Duncan Trussell Family Hour - TIM FERRISS

Episode Date: January 30, 2015

Tim Ferris (4 Hour Body and 4 Hour workweek) joins the DTFH and gives us some high-tech life tips for heating up the hot tub of our lives by cooling down our actual bath tubs.   This episode brought to you by CASPER.COM

It's Macy's friends and family. Get an extra 30% off great gifts for her just in time for Mother's Day when you use your coupon or Macy's card. And take 15% off Beauty Essentials or shop specials she'll love while supplies last. Plus Star Rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at Macy's. Sign up today at Macy's dot com slash star rewards. Savings off regular sale and clearance prices, exclusions apply. This episode of the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour Podcast is brought to you by Casper

dot com. Go to Casper dot com four slash family hour to get 50 bucks off a great mattress. Hello pals, it's me Dunkin' Trussell and you are listening to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour Podcast. I'm in the day two of a life experiment that I'm running and this experiment was inspired by today's guest Tim Ferriss and the experiment is what happens if I start waking up at seven a.m. every morning for the next two weeks. I already failed the day because I woke up at eight a.m. not seven a.m. but eight a.m.

is still pretty good for me because my old cycle that I'd allow myself to get into involve me sleeping really late which is an okay thing to do. Some people aren't morning people but I think I kind of am a morning person who pretends he's not a morning person and allows, I will trick myself into thinking that if I sleep late I'm going to feel more rested and from time to time when I have to get up really early to catch a flight or when I have to get up really early to do something whatever it is that's popped into my life I'll notice that after the first five or six minutes of horror that comes from waking up too early that kind of swooning, vertiginous awfulness

that comes when you're exhausted where your eyeballs feel like they're getting sucked back into your head and the gravity of the planet you're stuck on seems like it's turned up too high and your skin feels like it's being sucked off of your bones and your brain feels like it has been injected with a turkey baster filled with brown recluse spiders and everything in the universe feels like it's falling apart and your atomic structure feels as though it's about to try to run away from itself because it hates every single aspect of the dimension that it currently exists in that lasts for about three or four minutes and then suddenly this amazing sweet beautiful clarity pops in and if you're lucky enough

to stick your head out of your cave for a few minutes in the morning then you will quickly realize how beautiful the morning is something that a lot of people have forgotten you inhale all that fresh sweet prana that life energy that's out there the birds are singing you feel like you're a Disney character that birds are going to land on your shoulder and that squirrels are going to start dancing around you and then you make some tea and you look at the clock and holy shit it's seven forty five and you're wide awake and then you realize that you allowed yourself to fall prey to the myth that sleeping late gives you a lot of energy ferris inspired me I'm only into day two of this experiment I shouldn't be

bragging about it there's a at least a seventy percent probability that I will end up sleeping till ten a.m. tomorrow but at least I've done it for two days straight I think if I could do it for a few more days straight then this might be how I permanently am which will be pretty incredible people like Tim ferris are what I consider to be info healers they they use themselves as a laboratory and it's really cool chatting with Tim ferris because he's somebody who not only practices what he preaches but he's somebody who knows what it's like to get stuck down there in the deep stinking sticky trap of depression he knows what it's like to get pulled into that tar pit have you ever been to the labrea tar pit if you

live in Los Angeles you haven't been to the labrea tar pit you should definitely go it doesn't sound like it's a great place to have picnics but it really is the labrea tar pit you can go down there with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine and some cheese and your dogs and you can walk around and look at the weird bubbling tar that emerges from the ground it's actually a really fun place to go but at the labrea tar pit there's like this main lake which is where which has underneath it it basically just looks like a lake if you're expecting the labrea tar pit from the flintstones like an actual tar pit like a giant black hp lovecraft bubbling gooey oozing stinking doom pit you're not going to get a big version of

