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Speaker A: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is an author, a podcaster, an investor, and is known for having a near supernatural ability to predict the future, which has allowed him to obtain success in a huge number of different endeavors. For instance, he is a five time, number one New York Times bestselling author. But perhaps equally or more important to that, he's also exceptionally good at teaching people how to write. The entire process of writing and marketing a book. His books, the four hour chef and the four hour body and the four hour workweek, not only explain his own exploration of how to optimize and prioritize his time and learn particular skills, but he teaches you those skills as well. This is really what sets Tim apart. He is an exceptional learner and an exceptional teacher, and today you learn why that is. And in a characteristic Tim Ferriss way, he explains the process in a way that you can apply it. He lists out, for instance, the specific questions that you should ask when approaching any endeavor in order to get the information that you want and to make the process of learning and getting better at something and achieving great success in something that much more likely. That ability that Tim has to identify the specific questions that one needs to ask and answer, and the specific action steps to take in order to achieve success, is really what I believe sets Tim apart from everyone else on the Internet or on the bookshelf that's giving advice as to how to become good at something. Tim Ferriss is also dedicated to various philanthropic efforts, the most recent of which is the donation of several millions of his own dollars to research on psychedelics for the treatment of otherwise intractable psychiatric challenges such as major depression, suicidal depression, eating disorders, and addiction. And he's also brought together other philanthropists, which has really galvanized the whole field of psychedelic research for the treatment of mental health, transforming it from what was recently kind of a fringe area of science to a mainstay that's actually funded not only by philanthropy, but by the National Institutes of Health. So he's really transformed this entire scientific field into one that now is transforming the laws around psychedelics and is providing mental health treatment for people that would otherwise suffer. Today's discussion was a particularly meaningful one because not only is Tim a pioneer in the world of podcasting, but it also marked the nine year anniversary of his podcast the Tim Ferriss show now, as I mentioned earlier, Tim is known for being able to see around corners or predict the future. He really does seem to be about five, if not ten years ahead of everybody else in thinking about tools for optimization in particular domains of life. And so we were very fortunate that during today's discussion, he shares with us his current creative endeavors and how he's thinking about and approaching those. And he also breaks down for us the process of how to think about and prioritize one's schedule, not just on the order of the day, not just on the order of the week, but really thinking about one's life as a journey and how to organize and go about that journey. So today's discussion will provide with you tremendous insight into who Tim Ferriss is and how that incredible mind of his works in order to do all the amazing things that he's done. And of course, he teaches you how to do it. He will tell you the exact questions that you should ask and that you should answer, and how to step back and think about those questions and then prioritize so that you can decide how to best invest your time. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Tim Ferriss show. However, if you're not already subscribing to the Tim Ferriss Show, I highly recommend you do. I still go back and listen to early episodes of the Tim Ferriss show, and I'm a week listener to the new episodes. We provide a link to the Tim Ferriss show in the show note captions also in the show note captions, you'll find links to Tim's many New York Times best selling books and a link to his excellent weekly blog. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so called electrolytes, and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium, and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body. Body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement. That's lMnt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement lmNt.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, NiDRa sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels, levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non sleep deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial and now for my discussion with Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss, I am nothing short of thrilled to have you here. I've been reading your books, reading your blogs, listening to your podcasts for a very long time. And in preparing for today, I was thinking, who does Tim remind me of? Because I knew you reminded me of somebody, but I didn't know who. And then I realized it. You remind me of the neurobiologist Ramoni Cajal. You don't look anything like him. He doesn't look anything like you. He was a brilliant scientist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for essentially describing the structure of the nervous system. He was the first, along with another guy, to define synapses like this fundamental connection to the nervous system. But the reason that you remind me of Cajal is that it's a well known or not so secret secret in neuroscience that if you want to pick a really excellent project to work on, you simply go and look at what Cajal talked about, or hypothesized, and then you work on that. He had this almost supernatural ability to look at fixed, stained tissue of the nervous system. Much of it is incredibly beautiful, by the way, and think about how it worked when it was alive. And he's considered the greatest neurobiologist of all time, without question. And it's really this feature of being able to see around corners or into the future that establishes that link. For me, it's absolute truth that if you look back to what you were doing ten years ago, 15 years ago, the kinds of things you were doing, the kinds of questions you were asking, that translates to much of what people like myself and people in the fitness space, tech space, investor space, mindfulness space, psychedelic space, all these different arenas, what they're doing now. So it's not hyperbole to say that you are the Ramoni cajal of all those different spaces. And podcasting, of course, is one of those. So I owe you a great debt of gratitude, and many others do as well. So my first question for you is, what was your mindset around the time that you wrote for our body? Four hour workweek, but in particular, four hour body, because the protocols in that book are so very useful. They were at the time it was published, they still are now. And so many of the things like ice baths, the discussion around brown fat, thermogenesis, resistance training in its kind of basic form of just providing enough progressive overload to get an adaptation, not excessively long workouts, weight loss, slow carb diethye, and on and on and on. What were you thinking at that time, if you can think back to them, what were you foraging for? Were you thinking about when you woke up in the morning thinking, oh, I'm going to go find all this stuff that at the time was really esoteric because it has all played out very well. What I'm basically saying is, if you want to know what's going to be happening hot and useful in five years, ten years and onwards, just look at what Tim's doing at any moment. There it is.

