#889: Q&A with Tim — How to Get Unstuck, Resilience in Hard Times, Tools for Brain Health, Finding Inner Peace, Optimism as a Learnable Skill, and More

This episode is the second half of my recent live Q&A. I cover what I’m doing to try to prevent Alzheimer’s, how to change when you can see exactly what’s keeping you stuck, staying hopeful as current events turn darker, what Quantified Self 2.0 would need to deliver, where psychedelics fit in my life now, how I think about “all-natural” vs. synthetic options, and much more. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by: Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: HelixSleep.com/Tim https://helixsleep.com/tim (20% off any purchase)Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/Tim https://shopify.com/timFin https://fin.ai/tim powerful AI Agent for all your customer service: Fin. Ai/Tim https://fin.ai/timEight Sleep Pod 6 https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/ which cools or heats each side of the bed, with custom elevation and snoring reduction, and wearable-free sleep tracking: EightSleep.com/tim https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/Timestamps [00:00:00] Start.[00:01:59] What I’m doing to help prevent Alzheimer’s: sauna, Norwegian 4×4 intervals, Zone 2, urolithin A, lithium orotate, and dental health.[00:06:46] Knowing what keeps you stuck and still not changing: IFS, CBT, DBT, and the cost of inaction.[00:11:26] Will I move to a looser, more extemporaneous format? (Send me your ideas.)[00:17:51] From intellectual collector to builder.[00:18:38] What we’ll wish we’d been doing with AI 12 months from now.[00:19:05] Staying hopeful as the news gets darker: social media fasts, upside time vs. downside time, and Hard Times.[00:27:19] Will handmade work and human imperfection become more valuable?[00:27:37] Fix your state: exercise.[00:27:58] The best way to spend 5K–10K to get current on AI (you don’t need to).[00:29:59] Where psychedelics fit for me now, shorter-acting compounds, and anti-inflammatory effects at tiny doses.[00:33:49] Hugh Jackman’s 2,000-meter row.[00:37:17] What Quantified Self 2.0 would need to show me, and the missing piece of behavior change.[00:43:26] Life before and after psychedelics, and losing the fear of death.[00:49:59] “All-natural” vs. synthetic: supplements, cholesterol, and being your own advocate.[00:58:02] Xylitol and white teeth.[01:00:22] What I still love doing inefficiently.[01:00:59] Preventing tech neck.[01:03:05] Minimum effective dose for flexibility.[01:04:39] The $20 tip from Billy Joel.[01:06:09] My favorite birds.[01:07:12] When to keep investing in a friendship.[01:08:09] Am I at peace?[01:09:20] Parting thoughts. For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. This is the second half of a Q and A recorded during a recent livestream, but the second part is totally self-sufficient. You don't need the first half, so don't worry about that. If you want to listen to the first half, you can find it at tim.blog/podcast very easily. We had so many questions that we had to split it up. And we pick up here with how I'm approaching my own Alzheimer's risk genetically speaking, how I'm thinking about that. And then we get into breaking stubborn patterns, how I think about behavioral change, habit formation, et cetera, staying optimistic. I think this is the mother skill.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Certainly, I'm not the first person to say that. But in a world of creeping nihilism and darkness, how do you stay optimistic? What is the value of staying optimistic? How do you distinguish that from being a Pollyanna, in a sense, right? Next, learning AI by building things and the limits of self-tracking? How would I think about the quantified self now versus the very first meetup I went to ages and ages and ages ago? I also get into, and somewhat hesitantly, but I wanted to answer the question, how psychedelics have changed my life or affected me with lots of caveats and warnings, supplements versus prescription drugs? How do you think about that? Drugs in quotation marks versus all-natural in quotation marks? How do you answer, how do I answer the question, are you at peace?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Tough one, but we'll get into it and much more. Thank you again for the incredibly thoughtful questions. And with that said, please enjoy part two.

• 1:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Now would be the appropriate time. I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Next one is from Mary. I know Alzheimer's prevention is a big focus for you. Can you give a concise listing of the preventative measures you are taking, including drugs, all therapies, i.e. TMS, hot, cold, et cetera, food and movement? Mary, you're in good luck. In fact, I already have a draft of blog posts that is also going to be turned into a podcast where I'm going to go through all of this in excruciating Tim Ferriss detail. But I will give you a few things that come to mind, and there will be much more in terms of detail and non-obvious choices. But I'm going to preface it by saying that we are in the dark ages

• 2:38Speaker 00

  still with Alzheimer's and many neurodegenerative diseases. Having shepherded a few relatives through treatments for Alzheimer's, I will say that it is primitive AF. And many of these drugs are a Faustian bargain. In my opinion, I have access to a lot of great researchers, and there's very little consensus on the best way to try to address these things. I would say the only consensus I can point to is that prevention is the name of the game. And these processes, at least as we currently understand them, that culminate in what we

• 3:21Speaker 00

  would diagnose as, say, Alzheimer's, start pretty early, 30s, 40s, right? So I won't get into all the mechanisms of action that I think most interesting, because that's beside the point. You asked what I'm doing. Some of what I'm doing, sauna, a few times a week, 20 minutes, somewhere between 170 and 180 degrees. Hotter is not better. You can look at some of Rhonda Patrick's, Dr. Rhonda Patrick's, coverage of the research. You don't want to overcook your head. That is going to push you in the wrong direction, not the right direction. Interval training, Dr. Tommy Wood and I talked about this at length. It remains, I think, one of the most interesting interventions that I've come

• 4:02Speaker 00

  across, certainly at least as supported for maintaining hippocampal volume in the brain. And we can talk about the importance of the hippocampus another time. But doing this Norwegian four-by-four training, which is hard, gonna warn you, it's also helpful for VO2 max, and we can talk about how that's correlated to all sorts of good things. But you're basically doing four minutes of all-out intense exercise, like by the last minute, you feel like you're going to die and you're being chased by wolves, getting to a very high heart rate. I use a heart rate monitor, Morpheus, for tracking all of this. And then you take three minutes off, and then you do four again, and you do four rounds of that. Okay, doing this, I

• 4:42Speaker 00

  think it was three times a week for six months, produced durable changes out five years, if I'm remembering correctly. That is nuts. That is pretty wild. Is that the perfect protocol? Is that what you need? We don't know, but the evidence so far, at least it's been documented, supports that. There are other things you can do. Zone two training, certainly for mitochondrial health. Urolithin A is a supplement I've decided to take also for predominantly mitochondrial health. I don't have time to dig into that, but I do find the research there pretty compelling. You can buy that on Amazon or online. It's produced by a company called Timeline. Mitopure

• 5:25Speaker 00

  is their patented urolithin A. And there are other things that are light lifts. And again, I'm not saying any of these things cure Alzheimer's. I think by the time someone's far gone, it's pretty much far gone. However, five milligrams of lithium orotate, do take five milligrams of lithium orotate, that is also OTC, you can get it easily. And listen to my podcast with Tommy Wood, tripling down on dental health, air purifiers, water, creating systems such that your environment and your routines are as supportive as possible. I have become a huge fan of, so in the case of dental health, for instance, using gum

