Tim Ferriss on Tim Ferriss (and much much more)

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for having me. Great to see you.

Tim Ferriss: I think it was a lot of serendipity, somewhat engineered in a positive sense because it conforms with my personality fundamentally. But a lot of it started–and maybe this is going back too far–but I had a lot of health problems as a kid. And, some of those were a consequence of being born premature, and I had a lot of issues with thermoregulation, and so on. But, the only sport that I could participate in really, effectively ,was wrestling. My mom put me into kiddie wrestling because the puny kids could go against the other puny kids. And I had a lot of constraints. I would overheat quickly, and effectively had to experiment and work around a lot of limitations in sports.

So, the self-experimentation started with that, and later extended to other things. And then it just became a habit. And, when the first book was a few months out from launch, there were these things you might remember that were quite big at the time, called blogs. And, I just decided to take my personal experimentation and share it publicly, with the hypothesis that that might spread. And, lo and behold, had a few friends, one of whom ran something called Digg.com, which was gigantic. It was the front page of the Internet in a sense, somewhat akin to Reddit back in the day.

And, I realized that certain types of experimentation resonated.

So I took what I was already doing, amplified the volume on that, and it continued to resonate–continued to resonate in different subject matter from The Four-Hour Workweek with business and entrepreneurship to The Four-Hour Body with physical performance, and interviewing coaches, running a lot of trials on myself, to cooking, and to everything else that I did afterwards.

So, that has continued, and I’m sure you might feel similar, and I said this before recording, but congrats on a thousand shows–that is one heck of a milestone–that if I weren’t recording the podcast, I would be having a lot of those conversations anyway. And, the same is true of the experiments. If I weren’t sharing them, I would still be doing them. So, it’s a relatively light lift to share.

Tim Ferriss: This is a very, very good question. I have been from the outset–and I don’t know what catalyzed this in the beginning–but certainly as I had more and more exposure, I’ve been very cognizant of a few different dangerous possibilities, one of which is audience capture–people can find writing on this, there are a number of good pieces–which refers to becoming a caricature of your most extreme traits or behaviors because your audience rewards those things. And, there’s a real risk of becoming the mask that you wear.

And, for that reason, I will very often go off-menu with guest choice. I might interview someone on who knows what–on any facet of–some odd facet of philosophy. Which is not going to be maximizing downloads. Or do something that is true to my interest, but controversial, which will cull my audience in a sense–divide, and possibly cull my audience–to reinforce the driver that I think will preserve my, not just integrity, but prevent becoming an observer of a stage act known as Tim Ferriss. Which is really making, whether it’s the podcast or the books, the drivers my personal fears, goals, dreams, problems.

As long as I stick with that–the things that are relevant to my real life–I feel like I’m operating with an eight-point harness on to prevent some of the dangers of the Internet; or I should just say living at least partially in public to begin with.

So, when I meet people who listen to the podcast or have listened for 10 years, let’s say, and they say, ‘Wow, it must be really strange because you don’t know me at all and I think that I know you, but I don’t actually know you,’ and I have to be careful with this type of conversation sometimes. But, I say, if you’ve been listening that long, you actually do know me pretty well. Which is both reassuring and terrifying at the same time, because there’s such an asymmetry.

So, I feel like I have–and this isn’t any special pat on the back for me–but I’ve seen what public exposure has done. And, I’m not–I mean, I’m at best an F-class public figure–but what fame has done to real celebrities or people I’ve known who have had a lot of unexpected attention–I’ve seen some of the side effects, and I’ve wanted to avoid those.

Tim Ferriss: I do, I do. Because I still think about all of the risks, and guidelines, and insurance policies that I discussed in that essay, which I wrote for myself also, in a sense. But, if I am in, let’s say, Austin, Texas, which is home base–if I’m downtown at a coffee shop or something like that, or in Manhattan, or Williamsburg, or a coastal spot in the Pacific Northwest like a Seattle or a San Francisco–I will, if I’m out and about, get recognized a few times a day. And, generally, people–

Tim Ferriss: I’ve asked myself this question, because when it happens, sometimes people share really kind things, and they mention how specific episodes, or books, or any number of things that I’ve put out have really helped them, or their son, or their wife, or their fill-in-the-blank. And, that’s very gratifying. But, if I am in one of those cities, let’s just say, I will very rarely go to a coffee shop because I can’t actually sit down in peace and work at my laptop, or write, or just screw around with a book for an hour or two. It’s actually somewhat challenging.

And, I’ve very deliberately–and this is definitely to my economic detriment–de-emphasized and opted out of video for the most part over the last, I would say, four to five years. And, you and I have both seen how YouTube principally has become a massive driver as a growth engine for, quote-unquote, “podcasts,” which have more or less become fixed-location television shows by this point–a lot of them. And, I do not want more facial recognition.

So, as I look at the newer or future chapters in my life with family, etc.–I don’t have family currently, but would love to; I mean, that’s a high priority for me–I don’t want to compromise my own, and I much less want to compromise members of my family and their privacy when they have not probably set out with the decision to compromise their own privacy. And, there’s more that comes with that certainly. If you have enough public exposure, there are safety concerns and other things.

So, when I have in the last few years had people come up to me–and they’re almost always, I feel very, very, very privileged that my listeners, let’s just say in the case of the podcast, tend to be very polite, and well-educated, and well-mannered, and they’re just great for the most part–every once in a while, you get a wild card. But, when they walk away, I wonder to myself, what would it feel like not to have that anymore? Would I really miss it? Would I not miss it? I don’t have a clear answer.

