Tim Ferriss: The #1 Reason You Feel Stuck (It’s Not What You Think)

Tim Ferriss 0:00 If you just get off of social media for two weeks, it will do the same amount of good for a lot of folks as ten years of therapy.

Jay Shetty 0:07 What advice has made you the most money?

Tim Ferriss 0:09 Don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only.

Jay Shetty 0:14 What's something that the top one percent obsess over that most people never even think about?

Tim Ferriss 0:20 The absolute sacredness of [beep] .

Jay Shetty 0:26 Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. Today's guest is someone that I've been waiting to re-interview for nine years. I'm speaking about the one and only Tim Ferriss, one of the most influential thinkers in personal development and performance of all time. Tim's the best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, host of the Tim Ferriss Show with over a billion downloads. If you're someone who wants to learn how to make better decisions, overcome fear, and design a life that actually works for you, you won't want to miss this. Please welcome to On Purpose, Tim Ferriss. Let's dive in because-

Tim Ferriss 1:00 Let's do it

Jay Shetty 1:00 ... there's so much to extrapolate today with you, and I wanted to start off by asking you

Jay Shetty 1:05 like what's a thought that reappears in your mind often today? Or what are you fascinated by today that kind of steals your attention and gets you excited? Because you've done so many things, you've accomplished so many things. You, you're so active in so many ways. I wonder what fascinates you now.

Tim Ferriss 1:23 I can tell you. I literally was getting some texts on the way here from a few people I've been [chuckles] interacting with a lot. Uh, one is Tommy Wood, Dr. Tommy Wood, who's a neuroscientist, also a phenomenal athlete. Interesting combination. Uh, looking at, and we'll probably get into this more deeply, but different fuel sources for the brain and extending your cognitive runway. So in life, if you, as I, for instance, have a lot of neurodegenerative disease in your family, whether that's Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or otherwise, what can you do now? Assuming a lot of these conditions take decades to fully develop, how can you intervene early? So that's a question that's occupying my mind and have found, I think, some very, very compelling options that are not new to me. But if you go through the scientific literature and you talk to people on the front lines, you do find some interesting options. So we can talk about those. I would say bioelectric medicine, which ties into this. In other words, microchips and electricity over pills. A lot of medications have off-target effects.

Jay Shetty 2:31 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:31 So you have a problem or you want to prevent a problem, you take a drug. Very often, it is not as specific as we would like. There are side effects.

Jay Shetty 2:40 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:41 There's a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine that can be applied a million different ways. Uh, we, I, we probably should talk about it, but I'll give you an example. Here's a crazy example. There's a technology called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, that has existed for decades, and it's basically using a magnetic field to affect brain activity. So they put a paddle close to your head. There are different ways to do it. It might be a cap with a few other things. And you can either excite or inhibit different parts of the brain. Slightly more complicated, but let's just assume that's the case. And a scientist named Nolan Williams out of Stanford, along with others, developed something called the SAINT protocol, which is an accelerated version. So instead of taking, let's just say, TMS treatments that you would do once or twice or three times a week over five months, they compress it all into one week, five days. And you're getting zapped ten times a day on the hour, every hour, each of those five days. And what they end up seeing in many instances, and there's good published, peer-reviewed studies people can look at, seventy percent remission of treatment-resistant depression that is durable. You start to see impacts on things like OCD, generalized anxiety disorder. But one thing that I experimented with recently, this is maybe four months ago, because I have diagnosed pretty severe OCD, which I think can be a superpower, but can also be a super handicap. Uh, also, just look at my family. Uh, who knows how much of it is nature versus nurture, but generalized anxiety disorder, pretty high. And that can be a helpful monkey on the back for getting a lot done, but there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage, right? So I wanted to see if I could dial back both of those. Would I lose my edge or would I actually improve my edge? I just wouldn't be holding onto the blade of the knife, right? [chuckles]

Jay Shetty 4:32 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 4:33 And I went through this experimental protocol, which is one day. So instead of taking a week off of work, one day where you preload, and there's science behind this, with something called d-cycloserine. It's an antibiotic that used to be used for tuberculosis, among other things. Put in a lozenge in your mouth, and then an hour later, you start these stimulations. You do one day, three-minute stimulations on the hour, and I have gone from basically like an eight or nine out of ten severity with generalized anxiety to like a zero or a one.

Jay Shetty 5:04 For how long?

Tim Ferriss 5:04 For f- four or five months now. You cannot-

Jay Shetty 5:07 From that one day?

Tim Ferriss 5:08 From that one day.

Jay Shetty 5:10 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 5:10 It is incredible. Does it help? Does it hurt? The dose does matter, right? You can overdo it.

Jay Shetty 5:15 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 5:15 But this is a combination of pharmaceuticals to help with neuroplasticity and then brain stimulation. So I've been looking very closely at bioelectric medicine. I think this is... And if-- I try not to do it too much, but pat myself on the back a little bit. Say you look at The 4-Hour Body and then the subsequent ten, 15 years, a lot of that played out and ended up being very, very highly reinforced by science. I th-- I, I'm placing a lot of my bets attentionally. And then on the more philosophical side, but intensely practical, I don't think-- Phil-philosophy can be inert and kind of flaccid if you choose the wrong approach. But ultimately, if you're trying to decide on values, you're not gonna do a randomized control trial on that, right?

Jay Shetty 6:03 [chuckles] Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 6:03 You have to find your way. And fortunately, people have been attempting to do this for millennia. AndI would say that in the last few years especially, uh, there's a great book called, uh, Already Free, I think it is, by Bruce Tift, that discusses, uh, kind of two complementary approaches, which are the, let's just say, developmental achievement approaches that Western psychotherapy might take or self-help broadly. How do I improve myself?

Jay Shetty 6:34 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 6:34 How do I change my circumstances? But then on the opposite side, a perhaps let's call it more Buddhist approach, although it's not unique to Buddhists or Buddhism alone, the acceptance piece.

Jay Shetty 6:45 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 6:46 Right? Recognizing what is, allowing what is.

Jay Shetty 6:49 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 6:49 And it's a balancing act to do both. But I've been so, I would say, for decades, most of my life focused on the achievement piece.

Jay Shetty 6:56 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 6:57 And there's a lot to be said for it, a lot of upside. But paying also attention to the approaches, the practices that cultivate the other side, because guess what? None of us have as much control as we might like to think. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 7:11 [laughs] So well said, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 7:12 Especially once you add in other humans.

Jay Shetty 7:14 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 7:14 Sorry, guys.

Jay Shetty 7:15 [laughs] So true.

Tim Ferriss 7:16 That's an, that's an illusion. So I would say those are a few of the things that are very, very present for me.

Jay Shetty 7:22 I love it. You've just given us the contents page of our conversation.

Tim Ferriss 7:25 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 7:26 It's brilliant. This is, this is what I enjoy the most. That's fascinating.

Tim Ferriss 7:28 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 7:28 Do you mind if we dive into some of those a bit?

Tim Ferriss 7:30 Yeah, for sure.

Jay Shetty 7:31 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 7:31 And I, I, my hope al-

Jay Shetty 7:32 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 7:33 ... and I also said this before we hit record, is like I don't have anything to pitch or sell. I, I really am excited about some of these things that I'm exploring now.

Jay Shetty 7:42 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 7:42 So if I can give people very specific concrete recommendations, then I'll be... That in some way expand their thinking or help them, then I'm thrilled.

Jay Shetty 7:53 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 7:54 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 7:54 No, I'm really grateful for you to coming on. Let's dive into cognitive fuel then to go first.

Jay Shetty 7:58 What do we currently do or what do we currently know that we use for cognitive fuel and then the new approaches that you're looking at, how are they so different? As you said-

Tim Ferriss 8:08 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 8:08 ... they have less side effects. We're talking about potentially-

Tim Ferriss 8:11 In terms of fuel, first a caveat, not a doctor, don't play one on the internet. So talk to your physicians. Uh, however, what I will say is it's helpful to think of the brain like you would think of musculature.

Jay Shetty 8:27 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 8:27 Right? The mind, bo- body separation duality is, is a complete falsehood. So everything's really, really tightly interrelated. What I, what I will say is that if we look at the extremes to inform the mean, this is something I like to use as a heuristic, right? You can learn a lot by studying the extremes, in athletics, in business, the best and the worst outcomes, and that tells you a lot about the middle, but not the other way around. Like if you study the average this, the ideal customer, the A, B, or C in the middle, it doesn't actually help you solve the edge cases. All right. So if we look at, let's just say Alzheimer's, right? Some people, some scientists, some doctors refer to Alzheimer's as Type III diabetes. Why? Because the brain, and there are many factors that go into this, can end up in a state where it's very bad at utilizing glucose. Insulin insensitivity, you're basically diabetic in your brain, and I'm simplifying here. But, for instance, and I have done this with relatives of mine with Alzheimer's, you give them an exogenous ketone supplement of the right kind, give them a little shot, and I'll do it with them so they're not freaked out. Within twenty minutes, their sentences are longer, their rate of speech is faster. In some instances, there's something called the clock test, for instance, where you can look at the severity of Alzheimer's or other conditions by having someone attempt to draw a clock, and they just can't do it. And boom, like some type of stage magic, thirty minutes later they can draw a clock.

Jay Shetty 9:58 Crazy.

Tim Ferriss 9:59 So what's going on? Ketones are an alternate fuel source. And if you ever fast, if you ever experiment with intermittent fasting, which we can also come back to, another thing that has my attention, if you cultivate your ability to use ketones, suddenly you have this very compelling alternate fuel source. I'll give you a third one, though-

Jay Shetty 10:16 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 10:16 ... that is new to me, even though if I look back at my experience in life through sports, I'm like, "Ah, okay, that helps connect some dots." [laughs] Lactate. If you ever have done a bunch-

Jay Shetty 10:28 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 10:28 ... of cycling or you go in the gym and you get that burn, all right? Well, a big part of that is lactic acid or lactate.

Jay Shetty 10:35 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 10:35 Turns out the brain can really use that, not only as a fuel, but it's also a signaling. It's almost a, it's a s- it's a signal or a messenger that can produce all of these changes in the brain. And, uh, there is, for instance, Tommy Wood introduced me to this, the Norwegian four by four. People can look this up. Norwegian four by four is effect, uh, in effect doing, it's VO2 max training, and we can explain what that is.

Jay Shetty 11:02 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 11:02 But it's not really important right now. Basically, four minutes of incredibly hard, let's say, stationary biking. Uh, you're getting up to eighty-five, ninety percent of your max heart rate. Like in the last f- in the last minute of those four, you don't think you're gonna make it.

Jay Shetty 11:14 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 11:14 Right? Basically, you're running away from wolves.

Jay Shetty 11:16 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 11:17 Okay. And then you take three to four minutes off, and you repeat that again, and you do four cycles. So you're doing f- four minutes on, let's just call it four minutes off, four minutes on, at da ta, for f- four rounds. If you do that, uh, there was, there was a study conducted three times a week, and I think it was for six months. The effects on your brain, which includes some, uh, plausible volumetric changes, like certain structures in your brain like the hippocampus actually grow, right? One of the primary areas affected by Alzheimer's.

Jay Shetty 11:50 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 11:51 Those effects extend out for five years from six months of training three times a week. What is going on?

Jay Shetty 11:58 Yeah. What is going on?

Tim Ferriss 11:59 The VO2 max is just an indicator of the work that you're putting in. Okay. Well, why does that kind of work matter? Because steady state aerobics, walking for long distances, doesn't do it.

Jay Shetty 12:08 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 12:09 And there are people, credible people, who focus on this who think that lactate is-

Jay Shetty 12:15 Is the reason

Tim Ferriss 12:15 ... the main driver.

Jay Shetty 12:17 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 12:17 So for instance, this morning before I came here, I was like, "Well-"I'd like to have a little bit of extra energy. So I did a weight training workout where each of my sets with leg press or leg extension or whatever, large muscle groups, I just turned on a music track that lasts four to five minutes, and I was like, "All right. I can't stop for four to five minutes, and it's gonna be really painful." And that's it. Uh, because I, I think that the cycling itself doesn't necessarily have any magic to it. Like, you could use rowing-

Jay Shetty 12:46 Right. It's the intensity.

Tim Ferriss 12:46 It's the lactic acid.

Jay Shetty 12:48 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 12:48 It's the actual concentration in the blood. Those, I would say, are three interesting fuels to consider, and I'm sure we'll come back to this. But, like, sometimes you don't have a problem-solving issue, sometimes you don't have a quandary in your life that you can think your way out of, you have a fuel issue.

Jay Shetty 13:08 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 13:09 So before you try to-

Jay Shetty 13:11 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 13:11 ...riddle yourself with journaling out of all of your issues, maybe you're just starving.

Jay Shetty 13:17 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 13:17 And that could mean you need food. It could mean you need to improve your insulin sensitivity. Maybe look at intermittent fasting, which completely blew my mind with how it changed my-

Jay Shetty 13:29 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 13:29 ...insulin sensitivity and, uh, biomarkers over the course of four weeks. It really shocked me. And/or, and these are actually compatible, uh, looking at building up your ketogenic m- machinery-

Jay Shetty 13:43 Mm

Tim Ferriss 13:43 ...which you can do in a whole bunch of ways.

Jay Shetty 13:45 I love the point you're making about fuel, and I was definitely someone... I always

Jay Shetty 13:48 felt like when I came to this work, I had a really strong mind because of my previous work, but I hadn't really worked on my body.

Tim Ferriss 13:54 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 13:55 And it was when I married my wife, who's a nutritionist and a dietician, that-

Tim Ferriss 13:58 Good choice. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 13:59 That... Yeah, yeah. Very useful. Extremely useful for many reasons. Uh, but, but the body became a part of the conversation because she was so much about physical health as well as mental and emotional health.

Tim Ferriss 14:10 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 14:11 And I think I was so in the mental-emotional sphere that I kind of disregarded the body to some degree-

Tim Ferriss 14:16 Yeah

Jay Shetty 14:16 ...only to realize how much I was limiting myself-

Tim Ferriss 14:20 Yeah

Jay Shetty 14:20 ...based on this fuel point, and even to speak to a very recent occurrence probably a few years back, I was experiencing fatigue and low energy, although I was positive and living my purpose and felt-

Tim Ferriss 14:32 Yeah

Jay Shetty 14:32 ...meaning in my life and had beautiful relationships, but I was just tired.

Tim Ferriss 14:37 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 14:37 And I remember getting my biomarkers done and everything, and it turned out to be something really basic. But they were just like, "Your vitamin D-"

Tim Ferriss 14:44 Yeah

Jay Shetty 14:44 ..."is at a 10."

Tim Ferriss 14:45 Right.

Jay Shetty 14:46 "It should be at a 60 to 100 id- like, you know, for the optimal. But you're at a 10."

Tim Ferriss 14:51 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 14:51 Like, how did I not understand that something as small as this could be affecting my energy? It wasn't just about meaning. And I think you're so right. People are journaling really hard.

Tim Ferriss 14:59 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 14:59 They're trying to find their purpose. They're trying to do this thing mentally, and half the time it's like you're not giving yourself enough fuel to even be able to have that breakthrough.

Tim Ferriss 15:08 Yeah. It doesn't matter how good you are at driving the race car if no one's done an oil change, no one's checked the tires. [chuckles]

Jay Shetty 15:14 Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 15:15 No one's put proper fuel in the tank, et cetera, et cetera.

Jay Shetty 15:19 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 15:19 Uh, so I, I think that those levels are important to check, right? Like you mentioned the vitamin D. In a lot of my, my friends who have complained about anxiety or depression or fatigue, they might do a micronutrient test and realize that they're deficient in trace minerals, very common, whether it's copper, selenium, or other. And it's like, "Okay. Here. Try, like, eat, eat a handful of Brazil nuts [chuckles] once a day for a week and let me know how it goes." And they're like, "I have energy." I'm like, "Well, yeah. Okay, great. Well, then, then you can check off the selenium." So which I think can be very reassuring for folks, right?

Jay Shetty 15:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 15:59 Because if they've been banging their head against the wall trying to, quote-unquote, "figure out X" and they're just not making progress, it's not necessarily because your brain isn't working, you're not smart enough. Well, maybe it is because your brain isn't working. But you can f-fix it holistically through looking at your mind and body as one thing.

Jay Shetty 16:20 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 16:20 Right? Certainly through, say, meditation, right, you can have... You can exert all sorts of interesting effects on your body, right, through the breath as this sort of interface with the autonomous, uh, autonomic nervous system. So it stands to reason you can do the other.

Jay Shetty 16:37 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 16:37 Right? It's bi-directional. Like, if you want it, you can improve the mind by working on the body, and you can improve the body by working on the mind. They, they go together.

Jay Shetty 16:44 Absolutely. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 16:45 Uh, so that's, that's a lot of what has my attention. I mean, there's a lot of nonsense floating around out there about vagus nerve stimulation, but i-if you talk to certain scientists like Dr. Kevin Tracy, who wrote a great book, I think it's called... great book called "The Great Nerve," all about the vagus nerve, which is really like two-

Jay Shetty 17:03 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 17:04 ...transatlantic cables on either side of the neck with roughly 90 to 100,000 fibers on either side. He's got a great story in the book, uh, where he's discussing all of this research related to, in effect, activating something called the inflammatory reflex and preventing overwhelming cytokine storms for COVID, for you name it. And you can stimulate the vagus nerve a bunch of different ways. You could have an implant. Uh, there's actually something called famotidine over the counter. Talk to your doctor. Don't just start taking this. But it's an antacid, I believe, and that actually has some incredible effects related to that. But he was on stage talking about this at one point, and the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama's contingent happened to be at the same event. And the Dalai Lama got up afterwards, 'cause Kevin was talking about the vagus nerve, right? Just for simplicity, singular. And the Dalai Lama asked a question after the presentation. The translator translated and said, "You know, His Holiness would like to know, are there two of these that run down the neck?" And he said, "Yes. Actually, there are two." And the Dalai Lama kind of chuckled. And there's a practice that they have that involves meditating on these two channels that run down the neck and then basically innervate the rest of-The body, including the abdomen. And it's like, "Hmm. Oh, that's interesting."