• 6:09Speaker 00

  or mouthwash that includes xylitol. And don't have time to get into it right now in great depth, but a blog post and podcast is coming that's going to be dedicated to this with the enormous grain of salt that I am not in the business of treating disease. However, I am genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's with ABOE3,4 and other risk factors. So I am throwing the kitchen sink at it, or everything in the kitchen sink, I suppose the expression goes. So thanks for the question, Mary. Hopefully that is somewhat helpful. But my blog post and podcast will have a lot more. This is from, I think, a different Susan. I've spent nearly 30 years practicing acupuncture and previously worked as a psychotherapist. I

• 6:53Speaker 00

  observed that people can desperately want to heal while unconsciously holding under the very patterns that keep them suffering. Have you ever recognized exactly what was keeping you stuck, yet found yourself unable to let it go, and well, finally allowed you to? Oh, yeah, all the time. I mean, just look at anyone's New Year's resolutions, mine included. And look, I do the past year review, and I've got my behavioral engineering and so on, but there's still things that I can see. And I remember hearing Sam Harris talk about sorting other people's problems out. It's like, you can sort out other people's problems in two seconds. Giving advice is easy. But actually, moving into the catalyzing stage where you translate good intention to behavior is something else. So psychedelics,

• 7:38Speaker 00

  I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, they do allow you oftentimes to step outside of yourself as the protagonist in your own movie and watch that movie on a screen as someone in the audience. So it can be very helpful for developing an awareness and opening a window of opportunity for rewriting some of the beliefs and patterns that govern your life. But outside of that, IFS, Internal Family Systems, created by Dick Schwartz, I think is very useful, no drugs required, although it is often implemented in some form in the preparation and integration for, say, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. CBT, very helpful, might not be sexy, but in large part originating out of Stoic philosophy. If you have not looked

• 8:21Speaker 00

  into the Genesis story, it's actually a good read. But CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, very interesting. DBT, also very interesting. People can look that up if they'd like. And Atomic Habits, you know, I mentioned it once before, there's a reason it sold 25 million, 30 million copies. Good God, non-recurring phenomenon. Good for you, James. And, you know, the last two things I would say is that the pain has to be painful enough. Sometimes people just aren't in enough pain to change. I mean, I've seen this with addicts over and over and over again. I've sadly had family members who have died from addiction. I have best friends who have died from addiction. I've had friends who are currently, have friends who are currently addicted. Sometimes they have to really hit rock bottom. I hate to say it, but sometimes the pain isn't painful enough. And then last but not least, I'll mention

• 9:06Speaker 00

  fear setting. People can find fear setting, which I've talked about quite a bit before, a TED Talk, which has God knows how many views now, I don't know, many millions, focuses on this exclusively. I think tim.blog/ted will take you to that. And you can find it online for free. Don't have to buy anything. There are many aspects of this fear setting, which is intended to methodically remove different emergency breaks in your life, which are nebulous fears or inhibitions of one type or another. But there's one aspect of fear setting. It's the piece that is most neglected and most applies to this question,

• 9:45Speaker 00

  which is describing in writing the cost of inaction. And so what that looks like, you can take a piece of paper, it's very straightforward, grab a piece of paper, I like doing this analog, create three columns. You got one year, three years, 10 years, and then put at the top, whatever it is that you would like to change, and then you have cost of inaction. Right? So now you have three columns with three timelines. And in each of those columns, you're just going to write down, if nothing changes, if you continue doing what you're doing, or not doing what you're not doing, what are the costs, physically, financially,

• 10:26Speaker 00

  relationally, whatever it might be, one year from now, three years from now, it could be five years, pick your poison, 10 years from now. And chances are, if you get to that stage with something, the picture that it paints, that is, let's just call it nearly inevitable, is not going to be pretty. And that is how you take something that isn't currently painful enough, and you magnify it with a reality accelerator, to make it compelling enough, so that you make a change, recognizing that the change involves less pain, likely temporary,

• 11:07Speaker 00

  less risk, also probably reversible than the status quo. We think of risk, or downside risks, or problems, as the byproduct of something we do that is new. But we don't often take the time to consider the atrocious cost of the status quo in inaction. All right. I'm going to come back to that seed that I planted earlier. This is a question from Jason. Remember the format question I planted? Here's the question from Jason A. Hey, Tim, I've been a big fan since Four Hour Work Week. I have all the books. I was in a test group for Coyote. Thank you for that. Appreciate it. That was a fun little experiment with the card game. Really appreciate you and everything you do. Question, I really love the more relaxed and less polished format of the random show on the Q and As. Wondering if those are less effort? Fuck yeah, they're

• 11:52Speaker 00

  less effort. For me. Okay. Wondering if those are less effort for you compared to the researched intentional guest episodes? Yes, I put a ton of time into those, and it seems like there are just too many interview format podcasts in the world at the moment. Okay, I know I'm interjecting with my own director's commentary here. Any chance you would pivot towards a more consistently extemporaneous format in the future? Yes, I've wanted to do this, and I have had a number of different thoughts on how I might experiment with it. I've done some co-hosting experiments in the past, you might have noticed, where I've had, say, Kevin Kelly on, good friend of mine, and they invite the guest, and we both interview them. Did this with Danny Hillis,

• 12:37Speaker 00

  amazing, amazing, such a fun interview. And for me, those are extemporaneous, more extemporaneous. I think that that may not be as obvious to the listener, or to the viewer, but that is the case. And I am eager to hear what you would like to see me do. So please add in the comments, what formats you would watch or listen to, what you think could be fun for me to experiment with. I am very, very interested in this. So of course, as I am doing this in real time, we have a feed of comments. I'd love for you guys to drop in a bunch of comments. But if you want to gestate,

• 13:21Speaker 00

  and come back with a suggestion, you can also shoot me an at reply, just tag me on X, at T Ferriss, T F E R R I S S, and use hashtag format in that tweet somewhere. So that's the ask. I would love your input. I would love your thoughts, recommendations for experimental formats. This is something I really would like to do, because it's fun for me to do, it's lightweight, but I get to exercise my brain more in some respects than fixed format interview. I think interview formats are largely dead. I think almost every interview-based format

• 14:06Speaker 00

  in the world of podcasting, AKA, if we're looking at the latest vintage television shows on YouTube, are basically islands in the middle of the ocean with a rising water level. And it's not a question of if they will be consumed. It is just a matter of when, with respect to AI and other things. I've talked about The Canary and the Coal Mine, which is prescriptive nonfiction and the form of books. I published my sales numbers and so on, looking at trend lines, post-introduction of ChatGPT 3.5, in I believe it was November of 2023. And there are many

• 14:46Speaker 00

  reasons, therefore, that I would love to experiment with this. And let me know. I would really love to take a stab at it. So keep dragging them in. I will have access to this chat after we stop the live stream, and certainly I will be watching the specific tweets that go up with at T Ferriss and hashtag format. So please do let me know. There are lots of questions on translating thought or introspection or brainstorming to action.