There’s definitely a possibility that I would miss some of it because it’s gratifying to know that at least some of what you’re doing in the world has an impact. But, does it have to happen on the street? Probably not. If it were a blog comment, I think I would get 90 or 100 percent of that gratification, too. It’s too bad people don’t really–the platform-capture of the social media, or I shouldn’t say social media companies, but the larger tech companies–has become so profound that it’s more and more challenging to have a private audience like that unless you’re using something like a Patreon.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’ll talk about the village metaphor, and it might be helpful to people. And, I think it’s going to be increasingly important for even the–let’s just call it average George[?-ian? Yang?]–to think about these things as parasocial relationships become easier and easier to develop with platforms using algorithmically-driven A, B, or C to keep people on platforms.

So, I’ll explain what I mean by that.

So, I guess in a nutshell, it’s never been easier for people to be micro-famous for short periods of time. And, I’ll tell you what the risks are of being micro-famous even for an hour, a day, or a week–and there can be some durability to it. So, as you mentioned, the–let’s just say, the expression of the village idiot. Every village has its idiot.

By idiot, I would say historically they mean a crazy person. It’s not necessarily someone who is dumb. It’s someone who is just not quite there, not quite normal. And, if you then expand it to a small city, well, now you’re going to have, who knows, 50, 100 of those people. Then you go to–to expand out, you get to a New York City. Which is, let’s just say, New York City’s probably half of the size of my monthly audience. Okay. So, two New York Cities. How many crazy people are in two New York Cities? Well, you have quite a lot of people who may not be full-time insane, but people who are a little unstable–from a little unstable or impulsive to crazy. You’re going to have many, many, many, many of the entire classroom you mentioned, right?

Why is this relevant? This is relevant because oftentimes when I explain to folks some of the things that have happened as a result of public exposure, I tell them about the death threats.

I tell them about the crazy stalkers. I tell them about having to escalate stuff to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] or law enforcement. I talk about having to have security at events because of A, B, or C people who say they’re going to come and find me. They ask what I’m doing. What are you talking about that is so controversial? What are you putting out in the world? And, I say, ‘Nothing.’ You just need enough crazies in your digital village, so to speak, and these things will happen. It’s almost inevitable.

And I’m on, for instance, a private WhatsApp group with a number of people who are involved with media in various ways and have public exposure. And, this is a perennial topic that comes up. They all deal with this stuff on one level or another.

Some of it’s scarier than other pieces. Some of it is more inconvenient than other pieces. But, if you have sufficient exposure, you will contend with a lot of these things. You’ll have, for instance–I mean, this is the way I open that piece–but I have fans, readers, listeners reach out continually saying something along the lines of, ‘You’re my last chance. I’ve tried everything. If you don’t reply to me in 48 hours and help me, I’m going to kill myself.’ What do you do with that? Right? And, you do have to figure out what your policies are for contending with things like that, or you’re going to be endlessly enmeshed with person after person after problem after problem.

And, for people who are listening, they might think, ‘Well, must be interesting to have this problem as someone who has a podcast with a billion downloads.’ But, the reason that I mentioned at the outset this is going to become more and more relevant for more and more people is that the reason, for instance, a TikTok–one of the reasons that TikTok–gained so much traction, and now the other platforms are creating their own versions of TikTok to try to capitalize on this phenomenon of very short-form videos. But, part of the reason that TikTok succeeded was not the brevity of the videos themselves. It was that anyone creating videos had a chance, like someone buying a lottery ticket, of winning big. They didn’t need a large platform to suddenly go viral and have tens of millions or hundreds of millions of views. And, if you have that type of spike in notoriety, and if–certainly you try to capitalize on it by sustaining it, even if it’s–again, coming back to the little village, the larger village, etc.–forget about a hundred million people. Even if you just get exposed to 10,000 people, but prior to that, no one knew who you were, there’s a very good chance that you’ll be exposed to some of these challenges on a smaller scale, and you’ll need to deal with them on a smaller or a larger scale.

So, that’s another reason why I wrote that piece, because I feel like the technologies in place, and the incentives they’re creating, and the capabilities they’re creating, are going to subject more and more people to these weirdly lopsided parasocial relationships. And, most people, for instance–this is not perfect either–but have not bought their homes through an LLC [Limited Liability Company], or a trust, or something like that. And, that’s an imperfect solution. But, if people can find you very easily–you and your family–you need to be aware of that. And, that’s just a long, I suppose, TED Talk [Technology, Entertainment, Design Talk] answer to your prompt, but I’ll stop there.

Tim Ferriss: Is this Venice, California, or Venice, Italy?

Tim Ferriss: I certainly agree with that. And, I can’t remember the attribution–I’m not going to type on my keyboard right now–someone I’m sure can find it. But, there’s a quote that really stuck with me, and it was from, I would say, a credible source, whether it was a very well-known artist or otherwise. But the quote was along the lines of, ‘The danger is not in imitating other people. The danger is when you end up imitating yourself.’

And that really stuck with me. And I was, like: What does that mean, to imitate yourself? And then you look online, and it relates to the audience capture that I mentioned, where your most exaggerated positions, or exaggerated behaviors, or fill in the blank–things that take a few components of your personality, which may actually be true, may actually exist–and put them into these warp dimensions almost like you’re walking through a funhouse with these bizarre mirrors, and then feeds it back to you and says, ‘Do more of this. Do it bigger. Make it louder, make it crazier.’

And, I’ll say what I said before, because I say it to myself a lot: Be very careful of the masks that you wear, because it’s very easy to become that mask. And then, it’s no longer the real you and the stage you. They become the same thing.