Jay Shetty 18:28 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 18:29 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 18:30 Yeah. I, I, I find, I find that East-West connection, like, so fascinating and the, how the science is being able to prove these ancient techniques.

Tim Ferriss 18:38 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 18:38 I remember when I was talking to someone else on the show, it was that idea of them talking about circadian rhythms and looking at the sun first thing in the morning, et cetera, which of course-

Tim Ferriss 18:49 Yeah

Jay Shetty 18:49 ... you've talked about as well. And I was talking about how in the monastery in India, it was always about sun salutations.

Tim Ferriss 18:54 Uh-huh.

Jay Shetty 18:55 So Surya Namaskar-

Tim Ferriss 18:56 Yeah

Jay Shetty 18:56 ... is the Sanskrit version of sun salutations.

Tim Ferriss 18:58 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 18:59 And that was the practice. You woke up in the morning, and you paid respects to the sun-

Tim Ferriss 19:03 Yeah

Jay Shetty 19:03 ... which meant making, you know, eye contact with the sun and allowing-

Tim Ferriss 19:06 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 19:06 ... the sun rays to enter. And I'm like, th- all of these tech- they didn't have the language that we have.

Tim Ferriss 19:11 Right.

Jay Shetty 19:11 But the technique existed far back then. Talk to me about the, uh, did you call it the bioelectric?

Tim Ferriss 19:18 Bioelectric medicine.

Jay Shetty 19:19 Medicine, yeah, because you were talking about chips versus pills.

Tim Ferriss 19:22 Yeah, chips or electricity versus pills.

Jay Shetty 19:24 So explain to me what you mean by chips.

Tim Ferriss 19:26 Well, just microchips. So actually using a device which could be, in the case of, uh, I think it's Setpoint Medical, for instance, has a, an implant which is the size of a omega-3 capsule. I think it's called Setpoint Medical. Uh, they were on the cover of The New York Times for this, and it just got approved. It goes in the neck. It's actually p-a very fast procedure, and it app- it applies stimulation to the vagus nerve, which runs right along the carotid arteries, basically. And it is used for s- rheumatoid arthritis. It gives some people incredible relief, where they might have been incapacitated, laying on a couch, can't get up, have to elevate their legs, can't walk more than a few steps. They get this implant and then boom, like two months later, they're running upstairs on a tour through Europe with their husband. I mean, that's a real example.

Jay Shetty 20:18 It doesn't solve it. It doesn't reverse it. It just provides-

Tim Ferriss 20:21 This is-- That's a very good question. I, I shouldn't speak to that because I don't know enough about-

Jay Shetty 20:25 Yeah, right, right

Tim Ferriss 20:25 ... rheumatoid arthritis and what it looks like in terms of development over long periods of time. What I, what I will say is that broadly speaking, this is controversial, but it's, um, it's not that controversial with a few scientists I interact with who look at this very closely. I think a lot of our psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, some of them, you may be predisposed to those things genetically. But I believe a lot of those chronic conditions start with acute infection, much like long COVID or long Lyme disease. There's some acute immune system insult, often an infection, that leads to then chronic neuroinflammation. And when you address that neuroinflammation, a lot of the symptoms can abate.

Jay Shetty 21:14 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 21:14 Which is why there have been studies looking at just giving people who are depressed anti-inflammatories.

Jay Shetty 21:20 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 21:20 And I'm not saying, by the way, anyone listening or watching, that you should go gobble anti-inflammatories. There are side effects. Don't do that. Uh, but maybe there are other ways to address excessive inflammation, and it turns out vagus nerve stimulation could be one of those. There are other approaches. I can't recommend any current device out there. I'm interacting with this Scandinavian researcher who's amazing. I'm hoping that at least in the US, maybe in the next six months, something will be available that people can grab. Uh, I'll come back to that in terms of ancient insight being corroborated by science because there's a really cool tie-in. Uh, breathing, do breathwork. There are different types of breathwork that absolutely seem to have an effect on the inflammatory reflex. And that's actually part of the reason why I think folks often see benefits from meditation practice, especially if they do it twice a day, like 10 to 20 minutes per session, after about two weeks.

Jay Shetty 22:19 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 22:19 It's so consistent, right? It's like for the first week, they're like, "Ah, I don't know if this is doing anything." And then after like seven to 10 days, there seems to be something that happens, and people are like, "I'm so much calmer. I'm so much this." All right. There are a million different ways you could explain it, but let's throw one out there that doesn't really-- I haven't really heard discussed, that the rhythmic breathing that you entrain when you're doing that kind of sitting activates the vagus nerve. If you use a stimulator, guess what? You use it five minutes in the morning, say, for the year, five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night, because the effects last about 12 hours.

Jay Shetty 22:53 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 22:54 Okay? And it takes about two weeks for most people to notice everything settle.

Jay Shetty 23:00 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 23:01 Well, that's a strange coincidence. And if you do box breathing or something like that, like for people who are maybe tuning in who are like, "Oh, meditation. Oh, God. Like if I have to sit and focus on my breath one more time," or, you know, imagine a candle or whatever it might be. It's not necessarily for everybody. I get it. I mean, I- my monkey mind is on, like, high octane fuel. I get it.

Jay Shetty 23:23 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 23:23 But you could use an app that just helps you breathe.

Jay Shetty 23:26 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 23:26 Right? Or something, box breathing or whatever it might be. Try that 10 minutes twice a day for two weeks. See what happens. I think p- most folks will be very pleasantly surprised. On the ancient wisdom side-

Jay Shetty 23:39 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 23:40 ... I've always been interested but skeptical, interested in but skeptical of acupuncture.

Jay Shetty 23:46 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 23:48 Skeptical because, as with many modalities, practitioners sometimes oversell it.

Jay Shetty 23:54 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 23:54 Panacea for everything.

Jay Shetty 23:55 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 23:55 It's true with psychedelics. It's true with massage. It's true for PT. It's true for surgery. It's [laughs] I can fix all your problems. All right. Probably not. However, there, there are a few aspects, and I went to two universities in China. I speak Chinese, meaning Mandarin in this case. I've spent a lot of time around Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture on animals, how does that work, right? There's, uh, uh, as far as we know, maybe there's not a whole lot of placebo effect withDogs, let's just say. So being able to use acupuncture in place of, say, anesthesia with animals, that's pretty weird. That's interesting.

Jay Shetty 24:33 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 24:34 The other one that seems pretty compelling, there, there are several, but the other one [chuckles] is pregnancy. Using acupuncture for fertility. So what on earth is going on?

Jay Shetty 24:44 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 24:44 If that is actually a thing.

Jay Shetty 24:46 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 24:47 For the time being. Let's say maybe it is, and I, I know a few ch- uh, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, and they have walls of photos of babies. And I'm like, "That's interesting."

Jay Shetty 24:57 It is very-

Tim Ferriss 24:57 Now, you can't, you can't underestimate the power of the mind and the placebo effect, which by the way, people are like, "Oh, it's just placebo effect." The placebo effect is the craziest thing in the world. But let's leave that alone for the moment. One of the ways that you would stimulate, can stimulate some of the fibers in the vagus nerve is with placement on the ear. And you're applying electric current on something called the s- the symbacancha right here. The placement really matters. It's very, very specific, and then you need an- another probe to, you know, ground or complete the circuit effectively. That would be the five minutes of stimulation. You can also do it the neck, but the neck's quite uncomfortable. The placement of those probes corresponds to where the traditional Chinese medicine practitioners put the needles.

Jay Shetty 25:40 No way.

Tim Ferriss 25:41 And electricity's not the only way you can do it, right? It's not the only way. I mean, there was a physician in France who experimented with taking ballpoint pens and pressing on different parts of the ear.

Jay Shetty 25:52 Right.

Tim Ferriss 25:53 Which funny enough, that was in the 1900s. Ended up getting retrofitted and adopted by a lot of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China.

Jay Shetty 26:00 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 26:00 But the overlap's interesting, right?

Jay Shetty 26:02 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 26:02 Like that's very-

Jay Shetty 26:02 It's classic

Tim Ferriss 26:03 ... interesting, and it's also, you have to-

Jay Shetty 26:05 Wow

Tim Ferriss 26:05 ... wonder, it's like, man, how many thousands of years of trial and error did that take to figure out? [laughs]

Jay Shetty 26:10 Trial [laughs] yeah, the wrong place on your ear.

Tim Ferriss 26:12 Yeah. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 26:12 Yeah. And how did they figure it out too?

Tim Ferriss 26:15 Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's wild. And I should say-

Jay Shetty 26:17 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 26:18 ... as one voice of sanity, there's also a lot of stuff that has existed for a very long time that is probably nonsense, right?

Jay Shetty 26:24 Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 26:26 Uh.

Jay Shetty 26:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 26:27 But suffice to say, to answer your question, bioelectric medicine is using electricity or electronics in place of drugs.

Jay Shetty 26:35 To avoid the side effects. That being the primary reason.

Tim Ferriss 26:37 To avoid the side effects, to help establish homeostasis perhaps as opposed to overall blocking something or overall stimulating something, you know, smashing some receptor, but then, oh, by the way, it also has an affinity to all these other receptors that, eh, we don't really wanna mess with, but we can't avoid it.

Jay Shetty 26:54 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 26:55 Uh, and there is a place for drugs. Look, I take, I take prescription medication, right? It's like there is a place for it.

Jay Shetty 27:00 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 27:01 Um, but it's in at least the US where it's shocking to me that this somehow got pushed through. You can advertise on television directly to patients-

Jay Shetty 27:13 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 27:13 ... selling drugs. It's outrageous. The pharmaceutical [laughs] and, you know, industrial complex is a very real thing, and the incentives are very perverse in a lot of cases. So we are over-prescribed, over-medicated, without question.

Jay Shetty 27:31 Yeah, it blew my mind when I moved to this country and saw those ads. I couldn't believe they were real.

Tim Ferriss 27:35 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 27:35 I was like, "This has to be an SNL skit."

Tim Ferriss 27:37 It's so bad.

Jay Shetty 27:37 Or like it has to be something-

Tim Ferriss 27:38 It's so bad

Jay Shetty 27:39 ... comedic. I couldn't believe it. Because you don't have that in the UK, you just, you never see that.

Tim Ferriss 27:43 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 27:43 And so when I moved here, I was like, "Wow, it's literally telling me that this might kill me." Like might kill you is, is a legitimate, you know, like-

Tim Ferriss 27:51 In very, very fast word per minute fine print, right?

Jay Shetty 27:54 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 27:55 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 27:55 It's, it's, it's unbelievable. No, I, I appreciate that. You know, when Radhi and I started our tea company, Juni, it didn't start with a big plan. It started with an idea we really believed in. Shopify is what helped us turn that idea into a real business. It's the platform we use to build and grow Juni while staying connected to the people who support what we do. And what's been mind-blowing? How people actually find us. Sometimes it's an ad on Instagram, other times a YouTube video, a TikTok scroll, and even through AI tools like ChatGPT, you can literally complete a purchase inside a conversation. Shopify makes all of that seamless, because Shopify meets customers where they already are. Our products show up naturally, making it easier for people to connect with what we've created. As Juni continues to grow, I get to focus more on the creative side, knowing Shopify is handling the rest. Thought about starting a business? This is your sign. Get started today at shopify.com/jay.

Jay Shetty 28:57 A lot of what you spoke about, you talked about, you know, doing the, the lactate, and it was like six months to unlock. You talked about the, of the four, four, four, four, like-

Tim Ferriss 29:05 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 29:05 ... four on, four off, four on, four off, three times a week.

Tim Ferriss 29:08 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 29:08 Six months. And then you spoke about the idea of, uh, you know, two weeks of meditation twice a day to feel-

Tim Ferriss 29:14 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 29:14 ... the benefits. What I find more and more fascinating, even in myself, and what to speak of our community and the audience that tunes into shows like this is, we know that everyone struggles with that initial discomfort.

Tim Ferriss 29:26 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 29:26 Like you said, you have to do it for two weeks to start feeling the benefits and-

Tim Ferriss 29:29 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 29:30 ... noticing that, that calm or letting things settle, or you have to do something for six months. What have you found to be the best startup strategy to a new habit to unlock its potential when it may-

Tim Ferriss 29:41 Yeah

Jay Shetty 29:41 ... take two weeks to unlock its benefit?

Tim Ferriss 29:43 This might sound like a simplistic answer, but it's telling people that.

Jay Shetty 29:48 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 29:48 Do you know what I mean?

Jay Shetty 29:49 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 29:49 Because in many cases, it's like-

Jay Shetty 29:51 You're so right

Tim Ferriss 29:51 ... it's like, hey, study a language and you'll learn the language. But there, you're setting someone up for failure in that example, and I use that just because most people are like, "Oh, God," so much PTSD about learning languages, right? But if you tell them like, "Hey, here's what the graph looks like. As you... You're gonna have this type of experience and then once you add this new grammatical construction, like you're gonna have a bit of a trough of sorrow. Don't worry about it, right? You're gonna plateau, but you're not actually plateauing. Your mind is adjusting-

Jay Shetty 30:20 Mm

Tim Ferriss 30:20 ... to involve this additional complexity. And then da, da, da, da, and you kind of explain what like the stock chart of your brain is gonna look like, then people don't freak out and the abandonment rate's gonna be less.And so I think with something like meditation, saying you may see benefits sooner, but experience seems to indicate that a s- a switch is flipped around two weeks.

Jay Shetty 30:46 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 30:47 So commit to two and a half weeks-

Jay Shetty 30:49 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 30:50 ... and do less than you think is necessary. Do less than you think you can do. This applies to any new habit as far as I'm concerned. If you think you can do twenty minutes, but that's pushing it into redline territory, do ten.

Jay Shetty 31:04 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 31:05 Do less than you think you can do because that is going to contribute to endurance and longevity and enthusiasm.

Jay Shetty 31:12 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 31:13 Don't bleed the stone.

Jay Shetty 31:14 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 31:14 Right? There's a lot of upside to the Protestant work ethic and yada, yada, yada, rugged individual st- stuff that we find in many parts of the world. This is not a place to, like, show how much you can do-

Jay Shetty 31:27 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 31:28 ... if you're trying to adopt a new behavior.

Jay Shetty 31:29 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 31:30 So with, with the meditation, I, I, I would just-- I, I think it, it is undervalued how setting expectations can be-

Jay Shetty 31:39 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 31:40 ... the missing ingredient.

Jay Shetty 31:41 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 31:41 It's just like, hey, if I were trying to sell one of my friends, which I do often-

Jay Shetty 31:44 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 31:45 ... I would just say, "Look, much like ketosis or a ketogenic diet, it's pass-fail. It's binary. You can't do it fifty percent. The good news is you're gonna know after two and a half weeks, in the case of meditation, whether this works for you at all or not."

Jay Shetty 32:01 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 32:01 "And if it works, it could be pretty dramatic. But if you give up after a week, the whole thing's wasted."

Jay Shetty 32:06 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 32:06 "So just commit to two and a half."

Jay Shetty 32:09 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 32:09 And, you know, if you need to do a bet with a friend or something to set stakes and incentivize yourself so you'll be embarrassed if you stop, like, guess what? That's useful, too.

Jay Shetty 32:19 Yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 32:19 And I talked a lot about that in "The 4-Hour Chef."

Jay Shetty 32:21 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 32:21 Like, how do you actually set up incentives so that it's harder to quit? These are very-- You know, have your friend take some photos of you in your tighty whities in unflattering light, and that'll get released into the wild if you don't-

Jay Shetty 32:34 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 32:34 ... do it for two and a half weeks. Or it's like a hundred dollar bet and your buddy, your friend is gonna donate that to your most hated political candidate in your name if you don't do it for two and a half weeks. Okay, great.

Jay Shetty 32:45 Yeah. So good.

Tim Ferriss 32:46 You're, you're more likely to do it.

Jay Shetty 32:47 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 32:48 Everyone needs reasons.

Jay Shetty 32:49 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 32:50 So-

Jay Shetty 32:51 So good

Tim Ferriss 32:52 ... uh, I, I think that's the biggest one, honestly.

Jay Shetty 32:54 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 32:54 It's just setting expectations. And in the case of the, the Norwegian four-by-four, uh, this is a quirk of science and interpretation of science. So they did do the six months, and the effects seem to extend out to five years.

Jay Shetty 33:09 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 33:10 But that doesn't mean that you need six months.

Jay Shetty 33:12 Right. Right. Right.

Tim Ferriss 33:13 That was just the study design.

Jay Shetty 33:15 Yes. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 33:16 So who knows? I would imagine that it's not all or nothing.

Jay Shetty 33:20 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 33:20 That it's cumulative, and that's actually what I was texting with Tommy Wood about today. I said, "Well, like, what do we know and what do we not know?" Because that was the study design, and that's, I'm sure, since been replicated and people are modeling that. But is it possible that instead of, say, four-by-four, so, you know, sixteen minutes of this VO2 max training, is it possible that less time would work as long as you hit certain peak levels of lactate?

Jay Shetty 33:48 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 33:49 Could a ten-minute, could a five-minute-

Jay Shetty 33:51 Yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 33:51 ... session of weight training work if you hit a certain minimum threshold?

Jay Shetty 33:56 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 33:56 Question mark.

Jay Shetty 33:57 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 33:58 Who knows?

Jay Shetty 33:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 33:59 Right? Has anyone done three months-

Jay Shetty 34:01 Try it, yeah

Tim Ferriss 34:01 ... Norwegian protocol and looked at the effects? Yes or no? Maybe, maybe not.

Jay Shetty 34:05 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 34:05 This is the kind of stuff that I also fund through my foundation, right?