Speaker B: Well, thank you for the very generous comparison and intro. I'm thrilled to be here. So thanks for having me. And the FOIA body represented an opportunity for me to do a few things. The first was to diversify my identity from outside of the realm of the, say, business category. So it was a deliberate move since the success of the first book bought me permission to do something else that publishers would still want to gamble on. The I wanted to see if I could maybe like a Michael Lewis, take my audience with me to other topics. So that was a lateral move that was very deliberate from a career optionality standpoint. And then I was doing, I think, what I've done for a very long time and what I enjoy doing, which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field, could be anything. If anyone says always, never should I pay attention and take note of that, they may very well be right. But if anything is said in absolutes, I like to stress test. And in the case of, say, physical performance or physical manipulation, tracking. 2008, 2009 was a very interesting time because a number of different technologies were coming online, meaning being adopted by small groups. You had the very early stages of, say, accelerometers as wearables. You had a number of different innovations and means of tracking that had never been available before. You had, for instance, and this took a bit of ferreting on my side. It wasn't immediately on the roadmap for the four hour body, but continuous glucose monitors at the time, that was, I want to say, exclusively limited to type one diabetics, or maybe type two diabetics, but largely type one diabetics. And what captured my interest, and I can't recall how I came across it, but it was probably through the very earliest iterations of what later became the quantified self movement. And I remember attending the very first gathering at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica, California. This is, this was around 2000, 912 people, 13 people to discuss quantifying health. But the example of a professional race car driver I can't remember the form factor, whether it was f one or NASCAR or other who was using this continual glucose monitor for paying attention to glucose levels while driving. And I thought to myself, would that not be useful for healthy normals? Would that not have other applications? If this is being used by a high performer in this type of context, might it have other types of applications? Which then led me to use the very early versions of Dexcom, which were really painful to implant. No longer the case, of course. That's changed a lot. I wanted to see how I might be able to find a handful of different categories of things. There's the new, like the genuinely new, like CGM at that point was genuinely new, the very old, that might have some room for scientific investigation. And I would say, when I say scientific, I don't necessarily mean randomized controlled trials at a university. I do think, as an n of one, if you think about study design and you can even blind, you could even placebo control. And I knew people in the small subculture of quantified self who did this, you can, I think, approach things in a methodical way where you can make a lot of progress in trying to determine causality, or lack thereof, looking at very old things, looking at orphaned things. So, for instance, there are many examples in the world of doping where you have, say, Balco back in the day, where famously, Barry Bonds and others purportedly use things like the cream and the clear. And these were based on anabolics that were sourced from soviet literature or older literature from the fifties and sixties that might not be on the radar of, say, the anti doping groups that would administer the testing. So all of these different buckets were of interest to me. And I begin where I usually do, which is interviewing folks. So I would interview one or two people in a given field, and I might ask them any number of questions. So one is, what are the nerds doing on the weekends or at night? This is also really good for investing. It's like, all right, what are the really technical nerds doing at night or on the weekends after they've put in a really long workday or workweek? Let's take a really close look at that. Another one is, and I'll create a flow for this, but what are rich people doing now that everyone or tens or hundreds of millions of people might be doing ten years from now? And an example of that would be, let's just say, full time assistant, virtual assistant, AI. So we've seen the needs and wants being addressed by different technology, but it's an iteration of the same thing on some level. In the case of, say, using chat, GPT tied into zapier for various functions, and then where are people cobbling together awkward solutions? So where are people piecing together awkward solutions? And is there room for some type of innovation there? These are a few of the questions that I would not only ask myself, but ask experts in different areas. So if I end up spending time, say this was a few years prior to writing the four hour body. I spent time at NASA Ames and was interacting with a number of scientists, some people who were working on all sorts of biological tests and looking at genomics and had a very frank discussion about where they thought if they had to push. So I'll ask questions like push a little bit into the realm of science fiction and speculation, because I'm sure you can't support any type of projection like that with the literature, with scientific literature. But what do you think some of the risks are of, say, publishing your genome? Because at the time, a number of high profile folks had just made their full genomes available, and they're like, well, I think in the near future it'd be possible to reconstruct someone's face based on their genetic data. And they're like, high degree of confidence, like zero to 100%. How confident? They're like 80, 90%. I'm like, okay, I should pay attention to that, because if you're making your data available, let's just say, and it's anonymized per se, you still might be identifiable. Okay, that raises some interesting questions, like, okay, well, then how might you get around that? How might you put in safeguards so that you are the one and only keeper of your data, so to speak, brought up all sorts of targeted weaponry, bio weapons, possibilities that I was interested in. And then I would ask that person who's clearly willing to step outside of the box of whatever he's working on day to day, who are two of your close friends or two thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to, are kind of at the bleeding edge of something and unorthodox. And then I would just continue to have these conversations over and over again. And the stream of development that I paid a lot of attention to is something along the lines of the following. So the very beginnings are usually in some type of extreme case, and I think the extremes, and this goes for product design as well, but the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa. So you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases. So race horses, for instance, you'll often see things start with, say, race horses, or people with wasting diseases, for instance, or any type of chronic or terminal illness who are willing to try some more experimental interventions, then let's just take one step further. Bodybuilding. See a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding and high level athletes, then billionaires, then rich people, then the rest of us. So my assumption is, and was for the four hour body that, along the lines of William Gibson's quote, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So I'm never predicting the future. I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating that I think are going to bloom and end up spreading really, really widely. So that's generally where I start. And I assume the practitioners are going to be ahead of the papers. So studying, say, the coaches whose jobs are on the line, who are getting paid based on athlete performance, and assuming that a lot of that will eventually, if it holds up, make its way into, say, the peer reviewed exercise science papers. But it's going to have a lag time of three to five years, at least. At least. At least. Takes a long time. Yeah.

Speaker A: Science is often very slow to catch up. You mentioned many things I have questions about. You mentioned paying attention to the new, the very old, or the orphaned. So interesting. And I just thought I'd tell you that when you sit down with a graduate student or a postdoc and they're trying to come up with a project, rarely do you say, what do you want to work on? And they fire back a really interesting question. Sometimes they do, but that's the rare person. More often than not, you'll send them to the literature and they'll come back with like, okay, there's this new technique that we can use to answer a set of questions better than ever before. Or there's a very old theory I want to revisit. Or there's this theory that no one pays attention to. In fact, we had one guest on here, Oded Roshavi, who is studying it. Essentially inheritance of traits, transgenerational inheritance of traits. It's a little bit, although different from lamarckian evolution, but it's a lot like that in some ways. And these orphan theories that everyone assumed were wrong and there is a basis for them. So I think there's real genius in that analysis. It also struck me as you were listing off some of your process circa the writing of the four hour body, that I and many other people are probably curious about what the operations around all that looked like. Or were you at the time like waking up in the morning going, okay, I'm going to take a walk and think about the new, the old and the orphaned, or I'm going to take a walk or sit in a chair and think about like, what are the nerds doing right now? What are rich people doing right now? Cobbling together awkward solutions. Was that exploration a structured practice for you? Or is this just something that was the consequence of being Tim Ferriss, waking up in the morning and just like leaning into that? Because I've experienced both. Right. You know, but I think a lot of us are curious. I mean, that there's a lot of mystique around you. Whether you dispel it, whether, whether you like it or not, it's there and we're not trying to pry, but pry away is the establishment of structure for you something that's the consequence of structure in the first place? It's like, okay, now's time to think. Or do you just allow things to geyser up to the surface?

Speaker B: I do both. And I would say that in the case of the four hour body, it's a bit of an anomaly compared to my later books because I had recorded effectively every workout I'd done since age 16. As a competitive athlete, I had a lot of records and I kept copious notes on supplement use and everything imaginable. So I have what you might call hypergraphia. I just capture almost everything in writing, and that was very useful because at various points in time, let's just say I looked at a photograph of myself from making this up, but 2004. And I think I would like to look and feel like that again. Okay, let me revisit my workout logs. Let me just replicate the preceding three to six months of workouts and look at my intake and my diet at the time. And lo and behold, more or less, I could replicate the same type of look and feel and performance. So I had a lot already logged that I thought was worth examining and putting under scrutiny, trying to replicate with other people. I do think replication is really important. And then when it came time to commit to writing the book, I thought about what types of mini books would be of great interest to me personally. And that book, like many of my other books, was written in such a fashion that it could be a choose your own adventure book did not need to be read. In fact, in many ways it shouldn't be read linearly. From page one to the end, you get to pick and choose which chapters are of interest based on breath hold, vertical jump endurance, hypertrophy, cold exposure for fat loss, whatever it might be. And then I began talking to people and at the very outer bounds of self experimentation, at least in the Bay Area, it's a pretty small community, so you're one or two lily pads from just about everyone. And it's not accidental that I put myself in that environment in San Francisco specifically, and more generally in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, because there's just a high surface area for luck to stick to, because you have so many serendipitous encounters, you have so many people focusing on different disciplines that I think was the fertilizer and the fertile ground for everything else was actually the choosing the where of writing, physically being located in San Francisco. And then when I'm structuring things, maybe I'll get into some of the nitty gritty. But I was using at the time, and I still like to use a program called Scrivener, which is actually designed predominantly for screenwriting. It's used for many things now, novels and so on. It's expanded its reach quite a bit, but it allows you to gather research and all of your documents and drafts so that you can move them around in very novel ways, so that you can view, say, a split pane of your research and what you're working on simultaneously without having to toggle between a lot of different windows. And I was very promiscuous in my gathering of data. So I would gather from, say, the web, using a web clipper from Evernote, which I was involved with as a company, and basically, without bias, capture as much as possible. Put three asterisks next to anything that I thought I really might want to revisit. After I had read something a second time, which I would always do, then I could control f to find just three asterisks, because they don't occur much in normal writing. Just like people, authors, writers will use TK, meaning find such and such a date. Data needs to be inserted later. But I don't want to interrupt the flow of writing. Let me put in TK, because it doesn't really appear in natural English much in terms of structured thinking. The way I approached it was during that period of time in my life, it was interviews, tracking people down, conversations, emails, reading. So, ingestion, let's just say, for the work day, then a break for training and actually using myself as the human guinea pig for various things that had surfaced that might be on the docket.