So, in any case, I do think these are worth thinking about, also because it helps guide your decisions. And, I remember long ago–I didn’t heed this advice–but when I was in college, one of my friends, his father was the producer of the first successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Which came out of nowhere. The story of the making of that film is just insane. It’s really worth digging into. But, what he said was, ‘You want everybody to know your name, and no one to know your face.’ And, in retrospect, that was really good advice.

Tim Ferriss: I’m just imagining you in a Lucha–like a Mexican Lucha Libre mask. What style of Lucha Libre mask would you have?

Tim Ferriss: Okay, I’ll do the Lucha Libre. You can do the Masquerade Ball mask.

Tim Ferriss: I would say probably the middle answer is the closest to the truth, which is: I have frequently a weekly architecture of some type. And, this is not unique to me. I know Jack Dorsey used to do this. I know I borrowed it from other folks in the sense that I used to have more regimented daily routines, but I found that I was doing a lot of task switching. So, I would do this type of task with my employees for X period of time; and this type of task with deep work, some type of creative immersion for X period of time. And, what I found to be, from a, let’s just say, professional productivity perspective, much more manageable, and much more sustainable, much more pleasant, is having, for instance, Mondays and Fridays I do recordings at 10 a.m. or 3:00 p.m., my local time. And, I don’t have to fill all those slots. Those are just the slots that are available so my calendar doesn’t have podcast recordings scattered everywhere here and there.

And then, certain types of, say, physical training will be on set days. And, by doing that, I might have, let’s just say, Wednesday for principally writing, if I’m going to be doing writing. And then, on Tuesdays–Tuesdays tend to be the admin, miscellaneous, one-on-one with employee day.

So, all of the management pieces which, when they are scattered, I allow to drive myself crazy. I have very low tolerance for that type of thing. So, it’s much better to just create one critical mass where I can batch those similar tasks in one place.

On a daily basis, let’s just say–because people are often interested in morning routines–if you were to take all of the morning routines I have tested, and all of the morning routines of my guests, and all the morning routines of some other figures out there who are well known, and stack them together, your morning routine would last 27 hours.

So, I don’t do all of those things, but any given time there are a few things that I will do, and it’s, I would say, selecting two or three things out of a list of 10. So, do I have to meditate, sauna, cold plunge, do zone 2 training, do all of these things before I have my first cup of coffee? No, I don’t.

But, for instance, last night I just had some issue with the HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning]. The AC [air conditioning] in my room wasn’t working very well. So, I didn’t sleep terribly well. So, this morning it’s, like, ‘Okay, I’m going to have exogenous ketones,’–we can talk about that if you want–‘but just to provide my brain with some fuel, and also hopefully a little bit of anti-inflammation, I’m going to do a very short cold plunge, three to four minutes; going to have some tea.’ So, I had two types of tea–Pu-erh tea specifically–and a little bit of breathing while I’m freezing my ass off in the cold plunge, and then straight into the game. That’s it. The whole thing took whatever it was, 10 to 15 minutes.

But, let’s just say, tomorrow–oh, I also did measure my HRV [Heart Rate Variability] first thing upon waking up, with two different devices. But, let’s just say tomorrow if I’m not stiff, if I slept a little better, maybe I skip the cold plunge, but maybe I do a walk with my dog with a rucksack on to go get coffee, or something like that.

So I would say the morning routine varies, but if it’s helpful to people–and I originally got this from Tony Robbins, who can be controversial in his own right, but he has some very useful frameworks–the idea of keeping in mind the following progression: state, story, strategy. So, if you’re in a pissy mood because you didn’t sleep well, and you sit down with your journal to figure out how you’re going to solve your problems, you’re going to have a disabling or pessimistic story, which will lead you to have really suboptimal strategies.

So, for me–really physiologically, neurophysiologically, how do I prime my state in the morning–first and foremost, so that the story I have is a glass-half-full, more optimistic story, so that any strategies I come up with are going to be more enabling: I mean I see more possibilities. So, almost all of the things I just mentioned from this morning, and pretty much every morning, are focused on state first. And then, if I want to journal, if I want to brainstorm, that’s fine, but that comes after I’ve tried to establish a helpful state.

Tim Ferriss: I try, and I usually fail.

Tim Ferriss: It would really benefit you, for a host of different biological reasons, to go to sleep and wake up at the same time. I just seem to not be able to comply with this very basic demand. But, to answer your questions–

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, no problem.

So, exogenous ketones, just in brief–let me explain what ketones are. So, if you didn’t eat for three to four days, all of this precious body fat that we’re so good at storing has a purpose. And, your body would begin to shift from glucose, which is your default fuel for most people, and it would shift to breaking down body fat into ultimately a number of things, but including these beautiful, beautiful things called ketones. And, your brain, cardiac tissue, etc., loves ketones. It is a very clean fuel. If people want to dive into it, they can just consult Uncle ChatGPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer], and it’ll tell you all about this.

Ketones also–for instance, beta-hydroxybutyrate; let’s just call it a type of ketone–have a lot of anti-inflammatory properties. And, I’m not going to make this into a 30-minute thing, but I think the context is helpful. If you look at, for instance, the Atkins diet–some people might recognize–or the ketogenic diet: well, when did that initially get codified? I shouldn’t say ‘initially’; it’s been used for a long time in various traditions with fasting, but they’ve never thought about it as a ketogenic diet.

It was developed for epileptic children, and I want to say this was in the early 20th century, where they would use heavy cream primarily to help kids adhere to this diet–incredibly effective for decreasing the occurrence of treatment-resistant or pharmacologically-resistant epilepsy. There’s also a lot of research looking at using it for schizophrenia, and Chris Palmer at Harvard right now has done a lot of work, and he labels this metabolic psychiatry.