• 15:19Speaker 00

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• 16:03Speaker 00

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• 16:20Speaker 00

  As some of you might recall, I launched my own limited edition coffee a few years back. It was delicious. It was a blast. But that's a story for another time. Here's why I'm bringing it up. I needed and wanted an online store that would be beautiful, fast, and reliable. Plus a checkout that wouldn't scare people off at the finish line. So I used this episode's sponsor, Shopify. I've known the team since 2009, when they had something like 10 employees, and I was using it back then. Many of the most successful startups I advise today also use Shopify. From fast-growing new companies to some massive juggernauts, they all use Shopify. I started

• 17:01Speaker 00

  my first online business back in 2001. Back then, it meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails, and headaches after headaches after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours, ran 24/7 without drama, and Shop Pay, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add to cart to paid in seconds. Shop Pay lifts conversions by up to 50% relative to guest checkout. So it really smoothes the way. I use it all the time when I'm buying stuff. So if you're ready to make your first sale, check it out. Go to Shopify.com/tim and start your free trial today. One more time, that's Shopify.com/tim.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  This is from Vedant. How do you stop being an intellectual collector and start being a builder? Honestly, I would look at some of the older videos by Casey Neistat, who was a very famous, still is a very famous creator, who's had the longevity of decades at this point. He is very good at verbalizing and giving a rationale for consistently shipping something, whether it's once a day, once a week, once a month, it can be anything, which relates back to developing a bias towards action with the smallest next possible action. It doesn't need to be big, but you're reconstructing an identity and then the

• 18:33Speaker 00

  identity will lead you to habitual behaviors and that will lead to more output. John T., as it pertains to AI, 12 months from now, what will we wish we were doing today that we aren't, probably more defining and elimination as described in The Four Hour Workweek. But you don't need to read The Four Hour Workweek. You could buy books like The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. There are many different options. I have already recommended The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. These are evergreen topics that are going to increase in importance. Question from Mitchell. As the current events seem to continue to turn darker and darker, how are you staying positive and supporting your own mental health at this time? How are you remaining hopeful? What strategies have you implemented?

• 19:16Speaker 00

  I have not had any social media apps outside of YouTube, which I use daily for learning. I've not had any social media apps on my phone for probably five years now. I think that is a very simple step that you can experiment with, doing a social media cleanse slash fast for one or two months. Trust me, it's like doing 20 years of therapy.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  So you can swim upstream against this raging waterfall of bullshit and rage, or you can step out of that and just sit in an inner tube and float down the stream without social media. So in other words, it removes the need to do a lot of things when you remove that input. I would say, related to this, deciding on, in your calendar, where you're going to have upside time and downside time. And what I mean by that is, you spend an hour or two, it could be on ChatGPT, it could be on YouTube, could be elsewhere, looking for optimistic cases, asking questions about possibility

• 20:22Speaker 00

  and opportunities in the age of AI, in fill in the blank, in sector X, whatever it might be. This is upside time. So you are deliberately putting on your optimist hat. Somewhat echoes the thinking hats of Edward de Bono and lateral thinking, but you're putting on your optimism hat for upside time. This is in your calendar. This is dedicated study hall. And then downside time is similar. You are proactively setting aside time to look at risks, kind of like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. You're going to be focusing on weaknesses, threats, risks, et cetera, with the focus on finding descriptions of what can be done.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  It's not just a description of the problem. So I would use, for instance, an LLM as the front end to your YouTube search. And the reason for this is that to the extent possible, you really want to avoid, in my opinion, a passive feed of rage, nihilism, and pessimism. And that's what you get if you go to youtube.com and immediately get pulled into your curated fear, uncertainty, and doubt clips and shorts collection. This is how the platforms continue to make you the product. Their customers are advertisers. They are selling your attention. That is the sole purpose of these platforms, from a business model perspective.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Do not be fooled. The goal is not to entertain. The goal is not to help. The goal is to keep you on for as long as possible. And we have a heavy human proclivity to spend a lot more time on the things that upset us than things that make us optimistic. So the approach that counterbalances that inclination is having upside time and downside time and calendaring it. I would say two other things for me personally. Look at your past. You made it to where you are right now. There have been recessions, there have been wars, there have been lots of problems, and you somehow figured it out. Sure, you had stumbles along the way, probably had some disasters,

• 22:36Speaker 00

  and you recovered from those things. So I am reading, for instance, and this might seem like it's in my downside time, but I would actually put it in my upside time. I'm reading a book right now called Hard Times by Studs Terkel. So Studs Terkel is amazing, won the Pulitzer Prize. This is an old book. Hard Times, An Oral History of the Great Depression. And it is dozens and dozens and dozens of vignettes that have been organized thematically with people who went through the depression, explaining in their own words what happened to them. And you have destitution but joy. You have people who did better than ever during the worst of times,

• 23:22Speaker 00

  and they weren't necessarily bankers. A lot of those went the other way. Jingle writers, for instance. There's a very, very concrete example of someone who wrote jingles and just had this outpouring of creative productivity during the depression. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of examples, people of every gender, every race imaginable. And it's deeply humanizing of something that most of us are really only familiar with in a very passing way. It was a hard period in US history, and we've seen black and white photos of women sitting on doorsteps

• 24:00Speaker 00

  with underfed children, and we know a thing or two about it, all right? Maybe we know about the stock crash and brokers jumping out of windows, et cetera. Okay, fine. But that's a very cursory glance at what was an incredibly important historic event. And this book just personalizes the whole thing. That's upside time for me because it highlights again and again and again and again human resilience and how good people are at surviving, recovering, and then thriving after the fact. So those are a few. And look, not to sound like a shill for my own books. Trust me, I make next to nothing from my books, then you don't have to buy it. I'm sure you can find it on Pirate Bay or something.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  But the meta-section of The Four Hour Chef, which focuses on accelerated learning, is the most important section in that book. And it's about 80 pages. The name of the game on some level is having confidence that you can adapt in the future. And it's a chicken and the egg situation because, as Mike Maples Jr., a very accomplished entrepreneur and investor, told me at one point, one of the few things that you're responsible for with your kids is teaching them to be optimistic. Because if you teach them to be optimistic, they see options. They feel like they have agency, all right? So does the optimism come first and then the action? Or is it action and then the optimism? I think it actually points both ways.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  The arrow is bidirectional. So reading a book like this, Hard Times, makes me more optimistic that I can figure things out. Spending time on meta-learning makes me more confident that I can figure things out. Even if I'm test-driving the toolkit on something that seems as trivial and unnecessary as rock climbing, as is the case currently. Or it could be working on portrait drawing using Procreate and following along with YouTube videos. Applying the toolkit, doesn't matter where you apply it. It's the same toolkit. So if you're refining your use of that toolkit on anything,

• 26:14Speaker 00

  you are getting better at cultivating the meta cognition and ability to learn that will give you adaptability in a rapidly changing world, et cetera, et cetera. And then the social media cleanse is in the elimination bucket. It is turning off the torrent of inputs of the trivial many. And look, I have no social media on my phone. Do my friends still send me the dumbest and most entertaining memes on Instagram? Do I get sucked into it? Yes, but I can only go so far because I don't have the app on my phone. So I can waste a few minutes on some dumb, so many dumb things that I receive every day from my ridiculous friends.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  And I enjoy it, I'm not going to lie. Look,

