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/. I've used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast -- such as Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted for everything from setting up wills, proper trademark searches, forming LLCs, setting up non-profits, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is not a law firm, but it does have a network of independent attorneys available in most states who can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business with complete transparency and up-front pricing. Check out LegalZoom.com and enter promo code TIM at checkout today https://www.legalzoom.com/ to save 15%, and see how the fine folks there can make life easier for you and your business.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, founded by the genius Fins, who lit the internet on fire. And you may have heard of their mushroom coffee, which features chaga and lion's mane, which has taken Silicon Valley by storm. I use it pretty much every day, either that or the chaga, which is decaf, so it's a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing.

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water and oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom

• 1:51Tim Ferriss?

  elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something, you can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim. And use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out.

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom myself for many of my businesses, and many of the icons on this podcast have actually used LegalZoom. For instance, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, CEO of Automattic, which is now worth more than $1 billion, first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted to help with their businesses, whether that's setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a nonprofit, or finding simple cease and desist letter templates. Man, do I use a lot of those. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews,

• 3:15Tim Ferriss?

  and otherwise help you run your business. And important, there are no surprises. LegalZoom provides complete transparency. That means upfront pricing, customer reviews, and a satisfaction guarantee. Check out LegalZoom.com today to see how they can make life better and easier for you and your business. If you're pretending to be a lawyer on the internet, then you are asking for trouble. Put together the safety nets, get your Ts crossed and your Is dotted, enter promo code TIM at LegalZoom.com to save 15%. That's T-I-M for 15% off. Check it out, LegalZoom.com.

• 3:56Tim Ferriss?

  Why hello, warlocks and draw elf princesses. If you know what that is, you get plus one. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types in interviews where I tease out the habits, routines, et cetera, that you can use. This time around, I'm going to switch things up a little bit and answer a bunch of your questions. And these have been upvoted and suggested and starred and so on. And they come from subscribers to my Five Bullet Friday newsletter. So every Friday, I send out a newsletter. It is five bullets of the coolest things that I have found or enjoyed that week. It's free. It's one of the most popular newsletters on the interwebs. You can check it out.

• 4:40Tim Ferriss?

  It's free and free and free. tim.blog/Friday.

• 4:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's it, tim.blog/friday and you get all sorts of exclusives like chapters on books that I'm working on and blabbity, blabbity, blah. So you can check that out, but that's where I got these questions. So let's just jump right into it and I'll try to give a bunch of tactical specifics that people can use. Alright, number one, this is from Bran Beckett. Question, "I moved to a big city and know no one. How do you find great like-minded people? How did you find some of your friends?" So there are a few different approaches here and I would suggest checking out a post I did called "How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time" or something like that, which would seem appropriate to the question. But

• 5:26Tim Ferriss?

  the first step that I took in Silicon Valley when I landed here with my shitty hand-me-down green minivan and nobody in my network was look for organizations to volunteer for that feature speakers and so on, or members who you would like to get to know. And in Silicon Valley, I identified a few early on. Ty, the Indus Entrepreneur, and at the time, the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. And what you realize very quickly is when you're volunteering, the majority of your fellow volunteers do the absolute minimum

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  required, which means, for instance, if you notice that water jugs are empty for attendees and it's not your job, so to speak, but you go out of your way to fill them up and so on, you can very quickly be the A-plus student who gets noticed. And then over time, you'll be offered more responsibility. And within a matter of a few months, I went from lackey, peon volunteer to helping to organize the speakers and the panels, which put me in contact with many people, including folks like the co-founder of Electronic Arts, Trev Hawkins, I think that's his last name if I'm getting it right, Ed Bird, who is referred

• 6:51Tim Ferriss?

  to as Mr. Creatine, the founder of Cliff Bar and... And Jack Canfield, among others, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, 100-plus million copies sold, who later then introduced me to my book agent and many other folks who made the four-hour work week a reality. So that's number one, volunteer. Number two is go to conferences, be very strategic, and engage with moderators and ask a handful of questions. But I will let you just search "how to build a world-class network" in my last name, and it will come right up. All right, number two. Ooh, how am I going to say in this? Let's see. Wayne Tumatoroa, "Hi, Tim. The blog, books, podcast, and TV