So, the ketogenic diet and ketones in general are very, very interesting also for potentially addressing autoimmune diseases, autoimmune conditions. But, the reason I am taking exogenous ketones–that’s a fancy word, E-X-O, exogenous, just like exoskeleton, just means outside of the body–so endogenously, in your body, you can produce ketones, but you have to follow this very strange diet that is hard for a lot of people to follow, and it takes time to get into it.

The cheat code–and I’m not convinced that doing this all the time is good for you–but in a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation, I’ve been experimenting with it, you just have supplemental ketones. So, just like a dietary supplement, some are in liquid form, some are in powder form. There’s one that I sometimes mix with my coffee called–I think it’s Qitone with Q-I-T-O-N-E. Just use it as your creamer. Be forewarned, have a bathroom nearby when you first use it. Some people have a disaster-pants-type response to it the first one or two times. So, FYI [for your information], probably don’t do it for the first time on an airplane.

And, that’s what I would say, in brief, exogenous ketones are. There are a lot of interesting books written about this subject, but look up Chris Palmer and metabolic psychiatry for the state side of the story. It also is very beneficial for some things you might not expect, like zone 2 training–which is a type of, let’s just call it, aerobic exercise–and Peter Attia speaks at length about that.

Cold plunge: you kind of need a bathtub for that one. There are some bath houses that will have cold plunge available. I have something called The Plunge. It’s sort of the best bang-for-the-buck cold plunge that I’ve been able to find. I’m using it at 40 to 43 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very cold. I don’t know what that is in Celsius, but I can assure you it is very, very cold. And, I’ll typically do that for five to 10 minutes. And, there are some very, very interesting effects of that, not just on the sympathetic fight-or-flight nervous system, but after that first acclimation period of, say, three minutes or so, for a lot of folks, actually activating parasympathetic rest-or-digest, which I think, in some cases, explains the mood-elevating effects.

Cold baths used to be prescribed for melancholy way back in the day. This isn’t entirely new; we’re just getting a better understanding of the science. However, you can get the poor man’s 20% of that by sticking your face in ice or something like that. Ben Stiller actually, in Tribe of Mentors, talked about putting his face–I think it was Ben Stiller–in a bucket of ice. So, you could just have a huge mixing bowl full of water and ice if you want to get a little bit of the payoff of that. But, really, full body is the way to go.

And then, on the tea side, I mentioned two types of tea. In this case, I use something called Pique tea–P-I-Q-U-E–and the reason for that is you can instantly mix it instead of having to steep and stuff. But you can kind of use what you want. I love drinking Pu-erh tea. There seem to be a host of different benefits related to Pu-erh tea–that’s a Chinese tea–related to not just microbiome, but also potential fat loss, and things like that. It also just tastes delicious. It’s got a very kind of peaty–if you like whiskey, Pu-erh tea–it doesn’t taste exactly like whiskey–but it has that very peaty, barnyard type of smell and almost taste to it. So, that’s as much for pleasure as for anything else.

Tim Ferriss: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good.

Tim Ferriss: No, no. How do I spell Pu-erh tea?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. P-U–there’s often a hyphen or an apostrophe put in–E-R-H is generally how it’s written in English.

There’s another one. If you want the closest to whiskey–and I’m actually not a big whiskey drinker, but there are a lot of similarities–a friend of mine wanted to go sober, but he just loved the taste of whiskey so much, he was stuck in a conundrum, and he found a tea called Lapsang souchong tea.

Tim Ferriss: And, that also has a very whiskey-like flavor to it. So, he would have that after dinner, and it scratched the itch.

Tim Ferriss: So, I simultaneously feel like maybe at some point I’ll be part of the Butlerian Jihad–to invoke something from Dune–sort of this, I don’t want to say Luddite because that sounds very judgmental, but this, like, rise against the thinking machines. I may be part of that at some point. But, at the same time, I use LLMs [large language models] and AI [artificial intelligence] dozens of times a day, and I encourage my employees to use it dozens of times a day, and it’s going to change everything. I don’t think–some of the capabilities, the current capabilities–are overstated, but I think the implications, even 12 months from now, might be underestimated by a lot of people.

So, I use it for any type of research, and I will fact check. Of course, you need to have models check one another. But, for any type of diligence on, say, a startup, or on an industry, or to find scientific literature–right? When I’m looking at these new experiments that I want to run, it saves so much time. It is impossible to overstate. I mean, what would have taken me a week, or at least multiple days of fishing around, finding old PDFs [Portable Document Format], trying to scan those PDFs, and then go to Google, and then sort past all the ads to find the one credible PubMed link to do the this, the that–that’s all done in seconds.

And, there are better prompts and worse prompts, so certainly you need to get better at asking questions. But, fortunately, I spend a lot of time thinking about questions. And, there are still hallucinations for sure, and there’s some pretty creepy stuff about AI learning to lie, which is quite interesting–

Tim Ferriss: or certainly they’re willing to lie.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, we’ll see. I mean, I have a lot of friends involved–deeply, deeply involved–with AI. I’m involved with a lot of companies that are–I mean–entirely focused on AI in different facets. But, I wouldn’t say it’s–I’ll tell you what I don’t use it for, because I think that’s maybe interesting or–

Tim Ferriss: at least to me, it’s important. I don’t use it for writing. I want to preserve that capability. I want to keep that muscle from atrophying. I don’t want my writing, and my synthesis, and my ability to do things long-form, to go the way of my ability to remember friends’ phone numbers, or to chart a map to a basic location–which is now dependent on Google Maps–I don’t want those faculties to disappear. So, if I am writing, I am writing, and I view that just like I would going to the gym. If I decide to train to run a marathon, I’m not going to take an Uber from the start line to the finish line. I’m there to do the training and to do the thing. And there is a value, I believe–at least for me–in trying to preserve it, at least until I’ve been able to see some of the longer-term ramifications of becoming really dependent on these tools. So, that might end up seeming very silly a few years from now, looking back, but for now, I don’t use it for writing.