Jay Shetty 34:08 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 34:08 These are the-- [laughs] I get so tired of kind of chewing on my fingernails, wondering about these things that I just fund a lot of science. But there may be a smaller minimum effective dose-

Jay Shetty 34:18 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 34:18 ... for that stuff.

Jay Shetty 34:18 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 34:19 We'll see.

Jay Shetty 34:20 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 34:20 We'll see.

Jay Shetty 34:20 Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 34:21 That's the business of science, right?

Jay Shetty 34:22 Yeah. Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss 34:23 Is trying not

Tim Ferriss 34:24 to fool yourself. Setting things up so it's very hard for you to fool yourself-

Jay Shetty 34:27 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 34:27 ... or to bias.

Jay Shetty 34:28 Yeah. So I like that. Yeah. Underset expectations and do less than you think. That's a great one. Uh-

Tim Ferriss 34:34 Do less than you think. Absolutely.

Jay Shetty 34:36 Yeah. Do less than you think is a brilliant, brilliant method, and I think we're so scared of saying that to our friends or people we love because we know everyone wants instant change.

Tim Ferriss 34:45 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 34:45 And so because people want instant change, we wanna say, "Do this today and it will calm you down."

Tim Ferriss 34:50 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 34:50 And we know that isn't true because-

Tim Ferriss 34:52 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 34:52 ... it's gonna take a practice and a discipline and it might, but...

Tim Ferriss 34:56 Yeah. I mean, there are some, there are some very fast returns and then other things take-- seem to take more time. I interviewed, uh, years ago someone named, uh, John Krystal, who I believe is the chair of psychiatry at Yale, or he was at the time. And he did a lot of, along with his colleagues, a lot of the seminal work on ketamine as an antidepressant in humans.

Jay Shetty 35:18 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 35:19 And I think it was point five milligrams per kilogram over X period of time, and it showed these amazing effects. But now the point five milligrams per kilogram has become this religious dogma among a lot of practitioners, including some scientists who are like, "This is the protocol."

Jay Shetty 35:37 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 35:37 And it's like, well, is it? It's one protocol.

Jay Shetty 35:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was tested in that way.

Tim Ferriss 35:42 But it doesn't mean that is the-

Jay Shetty 35:44 Mm

Tim Ferriss 35:44 ... end all be all.

Jay Shetty 35:46 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 35:46 I would say also just on the ketamine front, very risk compound. High likelihood of addiction. Listen to that episode or just do some real deep dive before you ever consider having certainly any ketamine at home.

Jay Shetty 36:01 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 36:02 Whether that's through Johnson & Johnson esketamine, Spravato or through a clinic, my recommendation is do not have lozenges or anything like that at home. If you're gonna do-- If you're gonna pursue that for different applications, I think it's very interesting for suicidality.

Jay Shetty 36:19 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 36:19 It's one of the few things that I've seen if someone is acutely at risk of hurting themselves, in some cases with an infusion or an injection, a few hours later they go from, "I'm gonna kill myself today," to, "I don't know what I was so upset about." That's crazy.

Jay Shetty 36:33 That big?

Tim Ferriss 36:34 Yeah.I've seen that multiple times and so have other clinicians. It's-- That's one of the few interventions I would say for that particular type of catastrophic scenario that's pretty interesting.

Jay Shetty 36:44 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 36:45 So in any case, I'll stop there for the moment.

Jay Shetty 36:47 Yeah. No, I'm so-- I love it, man.

Tim Ferriss 36:49 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 36:49 This is what I wanted. I was like, I was like, "You're one of the few guests... You're one of the few people you can truly do this with."

Tim Ferriss 36:55 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 36:55 Where I'm just like, "Tim, I just wanna know what you're fascinated by right now." Like-

Tim Ferriss 36:58 Let my brain go crazy

Jay Shetty 37:00 ... that's what I-- but that's what I love about-

Tim Ferriss 37:01 Yeah

Jay Shetty 37:01 ... like it's, it's, you know, that, that's what I love about talking to you or like learning from you over the years-

Tim Ferriss 37:05 Yeah

Jay Shetty 37:05 ... is that you're just so deeply curious about so many things happening at the same time and they're just-

Tim Ferriss 37:11 Yeah

Jay Shetty 37:12 ... and they're all just interesting and new and they, they help you be more curious and ask questions and, you know.

Tim Ferriss 37:17 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 37:18 And, and I appreciate that because I, I'm like, "Well, otherwise what's the point?" Like, "Why, why are we even doing this?" You know? It's, uh [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 37:22 Yeah. People can, can see why, uh, I need to deal with the double-edged sword of OCD. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 37:27 Yeah, no. But I mean, I mean, no, you-

Tim Ferriss 37:29 It's great when you're looking at science, but if you're looking at some mistake you made yesterday and you're thinking about that for f-four days straight, maybe not so helpful.

Jay Shetty 37:37 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 37:38 You know?

Jay Shetty 37:38 How, how

Jay Shetty 37:39 did you make that-- Was that ever a turn you needed to make?

Tim Ferriss 37:41 Oh, yeah. I mean, that's why I did the, you know, antibiotic plus accelerated TMS. Oh, yeah.

Jay Shetty 37:47 What helped you make that turn?

Tim Ferriss 37:49 A few things, right? I, I think there's a degree of pain that especially over long periods of time you want relief from and for some of us that is just the looping ruminative mind that is turning on itself. So whether that's-- could be any number of things, right? Could be-- And in terms of OCD, like my mom's makes me look like a cakewalk with her OCD, but I'm not flipping light switches. I'm not washing my hands.

Jay Shetty 38:18 No, no. Mm-mm.

Tim Ferriss 38:19 Um, which is not denigrate any of that stuff. It's like people have different ways of it manifesting. For me it's all internal.

Jay Shetty 38:23 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 38:24 It's all internal. What if this? I should've said that. Loop, loop, loop, loop, loop. Imagining outcomes, et cetera. Perseverating on some conversation that I wish had gone a different way. And it's exhausting.

Jay Shetty 38:36 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 38:37 It's really exhausting. And, uh, you know, rest in peace, Nolan Williams unfortunately passed away, but I was introduced to him through the topic of psychedelics because he pioneered at Stanford also, he was a real polymath, a l-lot of very compelling research related to ibogaine. So ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from, uh, iboga tabernanth, which is a psychedelic plant. In this case the Bwiti tribe and others are using the root bark for these very long, super intense Mount Everest of psychedelic-like experiences. It, it is not to be trifled with. There are some very significant cardiac risks for certain people. You can die taking this unlike most psychedelics. And he was the first to really put under a fine scientific lens some of the neuroanatomical changes specifically in veterans. And so [laughs] yeah, ibogaine is-- it's a pretty remarkable compound in the sense that it effectively reversed the brain age of these veterans and specifically in cases of traumatic brain injury. That's strange.

Jay Shetty 39:55 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 39:55 This is [laughs] this is not really something you see.

Jay Shetty 39:58 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 39:58 It's not something that people had ob-observed with other drugs including other psychedelics and it seems to relate to something called glial derived neurotrophic factor. But suffice to say I connected with him about that and then it turned out this guy's not a one trick pony. He also is one of the world leaders in brain st-- non-invasive brain stimulation and accelerated TMS and I started looking at the literature and the results and I'm like, "You gotta be kidding me." I mean this reads like science fiction number one. Number two it seems unbelievable like a total scam but I know it's not a scam. Like these are very, very top tier scientists and when I realized that it could be applied to-- Well a few things. Backstory, I always had self-described as someone who struggled with depression. When I actually was able to address it most successfully I realized that the depression was born of fatigue which came from anxiety which interrupted my sleep.

Jay Shetty 40:58 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 40:59 So the domino to tip-

Jay Shetty 41:01 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 41:01 ... was actually the anxiety piece.

Jay Shetty 41:03 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 41:04 Much like the-- kind of like, this is not the greatest comparison but like the VO2 max. It's like that's the-

Jay Shetty 41:08 Right. Yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 41:08 ... that's the output you can point to.

Jay Shetty 41:10 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 41:10 But the catalyst was actually the anxiety and I was like well YOLO let's try it. The safety profile looks really appealing. The actual stimulation is relatively sp-speaking pretty low power. It's been around for decades. It seems like mostly upside potential.

Jay Shetty 41:28 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 41:28 There are some risks involved people should be aware of and people can search accelerated TMS and so on to find those. But all in all attractive for someone who's experiencing in my case the amount of chronic mental anguish.

Jay Shetty 41:41 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 41:42 That's what kicked it off.

Jay Shetty 41:43 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 41:44 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 41:45 How, how accessible is that now?

Tim Ferriss 41:47 So TMS itself, let's just say conventional TMS, is actually, uh, quite accessible much like ketamine clinics there are fly by night operations.

Jay Shetty 41:57 Right.

Tim Ferriss 41:57 So caveat emptor.

Jay Shetty 42:00 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 42:00 You gotta do your homework.

Jay Shetty 42:01 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 42:02 But TMS is very widely accessible.

Jay Shetty 42:06 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 42:06 And often reimbursed by insurance.

Jay Shetty 42:08 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 42:09 Accelerated TMS as far as I know is not reimbursable by insurance at the moment.

Jay Shetty 42:15 Right.

Tim Ferriss 42:15 So it is available at certain clinics. Uh, there's one that I've used called Acacia Clinic or Acacia Clinics in Sunnyvale, California. But it's expensive.

Jay Shetty 42:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 42:27 It's expensive. It's expensive for the five day. My hope and also part of the reason why I volunteered to be like one of the first 60 monkeys shot into space with the, the d-cycloserine, this very low dose antibiotic and the one day is that if you compress the five days into one day suddenly theCost should be much, much lower

Jay Shetty 42:47 Yeah, of course. Yeah

Tim Ferriss 42:47 ... dramatically lower.

Jay Shetty 42:48 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 42:49 And it's much more accessible because not that many people can take a week off of work, completely off of work-

Jay Shetty 42:57 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 42:57 ... because your brain will be exhausted.

Jay Shetty 42:59 Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss 42:59 When you have this treatment, [laughs] I remember going in for my first day of stimulations, got like nine hours of sleep. I was feeling like a million bucks. I could do jumping jacks all day. Had my first eight-minute stimulation, and I felt like I had just pulled three all-nighters studying for a test. I was so mentally tired. So if you do it, do not have any delusions of cranking out fifty minutes of work in between these stimulations. Ain't gonna happen.

Jay Shetty 43:25 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 43:26 But the one day, man, it's, it could be the future for-

Jay Shetty 43:30 Mm

Tim Ferriss 43:30 ... a lot of people.

Jay Shetty 43:31 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 43:32 And that is not widely available, but people can do some digging.

Jay Shetty 43:35 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 43:35 Uh, there are clinics, not a lot of them. The two main hardware companies are Brainsway. That's one, which I've used. I've used both because, I mean, my whole shtick, and it's real. It's part of the mission for me is being the guinea pig and taking the notes so that not everyone has to-

Jay Shetty 43:55 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 43:55 ... right? Just in case there's collateral damage, which sometimes there is. Uh, Brainsway has, um, some very, very sophisticated hardware, and then MagVenture is another one that has, uh, very well-developed hardware.

Jay Shetty 44:07 Right.

Tim Ferriss 44:08 As far as I know, those are kind of the two f-front runners. The other that I mentioned, which focuses specifically on the one day, AMPA Health, I have not tested, so I can't speak to that directly.

Jay Shetty 44:18 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 44:19 There seem to be credible people involved, but I can't-- I haven't really done the due diligence.

Jay Shetty 44:22 Yeah, yeah. Good to know.

Tim Ferriss 44:24 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 44:24 Good to know. I have so many friends and family members asking and-

Tim Ferriss 44:26 Yeah

Jay Shetty 44:27 ... wanting to discover, so very-

Tim Ferriss 44:28 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 44:28 ... very useful insight.

Jay Shetty 44:30 Tim, I wanted to switch to some of the philosophical aspects you mentioned there-

Tim Ferriss 44:32 Sure. Yeah

Jay Shetty 44:33 ... earlier, like the, uh, things that you're fascinated by right now, and I was thinking about even as a society, how we seem to kind of oscillate between this work-life balance to then hustle culture, and it seems that that just takes over the conversation for that period in time.

Tim Ferriss 44:51 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 44:51 So rewind back probably five to 10 years, and hustle culture was the thing.

Tim Ferriss 44:56 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 44:57 Work-life balance has kind of made its comeback now, and then you could look back twenty-five years, and we were talking about work-life balance when it first kind of probably entered the zeitgeist, and it was preceded by this hustle intensity culture, whatever it was called then. And you're kind of talking about this idea of this achievement mindset that you had-

Tim Ferriss 45:15 Mm

Jay Shetty 45:15 ... and it's been useful, and then now looking at this acceptance mindset that, you know, you're almost looking at the value of both, and I think that's even this whole conversation. We're talking about the value of both or this and this, or, you know, the connection between old and new and being curious, and I find, I find that with work-life balance and hustle culture or achievement-- Let's call it achievement because hustle culture just sounds like working hard without maybe any direction.

Tim Ferriss 45:41 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 45:42 But achievement culture and acceptance culture, which feel like together they're so synergistic, yet we tend to just go between one or the other-

Tim Ferriss 45:52 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 45:53 ... in different phases of our life.

Tim Ferriss 45:54 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 45:55 Where are you at with making sense of that for yourself and thinking about it for others?

Tim Ferriss 45:59 Well, I'll say something that might surprise people. So the first thing, as the guy who wrote a book called "The 4-Hour Workweek," like, I have no problem with 80-hour workweeks if there are good reasons behind it.

Jay Shetty 46:11 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 46:12 So let me-- I'll just let that settle for a second, and I'll add something that normally I wouldn't add to that, which is, like, read the Serenity Prayer, the actual-

Jay Shetty 46:22 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 46:22 ... Serenity Prayer. Acceptance across the board for everything is effectively becoming a cow standing in the rain, right? That's just complacency-

Jay Shetty 46:31 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 46:31 ... passivity. And then completely unrestrained achievement is just a greyhound running around a track chasing a rabbit.

Jay Shetty 46:39 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 46:40 And those dogs can't run very long. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 46:43 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 46:45 Uh, but they can sprint.

Jay Shetty 46:47 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 46:47 So number one, if you can't control or affect something, that probably lands in the acceptance bucket, right? Which is why I've not had social media on my phone for three or four years. Doomscrolling, not helpful for a million different reasons. I know people probably agree with this at face value. Nonetheless, [laughs]

Jay Shetty 47:05 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 47:06 Like, let's look at behavior, right? Like, show me what you do, not what you say kind of situation. It's like my friends, even some of my most accomplished, achiever friends, these are, like, mega stars within business. I know one guy in particular, such a smart guy. He's so good. He's got a wonderful family, and he took X off his phone a few years ago, and it's like he went through twenty years of therapy, right? It was like a month later, like, everything's better.

Jay Shetty 47:35 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 47:35 And then I'm in a group thread with him, and a few months ago, he started sending links to things on X, and I was like, "Uh-oh."

Jay Shetty 47:41 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 47:42 "You're back on the sauce."

Jay Shetty 47:43 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 47:43 "When did that happen?" And he's like, "Oh, I got dragged back in the cesspool. It's the worst." It's like he's been-

Jay Shetty 47:49 Yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 47:49 ... just came out of POW camp.

Jay Shetty 47:51 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 47:51 Like, he's a mess.

Jay Shetty 47:52 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 47:52 Uh, I, I mean, if, if you're listening, sorry. I, I-

Jay Shetty 47:55 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 47:56 Not, not a mess, but it's just like it's not an improvement.

Jay Shetty 47:58 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 47:58 It's, it's a worsening of psychological state, right? So that stuff, it's like if you can't act on it-

Jay Shetty 48:03 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 48:04 ... or if you're not going to act on it, that has to go in the acceptance bucket or in, in the ignore bucket-

Jay Shetty 48:08 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 48:08 ... in the, like, selective ignorance bucket. Then on the achievement side, for me, I would say that as a way of kind of setting the table, one of my friends, Josh Waitzkin, um, my second-ever podcast, by the way, uh, he was the basis for "Searching for Bobby Fischer." He's considered a chess prodigy. He hates that. Doesn't really describe him well either because he's become world-class, very, like, top1% in a couple of different disciplines. He's very systematic, but one of his guiding tenets, maxims, is avoid the simmering six, and that just means you're either off, like you could be taking a nap under a set of bleachers or something, or you're on, like you're the greyhound, right?You are completely focused and you're in sixth gear.

Jay Shetty 48:56 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 48:56 He's like, "Avoid everything in between."

Jay Shetty 48:58 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 48:58 So avoiding the simmering six. And I, and a lot of people I think, are at risk of the gravitational pull of the default, which is the simmering six.

Jay Shetty 49:09 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 49:09 Getting interrupted by text messages and emails and responding to everyone else's manufactured emergency, and so on.

Jay Shetty 49:17 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 49:17 That's the simmering six, and that will just murder you psycho-emotionally.

Jay Shetty 49:21 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 49:22 So for me, I try to really oscillate between restfulness or sprint. The fact of the matter is, as much as I would like to think otherwise, like I'm a working dog, right? I'm like, I'm like a Border Collie, right? If, if idle hands are the devil's workshop [laughs] then, you know, by extension it's c- like you leave a Border Collie trapped in an apartment long enough, it's gonna chew the couce- the couch to pieces.

Jay Shetty 49:49 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 49:49 Turn into a neurotic mess. It's like a lot of people are like that. I'm like that. It's good for me to have a mission, a project.

Jay Shetty 49:57 Yeah, me too.

Tim Ferriss 49:58 Um, yeah.

Jay Shetty 49:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 49:59 It's just... And I don't think anyone needs to apologize for that.