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  series. What are you most proud of and why?" I am most proud of, if I had to be proud of anything, which I think is sometimes dangerous, but I would actually be proud of a blog post and a talk, and they're closely related. The blog post is "Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide," which was the hardest thing I've ever chosen to write, certainly, and to hit "publish on." And you can check it out at tim.blog-suicide. It is perhaps not the most uplifting thing in the world, but I think it is extremely important as a pattern interrupt and has caught some people who are right at the precipice where I have

• 8:13Tim Ferriss?

  been myself. Similarly, made the decision to get on the TED Mainstage and really just bludgeon people emotionally right at the beginning of my talk to discuss some very stigmatized and important topics such as depression, manic depression, suicide, etc. So that can be found. Sorry for all the URLs, but I want to get through as many questions as possible. So tim.blog/ted, if you want to check it out. It's been watched more than 3 million times already, and it just came out a few months ago. Next question. Josh M. R. Allen. And just to revert back to the question I just answered, "It's easy to talk about the highlights. It's harder to talk about the lowlights." And I think that

• 8:57Tim Ferriss?

  is critically important so that we don't put the people we idolize, whether they be on magazine covers, or at the top of Hacker News, or whatever it might be, on a pedestal that leads us to judge ourselves too harshly against some type of flawless platonic ideal, which does not exist in real life. There you have it. Josh M. R. Allen, "How do you recognize and change a personal irrational rationale?" In other words, how do you tell if you're just being crazy? Well, this is timely because today I was trying to make a very nuanced, or at least from my perspective, complex investment decision, and I called a friend of mine, who is a very

• 9:41Tim Ferriss?

  good BS detector, and also, as he might put it himself, doesn't immediately go to math optimization. He wants to talk about the human element and underscore some of the maybe common sense aspects of a decision, whether that be sort of emotional resonance, or regret, or anxiety, and so on, not just the fine tuning of some arithmetic, in this case, for investment. And he gave me his argument, and the next thing he said was very striking, I thought, and he works with some of the best investors in the world. He said, "Okay, now that you've heard my suggestion, what assumptions of mine might be false?"

• 10:23Tim Ferriss?

  So he jumped right on his own assumptions and started putting them under a microscope. "What assumptions of mine might be false, and you could take this tack with friends?" So for instance, when I spend time with, whether it's Naval Ravikant, or Kevin Rose, many of my friends, I will ask them, after giving them an argument of some type, "Hey, man, if you had to pick that apart, or challenge it, how would you?" Because I don't want to go through life with fragile, collected illusions that are going to mislead me and cause me harm. Like, if you had to pick this apart, how would you? And if you want to practice that yourself, one thing that you might look up is steel

• 11:08Tim Ferriss?

  manning, which is an alternate to straw manning in argument, where in fact, and Charles Darwin was actually an expert at this, and he did this in his writing, where you create the strongest version of your opponent's argument, or counter-argument, and present it, so that you can then effectively present your own argument. So look up Steel Manning, and then there are books that can help you with avoiding cognitive biases. Think Twice would be one. There are other books, for instance, Seeking Wisdom, which is about Charlie Munger,

• 11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Warren Buffett, and others, including Darwin, and Poor Charlie's Almanack, or reading some of the commencement speeches of Charlie Munger, who is the right-hand man and investing partner of Warren Buffett, famed for his mental models, which are very much rudimentary in the sense that many of us have accumulated a toolkit as early back as high school, but not applied it regularly in what we perceive as the messiness of real life. So there you have it. Those are a few options, and you can, at the very least, look up cognitive biases on Wikipedia, and if they've taken down summaries for whatever reason,

• 12:29Tim Ferriss?

  you can go on the Wayback Machine and find it there. Next is Mike Mullins. "Hi, Tim. What processes do you use to break a bad habit or convert a bad habit to a positive one?" This could take hours in and of itself, but I'll try to keep it simple. I talk a lot about this in The Four Hour Body and The Four Hour Chef. In the beginning of The Four Hour Body, I talk about this a lot. There are a few chapters in particular. The Harajuku moment, I think, is extremely critical. Then in The Four Hour Chef, I talk about tools like stick.com. You can take a look at the site, and that'll cover a lot of the explanation at S-T-I-C-K-K dot com. There are a few elements that you need to pay attention to.

• 13:13Tim Ferriss?

