Tim Ferriss: The Hidden Nerve That Controls Trauma, Mood & Emotional Pain!

Every mental health complication or diagnosis is increasing, and I've worked with different scientists and done a lot of experimentation on myself, having grown up with multiple depressive episodes every year, to see if there are root causes that we can address. And so I'll just throw out a few things that have been very, very helpful. First, there's brain stimulation. When I did this, I had months of no anxiety. Then there's something called vagus nerve stimulation, and one of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years has seen a wild collection of benefits.

So let's talk about that. Tim Ferriss has become a performance hacking expert after speaking with over 800 influential voices on his podcast. Now he's taking the most valuable frameworks and techniques to help you-

... optimize productivity, health, and performance.

Tim, the variety of things that you write about, talk about, is so wide. So what is the question that most people should ask you?

How do you break down complicated subjects and accelerate your ability to learn? Because time is one of our most valuable non-renewable resources, and so I have a framework that you can apply to any subject matter which consists of the 80/20 principle, which is picking the 20% to focus on that will give you 80% of what you want. For instance, there's hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish, but with the most frequently used 1,500, you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in eight to 12 weeks, and if you figure that out, you're ahead of 99.9% of the world.

And what do you think is the question most people want to ask you?

So there's a lot of questions around mental health, and I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people because I was, uh, sexually abused by a babysitter's son on a weekly basis. I was this close to killing myself, and it can have a lot of effects, but these are things that you can slowly chip away at, and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can take the pain and make it part of your medicine.

How?

So...

I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe, so if you could do me a favor and double-check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on, so please do double-check if you've subscribed and, uh, thank you so much, because in a strange way, you are, you're part of our history, and you're on this journey with us, and I appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank you. Tim, you are a remarkably interesting individual in part because the variety of things that you write about, talk about, clearly have deep curiosity in is so wide that you're, you're hard to, to put into any particular box. So I... My first question to you is how do you think about the work you do and how do you sort of like self-define, if you do at all, who you are and what your mission is?