Jay Shetty 50:02 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 50:02 Uh, so for instance, like with this, uh, I have an 850-page draft of a book, and it's like, all right, well how-- what am I gonna do with that beast? I'll probably do a retreat where all I do is eat, sleep, exercise, write. That's it. And it will be full on as many hours a day as I can handle every day for a few weeks.

Jay Shetty 50:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 50:26 And it's not gonna be the four-hour workweek.

Jay Shetty 50:27 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 50:28 But it, it was with a, it's with an endpoint, with a very precise purpose-

Jay Shetty 50:34 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 50:34 ... that I feel good about, that I feel aligned with, and that's fine. And then after that I will probably b- bookend it by booking something like three to seven days with a handful of close friends doing something.

Jay Shetty 50:47 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 50:48 To just park it-

Jay Shetty 50:49 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 50:49 ... in zero. And I recognize that exact sequence of events will not apply to everybody, b- but if you just use the mantra of avoid the simmering six-

Jay Shetty 51:01 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 51:01 ... I think you can get a lot of mileage out of it.

Jay Shetty 51:04 Yeah. I like that too. I, I, I think you're spot on. I think that's probably where I've netted out too, because I think that simmering six is the distraction and is where all the stress and the tension comes from, where you're trying to balance both-

Tim Ferriss 51:17 Mm

Jay Shetty 51:18 ... at all times perfectly.

Tim Ferriss 51:20 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 51:20 Or get distracted by, "I'm trying to spend time with my family, but I'm still on my phone."

Tim Ferriss 51:24 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 51:25 Or, "I'm at work and I'm trying to make sure everything's okay at home."

Tim Ferriss 51:29 Right.

Jay Shetty 51:29 And you're never gonna win that way, ever.

Tim Ferriss 51:32 Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 51:32 And you have to have these really clear... I was, I was invited, yesterday was Sunday, and I was invited to a work thing like last minute on a Saturday night, and like years ago I would've said yes immediately because I thought it was extremely valuable and I needed to be there, and if I wasn't there, then I'd miss out on opportunities. And it was-- I was saying to my wife, and I had to say it to her only to make myself feel better about myself. I was like, "I'm so proud I said no."

Tim Ferriss 51:57 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 51:57 Because I've like really promised myself that my weekends are off time.

Tim Ferriss 52:01 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 52:01 And that wasn't the case in the beginning, and I'm glad it wasn't the case because I was sprinting and I needed that extra work, and that was important.

Tim Ferriss 52:08 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 52:08 And I, I don't feel bad about it. It was the right thing to do. But at this point, this was the right thing to do of, to be able to say, "Well, no, I really want a Sunday off."

Tim Ferriss 52:16 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 52:17 "I don't wanna run to a work thing in the middle of the day, which will probably take four hours, and, and I don't need to. It's not an emergency. I'm not solving anything."

Tim Ferriss 52:24 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 52:25 Uh, and, and yeah, that on and... What do you think is the biggest... Obviously, the simmering six is the obvious answer, but

Jay Shetty 52:30 what do you think is the biggest thing people come up against when they're trying to do on and off? Like, what's the hardest part of that? Your friend, for example, who quit X-

Tim Ferriss 52:38 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 52:38 ... felt the benefit, saw the growth, and then gets pulled back in.

Tim Ferriss 52:42 Uh, I think he had too much time on his hands.

Jay Shetty 52:44 Right. Okay.

Tim Ferriss 52:45 He's a rep- post-economic and-

Jay Shetty 52:48 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 52:48 ... Border Collie.

Jay Shetty 52:49 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 52:49 He has a lot of time for u- unusual, rare reasons.

Jay Shetty 52:54 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 52:55 Right? But I would say that if you do not have a primary project-

Jay Shetty 53:00 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 53:00 ... or mission, and it doesn't mean your job has to be something you love twenty-four/seven. Like working to live and just having a job that you can tolerate that you're good at, great. Like I actually think that's fine.

Jay Shetty 53:12 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 53:12 But if, on the other hand, let's just say you're an entrepreneur and you're kind of floating around. Like maybe you have a few cool things you're pursuing, but there's no hell yes, you know, kind of along the lines of Derek Sivers.

Jay Shetty 53:24 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 53:25 You're gonna be tempted to wander.

Jay Shetty 53:27 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 53:27 And that's how you end up sitting on the toilet looking at Instagram, and you're like, "I can't feel my legs. Oh, I've been here forty-five minutes."

Jay Shetty 53:34 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 53:34 Like that's how that, that's how that happens. And I've been there.

Jay Shetty 53:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 53:37 And it means you don't have a big enough yes.

Jay Shetty 53:39 Yes, yes.

Tim Ferriss 53:40 You need a bigger yes.

Jay Shetty 53:41 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 53:42 Uh, and I would say that the avoid the simmering six, though, is unhelpful in so much as it's telling you what not to do.

Jay Shetty 53:51 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 53:52 But that doesn't really give you a whole lot of direction. So another way to frame it is actually quoting a friend of mine, Chris Sacca, phenomenal, incredible guy, just like one of the best investors I've ever met. His story is nuts. And his question is effectively, like, are you living offense or defense? Right? So if you're responding to everyone else's agenda for your time in email-

Jay Shetty 54:15 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 54:15 ... defense. Right? If, for instance... I, I don't know when this happened, maybe you've experienced this, but [laughs] I guess people feel so stressed out and short on time that a lot of very busy friends of mine are now catching up on Sundays. Sundays is like their catch up on email day.

Jay Shetty 54:34 Yeah. Right.

Tim Ferriss 54:34 So I'll get texts that are like about business stuff. And my res-

Jay Shetty 54:37 On Sunday

Tim Ferriss 54:38 ... and I just, and my response has to be, for sanity, 'cause that, if I respo- and if I engage with that, I'm playing defense and breaking my own rules and boundaries.

Jay Shetty 54:47 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 54:47 So I'm just like, "Hey, bud! Sorry, don't do business on weekends." Like, "Text me again on Monday, Tuesday," whatever.

Jay Shetty 54:53 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 54:54 And, you know, Dr. Seuss has this amazing, Ted Geisel has this amazing quote, uh, "Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter."

Jay Shetty 55:02 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:03 Right?

Jay Shetty 55:03 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:03 It's like if somebody gets pissed off about that-

Jay Shetty 55:05 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 55:06 Guess what? You know, let them opt out.

Jay Shetty 55:08 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:08 And with, with all my friends, they're like, "Love that. Cool."

Jay Shetty 55:12 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:12 "Talk to you next week."

Jay Shetty 55:12 Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:13 They're fine.

Jay Shetty 55:14 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:14 Uh, so I would say aim for offense, not defense.

Jay Shetty 55:17 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 55:17 Offense means you're deciding on what you wanna do, and you're applying a certain amount of time or energy towards that-

Jay Shetty 55:23 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 55:24 ... before you're reactive.

Jay Shetty 55:25 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:26 You know, Jim Collins, the writer of-- author of "Good to Great"-

Jay Shetty 55:29 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 55:29 ... and "Built to Last" and these iconic books, he tracks his creative hours.

Jay Shetty 55:33 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 55:34 And I think for every three hundred and sixty-five day period, he's gotta have one thousand and something hours.

Jay Shetty 55:41 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 55:41 And he tracks it daily.

Jay Shetty 55:43 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 55:43 And if he's running behind on the count, he's like, "Oh, something's gotta change."

Jay Shetty 55:45 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 55:46 I don't take it to that level, but I try to make before I manage in a sense. Like when-- I, I really try to reserve the hours after I wake up for creative work to the extent that I can. I actually think I do my best creative work incredibly late at night.

Jay Shetty 56:05 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 56:05 But that is socially incompatible with any type of partner.

Jay Shetty 56:08 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 56:08 So I've had to switch things around a little bit.

Jay Shetty 56:11 Have you-- Wow, have you really?

Tim Ferriss 56:13 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jay Shetty 56:13 That's, that's impressive.

Tim Ferriss 56:14 I mean, my, uh, "4-Hour Workweek," "4-Hour Body"-

Jay Shetty 56:16 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 56:16 ... "4-Hour Chef," all written-

Jay Shetty 56:18 At night

Tim Ferriss 56:18 ... be-between like nine PM and four AM.

Jay Shetty 56:20 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 56:20 I would do research during the day.

Jay Shetty 56:22 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 56:22 But the actual synthesis, writing, et cetera, was all done very, very late at

Tim Ferriss 56:26 night.

Jay Shetty 56:26 So how have you managed to change yourself to a morning person?

Tim Ferriss 56:29 I don't think I am a morning person.

Jay Shetty 56:31 Right.

Tim Ferriss 56:31 I would say that there, there are a few things. So one is recognizing relationships are the m- are the, the meat of life.

Jay Shetty 56:40 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 56:41 If, if [chuckles] you're vegan or something, it's the, the sustenance of life.

Jay Shetty 56:45 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 56:46 I wrote this blog post, just went up like five days ago. I spent so long putting it together, called, you know, "The Self-Help Trap," like what I've learned after twenty-plus years of, quote-unquote, "optimizing myself."

Jay Shetty 56:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 56:59 Talking about some of this, but basically reorienting Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which by the way, Abraham himself never made a pyramid, and he, he added an update to that. People are accustomed to thinking about sef- self-actualization at the top.

Jay Shetty 57:11 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 57:12 He actually added self-tran-transcendence later. And th- and it was always something that was moving and shifting.

Jay Shetty 57:20 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 57:20 But I have recognized for myself, for quality of life, for the experience of time dilation, just getting more life out of your years, right? Not just adding more years to your life. We could talk a lot about that.

Jay Shetty 57:35 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 57:36 Relationships, close friends, family. It sounds so self-evident, but how many people do we know, maybe you look in the mirror and you see them, who at the end of a year, if you ask them, "Did you spend as much time as you would've liked this last year with your ten most important relationships?"

Jay Shetty 57:55 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 57:55 Almost everybody's gonna say no.

Jay Shetty 57:57 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 57:58 So really taking that on as a challenge means if I'm sacrificing twenty percent of my output because I'm forcing myself [laughs] to pretend to cosplay as a morning person-

Jay Shetty 58:10 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 58:10 ... that's fine.

Jay Shetty 58:11 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 58:12 Right? Now, one could make the argument, and it's not totally, uh, off base, uh, that, well, that's convenient for Tim to say 'cause, you know, he's had decades of, uh, putting things out that have-

Jay Shetty 58:25 Yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 58:25 ... luckily done-

Jay Shetty 58:25 Achieved, yeah

Tim Ferriss 58:26 ... done well enough. But I d- I don't think... That does hold some water, but it doesn't, it doesn't really hold all the water. [chuckles] That's, that's not, I don't think, a real expression. But the point is I have, through sprinting, right? But not ending up at The Simmering Six over many decades, right? Or like The Simmering Seven or Eight, which is even worse. Uh, you're running hot. I have burned out so many times that coming back to the meditation, right? Do less than you think you can do. If I dial back, let's say I lose l- quote-unquote, "lose" twenty percent and I don't burn out, well, that's like playing sports and not getting injured, right? If you get injured and you're out for two months-

Jay Shetty 59:06 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 59:07 ... and then you have three months of rehab-

Jay Shetty 59:09 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 59:09 ... you didn't save any time by being intense.

Jay Shetty 59:11 Totally.

Tim Ferriss 59:12 You lost time.

Jay Shetty 59:13 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 59:13 So I feel like also not being a morning person, like some folks, I have so many friends that are just like, "I wake up, I'm on fire." So jealous. Now cha- playing with your fuel source can, can help this actually.

Jay Shetty 59:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 59:26 But I feel like if, even if I have less energy, what that means is I just have to be very smart and selective about what I apply myself to.

Jay Shetty 59:38 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 59:38 So it makes me s- more selective with projects, more focused in what I'm trying to do 'cause I'm like, all right, friend X gets four hours of lightning in a bottle every morning. I probably get, eh, maybe ninety minutes, depending on how much caffeine I've had. So [laughs] I need to make those ninety minutes count.

Jay Shetty 59:54 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 59:55 And I-- that's actually a helpful forcing function for me.

Jay Shetty 59:59 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think

Jay Shetty 1:00:01 going back to what you were saying about doom scrolling and screen doom, I've had-- I mean, this sounds, again, so basic, but, but it is the stuff we all struggle with.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:09 Uh-huh.

Jay Shetty 1:00:09 Like I had to really make a commitment that if I was on a screen-

Tim Ferriss 1:00:13 Mm

Jay Shetty 1:00:13 ... that I was only on one screen at a time.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:15 [laughs] Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:00:16 Because what I would find was sometimes my wife and I would sit down to watch a show in the evening.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:21 Mm.

Jay Shetty 1:00:22 And I'm like, there's v- there's very little TV that gets my attention enough to really commit.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:29 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:00:29 And, and I'm not someone who generally loves using their time to do that.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:34 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:00:34 But at the end of a long day of work, and it's been busy, and we've had dinner together, we've connected, and you just kinda wanna zone out. I don't have the energy. I'm, I'm more the other way. I have lots of energy in the morning. In the evening, I can hang out with friends or family, but I don't do creative work in the evening. I never have.And so mine's the opposite, where I have less energy at that time, and so kind of switching off is kind of nice. But switching off and feeling like I wasted my off time-

Tim Ferriss 1:00:58 Mm

Jay Shetty 1:00:58 ... is not a fun feeling.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:00 No.

Jay Shetty 1:01:00 Like, I don't enjoy that feeling.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:01 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:01:02 So we'd watch a show and I wasn't committed, and then I'd be on my phone or I'd kind of be on my laptop too, and now I haven't achieved anything at work.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:08 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:01:08 I haven't doom-scrolled well enough, and the screen is boring me, and now I'm feeling like I'm wasting days, like, i- in the evening. I'm, like, adding all these hours up and going, "God, I wasted, like, three hours in front of the TV and I didn't do anything."

Tim Ferriss 1:01:21 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:01:22 And all of a sudden, A, there was a show selection problem, so we sorted that out, where I was like, "Okay, let's find something we actually care about watching." But the other part was just, okay, I'm going to leave my phone in another room where I just can't get it. I don't work at this time, so the laptop can't be near me, and, and I have to do this old school thing [chuckles] of, like, sitting in a theater in my own house. Like saying, "Okay, I'm at the movies now."

Tim Ferriss 1:01:44 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:01:44 Like, what does it feel like to go to the movies-

Tim Ferriss 1:01:47 Mm

Jay Shetty 1:01:47 ... and watch a movie, which we all used to do, and go to the theater without any other distraction, and actually enjoy our experience in? It's, it's been huge for unlocking presence and enjoyment and entertainment, even, even from a stillness point of view.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:02 For sure.

Jay Shetty 1:02:02 Because I feel like we're not even doing rest properly, which is why we can't work properly.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:06 [sighs] Oh, God, we could go so many directions here.

Jay Shetty 1:02:10 Go, go wherever you want. Go wherever you want.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:10 Yeah. No, I know. It's-- Uh, well, I was just gonna say-

Jay Shetty 1:02:12 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:02:13 ... I mean, I am very plugged into technology and digital, right? I mean, my, my main business per se is actually angel investing, which I've done since two thousand and eight. Like, that- that's actually-

Jay Shetty 1:02:25 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:02:26 ... the, the larger piece of my professional life from, like, an economic perspective. So I'm constantly involved with tech. I lived in the Bay Area for almost twenty years, and the people who created these tools, a lot of them, I mean, "The Social Dilemma" people can check out, treat it like smoking. Like, it is incredibly bad for you.

Jay Shetty 1:02:47 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:48 Even in moderate doses. So what I would suggest to folks, and I, I mention all of that, being plugged into tech, simply because if I were Amish and I'm like, "I don't have any social apps on my phone," people are like, "Well, Tim can do it, but that's nonsense-

Jay Shetty 1:02:59 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:03:00 ... because he's an edge case." Like, no, no, no. Like, my-- A lot of what I do is predicated on knowing what is happening.

Jay Shetty 1:03:06 Yeah. Same. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:07 And I still have no social media apps on my phone.

Jay Shetty 1:03:10 Yeah, that's impressive.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:11 And what I would say to folks is even if the counterargument is, "Well, I need it for my business," okay, fine. You can still access through a laptop.

Jay Shetty 1:03:20 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:20 And guess what? You can still record videos. You just have to batch upload them later or schedule them in advance. You just can't be self-interrupting with these apps on your phone.

Jay Shetty 1:03:30 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:31 If that is w- within the realm of possibility, try it for two weeks.

Jay Shetty 1:03:35 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:35 And my feeling is if you can't do that, if your entire livelihood does not depend on it, you're addicted, just like an alcoholic.

Jay Shetty 1:03:44 [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 1:03:45 Just like a smoker. It means you have a problem, right? And I would say sh- look, I can, I can talk about meditation and bioelectric medicine and this and that and the other thing. If you just get off of social media for two weeks, just like my friend, I think it will basically do the same amount of good for a lot of folks as ten years of therapy.

Jay Shetty 1:04:04 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:05 If you're constantly tapping a vein with social media as you're doing the therapy.

Jay Shetty 1:04:09 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:10 Also have feelings on caffeine. I think that's also true for cutting down on caffeine.

Jay Shetty 1:04:14 Talk to me about that.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:15 [chuckles] People are like, "I'm, I'm anxious." I'm like, "How much coffee do you drink?"

Jay Shetty 1:04:17 Yeah. [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 1:04:18 They're like, "Three to five cups." I'm like, "That's liquid anxiety." [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:04:21 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:21 Of course you're anxious. So, uh, coming back to the fuel thing.

Jay Shetty 1:04:25 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:25 It's like maybe it's not a problem-solving problem.

Jay Shetty 1:04:28 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:28 Maybe it's just a biological issue.

Jay Shetty 1:04:31 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:32 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:04:32 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:33 And caffeine is not a fuel, right? It's, it's forcing you to use your fuel faster, and look, guys, I understand actually how chemistry works and the adenosine and so on, but let's keep it simple, right? It's not adding fuel to the system. It is burning fuel faster.