  There's certainly the how-to, the instruction. How could I walk you step-through-step towards, say, quitting smoking? But you also need a sufficient why-to, and that's the incentive, which is either a stick or a carrot. And economics, certainly, or the study of human nature, more broadly speaking, is a study of incentives. So check out stick.com. Also look up a gent named BJ Fogg, F O G G, formerly, maybe currently, out of Stanford, who talks a lot about how to start with a small version of a behavioral change. So let's say, rather than flossing your entire mouth, you start with flossing your front teeth and use that to lead into something more comprehensive.

• 13:57Tim Ferriss?

  So I would say, take a look at that. But certainly, I've written quite a bit about this in For Our Body and For Our Chef. Retired man, next one.

• 14:09Tim Ferriss?

  I love the what I'm eating segments of Five Bullet Friday. Any simple chef secrets to change food from good to great? Yeah, I do have a couple of recommendations. There are a few. So number one is that if you look at professional chefs versus home chefs, they have an acute understanding of how to use acid in food. So if you need flavor to pop a little bit more, very often, it just requires a little bit of, say, lemon juice or some type of acid, it could be a vinegar, to really balance out or make some of the flavors pop. Salt can sometimes serve this function, but I have a bottle of unsweetened lemon juice

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  in my refrigerator for this purpose. Exactly. You can also use lemon zest. Lemon zest really works extremely well on a lot of dishes. And of course, these are broad strokes, folks, so it's going to work a lot of the time, not all the time. Get a microplane, and that is fantastic for making it easy to put lemon zest on things. Caramelized onions, so allium, from the allium family, you have, say, shallots, you have onions. Caramelized onions fix just about anything. So very often, I'll just get some onions, chop them up, do a little bit of knife work, which is not very hard. And if you want instruction on knife skills, check out Jacques Pepin. I think that's, I have no idea if the pronunciation is right,

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  but Jacques, like Jacques Cousteau, P E P I N. The dude is a master, and he's incredibly good at teaching. So check out knife skills there. But chop up some onions, and just as I'm prepping other things,

• 15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Have it on, say, medium heat with some olive oil and let it caramelize over the next, say, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes while I'm prepping other things. Caramelized onions go a really, really long way. A few of my favorite herbs and spices that I think are underutilized and generally unoffensive, ginger, cumin, or cumin, depending on how you want to say it. So ginger and cumin are really versatile. Turmeric, also very, very versatile. There are others like tarragon, which can, or dill, which are, can be really overpowering. Marjoram also, if you don't use them correctly or with the right type

• 16:34Tim Ferriss?

  of protein. But ginger, cumin, and turmeric, I find to be very, very flexible. Butter solves just about everything, so I'm not even going to bother talking about it. And last, I'll just say, as a tool, if you want to experiment with sous vide, which, much like sous chef, sous is under, so sous vide means under vacuum, you could look at a device made by a friend of mine, a whole group of friends, called the Joule, J-O-U-L-E, as in the measurement of energy, I believe, no physicist. It's a simple, simple, simple little device that allows you to use other pots and pans you might have, or even a kitchen sink for that matter, to experiment with sous vide. And you're, it enables you to

• 17:17Tim Ferriss?

  cook, say, proteins perfectly, all the way through, every time, and then finish it on a stovetop or under a broiler. So you can check out the Joule, which has been just a godsend. It's very, very easy to use, and the app that they have is just spectacular. J-O-U-L-E. All right, next one. Mickey Mayer. Hi, Tim Ferriss. What's your next book? You mentioned book deadlines a few times. Yeah, I just finished my new book. Literally, it is printing as we speak, and you guys can check it out. It's called Tribe of Mentors. Subtitle, Short Life Advice from the Best in the World.

• 17:58Tim Ferriss?

  And it is the collected wisdom of about 130 people I was dying to reach out to and ask a lot of questions that had bubbled up to the top of my mind. I just turned 40. My first book had its 10th anniversary and a number of friends had either died or been diagnosed with terminal illnesses in the last 12 months. I had a lot of questions on my mind. And so I reached out to these folks for help navigating life and turned out better than I ever could have expected. So, thank you, universe and everybody for that. But you can check it out. Go to tim.blog/tribe or just on BNN or Amazon or wherever. You can just look up Tribe of Mentors and it's currently on sale now. All right.

• 18:41Tim Ferriss?