• 27:04Speaker 00

  the internet is built for entertainment, among other things, sure. But I limit the damage, the downside risk of my own human inclinations by taking those apps off my phone. So I'll stop there for now. But those are a few of the things that come to mind. Questions on Wabi Sabi, it's from Eman, I'm probably mispronouncing that. Will handmade work and human connection become more valuable? In other words, human imperfection? Yes, I do think it will. Not sure quite how to capitalize on that or what to do with that assumption, but I do think that's definitely going to be the case. I'm going to go for a bit more. And then I'm headed to the gym. Oh, that's another thing. Yeah, state, remember that? Go to the gym or just work out at home. Exercise, folks.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Like mind-body separation, that whole Cartesian duality, bunch of nonsense. If you want to feed your brain, you want to feed your mood, you want to be optimistic, fix your state, exercise. So I'm headed straight to the gym after this. All right, Ox the Moron, that's a good one. Best way to spend 5 to 10K today to get current on AI? I don't think you need to spend 5 to 10K. I would use the tools, create projects, use the tools to help you use the tools. So I would, I guess, there are two thoughts on this. So there is a company called OBO that I am involved with, but it is custom designed for learning. Certainly, the frontier models are going to be going after this. But AI for learning, I want to learn, dot, dot, dot, you just fill it in. OBO.com, O-B-O-E dot com.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  And I would type in, effectively, give me 10 different projects. I am new to AI tools and LLMs. I want to get more familiar with these tools. Give me 10 project-based learning opportunities. In other words, 10 projects where I'm creating something.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  That I could consider for learning how to better use these tools and their various capacities. Each one, I should be able to finish in one hour, three hours or less, whatever your number happens to be. And I would also drop that into Claude, drop it into ChatGPT, let them all compete for best answers. And then you can go from there. I would build things. I would make things. I would try to automate some workflow. Generally, that doesn't give me a hard on because I think the definition elimination are more important, but making things, maybe there's something beautiful you want to make. I mean, give it the spin that's actually going to energize you. That is how I would get current on AI is by doing stuff. I don't think you need to spend five to 10K, but whatever the upgraded models are, frankly,

• 29:36Speaker 00

  even the slower models from six months ago are plenty. Yeah, actually, I can't speak out of school, but I've seen some amazing hackers just to prove a point, use older models to do staggeringly powerful things to say, hey, we don't need the latest and greatest to actually move the needle. They're already here. They have been for a while. This question on psychedelic experiences, if I'm still interested, if I'm still present, I do still find them useful. I have decreased my frequency dramatically as I've had other tools to bring to bear on state and mental health and so on, like neuromodulation.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  In other words, the accelerated TMS and the ONE D, O N E hyphen D protocol that I described earlier, but they still have incredible applications. I mean, I do believe that these compounds are still one of the most straightforward, not risk free, but straightforward ways to elicit some of the greatest adventures that humans can have on this planet. I still believe that. And insights and touching the timeless in ways that perhaps the mystics referred to and experience to be other means. I do find them deeply fascinating. What's new on that front, just the second part of that question, I would say shorter duration.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  There are shorter duration compounds that may have equal efficacy to say MDMA in treating conditions like PTSD without the typically combined dyad psychotherapy. In other words, separating the drug effect from the therapeutic wrapper in some respects. Methylone is one at the forefront right now. I've had experience with this. I mean, I've known methylene for at least 10, 15 years, but it is effectively the shorter acting, gentler cousin of MDMA and transcend therapeutics, which was co-founded by Kevin Ryan, who I interviewed on the podcast not too long ago.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  He also co-founded Business Insider, MongoDB, and Guild Group and many, many companies. But I think that stands a chance of reaching millions of people because it is easier to slot into the pre-existing healthcare system on many levels. There are many, many developments in this field. I'll just give you one more that I think is arguably most interesting to me, and I'm funding research that Chuck Nichols is doing on this, but looking at the potent anti-inflammatory effects of various psychedelics at doses that are unbelievably small. So let's just say, I'll give you an example. So in the case of mushrooms, let's talk about dried psilocybe mushrooms. I mean, we could get strain specific, but I'll keep it simple.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  If we're looking at the mushrooms of Terrence McKenna's Day, a hydrophed dose would be five grams. All right. If you're taking a microdose of these same mushrooms, it might be 50 to 100 milligrams. What would happen if you took one one thousandth of that? Well, psilocybin is actually not the best candidate, but some of these other psychedelics, many of which you would not recognize, and most people wouldn't, at subperceptual, but sub-sub-subperceptual doses, I mean, almost seemingly homeopathic doses, have incredibly potent, multi-mechanism anti-inflammatory effects.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  And I think, pet hypothesis, that many of the benefits we see from psychedelics, antidepressant effects and so on, in many, many people, many subjects, even in some of these clinical trials, are derived from anti-inflammatory effects on chronic neuroinflammation. And double clicking on that, that chronic neuroinflammation is often downstream of an acute infection that you had at one point. It can be caused by many other things. So it's not to use that as the sole lens through which you explain these things, but those are a few areas that I find currently very interesting.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Matthew, I tried Hugh Jackman's trip for becoming extraordinarily jacked, which was to row 2,000 meters in seven minutes. I want to hear how that went. Matthew J., please let me know. That's quite a tease. Matthew J., that is impossible. Yeah, the 2,000 meters in seven minutes. Hugh Jackman is a, an elite level athlete. Yeah, it's, you might kill yourself trying to replicate some of what he does. I've easily worked with 100 plus founders and entrepreneurs over the last 20 years, and I've seen some massive wins, some huge companies built and some failures and zombies. Among other things, repeatedly, I've seen how customer service can make or break a company. This is where FIN comes in, F I N.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  FIN is an AI agent, and people throw it around a lot. In this context, think of it as a digital employee. And FIN, your digital employee, delivers high-quality answers and helps resolve complex questions that your customers may have. And a lot of name brand companies use FIN. Rapidly growing companies like Asana and Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and past podcast sponsors like Gamma and Vanta rely on FIN to deliver accurate and thoughtful customer support to millions of customers and users. FIN is also built using custom models trained on thousands of actual customer interactions, and it understands the complexity and nuance of customer service like no other agent. This is what it does. You feed FIN your internal knowledge and policies, it learns your rules, and it can