Tim Ferriss: It’s alarmingly good. I mean, that’s–

Tim Ferriss: I would absolutely, and I actually plan to, use the LLMs for formatting or bullet pointing–

Tim Ferriss: It’s helping to structure writing in the same way that you described, because I don’t write as much as I would like to write. Okay, so what are the rate-limiting steps? What’s the failure mode? What are the failure points? And, one of them is–not shocking to, I think, anyone who writes–it’s just facing the blank page. But, if I can ramble, much like I used to just talk through what I wanted to write with a friend, and then a lot would become very clear. To start with voice, I think, would allow me just to write more.

So, is using AI to write more better than not using AI and not writing the pieces at all? Of course.

Or I shouldn’t say of course. But for me, the answer is: Of course. And, it’s just going to permeate everything. It’s going to become kind of invisible. It’s going to be the engine behind so many things. I’m excited and terrified of it. So, people are probably sick of hearing about it, but–

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we’re going to see probably single-person, single-owner, billion-dollar businesses within the next few years that employ AI agents as they would employ someone they might otherwise hire as a CFO [Chief Financial Officer] or something like that. I mean, it’s going to be–I would not be surprised if that’s the case. I really wouldn’t. Based on what I’ve seen, doing some travel overseas and spending time, for instance, in the UAE [United Arab Emirates], who is very, very, very aggressive on the AI front and what they’ve already done at a governmental level. I mean, it’s shocking what they are capable of doing. It’s like looking into the future, and we’re not even getting started yet.

Tim Ferriss: It’s exciting.

Tim Ferriss: For me, I try to deliver on the basic premise of the show, which is deconstructing world-class performers to give you tools, routines, habits, frameworks, technology that you can use. So, that’s the fundamental promise and premise of the show. So, I try to deliver on that. What that means is there’s a risk of some of these conversations, because of my own personal interest, becoming a little self-indulgent, right?

So, if I want to talk to someone, as has happened, about panpsychism, it’s like: Okay, I can talk to one of the most cited genius speakers and professors who is a proponent of this theory of panpsychism. But, at the end of that two-hour conversation–and I do this also–we talked about the culling of the audience; and so on, so occasionally I’ll do something like that, which is just purely self-interest and self-indulgent. What I try to find is the Venn diagram of things that are very personally interesting to me, whether I have a challenge, a problem.

Like, right now, my heart rate variability–I mentioned measuring that with two different devices in the morning–is continually low, and we could get into heart rate variability [HRV] and why that’s important, but generally for health, and performance, and so on, higher HRV is better. That’s the very kind of simple way to put it.

Tim Ferriss: Higher variability.

Tim Ferriss: I’ll let people look it up. Yeah, yeah. We’ll get into–it’s basically the variability of–there are different ways to measure heart rate variability. But when you wear any number of different wearable devices that are tracking biometrics, oftentimes they’ll give you a recovery score, and they might say, ‘Hey, hey, take it easy, tiger. Your recovery score is really low. Don’t do a lot of intense exercise today.’ Or the next day, ‘Hey, your recovery score is really high, go for it. Go crazy, hit the gym.’ A lot of that is based on heart rate variability.

The reason I’m bringing that up is that this is something that is very present for me, and this feeds into–so that’s the reason for, say, seeking someone out I can talk to about HRV or specifically what interventions you can use to affect HRV. And then, that led me to look at any number of things, and I found a credible scientist who is very well cited, who is got all the bona fides, because there’s a lot of nonsense floating around out there, as you’re aware.

Tim Ferriss: All right. So, there’s the reason; there’s the person. Okay: Now, what’s the prep? I listen to multiple interviews with this person. He is not overly saturated, but he does have a few long-form interviews. I listen to those. I am about 70% of the way through a book that he wrote, which has a bunch of references that I’ve also dug into. And because this is, hopefully, personally valuable to me, I’ve also gone into PubMed, and I’ve gone through the literature, and I’ve reached out to friends of mine who are biotech investors to ask them about different devices. I’ve really done a ton of homework on this.

And, before I interview this person, I’m going to test a few different things that I’m hoping will affect HRV. I just haven’t measured mine in a long time, so I’m establishing basically a seven-day baseline before I start adding any interventions as variables.

So, that would be a very, very current example. And, the research can take a long time. What does that mean? Like, in this case, it’s going to be a week or two of prep. I can’t do that for every interview; nor do I need to. So, in some cases, it might be someone I know really well on a subject I know really well. Then the question is: how do I pull out actionable details or advice that listeners can use–that they can use–ideally test in the next 48 hours or a week.

And, that’s it. I’d say that’s the way it goes.

And, in some instances–for instance, I find it easier to interview specialists who are not large public figures. If I’m interviewing someone who is an A-list celebrity–I remember the first time I interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jamie Foxx–they’ve been interviewed so many hundreds of times, I did a head-spinning amount of research because I wanted them to know that I had done my homework, and I wanted to come to them from an angle that they would find interesting, that would put them on notice that this wasn’t going to be an autopilot interview, and hopefully it would make them game to play ball. Right? Because there are a lot of guests who can be great–they can be great–but if they’re, like, ‘Oh God, this is just going to be the same 10 questions I always get,’ of course, understandably, just as I would, they’re going to go on autopilot.