  Next, Irene Hackett. This may hearken back to an earlier answer, but here's your question. Your latest TED Talk is important. What specific self-talk keeps you from that precipice now? This could help others. The TED Talk I referred to earlier is about an exercise called fear setting and tells my personal story of battles with depression and also a really close call with suicide in college. And as a side note, I didn't mention this in the TED Talk, but I was always fearful

• 19:21Tim Ferriss?

  of being diagnosed with a label of, say, manic depression because I didn't want it to absolve me of the responsibility of still trying to change and improve my behavior and so on. I didn't want to default to, say, pure self-medication as a way of avoiding certain changes to my thought patterns and behaviors and so on. Then I had... My full genome sequenced and there were only a few things that stood out. And one was on a scale of say, zero to 10. The genetic predictor for manic depression was at like an 11 or a 12. It was like spinal tap.

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I was like, well, I guess I can only dodge this for so long. And it had the opposite effect. Rather than making me depressed about being depressed or predisposed to being depressed and absolving myself of responsibility. I really didn't expect this. It lifted a huge burden because it made the point, I suppose, that I have programming. I mean, in my code base, I am hardwired, in a sense, and I'm mixing a lot of technology metaphors here, to experience manic depressive episodes, although I don't really get manic, so more depressive episodes.

• 20:40Tim Ferriss?

  And that made me feel as though I was actually doing a pretty good job with the instructions that I am actualizing through my DNA. And I felt better about myself actually learning this, which was very unexpected. But I'm not directly answering your question. What's specific self-talk? I'm going to expand that to exercises. Number one is fear setting. And people can learn about it in the TED Talk, tim.blog/ted, where I run through it.

• 21:20Tim Ferriss?

  But if you go to that page, there's also a text version and an explanation of fear setting pulled from my previous book, Tools of Titans. So you can check that out. That is going to be the most comprehensive and I do that all the time. Another question which helps prevent overwhelm, which I think is at times a not prerequisite, but an antecedent to depression.

• 21:48Tim Ferriss?

  So if you end up feeling as though there are too many inputs or balls to juggle, that can lead to overwhelm, which can lead to feeling helpless, which can lead to harsh self judgment, which can lead to depression, if that makes sense. So what would this look like if this were easy is a question that I constantly ask myself, and it's a question that I explore a lot in Tribe of Mentors, this new book that I just finished, which I mentioned earlier. And then the last piece, I would say, and there's a lot more to this because it's not just self talk. And in fact, we get ourselves into trouble when we try to rely in isolation on our own self talk to address depression.

• 22:29Tim Ferriss?

  I think that it's very difficult when you're caught in those circular thought loops to disengage from that. So community, exercise, getting into your body to get out of your own brain, and spending time with other people who can, for instance, and this comes back to an earlier question, who can test your assumptions and show you how all is not lost when you're saying always and never, these absolutes, in fact, do not apply, and this too shall pass, etc. Often requires other people, but I'll give you one more question that I apply in my own head in these circumstances, and that is, so what?

• 23:09Tim Ferriss?

  And I actually learned this from Richet Chada, who is an Indian actress who uses this herself. So if you have a given fear, you ask, so what? And this is best done, for me at least, in journaling. You write down the consequence, whatever is the answer to so what? And then you ask again, so what? So what? So what? And when you do that four or five times, which is not entirely dissimilar from how, say, Ricardo Semler, famous Brazilian born entrepreneur, uses why, or Ray Dalio, same story, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, asking, say, four or five whys to get to the root cause or the root belief. When you ask, so what?

• 23:54Tim Ferriss?

  So what? So what? And you answer it each time earnestly, you realize at the end, I'm actually fine. So what? Nothing. Everything is just going to be totally fine, and it's manageable or reversible, at the very least, in many, many, in fact, most cases. All right. Next question. Hope that helps.

• 24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Matches Malone, question, your top three to five books read this year? All right, it's more of a statement than a question, but I'll take it as a question. A few that come to mind, I've alluded to earlier, I would say Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charles Munger, although Seeking Wisdom, in many cases by Peter Bevillen, is a little more easily digested, I believe. So that's one, and that's actually a book that I've revisited, so I'm counting books that I've revisited. The next would be closely related, and both of these really drill on mental models and rules for making decisions, and avoiding common slips and cognitive biases.

• 24:54Tim Ferriss?

  Principles by Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Capital. Check out the cover blurbs, one from Bill Gates, one from Tony Robbins, if you want to know the type of people who listen very carefully to his advice, and his investment returns are just crazy. So, there you have it. I find investors and poker players very interesting to study for thinking systems and mental models that apply everywhere. The third I'll mention is completely unlike the others in most respects, and it's The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his name, but that's how I'll pronounce it. G-I-B-R-A-N.