Speaker A: Where were you training at that time? San Francisco is not famous for amazing gyms.

Speaker B: It's not famous for amazing gyms. At the time, I was training mostly at a climbing gym called mission Cliffs. They didn't have much, but they had barbells and they had kettlebells. I also had in the walkway leading from the front door of the apartment I was renting. It was more of a house, the front door, all the way to the first set of stairs. There were 30 kettlebells of various types. And I was training for certification because I wanted to put myself on some type of deadline with accountability for that type of training to get a better understanding of it. So I trained for a few hours. I also had developed a friendship with Kelly Starrett, so San Francisco Crossfit, who I have tremendous amount of respect for.

Speaker A: Likewise, on multiple levels. Terrific. And his new book, built to move. His great book. He's so good.

Speaker B: Yeah, he really not only talks the talk, but walks the walk, and exemplifies many of the capabilities that he teaches, which I take seriously. I like practitioners, not just the people with pretty theories. Although the theories are important, I prefer to see someone who can actually put them into practice. So Kelly served that function, certainly, and we're still very close friends. And then after that, all right, shake off the cobwebs. Get the body moving, get the brain moving. Also eat. And then I would actually focus on synthesis. So I would write generally from, let's call it 09:00 p.m. or 10:00 p.m. through to four or 05:00 a.m. and I would ride the wave if I happened to be in the zone. If I weren't in the zone, I wouldn't force it and I would try to get more sleep. But I have always performed best with my writing in those witching hours of let's call it 10:00 p.m. to 04:00 a.m. and my experience is that the writers I've interviewed, the writer friends I've become close with, if you look at when they made themselves, not necessarily what they do now, right, but what they did that eventually got them to escape velocity. They're almost always doing most of their writing very late at night or very early in the morning when the rest of the world or their social group is inactive.

Speaker A: Wow. And I say wow because, of course, all of this was prior to the publication of Matt Walker's seminal book, why we sleep, which I really see as the book that shifted a lot of people. Fortunately, from the I'll sleep when I'm dead mindset to I'll, you know, to really paying attention to it. And you know, I don't think Matt gets enough credit. I mean, there, there's been a revision of a few points within that book, but the majority of it is just spot on and hyper legitimate. So. Good. And yet what you're describing is a schedule that starting to write at 09:00 p.m. and finishing up around 04:00 a.m. but you talked about research earlier that day and training and eating. So were there naps in there?

Speaker B: I would sleep from say four to maybe eleven or twelve. So I would be getting up later and I've had conversations with Matt about this and there are night owls and morning larks. And there are certainly differences in the code, meaning the genetics, but that worked very, very well for me for a very long time. It is, however, a very challenging social schedule. So once you have a significant other and every girlfriend I've ever had is a morning person, if you want to spend time together, that schedule just does not work. So I made compromises later for the social side of things. But if you put a gun to my head and said you need to write the best book humanly possible, that is your only priority outside of some exercise and fuel. I would follow the same schedule.

Speaker A: I know several very successful podcasters, Lex Friedmande in particular, who. I think he's trying to follow a more normal schedule now, but he's pseudo nocturnal, at least by my read. And there are a couple other online content creators, Derek from more plates, more dates, who's hyper productive in his domain and is mostly nocturnal. And then as you're describing your writing routine and your overall routine, I was thinking that the great skateboarder everyone knows Tony Hawk, who is obviously a great skateboarder, no doubt about that. But Rodney Mullen, who invented the Ollie on street, the kickflip, the Ollie. Rodney is basically nocturnal and has been for a long time and would skateboard up and down the boardwalk in Santa Monica in the middle of the night because lack of distraction. And he's been doing that since his teens. I don't know what he's doing these days, but I think a lot of creators just need space. And I always wonder if that's because when I, at least the ones that are not socially dysfunctional like yourself, who when they are around people, there's this almost hopefully a desire to interact. So you almost have to remove the stimulus completely.

Speaker B: Yeah, it removes the plausible deniability, which might not be the perfect use of that phrase, but in the sense that it's harder to fool yourself into thinking you're doing something important when you're checking your messages or social media at two in the morning. Who are we kidding, folks? You should be writing in this case, and writers will do anything to avoid writing. I remember Ayn Rand wrote a book about writing, which is actually fantastic. I can't remember the exact title. It might just be on nonfiction writing, something like that. And she talked about polishing the sneakers or the shoes before writing. Like, I really just need to do this one thing, which is to just clean up that shoe, because somebody should really clean it up, and at some point I should clean it up, and therefore, why don't I just do, there's no time like the present. I'll just do that. And it's all to avoid writing, which is the harder thing. And in my conversations with Matt also, I should say that as someone who has self described as a person who struggles with onset insomnia, Matt made the point and sometimes we need to relearn things. Maybe you should just go to bed later and that might address some of this onset insomnia. And I don't know the causes for that, but I do get a second wind very late. Could be related to some cortisol release abnormality or just different scripting in my system, who knows?

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Speaker B: I'll mention one other maybe heuristic that I use for trying to peek around corners, which is if I find an example of an outlier trying to find two or three, because one is an exception. Two is interesting, three is worth investigating. That's how I think about it. And I recognize plural of anecdote does not equal data. However, a lot of interesting discoveries begin as case studies or case histories. And so there are some things we could talk about that I've paid attention to over the last few years that are not in the four hour body that I think are quite interesting and raise very, very exciting questions.

Speaker A: I'd love to hear about those. And along the lines of what I call anecdote data, most of what we know about human memory stems from one patient, Hm, who had his hippocampi removed for epilepsy. And of course, there have been millions, probably close to millions, of studies in animals and humans focusing on the hippocampi. But most of what we know about human memory is from one guy.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's a lot to be examined. Not all of it will get funding for RCT's. Let's be realistic. This is especially true if you're hoping for any type of directive data. Notice I'm not saying conclusive, but if you are a human who's going to be making decisions about diet, health, exercise, if you want any consensus, you're doomed. You'll be not going to get any answers before you die.