Jay Shetty 1:04:46 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:47 Um, also has some pretty profound effects on glucose levels too. Uh, if you ever wear a CGM and you have a bunch of coffee, it's like, "Oh, wow, I'm suddenly way out of range."

Jay Shetty 1:04:56 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:57 So when people have a caffeine crash, it's not necessarily because the caffeine is wearing off, 'cause you still have trouble sleeping at night, it's because your glucose spikes and then crashes.

Jay Shetty 1:05:06 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:06 Uh-oh, we're back to the fuel problem again.

Jay Shetty 1:05:08 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the fuel problem is there.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:10 All roads, all roads lead to fuel.

Jay Shetty 1:05:12 All roads lead to, lead to fuel.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:13 Yeah. [chuckles]

Jay Shetty 1:05:14 We're, we're looking for the four-hour fuel book now.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:15 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:05:16 Like, that's the, the-

Tim Ferriss 1:05:17 Gotta chip away at this-

Jay Shetty 1:05:18 Yeah. [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 1:05:19 ... thousand-page monster first.

Jay Shetty 1:05:20 Thousand pa- yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:21 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:05:21 Talk to me about the acceptance piece. Like, what's been the, what's been the hardest thing to wrap your head around with acceptance, the idea of acceptance?

Tim Ferriss 1:05:29 Well, I'll give two examples. Uh, the first is that personally doing any type of meditation that involves observing rather than f- suppressing or fixing, right?

Jay Shetty 1:05:40 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:40 So if you have frustration coming up, restlessness, aversion, just labeling it and allowing it to be, like a mother consoling a crying child, that's hard.

Jay Shetty 1:05:52 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:53 It's hard.

Jay Shetty 1:05:54 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:55 But I think it's a valuable practice. So, and that, that's something that I've explored. There are lots of good apps out there.

Jay Shetty 1:06:01 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:02 You know, I'm involved with The Way, so-

Jay Shetty 1:06:03 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:06:04 ... and I used it b- prior to getting involved with Henry Shukman, but there are many good options, right? There's Calm, there's Headspace, there's lots of different options. But I would say that specifically exploring something that cultivates your ability to observe things that you would call uncomfortable or negative without trying to change them-

Jay Shetty 1:06:25 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:06:25 ... is valuable. All right, the second, in terms of acceptance, is relational. Humans are crazy, man.

Jay Shetty 1:06:33 [chuckles]

Tim Ferriss 1:06:33 And, like, every human's nuts. Like s- like irrationality is just table stakes.

Jay Shetty 1:06:37 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:38 Like, we're not... Which is why any of the mar- like the, the, the, the, uh, efficient market theory stuff, where it's like we're all rational agents acting in our own best interest, I'm like, "Have you met-- Have you actually walked out, economist, and met humans?"

Jay Shetty 1:06:50 Yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:06:50 Like, what are you talking about?

Jay Shetty 1:06:52 Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:52 Uh, so in relationships, uh, I, I, I'll, I'll give a resource. There's a audiobook, there's no print version, called Fierce Intimacy by Terry Real, who is an amazing therapist. You should have him on the show.

Jay Shetty 1:07:05 Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:05 That guy's incredible and very opinionated, very... He does-- He's not one of those therapists who just echoes questions back and forth, and you're like, "Terry, uh, you know, what do you think?" He's like, "What do you think?" Like, he doesn't do that. He's like, "Let me tell you, like, you're being an idiot for these reasons, and, like, you need to grow up because of these reasons."He's not exactly like Dr. Phil or anything, but he's, he's very, very good at what he does.

Jay Shetty 1:07:26 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:27 And Fierce Intimacy, along with his other materials, and he's not the only person. You know, the, um, Gottmans are pretty interesting as well.

Jay Shetty 1:07:35 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:35 But Terry Real specifically has a number of principles that undergird his entire approach, and one of them is when it comes to relationships, objective reality doesn't exist. So for instance, right? [laughs] He gives this example. I'm gonna butcher it. It's very funny when he tells it. He's like, all right, let's say husband and wife are out to dinner. Waiter comes over, takes the order, walks away, and the husband says to the wife, "Honey, you don't need to yell." And she's like, "I wasn't yelling." And he's like, "Yes, you were." And d- you see where this is going, right?

Jay Shetty 1:08:11 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:12 And let's just suppose... and he, he ex- he gives this example. The husband says, "Well, honey, you know, I thought this might come up, so I actually hired professional audiologists and rec- and brought in recorders and based on the decibel level, let me show you. In fact-"

Jay Shetty 1:08:27 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:08:28 "... based on any conventional definition, you were yelling." Like, is that gonna help?

Jay Shetty 1:08:32 No.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:32 Of course not.

Jay Shetty 1:08:33 Definitely not.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:33 It's gonna be a fucking disaster.

Jay Shetty 1:08:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:35 So in terms of interacting with a significant other, as this context is describing, accepting that we-- for each of us, our interpretation of reality, our experience of reality is real. And if you try to fix it or win the situation by arguing over objective reality, it is just a dead end.

Jay Shetty 1:08:59 And that is what we all do.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:00 Yeah, that's what we all do.

Jay Shetty 1:09:01 That's literally all we ever do.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:03 I think, I think m- men are... Not, not to get too gendered, but let's call a spade a spade, guys. Uh, like, men are particularly bad-

Jay Shetty 1:09:11 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:09:11 ... in terms of habitually doing this. Women do it, too.

Jay Shetty 1:09:14 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:14 But in effect, accepting, for instance, someone's upset, all right? And trying to be curious, and this is gonna sound like some hand-wavy, you know, kumbaya stuff, but it's like trying to be curious before you react.

Jay Shetty 1:09:29 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:30 Right? That is sort of the key piece. It also ties into all the productivity. All, everything is so related, right? It's just like, do you have the space to think or are you just reacting to that text on a Sunday? You need the space, and there are a lot of ways to cultivate it. One is meditation, sure, but it's not the only-

Jay Shetty 1:09:46 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:09:46 ... tool in the toolkit, right? If you're, if you're... By the way, if you've had three cups of coffee and your sympathetic system is in overdrive, what are you gonna do? You're gonna bite someone's head off.

Jay Shetty 1:09:54 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:54 Right? So y- that's another lever you can pull. Okay. Fuel. Are you depleted? Okay. Well, let's fix that. And then on the relational piece, you gotta practice in the messy reality of relationships-

Jay Shetty 1:10:06 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:10:06 ... or it just doesn't count. You can read all the relationship books in the world. You gotta practice it. And historically, like, I did not [laughs] to put it mildly, grow up in a household that modeled conflict resolution very well.

Jay Shetty 1:10:17 Yeah, mine too.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:18 Lots of yelling and screaming. It was-

Jay Shetty 1:10:21 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:21 I didn't... If I learned anything, it was all of the most [laughs] counterproductive ways to handle conflict.

Jay Shetty 1:10:27 Yeah. Me too.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:28 And I carried that into my relationships. Surprise, surprise, didn't produce miracles of positivity. But in the last, I'd say, ten years have become much, much better. Uh, owe Terry Real a debt of gratitude, and my, one of my exes who introduced me to Terry, Terry's work, and my friend Kevin Rose, for that matter. Not to say Terry is the end all be all. Just resonated with me.

Jay Shetty 1:10:50 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:50 Just like different people have different parenting styles. Some people love Dr. Becky Kennedy. I tend to resonate with her stuff, but-

Jay Shetty 1:10:57 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:10:57 ... other people resonate with other things.

Jay Shetty 1:10:58 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:59 Um, but, but for me, when it comes to, to return to your question, acceptance, man, oh man, does that matter a lot-

Jay Shetty 1:11:07 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:11:08 ... in relationships. And there are many different iterations of it. So those would be two, right? There's the how do I sit with uncomfortable feelings without the necessity of fixing them or suppressing them?

Jay Shetty 1:11:19 Mm. Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:21 Which by the way, ties into workaholism and-

Jay Shetty 1:11:23 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:11:23 ... hustle culture and social media use.

Jay Shetty 1:11:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:26 Compulsive social media use. You're like, "Mm. I'm bored. I don't like it. I need to do X," right?

Jay Shetty 1:11:30 Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:31 Now, some people might get a little pedantic and say, "Bored isn't a feeling." You get the idea.

Jay Shetty 1:11:36 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:37 It's an experience you don't like.

Jay Shetty 1:11:38 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:11:39 That highlighting and that connectivity that you just put together, but the main piece on how the objective reality is what we always debate is fascinating because it's The Simmering Six of relationships. Like, it's, it's the distraction. It's the focal, focal point that steals everything away.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:56 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:11:56 Because that's all we ever think is the thing to solve is objective reality when if you accept that that's how that person felt in that moment-

Tim Ferriss 1:12:04 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:12:04 ... regardless of whatever objectively you experienced or you think objectively you experienced.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:11 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:12:11 And that's really hard to do because-

Tim Ferriss 1:12:13 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:12:13 ... we're so wired to be like, "But this is the truth."

Tim Ferriss 1:12:16 [laughs] Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:12:16 And, and in relationships, there's almost very little truth.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:19 If perhaps, like me, it sounds like, like you, you didn't-- you grew up in a household where, like, conflict haymakers were modeled really well.

Jay Shetty 1:12:28 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:28 But, like, resolution was not modeled well.

Jay Shetty 1:12:29 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:30 Uh, I think his name is Marshall Rosenberg. Might be getting the name wrong, but Nonviolent Communication.

Jay Shetty 1:12:36 Mm. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:37 Read, read the book.

Jay Shetty 1:12:37 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:38 It... Yes, it is schlocky in the sense that there's a format and it can feel a little, uh, repetitive, but guess what? In the beginning, if you're coming at from a, an upbringing that didn't teach you anything helpful [laughs] on the conflict resolution side, you need a format. You need a template, and it's incredibly, incredibly helpful. If only for... There, there, there's a whole process to it. People can just look it up. I'm sure ChatGPT or anything else will give you a good overview. But at the end, make a request.

Jay Shetty 1:13:13 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:13 Don't just bitch and moan-

Jay Shetty 1:13:15 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:13:15 ... about how you feel, what your partner did.Have a request. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:13:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:21 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:13:21 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:21 Don't just tell them what not to do.

Jay Shetty 1:13:23 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:23 That's actually not helpful. And I really had this driven home. Part of the reason I like exploring all these weird different nooks and crannies is you realize how much you can copy and paste to other places.

Jay Shetty 1:13:32 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:33 So a friend of mine, Jason Nemer, he's the co-creator of something called AcroYoga. You know, we're in Southern California, it's everywhere.

Jay Shetty 1:13:38 Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. I know the AcroYoga. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:40 So you go to a park and you see, like, people with other people on their feet-

Jay Shetty 1:13:43 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:13:43 ... and they're doing all sorts of cool stuff. And in those circumstances, basically partner acrobatics, although it can be pretty chill, if somebody is, say, like standing on your hands, saying, uh, "Don't push your heel down," is very unhelpful-

Jay Shetty 1:13:58 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:13:58 ... and actually kind of dangerous.

Jay Shetty 1:13:59 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:00 So instead of that, you say, "More toe. More toe." Right? It's-- You always wanna give them-

Jay Shetty 1:14:05 Yes

Tim Ferriss 1:14:06 ... direction for what to do-

Jay Shetty 1:14:07 Yes

Tim Ferriss 1:14:08 ... not what not to do.

Jay Shetty 1:14:09 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:09 And it applies to conflict resolution as well. So the, the-

Jay Shetty 1:14:12 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:14:12 ... non-violent communication, and also sometimes you can talk about the objective reality-

Jay Shetty 1:14:18 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:14:19 ... but you can't do that when one or more people are dysregulated.

Jay Shetty 1:14:22 Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:23 You just can't.

Jay Shetty 1:14:23 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:23 It's not gonna work. And that also counts for yourself. So sometimes, right, I'm in a great relationship right now. My relationships have never been better. Like the last few years, every one of my relationships, they're as b- uh, they are as good as they have ever been. Better. If I am feeling dysregulated, maybe I had too much coffee-

Jay Shetty 1:14:42 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:14:42 ... maybe whatever it might be. Not to throw coffee under the bus, but it is the world's most consumed stimulant. Too little sleep, a bunch of bullshit going on on the business side, somebody dropped a ball, whatever, and my partner wants to talk to me about something. If I'm not resourced, I'll just say, "Babe, I'm happy to talk about this. Let's do it at dinner."

Jay Shetty 1:15:01 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:02 "I am really unresourced right now."

Jay Shetty 1:15:04 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:15:04 "I'm just not in a place-"

Jay Shetty 1:15:06 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:15:06 ... "to have a good conversation about this, and I'm pretty pissed off about a few things. Has nothing to do with you."

Jay Shetty 1:15:11 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:11 And she's like, "Okay, cool."

Jay Shetty 1:15:13 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:13 So you also, on either side, need to be able to agree that that's an option.

Jay Shetty 1:15:18 Yeah, yeah. And, and

Jay Shetty 1:15:20 the productivity with that, sometimes I find, like I'll say to my wife, like, "I've got a crazy week coming up."

Tim Ferriss 1:15:26 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:15:26 "So just in advance-"

Tim Ferriss 1:15:27 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:15:27 ... "I'm just letting you know that this week I may not have the same space and stillness that I usually have, or presence that I usually have to, to deal with something," because I can preempt how I'm gonna feel-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:37 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:15:37 ... b- based on, you know.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:38 Yeah. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:15:38 And, and luckily, you know, I have a partner that understands that, where I'm like, "Hey, I'm traveling this week. I'm only literally back home for like three hours."

Tim Ferriss 1:15:45 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:15:45 "And then I'm back out." And it's like just people being aware of what your week even looks like, 'cause you-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:50 Um

Jay Shetty 1:15:50 ... we kind of walk around thinking our partners should know.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:53 Well, what does this sound like?

Jay Shetty 1:15:54 Go on.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:55 This sounds a lot like what we were talking about with how do you get someone to do the two weeks of meditation.

Jay Shetty 1:16:00 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:01 Setting expectations.

Jay Shetty 1:16:02 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:02 You can have almost anything that you want in life if you manage expectations early.

Jay Shetty 1:16:08 Yes. Yes, exactly. And, and I think we assume that we know our schedule and that our partner should somehow know that we have a busy week this week.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:16 [laughs] Right.

Jay Shetty 1:16:16 Because we're coming home like huffing and puffing or we're like-

Tim Ferriss 1:16:19 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:16:19 ... you know, whatever it is. We're on our phone and we're like, "Oh God, I gotta d..." You know, it's, it's almost like we're trying to send all these cues without just spelling it out-

Tim Ferriss 1:16:26 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:16:26 ... and just saying, "Hey, this is what my week looks like," and-

Tim Ferriss 1:16:29 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:16:29 ... you know, "What does yours look like?" And I, I try and do that a lot as well. It's fascinating, you said that we've been asking these questions about life and relationships and philosophy for like, you know, thousands of years.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:39 For forever. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:16:40 Yeah, forever. But at least documented thousands of years at this point.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:44 Uh-huh.

Jay Shetty 1:16:44 And I feel like we are still somewhat answering, asking some of the same questions.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:49 Okay.

Jay Shetty 1:16:50 We were mentioning this earlier, and I know you actually have a, a blog that-- a website that allows people to ask these questions.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:55 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:16:56 I wanna ask, what are the questions that are worth answering?

Tim Ferriss 1:16:59 Mm.

Jay Shetty 1:16:59 Because I feel like we ask a lot of questions.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:02 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:17:02 And now with AI, we're asking more questions than ever before.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:05 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:17:05 Which by the way, I think is better than the answer generation that we grew up in, which was having the answer was smart.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:12 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:17:13 When we both know that asking the right question is smarter.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:16 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:17:16 Which hopefully AI can help us get better at, because we all have to get better at asking questions. But what are the questions that are worth asking?

Tim Ferriss 1:17:24 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:17:24 Because I just feel like we're distracted by a set of questions that are not valuable.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:28 The questions that I keep returning to, a lot of them I've borrowed from different sources, right? And I pointed out, you know, the book right behind me.

Jay Shetty 1:17:34 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:35 Letters From a Stoic, Seneca the Younger. That's the Penguin's classic edition. I've probably given away 100 copies of that book.

Jay Shetty 1:17:41 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:42 Stoicism Bud- and, and Buddhism also, a lot of parallels.

Jay Shetty 1:17:45 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:45 Lot of overlap.

Jay Shetty 1:17:46 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:47 One would be, and this is actually borrowed from politics, someone who co-ran the war room for Bill Clinton put this in one of their books I bought. I, I was on a road trip, and I just grabbed it from his bookstore. [laughs] But the question stuck with me, which I think they got from Newt Gingrich, and it's like they all sort of diametrically opposed to Newt politically, but they were like he was ruthlessly efficient and effective, uh, at gaining control of the House and blah, blah, blah. And the question was, "Are you hunting antelope or field mice?" And the story behind it is effectively like if you're a lion, sure, you can keep yourself alive by hunting field mice-

Jay Shetty 1:18:23 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:18:23 ... and just eating like 100 a day.

Jay Shetty 1:18:25 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:25 Or you could put in the energy and the focus to kill an antelope.

Jay Shetty 1:18:30 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:31 And then that lasts you a day or two or three or whatever the number might be. And that's a metaphor f- for, in effect, coming back to what we're talking about, like are you doing a bunch of little micro projects, putting out fires, living on defense, juggling 10 different kinda cool projects instead of one big yes? If so, you're eating field mice.

Jay Shetty 1:18:53 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:53 And it's like that's no way for a lion to live.

Jay Shetty 1:18:55 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:56 You can survive. That's not really living. Like you need to hunt antelope. So to encapsulate all of that into one question-

Jay Shetty 1:19:01 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:19:01 ... is are you hunting antelope or, or are you hunting field mi-

Tim Ferriss 1:19:04 field mice?