• 25:32Tim Ferriss?

  This is, for a lot of people, going to be really woo-woo, semi-religious, mystical nonsense speak, but it's beautifully illustrated, I recommend getting the illustrated version. And I read it a few pages at a time in a sauna every night over the course of one or two weeks, and it may or may not have been, after reading a lot about different psychedelics, perhaps authored by Terrence McKenna, but that probably puts it in the proper context for why I found it so insightful. A lot of it, I think, is a little too highfalutin, but the latter half in particular, I found very insightful,

• 26:17Tim Ferriss?

  and helped me to work through a number of different emotional questions that I had on my mind. And, next question is Devi.

• 26:29Tim Ferriss?

  Why is worldly success apparently so important to you as evidenced by it being a primary focus of your podcast? Okay, so apparently is an important modifier here, so I'm glad that you included it. Why is worldly success apparently so important to you as evidenced by it being a primary focus of your podcast? We would need to define worldly success. I assume you mean business building, entrepreneurship, et cetera. And there are a few ways that I could attempt to answer this. The first would just be to observe that I have a very large audience comprised of entrepreneurs, self-described CEOs, founders, et cetera. And these are the tools and tactics and stories that I feel best service them and

• 27:14Tim Ferriss?

  help them where they are at the moment, or where their priorities might be in either initially building, growing, or say, selling a business, for instance. I should also simply point out that there are other interviews I've done with say Tara Brock and many others, in fact, that focus on the more, I'm not going to say esoteric, but perhaps spiritual, which is a word I don't like, I'll put it in quotation marks,

• 27:49Tim Ferriss?

  aspects of life. And that is all well and good, but people generally don't come to me for that. And the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I think, that's my dog Molly doing self-defense. Thank you, Molly. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is helpful for putting this in context because I feel like most of my audience is well-educated with a decent household income, and I'm helping them with business building and things along those lines. But I'm also pushing a little higher up and talking more about the things that would be of interest to those who are reading things like Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  Frankl, which, by the way, is the single book that pops up most often across all of my podcast guests and the 100-plus people in Tribe of Mentors who have not been on the podcast. So there you have that. I also would say That the question implies some mutual exclusivity in other worlds for that worldly success is focused onto the exclusion of something else. But I think that if that is what you meant or meant to imply that that's a false dichotomy. You can very much have both. And just because you do very well in the private sector or make a lot of money does

• 29:15Tim Ferriss?

  not by definition mean that you lack the other things or don't place an importance on them, any importance on them. Okay. Next question is Ian Filpot. What recent apps slash technologies have made your life easier? There are many if we look at technologies as or technology as any type of tool that helps you to solve a problem in any respect. I like the Momentum extension for Chrome, which can help mitigate procrastination. That's a really, really easy one. I like Egg Timer, another browser-based tool that allows you to set a timer.

• 29:57Tim Ferriss?

  You can just search Egg Timer, online timer. I am doing a bunch with WeWork and exploring having an office and set hours for doing certain things and location. So thank you, Tim Urban, the writer of Wait But Why for the inspiration there. If you're looking for something a little more expensive, I'm not sure you would be, but if you're allowing something a little more expensive, a Mila dishwasher with a rack on the top for cleaning silverware is just incredible, not cheap. And last but not least, I would mention a protein, and they have since become a sponsor of the podcast, but that's not why I mentioned them.

• 30:42Tim Ferriss?

  I'm looking at it right now across the room, is Ascent Protein, A-S-C-E-N-T protein, which is a native protein and doesn't, for me at least, cause any of the gastrointestinal distress that whey protein sometimes can. It is very, very minimally processed. Next question, Miko Irola.

• 31:05Tim Ferriss?

  If your podcast format allowed only one question, à la rapid fire question with lengthy answer, what would the question be? I think it would have to be, can you please tell us about a dark period that you experienced, or one of the darker periods you've experienced? How you came out of it and what you learned from it? I think that question gets all of the ingredients for something that people will retain. You get a real story, you get real world details, and you learn how they solve a problem. Very often, I think, podcasts, interviews and so on can focus on how people seize opportunity, find opportunity, create opportunity. But at the end of the day, I think that's the easy part.