Speaker A: Can you say that twice so that the Internet can hear it extra loud and clear? For those of you that are arguing about nutrition on Twitter, it might actually be life wasted. Yeah, I mean, I'm not being judgmental. I mean, I think that there's validity in lots of those pockets. There's stuff that's wrong in lots of those pockets. Diets that work extremely well, like, you know, four hour diet or slow carb. I always called the four hour diet, but the slow carb diet, it works extremely well. Anytime I followed it, I get much leaner and stronger and all that stuff that it's purported to do, it works. But, yeah, maybe you could just explain what you mean by that, because I think there are some argument slash friction spaces that are truly an energy sink.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would just say focus on what works for you and your family or your team. And if you're arguing on the Internet, recognize that you're just doing it because you like arguing on the Internet. You're not going to convince anyone of anything, and you're just going to make yourself more frustrated if you plan on changing any opinions. So for me, it's live and let live. And the more people who engage in that type of behavior, the more competitive advantage you have if you don't. So for me, I'm like, okay, if you want to spend this vital, non renewable resource of yours called time on that, if I ever compete against you, I'm going to win. So, great. I'll also not even try to convince you to stop doing that unless you see the logic in it, which I have, which is why I also don't have, at least for two years, have mostly had no social apps installed on my phone. And we could talk about that because I think recognizing that these things have been engineered to overcome any type of self discipline with billions of dollars at stake should lead you to believe that you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. So I just don't have the apps on my phone to begin with. And I find it much more gratifying to see disproportionate change from small inputs. So that's what I'm looking for. And I'm also looking for changes that are easy to make, that can have high adherence, that have very limited downside, which is very different from proving something. For instance, in the four hour body took a look at the potential effect of cell phones or the proximity of cell phones to, say, gonadal function and reproductive health. And the literature that was available at the time was very limited. Had some animal studies, mice, rats, et cetera. I recognize humans are not just large mice, so they don't always translate. But I looked at it and I said, okay, looking at this simplistically, is it plausible that there could be similar effects on humans? Seems to be the case also based on conversations with people who are specialists, but would never go on record. Therefore, if your phone is in your pocket, just have it on airplane mode. I mean, it does not have a high cost. And then pending any revision we can see. But while the jury is still out, I'm going to risk mitigate by taking this step well.

Speaker A: And I just want to say thank you there too. Read that recommendation. I followed the recommendation of not keeping the phone on in my front pocket or back pocket. And that's anecdote. My sperm analysis isn't relevant to this conversation, but worked out. But you could say, well, that's not necessarily because you had the phone off, but I did a very long, detailed episode on male and female fertility. There is now what I view as a really quality meta analysis. And it's pretty clear that there are effects of the smartphone on proximity of the smartphone when it's turned on, that are not good for sperm, isn't necessarily going to render somebody sterile, but on sperm that can be separated out from the heat effects. And so essentially, this is another instance in which you were right. I think more data will come out and. Am I a EMF conspiracy theorist? No. Do I wear tinfoil underwear? No. But I think it's interesting. I think it's important, and thanks to you, cued my attention to it. In fact, I teach about that in a course on neural circuits and biology and health and disease.

Speaker B: Amazing. And I don't expect to get everything right at all. That would be crazy. I'd like to think I'm not totally crazy. And it's very important if you are going to do self experimentation, or experimentation in small groups, which the quantified self community did quite well, and I think still does quite well, you should really make every effort to not fool yourself, which is hard, it's challenging at times, but read books like bad science, read books like how to lie with statistics, ensure that you are able to read studies well. You don't have to be the best in the world, but that you can on some level, identify the strengths and weaknesses of studies. This doesn't take a long time. Certainly our friend Peter Attia, Doctor Peter Attia has studying the studies, which is a multiple part blog series dedicated to this. There are other ways to approach it. I took one of his podcasts, republished it on the Tim Ferriss show, because it talked about how to examine studies, what powering refers to things like this. In the span of one or two weeks, you could really become literate with the building blocks of scientific literacy with respect to reading studies. And that gives you such an enormous life advantage. It's hard to overstate.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And I also think that there are a lot of things that just simply will not ever be explored in a randomized control trial. One of the things that Peter and I have talked about before is he texted me, what are your thoughts on BPC 157? This is a gastric peptide that's now been synthesized so people will inject it into a tissue that they're trying to heal or improve. Lots and lots of anecdote on BPC 157, making injuries heal faster, et cetera. Again, anecdote I've used it. I took an injection of it yesterday. In fact, Peter basically is not a believer because there's a lack of published data on this, which is perfectly fine, or I should say he's skeptical. And so there's always that possibility of a placebo effect. But I don't think there will ever be a really nice controlled trial on BPC 157 because the financial incentives aren't there. And no smart graduate student is going to go do a thesis on this. So that's the reality. I mean, maybe one will do it now that we're having this conversation, but it just doesn't. The payout isn't there.

Speaker B: And that last one you mentioned is one that people miss a lot. People doing these studies are people with careers, who are planning their careers, and so they choose what they're going to invest time in very carefully. So that's another limiter on what will end up in an RCT or not, right? I think that's good for people to hear. And as you get more involved with science, and in my case, through a foundation, Saisei foundation funding a lot of early stage science, you realize how expensive it is and how long it takes. It is a long term investment. And if you are looking to make behavioral changes or modify aspects of yourself, cognitive, physical, psycho, emotional, or otherwise identifying interventions, options that seem to have some plausible upside, like there is a mechanism that might make sense in humans. If you feel fairly certain there's very limited downside, which should include talking to people who are presenting their results as anecdote, then maybe you consider using xdev if you can cap your downside. And I recall, for instance, looking at trans resveratrol specifically not for longevity, but in potentially increasing endurance for four hour body. And I ended up testing it. And there's a funny story associated with that. Didn't quite work out as planned, and I don't use it any longer. But what I experienced prior to actually finding this on forums was joint pain, elbow pain. The one most consistent side effect was what felt like tendinosis in the elbows. And then I went online and I'd already done this, but I hadn't come across. I think it was the 500 group. People had been using 500 milligrams of trans resveratrol daily for long periods of time. And one of the most common reported side effects is joint pain. And I was like, okay, I'm not willing to make that trade off.

Speaker A: And makes sense to me. Yeah, I think it would be fun if ever you were willing that we could do a hybrid podcast on supplement fails. I have some spectacular failures, as do I, and I'm thinking about a few of them. I mean, some that were really like, took me off course. Like, there's one supplement called bulbine natalensis. This is another one of these shrubs.

Speaker B: Sounds like an infection.

Speaker A: I mean, this thing will really spike your testosterone and free testosterone. I'm talking back acne, like, huge strength gains, aggression. It's really wild. And then after about seven to ten days, it all crashes and you go below baseline. Oh, sounds terrible.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Even testicular pain. So it was unclear. So if you're a smart person, you halt use, right. So I can understand why people are skeptical of certain things, and then of course, there are supplements that I'm a big fan of and that you're a big fan of. We talked about those things elsewhere, but it might be fun to do supplement Fails podcast, if ever you're willing that.

Speaker B: I could do just experimental fails. Oh, yeah, yeah. End of one. Experimental fails, which include things that people might not think about. For instance, for our body had quite a bit of real estate dedicated to looking at things like PRP, so platelet rich plasma. I think there's a role for it. It's not useful for everything. For certain types of injury or repair, I think it's very interesting, but every time you get injected, this is where you have to be careful, because there are very few free lunches out there. There's usually some type of feedback loop, and your system is very smart at auto regulating things. This is, outside of that, a consideration that I hadn't made, which is every time you have an injection, there's a chance an infection, particularly if the site, in my case was the elbow, and the injection was made for the PRP, not quite where it should have been, slightly to the rear of the elbow, where the skin is very thick. And so it pushed staph bacteria from a mid layer of the skin into the joint capsule.

Speaker A: Not good.

Speaker B: And that really could have ended very poorly. I ended up having to go to the ER and get it, get it all removed and so on, but that could have ended up in a, in a much, much more severe situation. So you do have to be careful with this stuff. I've become a little more conservative with some what I do, including injections. I'm like, all right, like, let me think twice about the injections. If I'm going to swallow something, let me make sure I'm really looking at the implications for the liver.

Speaker A: Yeah, smart, very smart. I'm curious about some of the things that you talked about in the four hour body and that you've mentioned today, things like accelerometers, continuous glucose monitors, deliberate cold exposure. How many of those things are you still doing on a regular basis, and how many do you use? A couple times a week or a couple times a month, or go through phases of using and not using cold exposure?