• 35:16Speaker 00

  start supporting your overstretched support team. It's an extension, it's in a way infinitely extensible of your support team. And because every business runs things differently, FIN is fully self-managable. So check it out, see the difference FIN can make in your business. Check it out and learn more at fin.ai/tim. That's F I N dot A I slash Tim. Many of you know that I've battled sleep for decades. I've had onset insomnia. I'm constantly hot because I'm a little meat cube, and the list goes on. But I've used Eight Sleep for many years now, since the beginning, and man, it is a godsend. People have experienced up to 34% more deep sleep, and by people, I mean customers, HRV improvements of 13% on average.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  They've transformed more than 1 million nights of sleep for their customers. Eight Sleep just released the Pod 6. I'll explain what it is, and it is a major upgrade. But first things first, right? The Pod is a cover that fits over your existing mattress, kind of wraps it, cools or heats each side of the bed independently. As I mentioned, I run super hot. My lovely partner tends to run cold. With the Pod, we each get the temperature we want and need for good sleep. No more fighting over the thermostat, no more pulling the blanket off, putting the blanket on, sticking one leg out, all that nonsense. Fixes all of it. Now to the upgrades. The Pod 6 hub, the latest and greatest, that runs the temperature system is 50% smaller than the Pod 5 and fits under most bed frames.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  The thermal engine reaches your set temperature 20% faster, so the bed is ready whenever you are. And the cover embeds nine times the number of biometric sensors, tracking things like heart rate, HRV, and sleep stages with no wearable. The Pod 6, check it out, starts at $1,999, the lowest starting price Eight Sleep has ever offered. Use code TIM at eightsleep.com/tim for up to $200 off of the Pod 6. Spell it all out, that's eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM. So I'm going to tie two things together. There's a question here from Daniel.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Your question here is, okay, Doc here, building Quantified Self 2.0 with metabolomics. I do think metabolomics are incredibly interesting, starting from a real definition of health. Tim, what would QS 2.0, that's Quantified Self, I assume, 2.0 have to show you to be worth it? All right. Bookmark, because that's going to tie in here. Question from John C., that's J O N. Tim, your name came up when Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly spoke in the Ferry Building last week, that's in San Francisco, to launch Gary's new book, The Quantified Self. I know you were at the very first Quantified Self meetup 18 years ago at Kevin's house. It's true, I have a blog post with photos from that. I was still white knuckling, a little bit of a faux hawk with my remaining hair at the time.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  What role has self-quantifying played in your life since then, please? So these tie together, and I will answer Daniel's question and this question. So what would Quantified Self 2.0 need to show me? It would need to show me, I would say, A filtered, high-signal version of the lens that I've used for myself with Quantified Self, and that is a distilling from data to interpretation to action, and last mile being behavioral change.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  So where I think we are drowning at the moment is the volume of information, right? It is very, very easy to gather an overwhelming amount of data with wearables. Back in the day, it was pretty painful to painstakingly gather this stuff with your own spreadsheets and so on. Now it's trivial. It is easy to amass an ocean of ones and zeros related to yourself with your Oura ring, which I use, or your Wootband, or whatever it might be, plus add any number of other inputs. So much like a lot of books and presentations, we're not failing from too little information,

• 39:32Speaker 00

  we're failing from too much information, I think. So there's the interpretation layer, and I do think your inputs matter. So the metabolomics, proteomics, I think all of that, I think, is incredibly interesting. But ultimately, what it comes down to, for instance, in the realm of Alzheimer's disease, there are people who have these very fancy collections of very esoteric biomarkers. And that's great, and you can watch how they trend, but how does it change the clinical intervention? And the answer is, as it stands right now, it doesn't. Okay, fine. Maybe this is a case of harvest now, decrypt later. Okay, so maybe we gather all this stuff on my relatives, and it's too late for them, but five years in the future, we have this data, so we can do a retroactive analysis

• 40:15Speaker 00

  with fancy tools, AI, quantum computing, whatever. I don't think we need quantum computing for that. But to derive some type of directional signal for people now who have better interventions, okay, fine. But I think that's kind of a leap as it stands right now. So I'm looking for how something informs action, and that's not always terribly clear. Then how do you facilitate action? This is the big one. Because for healthy normals who are wearing any number of different tools, or having various tests on, they get back all this stuff, maybe they're given an interpretation, maybe it

• 40:58Speaker 00

  has to get pushed to their primary care physician, and in some cases, it's going to spot something that is really nefarious, or a trend line that deserves intervention. I'll give a simple example. Not to say that hemoglobin A1C is the end-all, be-all. I recognize this, but it's a simple marker. Well, in some ways, not so simple, but it's an easy one that a lot of, at least Americans, will recognize. So hemoglobin A1C is described by many doctors as your three-month or so running average of glucose, and it's used to infer your insulin sensitivity and so on. Because your fasting insulin can swing all over the place, certainly your insulin can swing all over the place.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Ultimately, I do think an OGTT, like most people, if they can afford it, which they can, should get an oral glucose tolerance test, where you're kind of taking blood and measuring things every 30 minutes for two hours, talk to your doctor. But if you have hemoglobin A1C, and you're looking at your trend line, all right, it's creeping up. Hemoglobin A1C appears to be going up over three-quarters, and if you telescope that out, uh-oh, I'm going to end up being a type-two diabetic. We should do something sooner rather than later. What's the advice? Now, you could have a pharmacological intervention. Who knows what that is, right? Put someone on low-dose terzepatide. Maybe somebody thinks that metformin is a good idea. Frequently, it isn't. Whatever that might be.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  But for a lot of folks, the answer's going to be clean up your diet and do more exercise of some type. How do you get those fucking people to do that? Especially when the pain isn't painful enough. They're like, I got plenty of time, it's not that bad, I'm still in range, even though the trend line would say sooner or later, you're going to be out of range. And if you wait and wait and wait, you're going to have a much larger problem that is lodged deeply into your physiology, that's going to be problematic. The behavioral change piece, I think, is huge, and that is currently what's missing. I am hoping to do a bunch with that with a company that I probably shouldn't name, so I won't get into it, but I am hoping to do a lot on that side, since that's effectively

• 43:10Speaker 00

  what I do professionally, is focus on behavioral change. That's a very, very long answer, but hopefully that's somewhat helpful. Sorry for, again, the accidental TED Talk. Beware those ketones, gets you all fired up. All right, first question, what was Tim like before you took psychedelics? What was the biggest shift? I'm sighing, not because it's a bad question. I'm sighing because I have to keep saying it's important. I talk more people out of psychedelics than I talk into psychedelics. If your buddy invites you to your first psychedelic experience, which is some rent-a-shaman giving ayahuasca to Panga Canyon, I would run the other direction.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  I mean, these are, as my old friend, who sadly passed away, iconic researcher in the field, Roland Griffiths, would say, you're using nuclear power. It is very, very powerful. You have to be very careful. And I would treat these compounds as if you're considering having spinal surgery or neurosurgery. You'd do a lot of homework, and you'd measure twice and cut once. With that disclaimer said, I mean, before psychedelics, there were gigantic psychological and emotional icebergs, causing incredible problems in my life that I was wholly unaware of. I was also completely unaware of how 17 different problems all related to one or two core problems.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  So there's a value in diagnosing or seeing the unseen. And I'm not talking about mechanical elves in this case, that's a separate Q and A. I'm talking about simply seeing your life and behavior as an objective third party would see it if they had 20/20 vision, right? That's incredibly difficult to do in sort of ordinary consensus reality. It's very, very hard to do. And in that experience, it is very common that you're able to take off the glasses you didn't realize you were wearing and inspect the lens, see how it's affecting everything else.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  So that's part one. Part two, aside from the diagnostic capability, is the, I don't want to say curative, but the therapeutic potential of contending with issues like PTSD, contending with issues like depression. It is not a panacea on any level. It's contraindicated for lots of people who might have a family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. The most interesting tool for those types of conditions that I've found is metabolic psychiatry, the ketogenic diet effectively, but it doesn't really need to be 100% ketogenic.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  But look at what Sami Incanan is doing, look at what Chris Palmer is doing, Dom D'Agostino has also commented on this at great length. But I know this is a real pregnant pause. I was able to put down a lot of very, very heavy, exhausting boulders that I didn't even realize I was carrying. That's the way I would put it. Life is lighter. Also, you know, let's say you're afraid of water. A lot of people are. I didn't even learn to swim until I was in my 30s, really. I was definitely afraid of drowning, couldn't swim even two laps in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, not even one lap, half a lap, I guess, if we're considering back-and-forth a lap. And if you look at how that's best overcome, that fear, this has gone somewhere, I promise,