• 31:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's not finding an opportunity that's the challenge, it's overcoming the roadblocks and opponents and competition and self sabotage, quite frankly, that you're going to face if you choose something with a high degree of uncertainty, which entrepreneurship certainly entails. So can you please tell us about one of the darker periods of your life and how you came out of it and what you learned from it? I think is a solid question that gets a lot. Two more questions. All right. Derek Miller is the next one. This is a good one. What advice would you give a 24-year-old male struggling to control his sex drive?

• 32:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's see. Number one, maybe get rid of broadband, turn off your Wi-Fi so you cannot compulsively visit porn sites. But I want to actually dissect the question because my answer may not make sense if I myopically look at this and assume that it's an issue with sex drive. So if you have an issue with controlling X, so in this case, 24-year-old male struggling to control his sex drive. If I want to give the

• 33:09Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of hand wave dismissal answer, I would say, enjoy it because it's not going to get better. But I would say that if you look at, say, overeating, someone could ask the same question or a similar question and say, what advice would you give to a 24-year-old who's struggling to control his appetite? And there could be biological causes, so certainly get some blood work done and see if you have out-of-control testosterone, or a luteinizing hormone, or FSH, or something like that. But across the board, we could just be asking, how should I control poor impulse control? And I think that is generally going to be the answer, right?

• 33:50Tim Ferriss?

  So if someone is obese, for instance, or just 20 pounds overweight, they might have some biological determinant that's causing them to overeat. So maybe their hypothalamus is all screwed up, maybe they have some weird leptin or ghrelin levels, who knows? But more often than not, it's just their environment is set up to defeat them. So they have, say, junk food all over the house. Or B, they haven't set up systems and rules to prevent themselves, incentives, we already talked about, to prevent them from overeating. So across the board, I would say the most useful tool that I have found for impulse control, or emotional reactivity, where you get steered by your emotions as opposed to

• 34:35Tim Ferriss?

  the other way around, is looking at Stoicism and something called CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. And there's actually a great book on this, which I recommend, called, it's a bit of a mouthful, so don't mind the title, but The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, subtitle, Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy. It's written by Donald J. Robertson. So you can just look up Donald Robertson, and the cover has, it looks like, a bust of Marcus Aurelius in the middle with two chairs, one on either side. But fantastic book, and I would suggest people check it out.

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  And if you want an overview of Stoicism, which is used by top NFL teams right now, a lot of the CEOs I know of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley because it makes them better competitors. You can check out Tao of Seneca. It's a free introduction to all of this stuff that I put out there, which has no trick, no nothing. It's just something I think is valuable and should be out in the world. So you can check that out at tim.blog/seneca. As far as controlling the sex drive goes, you could also check out an experiment I did called Nob Nom, which is a 30 day no booze, no masturbating experiment. And you can get a group together and hold each other accountable

• 35:59Tim Ferriss?

  with money to lose potentially. You could put together a betting pool. That works very well for losing weight or stopping compulsive masturbation, among other things. All right, last question. This is Jasmine Worth. Jasmine Worth, "Hi Tim. If you were only able to take five supplements for longevity and well-being, what would they be? Thanks for all you do. Thanks for reading and submitting the question." All right. So longevity and well-being. I'm going to preface this answer with a disclaimer. I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. So talk to your medical professional before consuming any supplement, or medication,

• 36:40Tim Ferriss?

  or stopping any medication or supplement, etc. Okay? Also, use your common sense. Don't do anything stupid, please. Internet, it's a tall, tall order for the internet, I know. But let me tell you a few things that I find interesting, and a few that I thought would be very compelling that I've chosen not to use. I think berberine is potentially very interesting for longevity. Also interesting for attenuating insulin or glucose responses after meals, for instance, much like alpha-lipoic acid. That is one. And I should note that I cycle on and off of any supplement that I take, because I assume that there are negative feedback loops. In other words, if something has an effect...