Jay Shetty 1:19:04 Do you ever hear people who just say, "Whoa, Tim, Jay, I don't wanna be a lion," you know?

Tim Ferriss 1:19:08 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:19:09 "You guys like being lions. You wanna be lions. You wanna go chase antelope."

Tim Ferriss 1:19:12 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:19:12 Like, "I don't wanna be a lion. I just wanna chase field mice."

Tim Ferriss 1:19:15 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:19:15 Like, you know, like-

Tim Ferriss 1:19:16 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:19:17 ... and what do, what do you say to that? Because I always find it interesting. I feel like, again-

Tim Ferriss 1:19:20 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:19:20 ... mentally as a society, we go between-

Tim Ferriss 1:19:23 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:19:23 ... you know, type A winners, this, this, this versus, "Hey, I just wanna have my lo- in life and be happy."

Tim Ferriss 1:19:29 I'm glad you actually a- you're asking about this, 'cause I think lion, okay, king of the jungle, et cetera, it implies almost that the person using the metaphor might want to be an apex predator, king of the hill-

Jay Shetty 1:19:42 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:19:42 ... whatever.That's an unfortunate side effect maybe of the picture that it paints. But the point is coming back to people falling apart when they have too much free time, right? This is a huge reason why most retirements fail and people have their health go off a cliff as soon as they retire in many cases. It's about knowing what your big thing is.

Jay Shetty 1:20:06 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:07 Having a focus.

Jay Shetty 1:20:08 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:08 And-

Jay Shetty 1:20:09 That's just what we need as humans plain and simple

Tim Ferriss 1:20:11 ... psycho-emotionally, philosophically, humans are in the meaning-making business. You can't do that with triaging email. You cannot fool yourself into thinking that that is deeply meaningful. There's a part of you that will know it is not, and you will suffer accordingly. So, uh, that's how I would answer it.

Jay Shetty 1:20:27 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:28 It's just-

Jay Shetty 1:20:28 No, I'm glad you, I'm glad you went there because I think sometimes achievement mentality gets mixed with meaning-making-

Tim Ferriss 1:20:35 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:20:35 ... in that people assume that, oh, you just-- there-- and there are some people who just wanna win, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:20:40 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:20:40 And that's not even to do with meaning.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:42 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:20:42 So you could go kill a big antelope and still not win because you didn't have meaning as a human.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:46 Yeah. Well, let me give, uh-

Jay Shetty 1:20:47 Yeah. Yeah, go on. Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:20:48 ... I'll give, I'll give a-- It's not even a counterexample. It's a compatible example.

Jay Shetty 1:20:51 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:52 Let's just say it's a kindergarten teacher, and her North Star is like, "I'm pu- I wanna put as much time as possible into whatever makes the lives of these kids better."

Jay Shetty 1:21:05 Yeah, beautiful.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:05 That's it.

Jay Shetty 1:21:06 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:07 So-

Jay Shetty 1:21:07 Yeah, that's the antelope

Tim Ferriss 1:21:08 ... is, is doing, is managing the bake sale for the PTA adding to that if the, if those are the parents of your students? No, it's not.

Jay Shetty 1:21:15 No.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:16 Therefore, it's a no.

Jay Shetty 1:21:17 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:17 Right? Is responding to email from friends or texts from friends who are asking you to go out to have drinks on a Wednesday night gonna contribute to that? No. It's actually gonna be counterproductive. No.

Jay Shetty 1:21:29 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:29 Right? You can still have fun. I'm not saying don't have fun.

Jay Shetty 1:21:31 Yeah [laughs] .

Tim Ferriss 1:21:32 But you can have a North Star. By the way, it doesn't have to be one thing forever. That can be very intimidating. Like, what is my purpose in life? What is my-

Jay Shetty 1:21:43 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:21:43 ... uh, what is my mission?

Jay Shetty 1:21:45 Yeah, it's too big.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:46 It doesn't, it doesn't have to be this permanent thing. For me, it generally isn't. For me, it's, it's like, I mean, I do have overarching things that guide my behavior as values, but, uh, I will just go completely immersive into fill in the blank. Bioelectric medicine for six months, that's it. That's all I care about.

Jay Shetty 1:22:06 Care about now.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:06 Is how do I translate that into something usable-

Jay Shetty 1:22:09 Yes

Tim Ferriss 1:22:09 ... in the real world?

Jay Shetty 1:22:10 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:10 Or, you know, for s- like supporting science related to psychedelic-assisted therapies and starting in two thousand and fifteen. Like, for a long time, that was it. And if people are like, "Well, I want you to do policy work," or this, that related to it, I'm like, "Nope. That's not my power zone."

Jay Shetty 1:22:24 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:24 Like, I am focused on science. Okay. And I made r-- uh, and it's supporting the science, not capitalizing on it. So I had a rule like no investing in for-profit companies-

Jay Shetty 1:22:32 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:22:32 ... related to psychedelics. Not that that makes someone... Uh, we need those.

Jay Shetty 1:22:37 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:37 But I was like, for me, that's a hard boundary, right?

Jay Shetty 1:22:40 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:40 Okay, great. I feel like I've kind of done what I set out to do in that world, so I've largely stopped.

Jay Shetty 1:22:46 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:46 I'm out.

Jay Shetty 1:22:46 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:47 Like, pass the baton. Let other people do it.

Jay Shetty 1:22:48 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:49 So it doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be some grand giant thing.

Jay Shetty 1:22:53 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:54 It could be teaching your kids.

Jay Shetty 1:22:56 Yeah. It's focus. It's central. It's, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:57 It could be, for instance, for me now, if I consider doing, adding... I mean, I'm a promiscuous activity adder. I love hobbies, and yeah, I'm just all over the place. And now that really focused on my current relationship that's going incredibly well, thankfully, right? Fingers crossed.

Jay Shetty 1:23:17 Mm-hmm. Fingers crossed.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:18 I, a-and I, I borrowed this from a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett, who's an amazing performance coach in PT, but he-- at one point, he told me, 'cause he also does tons of activities, and he said f- he's only adding new activities that consume time, physical activities-

Jay Shetty 1:23:31 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:23:31 ... that he can do with his wife or kids.

Jay Shetty 1:23:33 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:33 That's it. No solo activities. And it's like, wow, what a great forcing function.

Jay Shetty 1:23:38 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:38 Okay, cool. So with my partner, that's it. It's like, what can we do together?

Jay Shetty 1:23:42 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:42 Okay. And you can change your mind six months later.

Jay Shetty 1:23:45 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:45 I was like, okay, for now, that's it.

Jay Shetty 1:23:47 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:47 Only adding new time-consuming hobbies-

Jay Shetty 1:23:50 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:23:50 ... if I can do them with her. That's it.

Jay Shetty 1:23:52 Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:53 That's, like-

Jay Shetty 1:23:54 That's a great question

Tim Ferriss 1:23:54 ... that's a, that's a, that I think counts as a big yes.

Jay Shetty 1:23:58 Yes. Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:23:58 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:23:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:00 So-

Jay Shetty 1:24:00 That's a great question.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:01 Yeah. So-

Jay Shetty 1:24:01 I'm glad we unpacked it a little. It was good.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:02 Yeah. Yeah. So that's one.

Jay Shetty 1:24:04 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:04 Uh, you know, another one which I, I think about and, and have been thinking more and more about is what if I could only fix this? Only fix this is even tricky with achiever types. What if I could only subtract instead of add? All right.

Jay Shetty 1:24:19 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:20 So I'm sure this is true just about everywhere with humans, but you have some type of medical issue or you're trying to achieve X, you want to add things. What new software can I use? What new magic supplement can I take? Add, add, add, add, add, right? What books can I read? Well, what if you turn all that around and you're like, what if I could only achieve whatever the goal is or solve the problem by stopping reading certain categories of thing?

Jay Shetty 1:24:48 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:49 Example given, getting rid of your social media on your phone.

Jay Shetty 1:24:51 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:51 Right? What if... This is not medical advice, just-

Jay Shetty 1:24:56 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:24:56 ... informational example, but I am incredibly-- I think intermittent fasting and fast mimicking diets are incredibly undervalued.

Jay Shetty 1:25:06 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:06 Incredibly undervalued. So-

Jay Shetty 1:25:09 Cutting food out could be better than figuring out the right food

Tim Ferriss 1:25:11 ... this is a harder conversation to have with doctors because they're generally in the business of adding, 'cause they only get eleven minutes on average per patient in the US, right? [chuckles]

Jay Shetty 1:25:18 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:19 Uh, but for instance, you know, I've seen... It's like I could take tirzepatide or GLP-1 to try to-- And there, there might be some reasons for it, neuroprotection and so on, but I could do that to try to get my metabolic health under control. But I could also do intermittent fasting-

Jay Shetty 1:25:36 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:25:36 ... which is portable, uh, proven, right? Humans have been going periods without food for a very, very long time, uh, since we were, since before we were humans, so to speak, Homo sapiens. And the changes that you see with something like... And just to define what I'm talking about specifically in my case, intermittent fasting would be sixteen hours of fasting, eight hour feeding window.

Jay Shetty 1:25:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:59 And generally within that eight hour, eight hour feeding window, I'm having two big meals. That's it.And it's, uh, Mark Mattson is a scientist, M-A-T-T-S-O-N, who's done a lot on this. But you, you wanna have at least 16 hours so that you deplete your liver of glycogen, and then your body develops the machinery to turn on ketones more effectively.

Jay Shetty 1:26:19 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:20 Right? But you do that-- Uh, I mean, my entire family has insulin insensitivity. Like, uh, we have a lot of wonky genetics for this stuff. And if, if you're getting regular testing, don't just do fasting glucose. Get your insulin measured and also do an oral glucose tolerance test. There's a lot more you should test, but at least hit those three. And after four to six weeks of intermittent fasting, number one, all of my energy dips that I used to remedy with caffeine, gone. Like, completely gone. Like, just sustained energy. And when I woke up, I was awake. All right? One of the benefits of ketones. Uh, and my lab work, the oral glucose tolerance test, my doctors were like, "A++."

Jay Shetty 1:27:01 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:02 Four to six weeks. That's nothing. That is nothing.

Jay Shetty 1:27:05 Hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:05 It's also... Well, we can come to-- If we want to talk about asce-asceticism-

Jay Shetty 1:27:09 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:27:09 ...and just, like, the actual, I think, values that are a little more esoteric-

Jay Shetty 1:27:14 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:27:14 ...like fasting and stuff, abstaining. I think there's a lot to it.

Jay Shetty 1:27:17 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:17 Cue Seneca. He's got a lot on that.

Jay Shetty 1:27:18 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:19 But what if you could only subtract? And you could do that also by looking at what you're spending your time on. Like, do an 80/20 analysis, but identify the peak energy drainers in terms of activities, people, et cetera. Okay, what if you ju- you could only remove? You can't add more stuff.

Jay Shetty 1:27:35 Yeah. That's a great question.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:36 Right? So how-

Jay Shetty 1:27:37 Great question

Tim Ferriss 1:27:38 ...how do you tr- how do you develop a system to block or say no to these things?

Jay Shetty 1:27:42 Totally.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:43 Okay. Subtraction, subtraction, subtraction.

Jay Shetty 1:27:45 Great question.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:45 As a flip, I would say, on the default, very helpful. Similarly, you could ask whatever your common practice is or whatever rule you have in place, like, what if I did the opposite for 48 hours or a week? This "what if I did the opposite" I think is very powerful.

Jay Shetty 1:28:04 Hmm. Give me an example of something that you could flip that way.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:06 My first job out of college was as a technical sales guy at a mass data storage company. So we're selling, at the time, I mean, it's laughable now, but, you know, petabytes, oh my God-

Jay Shetty 1:28:17 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:28:18 ...of these network storage systems to movie studios and National Geologic Survey and so on. All of the experienced sales guys got in the office whene- whenever they got in the office, let's call it 9:00, and then from 9:00 to 5:00, they're sending emails and making cold calls.

Jay Shetty 1:28:36 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:36 Right? Trying to reach CTOs and CEOs mostly. And I was having terrible results doing this, and most of them were having terrible results, but that's how they did it, right? And so I... What do I know? I'm fresh out of college.

Jay Shetty 1:28:48 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:28:48 So I was just copying them. And at some point, I'm like, "This sucks." And I'm, my, almost, I was one of the lowest paid people in the company. I'm like, "I'm living in a very expensive part of the country." This is in the Bay Area [laughs] and I was like, "I'm eating at Jack in the Box, for God's sake," like, through the drive-thru. Like, I need to-- If I'm gonna make more money with commissions, I need to solve this.

Jay Shetty 1:29:08 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:08 So I was like, "All right, what if I did the opposite?" What's the opposite? Don't make any calls between 9:00 to 5:00.

Jay Shetty 1:29:13 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:13 Okay. And I started making calls between 7:00 and 9:00, and then from 5:00 to 7:00.

Jay Shetty 1:29:18 Hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:19 And what I figured out very quickly is that part of the reason the results were so bad between 9:00 to 5:00 is CTOs and CEOs are busy. Of course they are. So they have gatekeepers. They have, they have bulletproof vests-

Jay Shetty 1:29:31 Yeah [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:29:31 ...in the form of people who say no.

Jay Shetty 1:29:33 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:34 And those people are usually gone-

Jay Shetty 1:29:37 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:29:37 ...before 9:00, and they're gone after 5:00.

Jay Shetty 1:29:39 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:39 And so I had multiple experiences of calling pretty large companies, and literally, the person who answered the phone, like a receptionist, was the president or CEO of the company.

Jay Shetty 1:29:49 That's crazy.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:50 Within the span of, I wanna say, two or three months, two very large competitors who had New York and LA offices, I sold, I outsold all of our largest competitor, which I think was publicly traded even then, outsold their entire offices combined.

Jay Shetty 1:30:05 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:05 By doing what?

Jay Shetty 1:30:06 Just by doing-

Tim Ferriss 1:30:07 Just by doing the opposite.

Jay Shetty 1:30:07 Yeah. Because if it's not working...

Tim Ferriss 1:30:09 Yeah. If it's not working, try the opposite.

Jay Shetty 1:30:10 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:10 And if that doesn't work, okay, try something else.

Jay Shetty 1:30:13 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:14 I mean, with the podcast, for instance, like, everybody, almost everybody, even still today, offers advertisers net 30 terms, net 60 terms.

Jay Shetty 1:30:20 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:21 For people who don't know what that means, that means that you run the ad, they don't pay for it for 30 to 60 days. And that can create a lot of complexity because you need someone to chase them down. There are gonna be people who are late. There are lots of invoices and accounts payable, accounts receivable. There's all sorts of shenanigans that goes on. And I was like, "All right. Well, what's the opposite?" Prepayment. That's it. Everybody prepays.

Jay Shetty 1:30:42 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:42 What does that look like? Okay. And another maxim, I guess, of mine is, like, try the ideal thing first.

Jay Shetty 1:30:49 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:50 You can always do the standard later or you can do the complicated thing later.

Jay Shetty 1:30:53 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:53 But, like, what would my dream be? My dream would be people pay in advance.

Jay Shetty 1:30:56 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:57 And was able to make it work. And I was like, "Wow. Well, glad we tried that first."

Jay Shetty 1:31:01 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:02 And there are a lot of examples like that.

Jay Shetty 1:31:05 These are great questions,

Jay Shetty 1:31:06 and everyone can find them at?

Tim Ferriss 1:31:07 Tim.blog is, is the website. There are literally thousands of pages of free stuff. Uh, if you go to tim.blog/17-

Jay Shetty 1:31:15 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:31:16 ...however you wanna spell it, the number or spell it out, and that, there's a PDF with, like, 17 of these questions.

Jay Shetty 1:31:21 Amazing.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:21 And I use them all the time.

Jay Shetty 1:31:23 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:23 I still use them all the time.

Jay Shetty 1:31:24 When you say all the time, do you have a regimen of how often you use them or just whenever it feels right? Like...

Tim Ferriss 1:31:29 Uh, it's, it's more when they feel right.

Jay Shetty 1:31:31 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:31 So I would say most-

Jay Shetty 1:31:33 It's a bit more fluid

Tim Ferriss 1:31:33 ...most frequently, it's like if, if I'm starting to grind my teeth or just wake up and I've got the, like, "Ah," type of groan.

Jay Shetty 1:31:43 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:43 It's like, eh, probably time to break out the toolkit.

Jay Shetty 1:31:45 Yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:31:46 Something is not... Something's chafing. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:31:49 Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:52 Uh, or on, on the flip side, for instance, I have, uh, one or two startups th-that I'm gonna be getting involved with, and they're gonna be very exciting, big commit projects.

Jay Shetty 1:32:05 Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:05 And it's like, okayThese are gonna be very fast-moving, very competitive

Jay Shetty 1:32:10 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:32:11 Let me test a whole bunch of assumptions about these industries, because I'm advising typically-

Jay Shetty 1:32:16 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:32:16 ... to, to be helpful. And I will pull these questions out.

Jay Shetty 1:32:20 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:21 I like, "What does everyone say you need to do?"

Jay Shetty 1:32:23 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:23 Okay. Is there anything to support that? Or like science, i- is it just that somebody did that first and then everybody else copied and they're like, "Well, that's just how it works"?

Jay Shetty 1:32:31 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:31 Which is usually the case.

Jay Shetty 1:32:33 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:34 Okay. You know, what does doing the opposite look like?

Jay Shetty 1:32:37 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:37 What might that look like?

Jay Shetty 1:32:38 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:38 And 80% of it's gonna get thrown out, but you don't need 100%.

Jay Shetty 1:32:42 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:42 You just need one or two little levers. So I, I use it for the good stuff, too.