Speaker B: I use as consistently as is practical, so if I'm traveling, it's a little harder. But we're in LA right now. One of the first things I did was find a few options for contrast therapy. One of the first things I did, and by contrast, I do not mean infrared sauna and cold plunge. I'd much rather have hot and cold water, just in terms of sort of speed of heating.

Speaker A: The japanese approach.

Speaker B: Right. For just speed of vasodilation, particularly for injury recovery. I think it's incredibly helpful for mood regulation, certainly that's the case. And cold water for mood regulation or the treatment of, say, depression, or as a preemptive intervention to avoid or mitigate depression is old, used to be prescribed for melancholy, and people like the van Goghs of the world would be prescribed cold baths. So that was something I was like, well, let's take a look at some of the old history, read about that, and then look into pubmed and so on to see what might be supported. So the cold I'm still using, I become increasingly interested. This was not in the four hour body, but whole body hyperthermia, often excluding the head for depression, which I know.

Speaker A: There'S some research at a UCSF right now. Yeah, really interesting studies. Too early to report. I'm not involved in these, but I think these are really important, important studies because for all the people saying, oh, well, you know, it's ice bath stuff, you know, metabolism this, metabolism that. One thing that's very clear is long lasting, very significant increase in the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine. Not a replacement, perhaps, for antidepressant medication, but as you said, to move the needle toward antidepressant states. That's the cocktail and heat as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, and the hyperthermia, especially the way this formatted right now with some of the research is very early stages, there's going to be less adherence, it's not as readily available, say, a cold shower or cold bath. So I do think about the practical implications of that. But right now it's very interesting. Slow carb diet, still use it all the time. It is not my default 24/7 as it used to be. So maybe I'm just getting older and more self indulgent, but if I find myself going off the rails a bit and I'm like, okay, I'm getting closer to muffin top here. Let's stage an intervention. Then I will go immediately back to slow carb diet, and within a matter of weeks, it's pretty easily corrected.

Speaker A: Just a cue for people I know that slow carb diet achieved great prominence. In fact, wasn't it featured or mentioned in an episode of Orange is the New Black?

Speaker B: I think it might have been. It's made appearances on a handful of shows.

Speaker A: Great. I realize that I've been referring to this slow carb diet several times throughout this discussion. So for those that aren't familiar with the slow carb diet, I know they can go look up what that is, but so that we can keep them here for the rest of this discussion and not have to send them out and back just yet, could you give us just a brief top contour of what the slow carb diet is? Sure.

Speaker B: Slow carb diet is intended to be a simple, easy to adhere to diet for people who have perhaps failed other diets. That allows you to recompose your body, so improve muscle mass, decrease body fat percentage. And the rules are really simple, and that's part of what makes it work. It's not ideal for every sport in every circumstance, but broadly speaking, it works for a lot of people who've had trouble with dieting in the past. So rule number one, don't drink calories. That's it. Very simple. So, black coffee, unsweetened tea, great juice out, anything with calories out. You could add a little bit of heavy cream to your coffee, let's say. But that's. That's also bending the rules in a way that I don't like. So in the beginning, it's like, follow the rules so you can break them later. So in the beginning, let's just say you can't drink calories. Number two, don't eat anything white. Sounds pretty basic, right? Just don't eat anything that is the color of white. Or that could be white. Basically, that means you're going to be avoiding starches and things that are similar to starches.

Speaker A: That includes things like oatmeal.

Speaker B: That includes things like oatmeal. So, roughly speaking, just avoiding things that are white or that could be white will get you pretty far. And yes, there are exceptions, like cauliflower. Fine, you can have cauliflower, but again, don't get fancy, right? It's very easy to outsmart yourself when it comes to behavioral change. Keep it simple. So, for at least two weeks, forget about the exceptions. Right. Don't drink calories, don't eat anything white, and then eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. Okay, we got that. And then there are a few buckets you can choose from. Right. So you have vegetables, beans, and lentils and then some type of protein. So you're going to come up with meals that you can follow without deviating for a period of one or two weeks. Just come up with the same meals, and that's going to sound boring. Yes. But guess what? You do it already. You just might not realize it. And the lentils and the beans specifically, as a prereq, we can get into some of the reasons, but add a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite. Right. So that's actually a very important component of these meals. And there may be a handful of other rules, but those are the basics. And then the redemption is take one day off per week and just go fucking crazy. That's cheat day. There are some epic cheat days out there, some I've captured for myself, and anything goes. When I say anything, I do mean anything. So if you want to consume multiple pizzas, pints of ice cream, whatever, indulge. I left one out. No fruit during the week, so avoid fruit, avoid fructose, so agave, nectar, anything that is sort of hidden sugar, avoid all that. Uh, it's a no added sweeteners, obviously, but avoid. Avoid fruit and fructose. And again, it's not going to kill you. Guess what? If you're from european ancestry, your ancestors did not have, like, blueberries in the middle of winter, generally speaking. Right? So you'll. You'll be fine for a few weeks. Uh, and then there's that. Cheat day and cheat day. Anything goes. The amount of damage you can do on cheat day is pretty limited, and there are ways you can mitigate that. There's a whole chapter called damage control in the four hour body. But focusing just on that diet and having one day off where you know you can do anything, means when you are controlling yourself for those six days of the week, you're not giving up your favorite foods forever. You can even keep a list of all things you want to eat on cheat day, and then you have free license to eat on cheat day. And that provides you with a release valve so that you can build in the cheating as opposed to having it occur as a failure point. And there are a handful of other things there. If you have domino foods in the house, for instance, if you eat a lot of almonds or mixed nuts and you're just going to sit there compulsively eating them while you're sitting at your laptop, don't have what I call dominoed foods in the house, which are going to really create some portion control issues. But broadly speaking, don't drink calories, don't eat things that are white. Take from three categories and build your meals out. And those are the meals that you follow. Do not eat fruit or fructose. And then cheat one day a week. And Saturday is a nice day or cheat day for most folks. And just to answer some questions that people are going to have, no, that doesn't mean 24 hours. You can spread out over two days. That will actually set you back. But the amount of fat that you can store in a handful of sittings over 24 hours, which legitimately is more like twelve to 18 hours, pretty limited. So that's a slow grub diethouse.

Speaker A: Great. Thank you for that. I also want to ask, is it okay to take the day after cheat day and fast, or do one meal that day? When I followed this low carb diet, I benefited from it tremendously. Lost fat, gained muscle, tons of energy. Sleeping great, required less caffeine, all sorts of wonderful things. Stable blood sugar. I felt so, so good. Really enjoyed the cheat days. I really, really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the cheat days. So much fun. At some point, there's some gastric distress that comes from not regulating intake, which led me to not want to eat the next day. So I tended to do the cheat days on Sunday, in my case. And then I would fast most of Monday, just water, black coffee, tea, and then I might have a small meal in the evening. And then by Tuesday, I was back on the slow carb diet. Does that seem like a. And sort of a detrimental deviation from the plan?