that but there are little versions of that that you can walk by but the big pit just kind of looks like a a lake and that's why it's so dangerous or that's why it used to be so dangerous because animals would come there to drink and then they would walk into the lake and their legs would get stuck in the tar and then that was it they would just die there and that's why the labrea tar pit is a place that's just filled with the bones of all the prehistoric creatures that used to wander around what is now los angeles i think the labrea tar pit if there ever is an example of what depression looks like go to the labrea tar pit and look at that weird scene that they've constructed where there is a an elephant stuck in the tar it's screaming up at the sky

while its family watches on the little baby is stretching its trunk out to try to save its mama its daddy i don't know what the sex of these prehistoric things is but they're fucked they're in a shit situation and when you get depressed it is very similar to getting stuck in a kind of subjective tar which is composed of all of the symbols that you're using to define your life and you could get and it'll it'll just suck you in it'll just suck you deep deep deep down into the darkness and it kills a lot of people so it's a very dangerous thing and if you're somebody out there who is prone to depression or is experienced depression it's so important from time to time to take a look around your life and to make sure that you haven't fooled yourself into thinking that

everything's okay when in reality you are getting sucked into the black stinking darkness of the tar pits of depression and it starts off really slow just like sinking in tar probably starts off really slow i imagine that elephant uh an elephant most elephants or were bears or pigs or whatever died in the little brea tar pit i imagine for a lot of them was a really horrifying slow death where they just sort of gradually sank down into the tar it's not like the quicksand that you see in movies where it just gets you really fast i imagine it was a really slow inexorable awful starvation style death that happened and that's very similar to what depression is like it's a very slow sinking oozing doom that happens to you thank god it's not all it's

it's not just about escaping from depression sometimes you've got to look at your life and ask yourself is the temperature of my existential hot tub at the level that i would like it to be and that's a really important question there's nothing more disappointing than a tepid hot tub i don't know if you guys have ever ended up in that situation where you there's a hot tub wherever it happens to be whether you're at a spa or a hotel or wherever a beautiful bubbling hot tub you see this incredible hot tub and you climb in and it's like a little less than body temperature if i'm sitting in a hot tub i want to feel like i'm getting roasted by cannibals i don't want to feel like i'm sitting in a tepid puddle of giant spit filled with the

herpes viruses of strangers that aren't being properly boiled by the water temperature so from time to time you've got to stick the thermometer of your intellect into the slimy tepid lukewarm hot tub of your life and figure out if you can get the temperature up a few degrees and that's where folks like tim ferris come in because they give you a lot of tricks that you can use to turn that temperature up and really enjoy your existence instead of just being kind of okay don't fool yourself into thinking that your life hasn't become a puddle of lukewarm giant spit filled with the pubic hairs and bacteria and urine of strangers this can happen nobody wants their life to be a discount hot tub really excited about this episode but first some quick business this episode of the

ducatrussel family our podcast is brought to you by casper.com there are a few mistakes you can make in this human incarnation one of them being you can eat spicy food and then masturbate another one is going to a mattress store stoned that is a terrible mistake and it's a mistake i made not long after my mother died when i was in a kind of dark horrible grief and i convinced myself that paying for an expensive mattress would somehow make me forget the fact that every single person that i know and love in this material universe including myself will eventually be devoured by the snake of time now if you've ever bought a mattress you know that a mattress store is essentially a maze of mattresses that is being controlled by one of the most manipulative humans

on planet earth a mattress salesman they will go to you as you wander through this maze of mattresses and they will begin to poison your mind with all these insane ideas they will drop mattress technology bombs onto your consciousness until they have beaten you into a state of complete passivity they will watch as you lay on this mattress or that mattress and they will gradually move you in the direction of the most expensive mattress they think they can convince you to buy and in this case they navigated me because i was completely stoned and i think they could detect that into the far corner of the store the hallowed super expensive mattress section and i ended up paying the most amount of money that i have ever paid for a mattress to buy