• 46:44Speaker 00

  you might find a great method, like total immersion swimming. Created by a guy named Terry Lachlan, who became a friend. I did his last interview before he passed away, and where they start is not trying to do laps. It's not swimming in deep water. It's simply submerging your head, as if you were trying to teach an infant how to do survival swimming, also something very interesting that I'm not going to get into. So simply dunking your head, dunking your head, dunking your head. And then you might start with studying gliding positions. How do you use the least energy to go the furthest distance? Go to the shallow end, and you would practice getting into, say, fuselage-right, fuselage-left

• 47:29Speaker 00

  position. No attention to breathing, okay? You're kicking off the wall, going as far as you can, and then you're standing up, and then you're rinsing and repeating. And for long, literally within a handful of months, I swam more than a mile open water in the ocean. I don't think that's actually an outlier, if you practice this technique and this type of repeated exposure. Psychedelics are a very, very unusual form of repeated exposure. And there is such a thing as doing too much psychedelics. I know people who have lost the plot. You can really slip and get lost. You should take that seriously. Spend more time in consensus reality than you do in psychedelic land, or you can end up in a semi-permanent state of Alice in Wonderland. It's not a good idea.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  But what I mean is, if over time, and that could only be once or twice, maybe three times, but what you see, for instance, in some terminal cancer patients, is fear extinction of death. That is pretty interesting. They lose their fear of death. Why? Because they already experienced what they subjectively felt to be ego death. That's a scary way to put it, that's how it's phrased often, ego dissolution. What does it mean to experience consciousness without any sense of self, without any name, without any perception of time? It's pretty strange, is what it is, but it also ends up being, for a lot of people,

• 48:56Speaker 00

  very peaceful, even if it's type-two piece, like type-two fun. Hard in the moment, then afterwards, you're like, wow, I feel really at peace. I have fear of deterioration and things like Alzheimer's disease, but like death? Not really so afraid of it. And that's been true for a long time now. I credit that almost exclusively to psychedelics, and it's hard to put a value on that. It's such a bizarre thing to even posit, but writ large, it does seem to remove a base layer of anxiety that comes with the awareness that you are going to die, right? That's a big one.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  So I didn't expect to give such a fucking long answer, but I guess that's the theme of the evening. All right. Just to reiterate what I said about building, this is Daniel H. Number three commenter, meaning like number three ranked with a crown. Claude Code is mind bendingly good. It can take you from zero to hero, or at least reasonably competent. Yeah, it is really remarkable what you can build with these things. All right. So here's a question. Once again, with the caveat that I'm not a medical professional, so talk to your doctor. This is actually a question, a variance of this question I get a lot. Val had a question on natural statins. For those healthy young fellows with genetically high cholesterol slash heart disease, what do you think? This returns to a very old

• 50:19Speaker 00

  topic, which I unpacked at length in the four hour body. So there is that, but I'll give you the TLDR. And that is all natural versus synthetic. All natural does not automatically mean it's safe. And I do take certain supplements. I do take certain herbs. The challenge with that is there's very little regulation and very little standardizing. So for instance, if you look at examine.com or other places that have taken 10 off the shelf melatonin supplements and had them analyzed, let's just say they're all supposed to be three milligrams. By the way, you can't even buy melatonin in some countries for pretty good

• 51:04Speaker 00

  reasons, but forget that part. You have 10 of them analyzed. They all say three milligrams of melatonin. Some have precisely fuck all of melatonin, zero, they contain no melatonin, and some contain up to 20 milligrams of melatonin. That is a problem. If you are making the assumption for the moment that a supplement does something, having that variability on dosing is a bad thing. It is a bad thing. Also, there are many things that are all natural, hemlock, arsenic, that are incredibly dangerous. So if you take ephedrine hydrochloride and then you're like, well, I'm going to use Ma Huang instead, this Chinese, it's, you

• 51:46Speaker 00

  can still get yourself into a lot of trouble. There are cases where it's interesting to consider what the mix of various alkaloids and so on does versus in isolation. So you might look at, in the case of psychedelics, iboga versus ibagin hydrochloride. It's a worthwhile question. I would just say it needs to be studied with rigorous scientific controls for us to feel confident that we are not fooling ourselves. And you can do that. So in the case of, say, ayahuasca, how does ayahuasca differ? Or how might it differ in its effects versus vaporized NNDMT? Since ayahuasca contains NNDMT, and the way

• 52:31Speaker 00

  it is commonly explained is ayahuasca contains this NNDMT that's found in the leaf of this plant called the chacuruna, and it is not bioavailable when you take it orally, therefore you consume. And the ancients figured out, as they did, you macerate, smash, and combine it with this vine, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and voila, suddenly you absorb it. And at the end of the show, the molecule that did the most action is NNDMT. Well, in a case like that, it turns out that the beta carbolines in the vine itself, in a harmine and harmaline and so on, have some really interesting effects of their

• 53:16Speaker 00

  own. But to come to your specific question on cholesterol, I don't know if you're talking about red rice extract or other things, but when it comes to mortality in my family, for instance, which of the four horsemen of death is going to get you? You know, is it neurodegenerative? Is it cardiovascular? Is it something else? And I think Peter Tew does a good job of describing these in his book, Outlive. But in my family, all the males die of heart attacks. That's basically it. Everyone dies of heart problems. So if I were to use something that were an herbal supplement, number one, I would need to have it tested, and I would need to get multiple batches over a period of several months.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  So I'd buy one, I'd have it tested. Maybe I wait, maybe I take it, maybe I wait. Another month later, I buy a bottle, hopefully it's a different lot number. I have that tested. Do the results come back the same? This is an important question. Now, I also said, though, these organic, broad spectrum products, if they haven't been sufficiently studied, some of them have been, can have unintended off target effects. So if I'm trying to avoid death, and I'm no spring chicken, I'm 49, I would prefer to take what has the longest history of supportive data with the lowest downside risk. And if you do more sophisticated lipid analysis and so on, look at your genetics. In my case, you can figure