Speaker B: I think that if that is what works for you, then that is what works for you. So the slow carb diet template for me is a starting point. And generally I'll say, I think this is from Picasso. Right? It's like, learn the rules as an amateur so you can break them as a professional. But it's like, I recommend most people kind of stick with the format for a handful of weeks and measure the results. Right. So there are guidelines for how to measure. The scale is a bit of a blunt instrument, so there are other ways, but if you're extremely overweight, you can just use the scale. And fasting, I think, is fine. Or just ratcheting back your caloric consumption significantly. And what happens over time for most people also is for the first, say, four weeks on cheat day, you're going to go completely insane. And I remember I was doing something much stricter called the cyclical ketogenic diet, which is a whole separate thing. It's much more limiting in terms of what you can eat. But I was training for, ultimately the nationals in chinese kickboxing. This was happening in 99. So I was training super hard. I was following a cyclical ketogenic diet, which meant I could eat very few things. But I did have this one cheat day, and I would do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand, which is one of the things you can do to limit the damage on cheat day, do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand. And then I would just go crazy. I mean, I would drive to like Krispy Kreme, buy twelve donuts, and they would be gone by the time I got home. And it wasn't an hour away, it was like a ten minute drive. Donuts would be gone, right. I would go to Safeway and I would buy a bag of those fun size snickers. And that would be just a tiny portion of my calories for you. A lot of sweet stuff. I also did the savory stuff. I mean, I had my favorites. Nothing was pizza. Nothing was safe. Nothing was safe. My, my paws got into everything. And then over time, because the next day you're going to feel like you got hit by a diabetic dump truck, you start ratcheting back and you're like, okay, maybe I don't need to do that. Maybe cheat day will just be two meals. Or maybe cheat day will just be like the pastries in the morning with the coffee, and you start to regulate a bit. Generally, you don't have to, but over time you generally will. And I think after you've followed it to the t, just follow the commandments for, say, four to eight weeks, then you can certainly deviate. And I'm not saying if you're not hungry, don't eat. However, in many cases, people have, they have acclimated to not eating in the morning, and then they end up overeating later in the day. If you have that habit, right. If you're consuming 50% of your calories or more at dinner and you want to lose body fat, I would say get some cottage cheese or something that will give you 30 grams easily in the morning. Worst case scenario, use a protein of some type. Just don't make it hyper caloric, mean powdered protein. Like, could be powdered whey. Powdered whey protein. Whole food is going to do a lot more.

Speaker A: And no calorie counting. Correct.

Speaker B: No calorie counting. It tends to be self limiting. When you're eating this much fiber and this much protein, it tends to be very self limiting what you'll want to consume and what you can consume.

Speaker A: Once again, I had great experiences with slow carb diet and I'm going to go back on.

Speaker B: Yeah, and nobody, and nobody needs to buy anything to figure it out. If you just search on Tim blog slow carb diet, you'll get everything that you need to get started. No purchase necessary.

Speaker A: Well, it works very, very well, I'll say that. And it's very straightforward to follow. And it does include the notorious cheat day. Infamous cheat day. And it can be done on a very reasonable budget. And so if people want to learn more about that, they should go to Tim's blog on four hour body and slow carb diet. We'll provide a link, but I think it's worth highlighting again just how effective that is. As you pointed out, thousands and thousands of people using it to great success, some of whom were quite obese. Any updates on those folks? Are they still keeping the weight off?

Speaker B: I would like to do a follow up, but I think with diets in general, there's a lot of reversion to the mean, regression to the mean. So I would expect that some have kept it off and some have not. That would be true of, I think, every possible diet, especially for people who are overcoming behavioral inertia of having gained hundreds of pounds. But I'd like to do some follow up. What was fun about the post I put together called how to lose 100 pounds on this low carb diethye we had, we profiled say four or five people, but there were dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. And this was a very long time ago. So I would say that a long term follow up would be super interesting and that we did at one point track several thousand people through a platform. At the time, I think it was coach me as they follow the soil carb diet for the first sort of four to twelve weeks. And that was fascinating because I want the data and I'm happy to be proven incorrect with any of my assumptions. I mean, I don't view that as a failure. I view that as a huge net gain and it has a very high adherence rate. So I pay attention to not just is something effective, does it get you the outcome you want. Not only is it efficient from a time and resource perspective, but, but how high is the adherence rate? If you take a random sampling of 1000 people from the US across socioeconomic classes, et cetera, how many people practically speaking will be able to, or willing to follow this for say an eight week period of time or a four week period of time? And I try to optimize for the widest adherence because I know the slow carb diet people come in, they're like but what about intermittent fasting? What about this? And what about endurance athletes? I'm like this is nothing for everybody. In all cases it just happens to be a good default diet with a high adherence rate. And like you said, it's very inexpensive. It can be followed very, very inexpensively.

Speaker A: Sorry to interrupt you. One thing that I really like about it is that um. Many uh, variants on caloric restriction which is because laws of thermodynamics definitely apply.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker A: We're not trying to say they don't. Um, but one of the issues with a lot of things including intermittent fasting, which I sort of do some variant of because I'm not really hungry to eat, I, until about eleven, I like to train in the morning if I can, et cetera, is that they can sometimes prevent best performance in terms of especially resistance training, high intensity resistance training. So very low carb diets. I've tried them. Um, even if you're paying attention to, you know, other ways to restock, glycogen performance drops off. Whereas with slow carb diet I feel like I can think, I can work, I can exercise, I can sleep. Like everything just works well. But there's one thing in it that I wanted to raise that when I heard this I thought there's no way this is true. Which was uh, making sure that you get 30 or so grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking. Yeah. And I thought how can that be? Like, how can adding protein early in the day actually make a difference? And it really did work. I was, I still track my numbers. So in terms of dropping body fat percentage, increasing muscle, it really does work. Now whether or not that's simply because it's offsetting food intake that I would have um, food that I would have taken in later in the day, I don't know. I mean I don't. I'm not going to make myself my own control experiment to the point that I drive myself crazy. But it really does work quite well to get past sticking points to just get that 30 grams of protein early. So sort of violate the time restricted feeding component deliberately with some protein in the morning, then still train and do all the other things and carry on as usual. And it seems so peculiar, like eating more and losing body fat. It works.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's counterintuitive. And a lot of approaches can work for a lot of different people. Right, to state the obvious, but this particular aspect of this low carb diet is helpful for, let's just say, the majority of the people in that thousand person sample. I was talking about the hypothetical pull from different parts of say, the US or anywhere, because it seems to help with a few things. First, there's just the thermic effect of food. And for protein, there's a greater thermic effect. You also have, and I think there's decent. At the time there was decent literature to support this. So I don't know if it's changed that the protein intake along those lines has an appetite suppressing effect. So the net daily calories consumed tends to be less when someone has a higher protein meal earlier in the day. And last but not least, I will say one of the risks, and there are many people who execute well on this, but you have to be very meticulous, which is true of the ketogenic diet as well. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you do it 60% right or 70% right. You really get in there. You can get yourself in there.

Speaker A: Massive psoriasis. I mean, my scalp, you know, sloughing off like when I'm in ketosis and going like, what the hell is going on here? Going back on some complex carbohydrates and it. Going away.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: I don't need a randomized control trial to know I simply don't want to.

Speaker B: Run that experiment with your scalp. Yeah. So in the case of, say, time restricted feeding, some people who do intermittent fasting lose a lot of muscle mass. And there are multiple reasons for this. I think people should make use of relatively widely available tools like Dexa and so on, and to ensure that your composition is actually moving the way you think it's moving. Make sure you standardize your hydration for that as well as time of day. Just pro tip. That's true for blood tests as well. But it seems to get net net better effects than trying to teach people how to fast effectively, which you can do, and we can talk about fasting. That's something that was not included in the four hour body that were I to rewrite it today, I would include a section and there was a bit in tools of titans to address that on more extended fasts. Let's just call it three to seven day fasts. So that's an area that's of great interest to me, as is ketosis and metabolic psychiatry, a la Chris Palmer, who we both know.