Tim Ferriss: I can tell you why I do it.

Tim Ferriss: So, there are times–

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The other part of it–and sometimes I will ask them in advice, and I really enjoyed your pre-recording boot-up sequence, the flight safety instructions before we got started, because I learned something new. You’re like, ‘If I’m leaning back, that means let it rip. And, if I start to lean forward, that means make some space, I’ll have an interjection.’ I’m like, that’s so smart. That’s such–it’s a silent cue, and I might not be doing a great job of dancing with that because I’m not always looking at the screen. My eyes wander around–

Tim Ferriss: but I was like, ‘Oh, I could definitely steal that. I could definitely borrow that.’

Part of the reason–I’ll give you one that I often will ask, but sometimes I’ll already have the answer from having listened to one or two interviews–and that is: What are some of your greatest hits? Meaning stories. If you had a TED Talk, what are the stories that you’ve told that you know stick, or get a response from an audience, or resonate really deeply? What are stories that you’ve heard told back to you? And: Let’s just start with one or two of those.

I don’t always do that, but I’ll frequently do that, and it’s for two reasons. One, for sure, you would expect it will help hook an audience and get them to sit down, and my objective is commit to a long-form conversation despite all of the drive to short form. The second is to boost the confidence of the guest and allow them to hit their stride comfortably–

Tim Ferriss: without stumbling out of the blocks. So, that’s the other reason.

Tim Ferriss: Sure. Me, too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, I would say it’s fair in certain areas. And I would say I over-apply optimizing, let’s just say, 20 years ago. But, that I’ve become much more surgical with where I apply it.

Because, I don’t think life–our short experience on this planet–is meant to be endlessly optimized. You can end up with trade-offs that make it a losing trade. And we could discuss what I do mean by that. I do think there can be an optimizer’s curse of sorts, and there are various species of that.

So, for instance, right now with something that–let’s just say HRV. If we take that as foundational on a pyramid with–I guess I’m going to be mixing metaphors here–but with an upstream effect on a lot of other things, in this case, thinking of the pyramid, that’s of interest to me. Because, if there’s a simple intervention with very limited downsides–there are constraints that I apply to these interventions, especially if I’m going to be discussing them publicly on something like a podcast–limited known downside–so there’s a cap on the downside. There’s a relatively fast feedback loop so you can determine with some type of tracking whether it’s having an effect or not. And, yes, N of one, no placebo control, yada, yada. I get it. With some literature support, ideally. Then that’s of interest.

But, am I going to speed-read poetry, for instance? I would say 30 years ago–did I read much poetry? No. Now I read a lot more poetry, and I read a lot more fiction. And, there are books I don’t want to end. I will read them more slowly.

Tim Ferriss: I will read fewer and fewer pages each night because I don’t want that book to end.

There are a few different risks of, I would say, optimizing. And, people talk about life-hacking, body-hacking, biohacking, this hacking, that hacking. And, the first is that if you try to optimize everything, you can’t be an expert in every domain, so you’re going to end up playing the sucker in some of those areas if you’re borrowing conviction and throwing a lot of intervections[?interventions?] into the soup at once.

So, for me–I’m actually probably going to write a blog post about this. But: How do you think about testing different interventions as an N of one–as a human, as a guinea pig–who is interested in results, first and foremost, and not trying to model an RCT, a Randomized Controlled Trial, even though those are important? But, the truth is–and this is why I get very frustrated sometimes with scientists who are, like, ‘I don’t believe anything but the data.’ And, ‘We can’t know this, therefore we need to wait for large-scale randomized controlled trials.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, as somebody who funds science, and I know that you know that I know that you know, that that study is going to cost at least a million dollars to run and nobody is going to fund it.’ Right? So, in the meantime, if people are suffering–right?–you can say that on a podcast. But, I’m like, ‘Mr. Scientist or Mrs. Scientist, let me ask you: If that were your seven-year-old son, what would you do? You wouldn’t wait for an RCT. How would you actually navigate that maze?’

The other optimizer’s curse is that–and I’ve suffered from this–and I think if you think, for instance, some of the advice in the 4-Hour Workweek and you take it to an extreme, you can end up in this position: If you value–the more highly you value–your time, and the more that you view little time commitments/interruptions that are panty pinchers as wasting your time, the more frustrated you can feel for a higher percentage of your day or week.

Tim Ferriss: If that makes sense?

Tim Ferriss: Because, if you’re, like, ‘Well, my time is worth $200 an hour’–I’m just making that up–and I got this call I didn’t want to get, or I had to deal with some family drama, or whatever it is, and that was 45 minutes, you start putting together this mental ledger of how much these problems or inconveniences are burdening your time.

And, it can really affect your quality of life, where ostensibly–and this applies to making money, too, or making investments, also–it’s like, ‘Wait a second.’ If you’re making an investment that, if you ask why a few times, fundamentally is to improve the quality of life for you and maybe your family, if it makes you a stress case, it’s not a good investment. It doesn’t really matter what the financial ROI [return on investment] is. If it makes you a continual stress case, you’re sort of defeating the point.