• 54:44Speaker 00

  out I'm a cholesterol hyper absorber. That's not true for everyone. But if a doctor of mine says, we want to put you on these four medications, I could look at those medications. You really have to be your own advocate in medicine. And I could say, well, which of these medications have been on the market the longest and been studied most rigorously? Which is the most innocuous of the whole lot? And in this particular case, it ended up being something called the zetimibe, which is extensively, has been extensively studied, brand name Zetia. And the question I posed was, well, okay, if the goal moving forward is to be under the curve, it's sort of like total surface area under the curve of having

• 55:25Speaker 00

  these values at certain target levels or below certain levels, there's no immediate rush, I'm not getting triple bypass, quadruple bypass surgery. Could I, is it okay with you, if I start with this most innocuous, best studied drug, to see if I am a hyperresponder? Answer yes. Try it. Guess what? I'm a hyperresponder. I don't need to take the other three. So this is how I approach it. But I do like the specificity, repeatability, consistency of certain drugs over their all natural alternatives, just because there are so many

• 56:04Speaker 00

  unknowns in the supplement world or all natural world. By the way, that's also why I think, broadly speaking, since a lot of people are interested in psychedelics, that something like LSD or a methadone or an MDMA is more interesting from a mainstream healthcare perspective, if we're talking about mental health, because 50 micrograms is 50 micrograms is 50 micrograms, if you have your synthesis dialed. Whereas with ayahuasca, if it's sort of the shamanic eyeball dose, there are too many variables. There's cook time, there's concentration, there's leaves, there's add mixtures. It's like, a cup of ayahuasca is

• 56:47Speaker 00

  not a cup of ayahuasca, is not a cup of ayahuasca, even if you're doing your best. Now, there are some interesting approaches, you know, Hamilton Morris and I spoke a lot about farm ayahuasca and basically trying to replicate the combination using drugs. I've never messed around with that personally. But I have seen more people get very destabilized from ayahuasca and underestimating LSD, but that's a separate problem because it's not the cool kid on the block. Right now, it's old, so people underestimate just how potent it is. But in the case of ayahuasca, it's because people have one or two cups that are really light in terms of consistency. And then they're like, I'm an ayahuasca pro,

• 57:31Speaker 00

  and they go to South America and they have something that has consistency of honey, and they get destroyed. It's that inconsistency that I don't like. So, long answer to a short question, as per usual this evening. Tim's a supplements company, worst nightmare. Yeah, most of the time. It's also a reason why it was so expensive to build my first company because I actually did all the due diligence and standardizing. It's very, it's much more expensive to try to put in those standard operating procedures than to not. So most people choose the not. How are my teeth so white? That's a good one, Jennifer. Okay, I have an interesting question since you spoke of dental health. How are your teeth so white? They're not veneers.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  I can think of something about Mary. Are some of these actors you see in Hollywood, we're like, God, that looks unnatural. Plus, they look a little too big. It's a spooky look. Never say never. Who knows? Maybe they'll get yellow enough at some point that I'll choose to bite the bullet. But I attribute this to the xylitol gum and xylitol mouthwash. I don't really have any other explanation because I always brush my teeth. Great. Okay. Upgraded to Sonicare a few years ago, just because I've had receding gums since I was a little kid. I had surgery when I was a kid, actually, where they cut out a piece of your palate and grafted onto your gums. Very painful. Don't want to have that again. And I tend to be a vigorous, vigorous, I've got a through a little Sean Connery,

• 58:56Speaker 00

  vigorous toothbrusher. So the Sonicare just does more delicate job. But that's been true for years. And sure, I added in a water pick of sorts, although I use a different brand. The only explanation that I have, I don't use the whitening strips or anything like that. The only variable that is new is the xylitol gum and mouthwash containing xylitol, which I use probably twice a day. And actually, I have one I can show you. This was recommended by Tommy Wood. See that? It's called Byte, B-I-T-E, mouthwash bits, 124 bits. This will last you forever.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  And you can hear they are these tiny little, they're not tablets. They look like tiny candies. And these are great for travel, but I use them at home as well. You basically crunch it up, chew it, break it up into powder in your mouth, and then you take a tiny swig of water and voila, you have mouthwash that includes xylitol. Swish it around for a minute, spit it out. That's it. I have it here. So after a meal, I'll rinse my, rinse my mouth, throw one of these in, and then spit it out. It doesn't take any time at all. That's habit stacking also. Hat tip to all the oldies who set the path. But that's the only thing I can think of. So thanks for the question. And that makes me really happy. I haven't

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  had anyone say that to me. So that's, I'm thrilled. No white teeth filters on this video. I'll hit a couple of fast ones. Stephanie, hi, Tim. You're the master of efficiency and maximizing impact. Thanks for all I've learned over the years. My question is, what is one of your favorite things to keep doing inefficiently? Long meals, long coffees. I had a two hour coffee chat today with someone I can't mention, but nothing for the podcast, just bullshitting, exploring the world via conversation with somebody and reading fiction, certainly. I'm also watching Mobland and stuff. I mean, let's not kid ourselves. I, I do like the visual storytelling. I think a new episode's coming out today. So I am excited. And then next question from Mike. Any thoughts on tech neck?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Tech neck, pointing at my neck. Prevention, better posture tricks and slowing the inevitable for people who sit at computers a lot. Yes, I actually have some very simple recommendations for this. One is meditate twice a day. I, after meditating, doing TM in this case, 20 minutes, twice a day, sitting in a straight stacked position, not hyperextended, not slouching. After about four weeks of doing that, especially after a few months of doing that, started getting compliments on my posture out of nowhere. People would say, you have the best posture. You walk like a dancer. And I'd say, what? And it took me a while to figure out that the meditation was the cause. I was strengthening

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  or conditioning two things. Motor patterning for holding myself in this balanced stacked position. I was also training slow twitch muscle fibers, these postural muscles that fall apart if you're just collapsing. They don't fall apart, but they certainly don't do their job if they're chronically tight. Also getting massage once a week. I've done that ever since I was poor AF. Look, you can find a Chinese massage place and get a massage for 10, 20 bucks. I don't want to hear the excuses. You can also use self massage tools. I've got Theracans and so on all over the house, Theragun, you name it, all the Theras. Work on your pectoralis minor and make sure your chest is not overly

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  tight. That will also help. And don't mess around with the chairs. Get a good chair. And then do more work on laptop than your phone. And this laptop right now is elevated. Why is it elevated? Because I want to be looking straight. I don't want to be craning my neck. This is what I was going to use, but it was going to be too high. This is a laptop stand. Not sure if you can see it. It says Roost. This is my favorite laptop stand. It's very easy to throw on a backpack or a tote bag or, or whatever. It's incredibly easy to travel with. So those are a few tips, but honestly, meditate twice a day for 20 minutes and you will build the posture. It is a habit and it's also muscular. Okay,

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Andres, minimum effective dose for becoming more flexible. Look at the gymnastics strength training I mentioned, GST with Coach Chris Summer. Long story short, it is developing strength in your end ranges, not a lot of passive stretching. So working active flexibility. So I'll give you an example of what that means. If you were to sit on the floor with your legs extended out in front of you together, toes pointed, all right? So that's a pike position. And then keeping your back entirely flat, put your fingers on the floor, you can be on your fingertips, walk them forward, and then try to pulse your legs up, keeping