Speaker A: Incredible. I mean, what the awakening that he's created through his book and going on your podcast, my podcast and others, and letting people be aware that changes in diet can impact mental health. So I think in two, three years it's going to be a duh. And we're not just talking about the difference between slamming back horrible foods, horrible for us foods, versus eating really clean. I mean, really specific diet protocols to treat mental health. Yeah, incredible.

Speaker B: Yeah, super exciting. So that's one of the things that I'm paying a lot of attention to right now. There are handful in that realm within the, just say, the interplay of mind and body, since the cartesian duality and separation of those two makes no sense from a biological standpoint. So that's something that certainly captured my attention and I paid a lot of attention to even as far back as early two thousands for mental health and just cognitive performance.

Speaker A: Thanks for revisiting some of the four hour body and slow carb diet and elaborating on some of the process that went into that. And I think creators of all kinds, thinkers of all kinds, and people who are interested in the contents of the four hour body are going to be very grateful for that information. I certainly am fascinated by your process. One of the things that you mentioned along the lines of process was the power of places and where one happens to live. I think there's an essay by Paul Graham that talks about this. It's a little outdated. And it talks about the messages that you. The tacit messages of being in certain cities. I think it was like Boston, you're not smart enough. What was it? It was New York, you're not powerful enough. And not you, obviously, or you should be more powerful. Is the message like the tacit message? Los Angeles, what you're doing, people aren't paying enough attention to it, something like that. Tacit messages. These are stereotypes about cities. Certainly cities change. The role of places is an interesting one. Like, you know, you mentioned, you know, small gathering, Kevin Kelly's house, quantified self. And I think for people who don't know people like that, right. Maybe we could get your thoughts on, you know, how would one think about where to live? And maybe even curating their own gatherings, useful gatherings, because it's not that I have to imagine. It's not that you guys sat back and I. And you're like, I'm Tim Ferriss. And he's like, I'm Kevin Kelly. Let's have a gathering so we can talk about it in a few years on a podcast. This stuff happens. That word, you know, it's a dangerous word organically, when people who have common interests decide to get together and talk and listen and brainstorm. And I'm yet to do that with good people and not have something really incredible come out of it. Not necessarily that day, but looking five years, looking back five years later and just going, God, that was really worthwhile.

Speaker B: Totally, yeah. Few thoughts in no particular order, I would say. The first is, it depends. My recommendations depend a lot on where you are in the arc of your career, in life. If you are in full growth hyperdrive mode and you are trying to build both yourself and your capabilities in a very concentrated way, where you're not necessarily focused on family, you maybe have fewer obligations then, if you're serious, I think many people should consider moving to an area of high density for a period of time. It could be three months, it could be six months, could be longer. But putting yourself in a New York or in La or San Francisco or Chicago, or as new places develop, I'll give you one you might not expect, say, in Ottawa, Canada, where Shopify is based. And the presence and growth of Shopify has spawned an entire ecosystem of startups. So there may be options outside of the usual cast of characters, Pittsburgh and Duolingo, similar effect. So there are more options than people might recognize. But taking a journey and placing yourself in a place where you can be in a very active pinball machine, where you may interact serendipitously with many different people from many different worlds, I think, is hard to overstate the value of drive and my filtering function. Let's just say, because when I first got to the Bay Area, nobody cared about me. I was nobody. I was driving my mom's used minivan hand me down, that had the seats stolen out of the back.

Speaker A: Were you terrible? Were you in the south bay?

Speaker B: I was working in San Jose, yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, no disrespect to San Jose, I'm from the south bay, but there's a bleakness to the south.

Speaker B: There is a little bit of bleakness. And then I lived across the street in this tiny apartment, lived across the street from the jack in the box in Mountain View. So it's not like I was strolling onto the big stage and just blowing people away.

Speaker A: Oh, I, I grew up right near Mountain View. I'm very familiar. I probably skated the curves at that jacket. Probably. Did you train at the gold's gym off rings store?

Speaker B: Did, actually.

Speaker A: Amazing. That was a great gym.

Speaker B: That was a great gym.

Speaker A: That was a great gym. I don't think it's still, I go.

Speaker B: There super late before my writing sessions and it had the benefit of being open really, really late. And wow. Ringstorf, I haven't thought about that in a long time. So the point is, I also started where a lot of people are starting. And what did I do? I put myself in a high density environment. Next. What did I do? Knowing no one, I started to volunteer at events where they had interesting speakers and interesting people coming to hear those speakers. So I put myself in Silicon Valley and then I began volunteering for groups like Svase. I don't know if it exists anymore. The Silicon Valley association of Startups Entrepreneurs, I think it was Thai, the Indus Entrepreneur, which is a very sort of indian or indian american focused organization that does a lot in the realm of startups. And I would carry water, I would take out garbage, I would check name badges, I would check people in. Nothing was too low for me. And I'll give you guys a tip that will be obvious to some, but non obvious to many when you are volunteering. A lot of folks who volunteer do the absolute bare minimum because they are not getting paid. This is not going to get you noticed, but it sets a very low bar so that if you volunteer at these events and someone's dropping the ball or there's something happening that needs fixing and you just proactively do it, the producers of these events will notice you. And this is what happened over time, over a few months. And then I got invited to join in on meetings that were planning future events. And I eventually got to the point where I was recruiting speakers and able to set the agenda for an entire main event. And then that's how I got to know, say, Jack Canfield, who is the co creator of chicken soup for the soul, and many others who introduced me to my book agent many, many, many years later, Jack Canfield. But I was a nobody then. You have to play the long game, but you can be methodical on how you play that. And that is one approach, just as an example for how to build your network, which snowballs over time. Don't hump every vip's leg within ten minutes of meeting them. Play it cool.

Speaker A: And gatherings where that person has a lot of demands on them. The last place you want to do that.

Speaker B: The way you're going to make yourself.

Speaker A: No saliency to that.

Speaker B: Yeah. The way you're going to make yourself memorable with people like that is to be very professional, always on time, predict what they're going to need or problems they'll run into beforehand and address them before they even think of them, and be easy to deal with. And people like that, high performers, notice these things. They will make note of it.

Speaker A: Yeah. The being easy to work with is something that I used to tell my graduate students postdocs, because the opposite of that, nobody wants. Nobody wants that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Especially in the beginning, like later. Okay, great. You're Steve Jobs. You want to be difficult here and there, or a lot, no problem. But in the beginning, that can be a real liability. You can make up for that if you are the best in the world, but in the very beginning, you probably won't be. So try to stack the deck in your favor. Volunteering is a shortcut, and that would be one way of doing it. Another now, especially given the virtual communities that exist. So you have subreddits, you have online communities, you have Twitter groups, you have clubhouse. You've got a million different options, which can be overwhelming.

Speaker A: Clubhouse still going?

Speaker B: Maybe not. I have no idea.

Speaker A: Oh, no. I don't know. I'm not saying it's gone. I just remember during the pandemic, there were some clubhouse gatherings that hopped on there, but I've sort of forgotten to. Together.