Jay Shetty 1:32:47 Yeah. No, I love that. I love having a core base of questions to come back to-

Tim Ferriss 1:32:52 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:32:52 ... rather than just reminders or reflections or-

Tim Ferriss 1:32:55 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:32:56 ... questions are just great because y- you can, you can usually tell straight away that-

Tim Ferriss 1:33:00 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:33:01 ... you've been chasing too many field mice.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:03 Exactly. And what I like about that is it's... A- you know, I've tried for myself over time to make these questions, like, tighter and tighter-

Jay Shetty 1:33:10 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:33:10 ... and tighter. Because when I'm running around, even if I'm not journaling, if I'm just sitting on a train ride or a plane and I'm thinking to myself, "Man, why am I so stressed out?"

Jay Shetty 1:33:21 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:21 Right? I have other tools that I'll use. Um, w- people might be familiar with some of them from the four-hour workweek, and I didn't create them, like 80/20 analysis, et cetera.

Jay Shetty 1:33:29 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:30 Calendar reviews, past year reviews, all that stuff, fear setting. But you can just sit there, look out the window and ponder some of these questions, and then you're like, "Hmm."

Jay Shetty 1:33:39 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:40 Too many field mice.

Jay Shetty 1:33:41 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:41 Too many field mice. I'm always slightly hungry. Why? Right? Existentially, there's some malaise. Why? I'm eating field mice.

Jay Shetty 1:33:48 Yeah. It's, it's... When we w- when we were walking over to the studio and we were talking on the way and I was saying, "Yeah, like, I feel like I've... This is finally a year where I'm know what to say no to, what to say right."

Tim Ferriss 1:33:58 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:33:58 It's, it's that... I- I didn't ask you in that way, and I love that language for it because it was that. I was-- I spent years over-committing, under-committing, not know- you know, all that kind of, all the, all the versions of it.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:09 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:34:09 Like you just said, like, do the ideal, do the opposite.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:12 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:34:13 Figure it out, and then, and then you start going, "Okay, no." And I've finally found a flow through asking these questions. And guess what? The flow will be dis- disrupted again by something else.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:22 Mm-hmm. For sure.

Jay Shetty 1:34:22 And so those questions will become valuable again. And so-

Tim Ferriss 1:34:24 Yeah. You're never-

Jay Shetty 1:34:25 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:25 It's not set it and forget it.

Jay Shetty 1:34:26 Exactly, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:27 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:34:27 And that's where the... Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:28 It's, it's, it's like meditating or weightlifting or whatever.

Jay Shetty 1:34:30 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:30 I guess it's a practice.

Jay Shetty 1:34:32 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:32 So you come back to it.

Jay Shetty 1:34:33 Yeah. I also find, like, if you just get

Jay Shetty 1:34:35 good at o- if you can figure out the process of doing one thing well-

Tim Ferriss 1:34:39 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:34:39 ... that process usually helps you do multiple things well.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:42 Oh, it's all the same.

Jay Shetty 1:34:43 Right?

Tim Ferriss 1:34:43 Uh, as far as I can tell.

Jay Shetty 1:34:44 Don't, don't you feel that way? Like, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:45 For sure.

Jay Shetty 1:34:46 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:46 And it's, it's easy to lose sight of that, right?

Jay Shetty 1:34:47 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:47 It's like I was, uh, just in New Mexico doing, um, a short meditation retreat, which I, I find helpful.

Jay Shetty 1:34:54 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:54 I mean, nothing like what you've done, but, you know, short.

Jay Shetty 1:34:56 No.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:57 Short.

Jay Shetty 1:34:57 No. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:34:57 Short little check-in with-

Jay Shetty 1:34:58 Yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:34:58 ... with some teachers.

Jay Shetty 1:34:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:59 And one of the meditation teachers, Valerie at Mountain Cloud in Santa Fe, New Mexico, used to be a, a very high level, like, world-class flute player.

Jay Shetty 1:35:09 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:10 She and I were comparing notes on, in her case, flute, and then I used to compete in archery, and we were comparing notes, and I realized, holy shit, I totally... I was having some challenges with meditation. I was having a really hard time at this retreat. I was just, like, really frustrated a lot of the time. And I thought to myself, "Oh, wow." [laughs] Her discussing flute made me think of archery, and there are all of these things from archery that I can just copy and paste directly into meditation.

Jay Shetty 1:35:36 Yes. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:36 And then, um, uh, literally right after that, the next three sits, totally different world.

Jay Shetty 1:35:41 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:41 And I was like, wow, how funny it is that even at this point, after making a career of drawing parallels between fields, I had sat there and I'm like, "I need to get better at meditating," and hadn't even looked in other areas of my life to copy and paste.

Jay Shetty 1:35:57 Literally, yeah. I love that.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:58 I was like, "Dummy. God."

Jay Shetty 1:35:59 Yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:35:59 "Come on, Ferriss. Wake up."

Jay Shetty 1:36:00 No, I feel like that all the time. I

Jay Shetty 1:36:02 was, I was, uh... This-- Recently I got... I, I mean, not that I-- I'm not even sure if I'm gonna do it for real, but it was like I got sent an audition for an acting gig.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:11 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:36:12 And it was interesting. The role was interesting.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:13 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:36:13 And I was like, "Oh, this is a bit of flattery. This is a bit of fun. Like, let's see." And then, like, all the, like, fear came in around, like, "Oh my God, what if I do it and I fail?" And like, "What if I send an audition tape and I look like a fool?" And-

Tim Ferriss 1:36:24 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:36:24 ... "What if someone, like, sees this and then thinks all my other stuff isn't..." You know, whatever, all the stuff that.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:29 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:36:30 And, and I was like, "Wait a minute, like, why am I..." And I was like, "Oh, of course I'm scared," 'cause I haven't got a coach.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:34 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:36:35 And I haven't done any classes to see if I even enjoy it or like it.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:40 Mm.

Jay Shetty 1:36:40 And I haven't even done the scales version of, like-

Tim Ferriss 1:36:43 Mm

Jay Shetty 1:36:43 ... you know, making different faces or... And then a s- and then I got a coach, and it was, like, within hours-

Tim Ferriss 1:36:49 Mm

Jay Shetty 1:36:49 ... I was like, "Oh, I could do this well. I could give it a go if I wanted to." Like-

Tim Ferriss 1:36:52 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:36:52 ... I could give an audition, not saying I could get the role. I could do the audition-

Tim Ferriss 1:36:57 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:36:57 ... with a little bit of confidence-

Tim Ferriss 1:36:59 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:36:59 ... because now I had a system and I had tools, and the coach would talk about how, like... He was like, "You know, if you're doing theater, you gotta be able to, like, be big."

Tim Ferriss 1:37:07 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:37:07 And he goes, "So I always try and get everyone to be a 10."

Tim Ferriss 1:37:09 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:37:09 And so you start at a 10, and then for TV, you roll that emotion back down to a two.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:14 I'm so introverted. This is, like, my nightmare.

Jay Shetty 1:37:16 Yeah, literally.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:16 I re- well, I remember doing a little bit of TV way back in the day, and they're like-

Jay Shetty 1:37:19 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:37:19 ... "Okay, just more energy, more energy."

Jay Shetty 1:37:21 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:21 And they did, they kept telling me, "More energy," and I'm just like, "Bro."

Jay Shetty 1:37:23 [laughs] I would go-

Tim Ferriss 1:37:24 "Maybe this isn't for me." [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:37:27 But for me it was the technique. It was, like, really helpful to go, he's, like, acted as a 10.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:32 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:37:32 And then for TV, you'd roll it back to a two.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:35 Yeah. Yeah, helpful. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:37:35 And I was like, what a cool, like, technique. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And I, I, I was, I was actually gonna ask you, have you read the book The Zen of Archery?

Tim Ferriss 1:37:43 Yeah, I have.

Jay Shetty 1:37:43 Yeah, yeah, I thought so.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:44 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:37:44 I was like, I was thinking about-

Tim Ferriss 1:37:45 I have

Jay Shetty 1:37:46 ... I've, I've got some favorite stories from that book. It's like-

Tim Ferriss 1:37:48 It's a great book

Jay Shetty 1:37:48 ... it's, it's got some-

Tim Ferriss 1:37:49 I'll throw out another one.

Jay Shetty 1:37:50 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:50 Um, because we were... I was talking about music, and-

Jay Shetty 1:37:52 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:37:52 ... it ties into a lot of what we're talking about. One of my favorite short books, I can't remember who recommended this to me, might've been Seth Godin. It's called The Art of Possibility-

Jay Shetty 1:38:02 Uh-huh

Tim Ferriss 1:38:02 ... by, I wanna say Benjamin Zander. Um, I'm blanking on his wife's name, which is embarrassing, but Zander, Z-A, Z-A-N-D-E-R. And it's a conductor, very high levelLike, orchestral conductor. And it is a wonderful book. It ties into everything that we're talking about.

Jay Shetty 1:38:20 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:21 So for folks who want, I think it's like 150 pages or something. Really, really exceptional book.

Jay Shetty 1:38:26 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:26 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:38:27 Yeah. That's cool. I love it.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:28 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:38:28 Uh, Tim, you've been so fun to talk to as always. This is like just-

Tim Ferriss 1:38:31 Yeah, my pleasure, man. You're-

Jay Shetty 1:38:32 You're such a fascinating individual truly, and I'm so gr- grateful that you've always been the human guinea pig because it's fun being in your mind and, and talking to you just about things you're exploring because I think it brings back a zest for life naturally. It's contagious.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:46 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:38:47 Uh, it creates this curiosity in everyone. And at the same time, I think we've talked about so many practical things that people can actually apply in their

Jay Shetty 1:38:54 lives. I wanted to end with two segments.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:56 Yes.

Jay Shetty 1:38:56 One of them is a bunch of questions that we just got from our audience that we love that I wanted to, to throw at you.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:02 Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:39:02 Um, and-

Tim Ferriss 1:39:03 You want me to keep my answers short, or what do you, what do you want?

Jay Shetty 1:39:05 No, these ones you can flow a bit.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:06 Just riff? Okay.

Jay Shetty 1:39:07 Yeah, you can riff a bit. Uh, these are questions, kind of what you were saying, questions that you ask repeatedly. There are certain questions that we found our audience loves knowing the answer to from-

Tim Ferriss 1:39:14 Right

Jay Shetty 1:39:15 ... different people. Uh, and so we throw them out to you. Uh, so this one is: What makes a good friend?

Tim Ferriss 1:39:22 What makes a good friend? That is a damn good question. [sighs] I would say it's, it's someone who says what they mean, means what they say, who's reliable. You know, someone you can share your joys and sorrows with-

Jay Shetty 1:39:37 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:39:38 ... over time. I mean, that's about it. I would say that over time, this applies across the board, intelligence, in quotation marks, because what does that even mean, has become less and less important to me.

Jay Shetty 1:39:51 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:51 Like, trustworthiness and reliability-

Jay Shetty 1:39:53 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:39:53 ... come way before that now.

Jay Shetty 1:39:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:56 Not to say my friends [chuckles] are stupid. Like, my friends-

Jay Shetty 1:39:58 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:39:58 ... tend to be te- You know, they tend to be pretty smart.

Jay Shetty 1:40:01 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:02 But I'm not sorting first by that.

Jay Shetty 1:40:04 Yeah. I love everyone who's made it now is wondering, "Wait a minute." [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:40:08 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:40:09 No, no, I love it. That makes sense. What's the difference between being efficient and cutting corners?

Tim Ferriss 1:40:15 I mean, what comes to mind for me is cutting corners implies aiming for short-term gain, but long-term side effects or consequences, right? Cutting corners implies you're not doing something you should do. And I would expand that further just to say that I do not focus on efficiency as much as people think. Efficiency, and I'm borrowing from Peter Drucker here, also "The Effective Executive," everybody should read that.

Jay Shetty 1:40:39 Mm. Yeah, great book. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:39 Holy cow, what a great book. But Peter Drucker, paraphrasing, "Effectiveness is doing the right things, and then efficiency is doing things right."

Jay Shetty 1:40:48 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:49 The way I would reframe that is, like, what you do, like picking your big yes, matters a lot more than how you get there.

Jay Shetty 1:40:56 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:56 It's kind of like if you're starting in Kansas and you're intending to go to California, but your car pointed towards New York, it's like you could be Mario Andretti.

Jay Shetty 1:41:03 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:03 Doesn't matter. You're going the wrong direction.

Jay Shetty 1:41:05 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:05 So the, the what matters a lot more.

Jay Shetty 1:41:08 Yeah. What advice has made you the most money?

Tim Ferriss 1:41:11 [laughs] These are good questions. I like these.

Jay Shetty 1:41:14 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:15 It's hard to attribute to one person. I wish I could, but it's, it's from a couple of different folks. Well, I'll actually give a nod to some folks who have informed the thinking. Aiming to be a category of one.

Jay Shetty 1:41:26 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:26 So don't, don't aim to be the best, although I think that's fine once you do what's, what, what I'm about to describe. Aim to be the only.

Jay Shetty 1:41:34 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:35 Right? And we, we were chatting a bit before we started recording about how-

Jay Shetty 1:41:38 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:41:38 ... the podcast landscape has changed, and it would be very hard to start my show now.

Jay Shetty 1:41:43 Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:43 Right? You would need to be more n- probably narrowly focused and differentiated in a bunch of different ways.

Jay Shetty 1:41:50 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:50 So for that, there's a great essay, if you can find it online, at, uh, kk.org. Kevin Kelly wrote "1000 True Fans." I think it was true ten years ago, and it is going to become ultra-

Jay Shetty 1:42:03 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:42:03 ... ultra-true-

Jay Shetty 1:42:04 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:42:04 ... as AI starts to gobble everything.

Jay Shetty 1:42:06 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:42:07 "1000 True Fans," you gotta read it. Uh, "The Law of Category" is a chapter from "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing."

Jay Shetty 1:42:13 That's a great book.

Tim Ferriss 1:42:14 I think I put it... I think I excerpted it in "Tools of Titans" or, or "Tribe of Mentors" because that chapter had a huge impact. Um, "Blue Ocean Strategy" also. Those are all related.

Jay Shetty 1:42:24 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:42:24 So, so the advice to basically aim to be the only, definitely one.

Jay Shetty 1:42:28 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:42:29 Another one would be, and this relates to, I guess, the angel investing and so on, is to... And Marc Andreessen, very famous-

Jay Shetty 1:42:38 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:42:38 ... entrepreneur and technologist and investor, but also, uh, the late Scott Adams, controversial guy, but, uh, certainly was very good at what he did with Dilbert, uh, had, had similar echoes of this, basically talking about two things. The first is that trying to become top 1%, and this relates to the first point, like, uh, Michael Jordan-

Jay Shetty 1:42:58 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:42:58 ... in basketball, very hard. Yo-Yo Ma, very hard. Almost everybody's gonna get cut.

Jay Shetty 1:43:05 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:06 But if you can be top, say, 25% in two fields that are rarely combined-

Jay Shetty 1:43:10 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:11 Right? Software development, although AI's gonna kill that, but software and let's just say debate.

Jay Shetty 1:43:17 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:18 Or a law degree. Oh, that's interesting.

Jay Shetty 1:43:20 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:21 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:43:22 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:22 So I tend to think about combining-

Jay Shetty 1:43:24 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:43:25 ... top 25% of, of fields that are rarely combined. And then the, the last one would be choosing projects based on acquiring skills and either building or deepening relationships that transcend that project. Because a lot of my projects fail by any external metric. But if I'm building friendships with very interesting people who are smart, and I'm developing skills that are kind of transferable, over time you just win.

Jay Shetty 1:43:53 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:53 It's very hard not to win.

Jay Shetty 1:43:55 Mm-hmm. That's great advice. That's huge. That's... There's so much in there. Huge advice. Thank you. Uh-

Tim Ferriss 1:44:01 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:44:01 ... this one: What's something that the top 1% obsess over that most people never even think about?

Tim Ferriss 1:44:07 I mean, this is gonna sound self-serving because my t- my 850-page book is about this. Uh, saying no.

Jay Shetty 1:44:13 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:14 The absolute sacredness of focus.They're all, uh ... I mean, some people are better at this than others, but in their own way, they are very, very militant about that in a way that's very different from, say, the top 40%.

Jay Shetty 1:44:31 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:32 Right? Like, the top one to 5%, even if they don't realize it, have set up systems or they have employees or they have, [laughs] you know, no available email address or whatever-

Jay Shetty 1:44:44 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:44:44 ... or unusual ways to calendar. Even if they don't realize it, they're very, very good at firewalling their attention.

Jay Shetty 1:44:50 What's the allure of yes?

Jay Shetty 1:44:52 Like, what is the allure? Is it people-pleasing? Is it distraction? Is it busyness? Like, w- what have you found to be the allure?

Tim Ferriss 1:44:58 I think those are all good answers, right?

Jay Shetty 1:44:59 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:59 So I think there's FOMO because m- everything in modern marketing is intended to foster fear of missing out.

Jay Shetty 1:45:06 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:07 But if you only have one good idea or one good chance, you're screwed.

Jay Shetty 1:45:09 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:10 You, you need to develop, and you only do this through experimentation and time on the field, the confidence in your ability to generate or capitalize on opportunities.

Jay Shetty 1:45:20 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:20 Right? This is incredibly important. And, uh, I, I, I mentioned angel investing a bit. For people who don't know, that just means investing in, in my case, in companies very, very early.

Jay Shetty 1:45:30 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:30 Right? So when it's two people and an idea on a napkin, investing in those people. If you don't have the ability to say no, you run out of money, you're dead, game over. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:45:42 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:42 That's, that's the end of your angel investing-

Jay Shetty 1:45:43 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:45:43 ... right? Because most of them are gonna go to zero.

Jay Shetty 1:45:45 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:46 And I would say that that seems like something that doesn't apply everywhere else, but guess what? You can make more money later. You ... As far as we know, you can't create more time later.