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  them completely straight, quads contracted. They're called pike pulses. Try to do 20 of those. They are very hard. If you do that, plus some of the ab exercises from the Happy Body, for instance, laying on your back with your legs straight up in the air, and then reaching up again with your legs locked, in this case, toes pulled back, you're strengthening in the end range. And due to all sorts of things like the Gold's Utenin reflex and all sorts of different types of inhibition, your body then learns, I am strong enough to not get injured in a slightly broader range of motion. And you will get more flexible. So developing strength in the end ranges, be very careful with your shoulders. Don't

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  push it on the shoulders. For me, that is what has given me the best ROI on flexibility and mobility and active flexibility in the least time. This is from Handy, Hyundai. When you were a kid, what was the one mundane thing you couldn't wait to grow up and do? Not buying a car or something like that, but something small like going out alone in the evening that felt like the ultimate adult privilege. All right. When I was a bus boy, working for table scraps, I worked in a lot of restaurants, started when I was 14, cleaning an ice cream shop. I got fired from that one. Different story. But I remember being a bus boy at this one restaurant. This is out on Long Island. And all these fancy people from Manhattan would come out on the weekends and visit their fifth homes or

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  whatever. And I had the shitty shift. It was like the late afternoon shift because the best shifts went to the people who'd been there longer, obviously. But there was one experience that salvaged it for me, one in particular. There were a few. And it was that Billy Joel, the iconic musician, would come in a few times a week, sit down, he would have a cup of coffee, read the newspaper, and he tipped $20. And to me, that blew my fucking mind, that Billy Joel was rich enough to have a coffee and then tip me $20.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  It just blew my mind. I mean, I was like, one day, oh my God, imagine if one day I could walk in and have a coffee and tip some kid $20. That was just the ultimate. What a fantasy, you know? So that's what comes to mind. That was the ultimate for me. It's fun to do when you have the chance. From Tonya and Maine or Tanya, what are your favorite one, two, or three birds and why? Look, I don't have a lot of time to get into it because I want to run. Red-tailed hawk, for a lot of reasons, you can look it up. But also had my first training in falconry with a red-tailed hawk, very common in North America, very good beginner bird for falconry. It will be very forgivable of certain types

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  of mistakes, but it's not so good. There are certain birds that will cover your inadequacies so effectively that you don't improve as a falconer. So red-tailed hawk, hummingbird, many types of hummingbirds. And then you guys can look it up. The superb bird of paradise. What a name. Man, wouldn't you like that on your LinkedIn? The superb bird of paradise. Some of you will recognize this bird visually, but not by name, if you've seen Planet Earth. And it has this spectacular electric blue hood, basically, that it can create, the male for this fancy dance that it does after creating a small clearing. So that's the superb bird of paradise. This is from Andy. How do you decide when to keep investing

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  in a friendship versus accepting that it's become one-sided? On some level, this is not true all the time, but if you're asking that question, maybe you have your answer. But I would not come to that conclusion until you have improved your ability to communicate as much as possible. Crucial conversations, I mentioned it twice already, the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, also very much related to this topic. And even though it has been used within the world of fast growing tech, for instance, Asana, I think it was Asana. Many start, tech startups have all of their managers, employees, read these books. I'm pretty sure it's Asana and Dustin Moskowitz. It applies to relationships and any relationships. And a lot of it's based on the work of Gay and Katie Hendricks. If you want to look

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  up, for instance, Conscious Loving and other books that they have penned. But the 15 commitments of conscious leadership kind of gets to the point quickly and offers you tools that you can use. And then the last question from Matt E. Are you at peace? You know, I would say. More than ever, more than ever before, I'm feeling pretty good. And that's not a function of finances. I can say that definitively because I've been okay, unworried financially for a very long time. Thankfully, I'm very, I've had a lot of good luck, born in the right place, you know, in the US, land of opportunity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not enough. A lot of the tools we've already talked about does take, in my case, took some heavy lifting.

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  But I would say that I have never been more at peace. I feel great, very, very excited about the future. And I know that there are going to be some big, big challenges individually and societally. I mean, I have very close relatives who are in terrible shape. I just supported an uncle through hospice. He's no longer with us. That's very recent. Shit happens, but I have never been more at peace. And things can change, but it's been pretty stable for a number of years now. So I'm very grateful for that. I don't take it for granted and I wish the same. And more for all of you. Thank you for tuning in, guys. I'm gonna get to the gym at long last and it's always fun to do these.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  If you haven't chimed in on format ideas, let me know on Twitter. I will call it Twitter, but on X, at T Ferris, hashtag format. And I'm sure we'll have lots of show notes for this episode. So for people who are listening and watching this, by the time you hear or watch this, you can go to tim.blog/podcast, a guest search for Q and A and find the latest one. And I will stop there for now. Thank you guys so much for tuning in, whether you did it live or you're doing it asynchronously as all the cool kids are doing. And until next time, two things. One, if you're suffering, you're not alone. There are tools that work. So check out the show notes and look at some of the things that we covered.

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  There are things that actually work pretty consistently. And second, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others. Sure, of course, but also to yourself. Learn to work on that inner monologue. And to do that, you have to develop awareness. I had very little of it for a long time. Speaking of awareness, check it out, Awareness by Anthony DeMello, a book I've gifted more than 100 times probably at this point and that I have read probably 15 to 20 times myself. And with that, goodbye and good night. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. As some of you might recall, I launched my own limited edition coffee a few years back. It was delicious. It was a blast, but that's a story for another time. Here's why I'm bringing it up. I needed and wanted an online store that would be beautiful, fast and reliable, plus a checkout that wouldn't scare people off at the finish line. So I used this episode's sponsor, Shopify. I've known the team since 2009 when they had something like 10 employees and I was using it back then.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  Many of the most successful startups I advise today also use Shopify. From fast growing new companies to some massive juggernauts, they all use Shopify. I started my first online business back in 2001. Back then, it meant late nights, a lot of broken code, emailing tons of customer support emails and headaches after headaches after headaches, hoping the payment page wouldn't stop orders, drop orders, the whole nine yards, right? In contrast, my Shopify store got up and running well within a few hours, ran 24/7 without drama and Shop Pay, the easiest checkout on the market, got customers from add to cart to paid in seconds. Shop Pay lifts conversions by up to 50% relative to guest checkout.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  So it really smoothes the way. I use it all the time when I'm buying stuff. So if you're ready to make your first sale, check it out. Go to Shopify.com/Tim and start your free trial today. One more time, that's Shopify.com/Tim.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It's made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring feel. If you're thinking about upgrading your sleep, Helix will ship it to your door for free in the US, let you sleep on it for 120 nights.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  And if you don't love it, they're happy with Helix Guarantee, makes returns completely painless. So check it out. Go to helixsleep.com/Tim for 20% off sitewide. That's helixsleep.com/Tim for 20% off sitewide.