Speaker B: Maybe not. The platform affinity is really fickle, which is why I think, to the extent possible, if you want to build a world class, and I use that term very deliberately, network in record time, just to give you a nice headline, I would say focus on the uncrowded channel, which is in person, it's out of fashion, it's out of vogue. Going to a conference and actually interacting with humans in the hallway, approaching panelists. This is another thing that I did. I'll give it. I'll give another tip. So very early on, I would go to conferences. Nobody cared who I was. Nobody knew who I was. Fine. And I would study the panels. Let's say I'm going to a big event like south by Southwest, and I would. This is what I did in 2007, which was just prior to the first book coming out, and I would go to these various in person events. I was focused mostly on events that had the. The thematic focus of blogs. We could come back to that, but blogs were what podcasts were a few years ago. They drove incredible traffic, but they were undervalued by mainstream media, undervalued by mainstream publishers, et cetera, which meant there was an arbitrage opportunity in a way. And I would pick, say, a handful of panels with topics I thought were super interesting, and then the panel would end, and what would happen? The panelists would get rushed by various folks because many of them were well known. Who was not getting rushed? The moderator. I would go straight to the moderator, and I would talk to the moderator. I'd thank them for the panel. I'd be very genuine. None of it was made up. And talk to them for a bit. They would generally ask why I was there, what I was interested in. I would mention whatever that happened to be. In this case, it was, I'm finishing my first book, or I had my first book coming out soon. I'm here to hopefully meet people who are involved with a, b, or c. And then if we hit it off, which was not true every time, but if it seemed to be going well, I would say is, I don't know anyone here. I'm really sort of orphaned here, making my way through this entire event. Is there anyone else here you think I would get along with? Who? Maybe I could buy a drink or a coffee. And the vast majority of the time, they'd be like, oh, yeah, you should meet so and so. And then I get the introduction, and then I would meet that person. I would have a genuine interaction with that person. And if it made sense, if things were going well, I'd do the same thing. Is there anybody else here you think I should just say hi to and get along with? Not who I can ask for something. And that wasn't deception. I was being honest, like someone I could actually vibe with. And if so, would you mind making the intro? Yeah, sure. No problem. Many of those people are still my friends. And by being surgical in that way, not trying to gather business cards, to use a really antiquated metaphor at this.

Speaker A: Point, people still hand them out.

Speaker B: Yeah, people still hand them out. I guess depends on where you are, especially, like, Boston. But rather than trying to collect people as Pokemon cards, developing, say, three to five deeper relationships through longer conversations at an event, that is what directly led ultimately to the hockey stick for the four hour workweek within tech, within specifically San Francisco. So those would be a few approaches for building your network when you don't have the ability to just walk up to, say, Kevin Kelly, and have a conversation that came over time.

Speaker A: Yeah. Whether or not it's health practices or nutritional practices or at meetings, it seems you're oriented toward the uncrowded but very interesting people in spaces. But the keyword there, I think, is uncrowded. And, of course, the other keyword is interesting. Right? I mean, it's not like you're standing in the parking lot talking to whoever happens to be there, although that can be interesting. There's a serendipity there, and there's always things to learn from people. But in terms of career advancement and building new ideas and forging for information, I'm just struck how you've done that over and over and again. Thank you for giving us some insight into the process. Please.

Speaker B: Here's another one. I think there's a tendency among people who want to develop their networks or their relationships to be star fuckers, not to get too technical.

Speaker A: But that's a technical term, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: They want to tell other people they are friends with someone more than they want to develop skills or learn from someone. This puts you in a very disadvantaged position, because then that means, all right, you want to become friends with Elon Musk. Good luck. Or you want to become friends with this a lister celebrity who everyone else wants to meet. Good luck. It's going to be a crowded, bloody path to get there. And by the way, they've also certainly developed really attuned defenses against people like you. So it's going to be hard.

Speaker A: On the other, they have staff to prevent from having.

Speaker B: They have a phalanx of protectors to prevent you from ever getting to that person. On the other hand, if you're approaching it from the standpoint of developing skills, learning, and actually becoming potential friends with someone, I'll give you an example you could go after. You want to become better at boxing? Let's just make that up. All right, maybe not the greatest example. Skiing would be another one. But let's. Let's stick with boxing just because of the way I'll explain it. If you wanted to say, get personalized lessons from Floyd Mayweather, ain't gonna happen. Okay, let's go then. Maybe a step down out of the pro ranks to gold medalist. Okay, if it's a brand new gold medalist, let's just say, like, oscar de la Hoya, when he was really the golden boy and it just thrashed everyone, still going to be hard. What about the silver medalist who just had a bad day when he had that last bout against Oscar de la Hoya? Potentially. Right. From a technical perspective, from a personal connection perspective, you may have more in common with that person or a bronze medalist, and they can get you 70 80, 90% of the way there. And by the way, you probably don't have the physical attributes to make to 100% anyway. If you're coming to it this late and you could get, in many cases, one on one lessons, whether in person or virtually with someone who is of that caliber, they're in the same front of the pack as the names I just mentioned. Maybe not as famous. $100, $200 per hour for a lot of people, that is within reach.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm not sure what the value of saying one knows somebody very famous is. It's just never been something that I've oriented to.

Speaker B: It's a common orientation, though, and I think that's true for a lot of things. Like many people use, say psychedelics because they want to tell other people the story that they have of doing psychedelics. They're not doing it intrinsically for what they hope to get out of that experience. Maybe there's part of them, but it's more the social signaling and validation they get when they project that out at a group dinner into a story that they can tell, and that's true for many things. So, one of the questions I ask myself with all sorts of things, if I could never talk about this, would I do it?

Speaker A: What a great, great thing to think about, right?

Speaker B: Like, if I could, if I could have. Let's just say we didn't know each other. And I was like, okay, I'm earlier in my career, let's apply some constraints. So I'm not where I am. I still want to do a, b, and c in the public eye. Maybe I want to build a podcast, whoever. If I could meet with you, but I could never tell a soul, would I do it?

Speaker A: I don't know. Would you? I would. I would. But I would, too.

Speaker B: But. But for a lot of folks, if.

Speaker A: This meaning I'd meet with you, I'm not saying I'd meet with me, by the way. I'd meet with me. Believe me, I meet with me all the time, and sometimes it's pretty unpleasant.

Speaker B: And that can be applied to all sorts of things, right. And it's a useful question because I asked myself this for examining your motivations, and I'm not saying one motivation is always better than another, but you should at least be aware of your driving motivations, because you can end up playing games you're not even aware you're playing, and that's how you end up, I think, getting into a lot of trouble in life one of the ways. So that would be a question I might apply. I apply other questions. There's a great question that Seth Godin applies, who really, I admire tremendously and has built an incredibly unorthodox, unique life for himself and his family. He's zigged when everyone would expect him to zag, and he always has a defensible logic behind it. And much like Derek Sivers, but most people have probably heard the hypothetical question, like, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Right? Or, what would you do if you couldn't fail? And Seth turns that around. I think that's a good question. But he turns around and said, what would you do if you knew you were going to fail in terms of identifying what you would do for the process? What would you do if you knew it was going to fail? Okay, you're considering these five different projects. Let's say they're all going to fail, but you still have to choose one of the five. Which would you choose?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. Much harder to answer. And at the same time, I'm called back to when I was a graduate student. And still now with the podcast, I have this litmus test, which is. Is the experiment that I'm working on. The one that I want to be working on most of is the podcast that I'm working on, the one that I want to be working on most. I mean, there's truly no other podcast I'd rather be having today than this one. Right? And the moment I'm starting to think, oh, I wish I was doing that thing over there, I realize I'm off target. I'm off target. And I think that asking really good questions is something clearly that you're very good at and getting a little bit deeper into your process around that. Do you write those things down? Is there a notebook someplace in the kingdom of Tim Ferriss in Austin or elsewhere that says those questions, that essentially those questions are written? Are they?

Speaker B: Yeah. I literally have a document with questions that I've gathered from Seth printed out. And at the Airbnb where I'm staying here.