Similarly, if you’re optimizing, but through that optimizing you make yourself less patient, more anxious, more reactive, you’re, I guess, missing the point. And I’ve ended up doing that in the past. So, I try to keep a close eye on that and deliberately, quote-unquote, “waste time” to force myself to chill out, pardon my French. It’s just, like: Relax. We’re all going to die. We’re monkeys spinning on a rock in the middle of space. It doesn’t matter that much. Let’s do some cosmic insignificance therapy and just breathe a little bit. If you have to sit at the post office for an extra five minutes, who cares? Ask a hundred people what the full name of Alexander the Great is–no idea. So, the idea that you’re going to build this tremendous legacy and an extra five minutes on the phone with your mom is going to disrupt your legacy is just patently ridiculous.

Tim Ferriss: You can see the resemblance.

Tim Ferriss: Ooh, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: That is a huge compliment. Thank you very much.

Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s helped me to remove a lot of verbal tics because I listened to early episodes and they drove me absolutely insane. So it brought my OCD [Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder] to bear on trying to fix verbal tics, not just in post-production.

Also, for sure, conversationally I feel more fluid, more capable of asking–not just asking questions, but like you said, asking the dumb questions. Asking the basic questions that are sometimes the key to unlocking a different level of exploration around a topic–

Tim Ferriss: And, even among–if I were sitting at a table, making–well, I guess I’ve done this, so I’m not making it up totally. But, you might have a table of eight or nine experts in a field, and you ask the dumb question–the one that you’re a little hesitant, embarrassed to ask–and it ends up opening, or I should say highlighting, this deep, unanswered question in the field that has been tabled, let’s just say, because it’s too challenging to grapple with. Like, the hard problem of consciousness, or something. I mean, that’s an exaggerated, maybe mega-example. But, that’s a lot of fun.

So, playing the idiot, being the conversational court jester, in a sense, I’ve come to really, really, really enjoy. Because now that I’ve had 800 at-bats, I’ve realized how often–not always, but how often–it leads to something really interesting.

Separately, I’ve just become more curious. As I’ve done more episodes and broadened the scope–and I feel very lucky. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but you were early, early, early, early. I came in well after you, but 2014. I feel so lucky that I started when I did because, at the time, interviewing world-class performers to deconstruct and tease out their routines and habits, etc., was new. If I were to start that now, it would not be new–

Tim Ferriss: There are five million of those shows on YouTube alone.

But, what that allowed me is a broad enough canvas where I can really go into some strange corners and arcane subject matter, and interview those people. So, my breadth of interest has expanded. And, I love it. I love it. I’ve done it for a long time, as have you.

Every once in a while I’m like, ‘Gah, this podcasting game, and these young kids with their video. Bah, I’m sick of it.’ But, the truth is I have these conversations anyway. Right? And I already had a short conversation with the scientist I’m going to be interviewing. We talked for a half-hour. I was like, ‘Why am I doing this? I should just be recording this.’

Tim Ferriss: And I was, like, ‘Okay, okay, okay, pause, pause, pause. Let’s keep it fresh, we’ll talk next time.’

Tim Ferriss: So, I figure it’s so easy technically to record these days, there’s no reason to stop doing it. I feel very fortunate that I started when I did.

Tim Ferriss: I will answer that. Before I forget, I want to offer a tool for people related to one of your earlier questions. Or observations, which is part of you. Like, your inner Tim Ferriss is very interested in these things, these interventions. And then the other part of you is very skeptical of these things–as you should be. I just want to say briefly, like, the scientific method is great. It’s not perfect. There are weaknesses. But, it is the best framework so far that we seem to have come up with for not fooling ourselves.

So, when you’re considering all of these different things–when your inner Tim Ferriss is excited about, ‘Oh my God, there are these 20 things I could try,’–how do you not fool yourself? There’s actually one AI-based tool, and I’m sure there are many more, that’s pretty useful to play with called Consensus.app. And, Consensus.app looks at scientific literature. So you can drop into the search field, ‘What is the evidence for or against X doing Y?’ Then just let it rip. And it will go through the studies, the meta-analyses, and it will give you a relative ranking on effect/no effect. Or: it does X, or it doesn’t do X. It’s imperfect; obviously your mileage may vary; do your homework. But, for people who are not going to be really digging into the scientific literature, but they want to do a 60-second check to make sure they’re not going down a complete dead end, it’s pretty helpful. So, there’s that.

On the episodes, I would say that I’ll give a few, for different reasons.

The one episode that I would say I have revisited in my own mind the most that did not get as much attention as I would like, that I feel very proud of, was an early, early interview with a hospice care physician named BJ Miller. BJ Miller has helped thousands of people to transition to death in non-hospital settings. He also went to Princeton after I did–excuse me–he also went to Princeton a few years before I did and was a warning to all incoming students because he had climbed up on this commuter train very late at night, this one-car train that would take students from Princeton to Princeton Junction. He had a watch on. The electricity arced, and he burned off three of his limbs–

Tim Ferriss: So he’s a triple amputee. Very handsome, very charming, incredibly smart. Who has–he’s witnessed the last chapters for so many people and facilitated that.

The conversation, I think, is really profound on a lot of levels. And it’s one of those conversations where he’d say something that seems kind of funny and flippant–maybe it was a joke–and it pops back into your head two weeks later. And you’re, like, ‘Oh my God, wait a second. There are actually a lot of layers to that.’ Sort of like these off-the-cuff comments that, like, the Dalai Lama might make; and you’re, like, ‘Oh, that’s a funny response.’ Then a week later, you’re, like, ‘Wait a second.’ He’s really got a lot to offer. And that made me think about life and death and living very differently, especially the social components, the human-to-human interactive components. So, BJ Miller I would really recommend.