Jay Shetty 1:45:56 Hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:56 Back to Seneca-

Jay Shetty 1:45:57 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:45:57 ... on the shortness of life. And people are really burning-

Jay Shetty 1:46:03 Hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:46:03 ... time-

Jay Shetty 1:46:04 Hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:46:05 ... in ways they will realize are pretty terrifying. But FOMO is a piece of it. People-pleasing is another, which generally is short-term nice, long-term mean.

Jay Shetty 1:46:15 Hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:16 You always end up paying the piper with that one.

Jay Shetty 1:46:18 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:18 [laughs] It's like you're gonna have to have an uncomfortable conversation.

Jay Shetty 1:46:22 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:23 Do you wanna have two years of pain before that or do you wanna just do that now?

Jay Shetty 1:46:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:26 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:46:26 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:27 Then I would say field mice.

Jay Shetty 1:46:29 Hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:30 Right? If you don't have an antelope and someone else is like, "Hey, come help me with my antelope."

Jay Shetty 1:46:35 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:35 "Hey, why don't you come to my party about my antelope?"

Jay Shetty 1:46:38 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:38 You're like-

Jay Shetty 1:46:39 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:46:39 ... "Antelope, sexy."

Jay Shetty 1:46:41 Yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:46:41 All right. Sure. I'll say yes to your party.

Jay Shetty 1:46:42 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:42 Sure. I'll come to your-

Jay Shetty 1:46:43 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:46:44 ... you know, bat mitzvah magic show. Sure. I'll do this. Sure. I'll do that.

Jay Shetty 1:46:47 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:48 You know?

Jay Shetty 1:46:48 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:49 And-

Jay Shetty 1:46:49 All of a sudden

Tim Ferriss 1:46:50 ... before you know it, your calendar's full of field mice.

Jay Shetty 1:46:53 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:54 Those are some of the pieces. You can spend quite a lot of time on, on that-

Jay Shetty 1:46:59 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:46:59 ... diagnosing it, but those are a few of the big ones.

Jay Shetty 1:47:01 Absolutely. Great answers. All right. Uh, what's the emotional cost

Jay Shetty 1:47:05 of constantly trying to improve yourself?

Tim Ferriss 1:47:07 [laughs] The emotional cost of constantly trying to improve yourself in a vacuum-

Jay Shetty 1:47:11 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:47:12 ... without the acceptance piece is that you always think you're broken.

Jay Shetty 1:47:16 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:16 And that is too high a cost for anyone to pay. It's an expanded discussion in the, the Self-Help Trap blog post that I wrote.

Jay Shetty 1:47:24 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:24 By the way, I think it's probably now ... Within 24 hours I knew it was gonna be my most popular blog post of the last 10 years probably.

Jay Shetty 1:47:31 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:32 It's wild. I didn't know if it would resonate but-

Jay Shetty 1:47:34 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:47:34 ... holy shit. So the, the cost to constantly improve yourself, almost by definition you have to constantly be looking for ways to-

Jay Shetty 1:47:44 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:47:44 ... fix yourself-

Jay Shetty 1:47:45 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:47:45 ... which means you're looking for ways you're broken.

Jay Shetty 1:47:47 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:47 And that means you're always in the red.

Jay Shetty 1:47:50 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:50 Right? There's always one more problem. And so the feeling of peace eludes you by one more workshop, one more book, one more retreat, one more psychedelic, whatever it is. You're always going to be one step behind if that's the only lens through which you're looking at things.

Jay Shetty 1:48:08 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:08 The achievement, self-improvement side.

Jay Shetty 1:48:10 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:11 If you have the acceptance side, then you can start to balance out the wobble board.

Jay Shetty 1:48:16 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:16 So I would say that's, that's what comes to mind.

Jay Shetty 1:48:19 Yeah. It's almost like the old idea of climbing the mountain and pausing to look at the view and then climb some more and looking at the view and-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:25 Yeah. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:48:25 You know, it's like you'd, you'd never go on a hike and not stop and look at the view.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:30 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:48:30 It's a ridiculous idea. You'd never just go, "I'm just gonna ... I'm only gonna look at the view when I get to the top."

Tim Ferriss 1:48:35 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:48:35 And then there is no top because-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:37 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:48:37 ... you just keep discovering a new top. And-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:39 Mm.

Jay Shetty 1:48:39 It's like, no, I, I grow... We got to a flat piece of land and then I stopped and we had a little-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:43 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:48:43 ... you know, sandwiches and had some lunch and looked at the view and had a bit of peace and appreciated how far we'd come and-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:49 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 1:48:50 ... yeah, it's-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:50 And, and furthermore-

Jay Shetty 1:48:51 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:48:51 ... I'll just add to this, the hyper-individualism of most self-help-

Jay Shetty 1:48:56 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:48:56 ... I think is very problematic.

Jay Shetty 1:48:59 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:00 And I, I, I wanna keep this n- not, uh, prevent it from becoming a TED Talk, but, uh, Pema Chödrön has a really great poem, who Henry Shukman introduced me to actually, and I won't be able to recite it 'cause it's pretty long, but it effectively, it's from When Things Fall Apart.

Jay Shetty 1:49:18 Yeah, yeah. Great book.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:19 And, uh, talks about, you know, ascending the mountaintop just as you were describing, and the problem with that is that you leave your alcoholic sister, your schizophrenic friend behind.

Jay Shetty 1:49:29 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:29 And then when you get to the top you realize, oh, it just descends. And actually the mountain descends back into the messiness of human relationships.

Jay Shetty 1:49:39 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:40 So-

Jay Shetty 1:49:40 Mm

Tim Ferriss 1:49:41 ... that's, uh-

Jay Shetty 1:49:42 Yeah. Wow

Tim Ferriss 1:49:43 ... if you wanna be on the playing field.

Jay Shetty 1:49:45 Yeah. That's powerful.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:46 I think it's, it's, it really ... Another question, like a question that I'm asking myself right now which is not one of those 17-

Jay Shetty 1:49:53 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:49:54 ... is what if almost everything you did or project you added had to improve your relational life somehow?

Jay Shetty 1:50:01 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:01 That's the criteria. Or-

Jay Shetty 1:50:03 Because that's your antelope right now as well.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:05 Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it also feeds and reinforces and strengthens everything else.

Jay Shetty 1:50:09 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:10 Or what if, just to make it simple, you put together your to-do list. What if for the next week, two weeksYou-- The first thing you had to do was one that was going to improve your relationships-

Jay Shetty 1:50:23 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:23 -some way. By the way, it doesn't need to be a big thing.

Jay Shetty 1:50:25 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:26 Sure, it could be having that long overdue hard conversation with your parents, but that's a heavy lift. It could also be saying hi to your significant other in the morning and kissing him or her on the cheek before-

Jay Shetty 1:50:37 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:37 -you jump on your phone.

Jay Shetty 1:50:38 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:39 Right?

Jay Shetty 1:50:39 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:39 It doesn't have to be a big thing.

Jay Shetty 1:50:40 Totally, yeah. All right, last one of these. If someone feels behind in life, what would you tell them?

Tim Ferriss 1:50:47 Uh, I'd say a few things. I'd say, number one, it's never too late. I've, I've seen so many examples of people doing amazing stuff starting in their fifties, sixties, seventies. Uh, Jim Collins, actually his new book, I don't know if it's out yet, but What to Make of a Life, profiles something like thirty people, and these are incredible examples of success, and a lot of them did their most important work in their fifties, sixties and seventies.

Jay Shetty 1:51:13 Wow.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:14 So it's not too late, number one. And number two, uh, I'd recommend... I'm giving so many book recommendations.

Jay Shetty 1:51:20 It's great.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:21 People are just like, "Oh God, more homework."

Jay Shetty 1:51:22 We'll make a, we'll make a list from this podcast.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:51:24 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:24 So 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman-

Jay Shetty 1:51:26 Oh, I love that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:27 I think is a phenomenal book.

Jay Shetty 1:51:28 I loved it.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:28 And there's a chapter in that book-

Jay Shetty 1:51:29 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:51:29 ... specifically, and you can find it online, called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, and people should check this out. Uh, I, I-- and this is not... Some people are like, "Oh, Tim's become so nihilistic." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. This isn't nihilism." S- But you can make your problems seem less life or death by zooming out.

Jay Shetty 1:51:51 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:52 And Oliver does this very well.

Jay Shetty 1:51:54 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:54 Right? And a friend of mine, E-uh, Ed Cooke, he, he's a world-class memory competitor for a long time. He trained, I think it was Jonah Lehrer, a writer, to become national memory champion in the US in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. I mean-

Jay Shetty 1:52:06 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:52:07 ... the guy's the stuff.

Jay Shetty 1:52:07 Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:08 And Ed Cooke will do the same thing even though he's-- I don't even think he knows who Oliver Burkeman is. Which is he'll, like, imagine zooming out to, like, above his house. If he's really stressed out, like zoom above his house, then zoom out to, like, above the city, then the country, then out to seeing the planet-

Jay Shetty 1:52:24 Mm.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:24 -then zoom out even further, looking at the solar system. And there's something to it-

Jay Shetty 1:52:29 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:52:29 ... that almost always takes some of the pressure out of the tires.

Jay Shetty 1:52:33 Absolutely.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:33 And it's like, okay, at the end of the day, and I don't think this is bad news, but, like, we are a bunch of monkeys on a spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos, right? [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:52:42 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:52:42 So, so maybe the fact that somebody said a, you know, sent a really pissy email to you, like, ah, like, in the grand scheme of things.

Jay Shetty 1:52:48 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:49 Like, okay.

Jay Shetty 1:52:50 It's, uh... Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:51 And I need that for myself too. I'm not, like-

Jay Shetty 1:52:53 Me too. I use it all the time

Tim Ferriss 1:52:53 ... wagging a finger at people. I'm like, "Look, I can get wound up about the, the..." I'm really good in crisis and with giant, like, projects and problems. It's the dumbest shit in the world, like somebody cuts me off at the buffet line in an, like, an airplane lounge or something, and I'm just like, "Really? That's what you're gonna get wound up about?"

Jay Shetty 1:53:09 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:09 "For, like, two days?"

Jay Shetty 1:53:10 Totally.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:10 "Like, for the next eight-hour flight you're gonna think about that guy? What's wrong with you?"

Jay Shetty 1:53:13 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:14 So trust me, it's like I'm drinking the medicine too. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:53:16 Yeah, absolutely. No, no, I can relate to both. And, and it's both. It's like there's times in life where thinking what you do matters-

Tim Ferriss 1:53:24 Mm.

Jay Shetty 1:53:24 -is everything.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:25 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:53:25 And then there's times in life that embracing your own insignificance-

Tim Ferriss 1:53:28 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:53:29 ... is the only way to function.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:30 Yeah. There's a great Bertrand Russell quote. It's along the lines of, you know, the sure sign of impending nervous breakdown is taking one's work incredibly seriously. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:53:40 Ah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:40 Something like that.

Jay Shetty 1:53:41 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:41 I'm butchering it, but it's very close.

Jay Shetty 1:53:43 Yeah. I like that.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:44 Uh, and the, the dose makes the poi- the, the poison, right? Like, you have to believe in what you're doing-

Jay Shetty 1:53:50 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:53:50 ... and at the same time, kinda recognize, like, we're all on the Muppet Show here. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:53:53 Exactly. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. As, as, as the Buddha would say, to hold it, you have to hold it in your... hold the bird in your hand, but not too tightly.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:01 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:54:01 It's like you hold it too tightly, you suffocate it.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:03 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:54:03 But if you don't hold it at all, then you can't help it.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:05 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:54:05 And so it's, yeah, it's that, it's, it's hard. It's hard.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:08 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:54:09 And you're always gonna go in between.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:10 Yeah, you gotta crush a few birds first if, and let a few go to figure it out.

Jay Shetty 1:54:13 Ex- exactly. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:14 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:54:14 Sadly. Sadly. Uh, Tim, we

Jay Shetty 1:54:17 end every episode with a Final Five. These have to be answered in one sentence maximum.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:20 Okay. Got it.

Jay Shetty 1:54:20 So these, these are short. Uh, so Tim, these are your Final Five. Question number one: What is the best advice you've ever heard or received?

Tim Ferriss 1:54:27 Don't believe everything you think.

Jay Shetty 1:54:30 Question number two: What is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

Tim Ferriss 1:54:33 You need money to make money.

Jay Shetty 1:54:35 Question number three: What did you used to value that you don't value anymore?

Tim Ferriss 1:54:39 Hmm. Achievement without acceptance.

Jay Shetty 1:54:42 What did you never value before but that you do deeply value now?

Tim Ferriss 1:54:46 [laughs] Emotional experience. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:54:50 Really?

Tim Ferriss 1:54:50 Yeah. I mean, I thought emotions were just lim- limbic system liabilities for a long time.

Jay Shetty 1:54:56 What changed your mind on that?

Tim Ferriss 1:54:58 Well, a few things. I mean, I realized you just can't get around it. Like, who are we kidding, right? Like, [laughs] you can't. Like, we're too-

Jay Shetty 1:55:04 No, but I think it's a really good conversation 'cause, 'cause-

Tim Ferriss 1:55:06 Yeah. That, that, that's, that's one, right?

Jay Shetty 1:55:07 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:07 You just can't get around it.

Jay Shetty 1:55:08 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:08 So coming back to the serenity, bro, it's like, [laughs] yeah, good luck with that, Ferris.

Jay Shetty 1:55:12 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:12 [laughs] Uh, and even if you could become Spock, you're gonna interact with people who are not Spock.

Jay Shetty 1:55:18 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:18 So we're right back at square one.

Jay Shetty 1:55:19 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:20 And, uh, that, that's one. And secondly, there's quite a long story behind this that I won't get into, but, um-

Jay Shetty 1:55:26 You can if you want. If you want.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:28 Uh, yeah, I would just say that to experience the full richness of being human, you have to embrace being human.

Jay Shetty 1:55:33 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:34 And a very large part of that-

Jay Shetty 1:55:36 Is emotional

Tim Ferriss 1:55:38 ... is emotional.

Jay Shetty 1:55:38 Yeah, well said. Uh, fifth and qu- final question. We ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Tim Ferriss 1:55:47 I'd say smile and say hi first.

Jay Shetty 1:55:49 Yeah. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:55:50 And I'm borrowing that from, from Gabby Reece, uh, amazing woman who I interviewed alongside Laird Hamilton a long time ago. But yeah, go first was hers. But yeah, like, smile and say hi first.

Jay Shetty 1:56:01 It changes everything.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:02 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:56:02 It actually does.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:03 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 1:56:04 It actually changes everything.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:05 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:56:05 If you walked into a room and brought the energy you hoped to get out of it, it's like...

Tim Ferriss 1:56:09 Yeah. There's another... [laughs] This isn't-

Jay Shetty 1:56:11 Go on

Tim Ferriss 1:56:11 ... this isn't as poetic.

Jay Shetty 1:56:13 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:13 But there's another one that somebody told me at one point, I'm like, "Oh God, that's good." They said, "If you walk out one day and you meet an asshole, that person's an asshole."

Jay Shetty 1:56:22 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:56:22 "If you walk outside and everyone's an asshole-"You're the as- you're the asshole [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:56:26 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:56:27 You know?

Jay Shetty 1:56:28 It's true. It's true.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:29 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:56:30 I, I know plenty of those. Like-

Tim Ferriss 1:56:32 Go get some ketones from macadamia nuts or a cold shower.

Jay Shetty 1:56:35 [laughs] Dude, I love it.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:37 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:56:37 Thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope everyone checks out tim.blog/17 for the 17 questions. And people can actually read your new book kind of to get... You wanna talk about that a bit?

Tim Ferriss 1:56:47 Yeah, sure.

Jay Shetty 1:56:47 Sure.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:47 Yeah, people can get... If they go to tim.blog, that is a URL.

Jay Shetty 1:56:51 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:51 Kinda confusing, but just type tim.blog in. You can get I th- I wanna say 175 to 200 pages of my various books to read.

Jay Shetty 1:56:59 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:59 Plenty of actional- uh, tons of actionable stuff. It's not just buttering you up for the book. Like, y- you don't ever have to buy the books. I mean, there's more in the books obviously, but there's, uh, yeah, if you go to tim.blog, you'll find 175-plus pages. And then for the No Book, which is kind of the code name for the book about saying no, definitely my funniest book so far.

Jay Shetty 1:57:20 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:57:20 'Cause I did it with Neil Strauss, who acted as my student, and he was so bad, so comically bad at saying no. There's a lot of funny exchanges, real text messages-

Jay Shetty 1:57:33 That's cool

Tim Ferriss 1:57:33 ... and experiments and stuff.

Jay Shetty 1:57:34 That's cool.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:34 But you can find, I wanna say 50, 75 pages of that, uh, at tim.blog/nobook. And, uh, yeah, so all that stuff, all that stuff is free. People can check it out.

Jay Shetty 1:57:45 Well, thank you. Well, everyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you tag me and Tim on Instagram, X, TikTok, wherever you're viewing the show or seeing clips. I wanna know what resonated with you, what you're practicing with, what you're trying, uh, what you're exploring. I love seeing how what we discuss here turns into reality. So let us know what you're taking action on. And Tim, thank you so much. I hope you'll come back-

Tim Ferriss 1:58:07 My pleasure, man

Jay Shetty 1:58:08 ... on the show.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:08 So much fun.

Jay Shetty 1:58:08 And we won't take nine years again.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:10 You're very good at what you do, man.

Jay Shetty 1:58:11 Uh, uh.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:11 It's fun to watch, and it's fun to experience also.

Jay Shetty 1:58:14 Dude, it's, it's easy with someone like you.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:15 So thank you. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:58:15 This is like a dream. This is like my favorite kind of episode. You're the best. Thank you, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:19 Yeah. Thanks.

Jay Shetty 1:58:20 Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:33 I don't believe that, like, comparison is the thief of joy. I think envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison is invaluable