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Say it's an agonist for something, then it's probably an antagonist for something else. Or if you're taking, say, supplemental testosterone, it's going to affect your HPTA. In other words, your hormonal axis, and then your body will stop producing as much testosterone because you're getting it from elsewhere. The body is very smart that way about homeostasis. Okay. So berberine is one. Resveratrol, I was interested in for a period of time, found in wine, although in no concentration, really valuable for life extension purposes. And a lot of people have paid attention to resveratrol. When I took this resveratrol for a period of time, I found, and many people have found

• 38:09Tim Ferriss?

  this, that it caused joint pain, specifically in my elbows. So I decided that was not a good harbinger of things to come, and I stopped taking resveratrol. Other people find metformin and rapamycin very interesting. If you want to learn more about rapamycin, R-A-P-A-M-Y-C-I-N, which is a very strong prescription medication that you should not take without doctor supervision, then you can search life extension, Odyssey, maybe? Life Extension Easter Island and my name. And there's an entire episode where we talked to two scientists, three actually, but two

• 38:50Tim Ferriss?

  who are very well-known for metformin specifically and rapamycin specifically. Metformin is very interesting to me. It's used by type 2 diabetics quite a bit. I'm not currently taking it. Also something you should not take without medical supervision, but has some promise. Fasting is not a supplement, but it's the absence of all supplements. I do find fasting very interesting. And Dom De Agostino, so Dominic De Agostino, and I have talked a lot about this on the podcast, and has some very fascinating implications and applications for both performance and longevity.

• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well-being, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the following, which is also something that is typically prescribed with medical supervision, and that is lithium. So lithium is a monotherapy for, say, bipolar depression, might be prescribed at 1,500 milligrams, and it might be, say, lithium carbonate, I believe. There are people who believe, and there's some good writing in the New York Times, for instance, and I think the article is "Maybe We All Just Need A Little Bit Of Lithium," something like that. If you search "New York Times, Maybe We Just Need Lithium," you will find an article that discusses groundwater concentrations of lithium and inverse correlation to, I believe it was, suicide, homicide,

• 40:16Tim Ferriss?

  manic depression, and so on. And based on that, and the recommendation of a doctor that I work with, note, even I work with qualified M.D.s on all of this, I began taking five milligrams of lithium orotate on a daily basis, and it appears to take the edge off and mitigate, to some extent, anxiety and potential spiraling towards the edge of the precipice, as was put earlier, with respect to depression. So, could be psychosomatic, but that's 99% of life, isn't it? So, for the time being, I will continue taking it,

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  but I do, much like everything else, cycle both on and off of these things. So, Jasmine, hopefully that helps. I do take things that you might not think of as a supplement, for instance, apple cider vinegar. I'll typically have a tablespoon of that in water, both in the morning and before bed, which might be considered an old wives' tale for boosting immune function, but for whatever reason, seems to work for me, and when combined with honey, also helps with sleep for thousands of people who have tried it. And you can look up Seth Roberts, honey and apple cider vinegar, abbreviated ACV, if you want to try a very simple remedy for potentially helping with insomnia and so on.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  All right, folks, so that is the Q and A for today. Thank you to everybody who subscribes to Five Bullet Friday who submitted questions. And if you'd like to submit your own and check out what all the buzz is about, then you can check out Five Bullet Friday at timdoplog forward slash Friday. And that is it. So thanks for listening, everybody. And until next time, be safe, test your cognitive biases and have fun. Talk to you soon.

• 42:17Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 42:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom. I have used LegalZoom myself for many of my businesses. And many of the icons on this podcast have actually used LegalZoom. For instance, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame, CEO of Automattic, which is now worth more than a billion dollars, first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted to help with their businesses, whether that's setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search,

• 43:44Tim Ferriss?

  forming an LLC, setting up a nonprofit, or finding simple cease and desist letter templates. Man, do I use a lot of those. LegalZoom is not a law firm. But they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business. And important, there are no surprises. LegalZoom provides complete transparency. That means upfront pricing, customer reviews, and a satisfaction guarantee. Check out LegalZoom.com today to see how they can make life better and easier for you and your business. If you're pretending to be a lawyer on the internet, then you are asking for trouble. Put together the safety nets, get your Ts crossed and your Is dotted.

• 44:29Tim Ferriss?

  Enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at LegalZoom.com to save 15%. That's T-I-M for 15% off. Check it out, LegalZoom.com. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, founded by the genius Finns who lit the internet on fire. And you may have heard of their mushroom coffee, which features chaga and lion's mane, which is taken Silicon Valley by storm. I use it pretty much every day, either that or the chaga, which is decaf, so it's a separate version. And I use both of these primarily for focus and productivity. They just get you going, light you up like a Christmas tree. So you should definitely check it out.

• 45:12Tim Ferriss?

  People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement, and for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week, so you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water, and oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee.

• 45:56Tim Ferriss?

  I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So. If you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something, you can try a sample pack, which is great also, right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim. That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim and use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If

• 46:40Tim Ferriss?

  you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out.