Then I would say from just a pure entertainment, ‘Oh my God, how can someone be this full-stack talented?’ Jamie Foxx–and his life story–is just incredible. That was an interview that was a giant get for me at the time because it really was before A-listers did podcasts. Podcasts were still the backwater, and radio and TV were the real media. And, did whatever it was, two hours with Jamie, in his recording studio at his house. So he was able to hop on the piano and do impersonations. My God, what a talented human. So I would say for pure entertainment and just watching a performance unfold, Jamie Foxx or Hugh Jackman. It would be one of those two.

Then I would say, let me come up with another one. Man, there’s so many. It’s a paradox of choice problem when you have as many as you or I do. You, especially. But, for me, let’s see. I would say maybe the first–and I mention this one just because it really was, I think–and I’m not pointing to my podcast as the catalyst of this–but a turning of the tide with respect to national and international conversations around, and even a regulation of, and scientific funding of psychedelic-assisted therapies for various types of primarily mental health conditions. But, maybe my first conversation with Michael Pollan, the author, around his book How to Change Your Mind.

Tim Ferriss: I think it’s still a very good overview of that subject matter and a lot of what Saisei Foundation has done, which is this tiny foundation you mentioned that I started quite a long time ago. Saisei Foundation: Saisei means rebirth in Japanese. I lived in Japan for a while. And, a lot of the early science that Saisei focused on was psychedelic-assisted therapies and creating some of the first dedicated centers at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins, and so on. Later, looking at things like brain stimulation and other types of tools.

I would say those are a few that come to mind. I’m sure as soon as we stop recording, I’m going to go, ‘Oh, God, I should have mentioned A, B, or C.’ But, I’ll go with those for now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we’ll see.

Tim Ferriss: And, definitely not a panacea. I would tell people measure twice and cut once–

Tim Ferriss: You are playing with nuclear power from a psychological and psychiatric perspective. So: Use wisely. Don’t find your shaman on Craig’s List or Facebook. Work with a proper clinician.

Tim Ferriss: Less disciplined.

Tim Ferriss: I would say less.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t think it bothers me, no.

By disciplined, I would say what I mean by that is 10 years ago, I thought of self-control and discipline as virtues, and maybe they are; but I was much more regimented. And I relied on this highly variable factor, which is willpower.

And, I think that’s a fool’s errand for most things. I think you need systems. I think you need time-blocking and routines in your calendar so that you do not give yourself the opportunity to falter when you haven’t had enough sleep, when you haven’t had enough caffeine. I really think that systems beat goals.

And, which is not to say there is no place for willpower. I just think, much like perhaps, at least in the United States, Protestant work ethic gets emphasized, or something akin to that, is so highly lauded that you can begin to put a lot of effort into things that do not matter in the first place. And similarly–that’s doing things that should be easier or more targeted in a very difficult way. And, similarly, I think you could say the same for willpower.

And, I still do hard things, don’t get me wrong. I still have my favorite forms of suffering–

Tim Ferriss: Fasting, exercise, cold plunge, I still do that stuff. But, I try to let the systems do the work when I can. And, setting incentives properly, deadlines, blah, blah, blah. Getting people involved so that what I need to do, I do automatically.

So, that’s how I would say I’m less disciplined.

And, I also just don’t take myself as seriously as I did 10 years ago. Because–I said this before, but it’s just kind of ridiculous–the more history you read, the more you look at the macro timeline of humanity, and, like, any type of astronomical level, you’re looking at timelines, it’s just really silly to take yourself too, too seriously.

Now, you have to have some, maybe, expected human level of hubris to actually get work done. Like, you have to find meaning or think something is meaningful, even if it’s a trick, that’s fine. Like, you do need to do that so you’re not just, like, ‘Oh, what’s the point? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, why lift my finger? Why tap these little monkey hands on this keyboard?’ Like, you have to find meaning and purpose in something. Which I get. But, I take myself much, much less seriously than I used to. It’s exhausting, taking yourself seriously.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, do a short, intense sprint that is front-loading the effort to create the system, as opposed to making yourself susceptible to the ups and downs of state, which will always be there, by relying on the intermittent feeding of yourself with willpower. Like, front-load it. Front-load it and create the systems.

Tim Ferriss: I would say that a lot of it comes from competitive sports. If you look at any, any athletes or coaches who are consistently winning, doing well, they will follow this to a T, for sure. And there’s some adapting, of course, depending on recoverability, etc. But, there are plans; you execute the plan; and that’s it. Certainly, if you get injured and so on, you have to make accommodations and adapt.

But, when I was starting my own business and reading all these business books, and for better and for worse, a lot of the process-focused books, at least at the time that I read, had manufacturing examples. It’s like: Okay, if you’re looking at the Toyota way, or you’re looking at any of these things: process, process, process. System, system, system.

And then when I was writing The Four-Hour Workweek and looking at how different people have implemented Pareto’s law, or the 80/20 principle, and looking at somewhat satirical, but also actually surprising practical things like Parkinson’s Law, it’s, like: Okay, as you add all of these things together, it just seems more and more that systems, systems, systems are, in a way, a big investment in the beginning that make everything else less energetically, financially, emotionally expensive over time.

And, I think I also just have a personality that likes–

Tim Ferriss: to try–yeah, exactly–that strives for anything that can be ‘set it and forget it.’

Tim Ferriss: Anything that can be ‘set it and forget it,’ I’m going to prefer. Look, you’re, like: ‘Oh, I forgot to meet with my therapist. Oh, I should really reach out.’ It’s, like: Why don’t you just prepay so that you have the proper sunk cost? Use sunk cost to your advantage: prepay, standing meeting every Thursday. You miss it, you pay for it. Boom, problem solved.