what essentially boils down to a kind of vibrating bed it's so embarrassing but at the time i was really proud of it and as i was laying on that mattress stoned out of my mind and the mattress salesman pressed the vibrate button and the thing began to vibrate then somehow i thought this is it man even though i'm in a state of deep grief right now i'm going to have this to comfort me and and when things get really bad i'll just turn the vibrate button on on my mattress and drift away into infinity the mattress salesman recognizing that i was stoned also said this to me and this was the nail in the coffin that led to me paying for this ridiculously overpriced mattress he said don't get addicted to this mattress my wife has one of these and i didn't even consider the fact

that he doesn't sleep he didn't say we have one of these he said my wife has one of these like they sleep in separate beds my wife has one of these and it became a little bit of a problem for her because she couldn't get off of the mattress because she became addicted to getting massaged by it and that was it the moment he told me that this there's the potential for addiction in this mattress i bought it then and there it was shipped to my house i don't remember when a week later a week and a half later i got the mattress installed the mattress and it felt pretty good for about a year and of course i only use the vibrate function four or five times and then one one of my friends real started making fun of me because i have the same kind of vibrating

bed that you see in 70s softcore porn movies where you put quarters in and the thing starts vibrating i use the vibrate function maybe 10 times total and and then after about a year the mattress just kind of collapsed in on itself and went from being comfortable to feeling like i was sleeping on the body of a roadkill dog just kind of lumpy and just i would wake up with back aches and it would hurt so i was going to buy a brand new mattress when i was contacted by casper.com and they actually sent me one of their mattresses to try out i do not advertise anything on this podcast that i don't actually use and after a few weeks of sleeping on the casper mattress with my other mattress leaned up against the wall in another room in my house i ended up getting rid of my

old super expensive mattress and replacing it with a casper mattress which is currently the mattress that i am sleeping on right now casper is awesome if you go to casper.com you will see that with one click you can completely bypass the experience of being sucked into a mattress labyrinth with a super manipulative pan like creature trying to convince you to spend zillions of dollars on something you could never possibly understand anyway here's what's cool about casper.com number one it's not that expensive especially for this level of a mattress you know how we go to a hotel and the mattress is great like you lay on the mattress and it feels great you're like wow this is a really nice mattress that's what the casper mattresses remind me of they're firm which i like uh because

i have a scoliosis and if i sleep on a shitty over soft mattress then i end up getting muscle spasms and senior citizen style disorders so they're really nice mattresses they're bouncy they are they come to you in a box it's free shipping and here's the really cool thing about the casper mattress if you don't like it you can send it back that means that you can try it out for a hundred nights and you can send your mattress back so you really have nothing to lose if you're thinking about buying a mattress go to casper.com and check out their mattresses and i swear to you that this is currently the mattress that i use it replaced my old expensive mattress and i highly recommend if you're in the market for a new mattress this is the way to go and what do you

have to lose if they send you the mattress and it sucks then you get to send it back so you lose nothing and then you can go let the mattress demon convince you to buy an overpriced doom bed. Okay here's the stuff that i have to read it says these are required talking points so i'm just going to say these uh an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price just the right sink just the right bounce two technologies latex foam and memory foam come together for better nights and brighter days risk-free trial and return policy try sleeping on a casper for a hundred days with free delivery painless returns the mattresses are made in america five hundred dollars for a twin size mattress nine fifty for a king size mattress comparing that to industry

averages that's an outstanding price point true um okay so yeah that's all the stuff i have to say whatever that it's a great mattress um i don't care where the damn mattress gets made by the way and call me a call me a hater if you will probably when i go to hell chris kyle will punch me in the face for saying that but if it's a if it's a if it's a nice mattress i don't care if it was forged in the fires of mordor doesn't matter to me and this is a nice mattress eight hundred and fifty bucks for a queen go to casper.com forward slash family hour you get fifty dollars off it's a really nice mattress it is the only mattress that i use here's another good reason the casper didn't include in reasons to buy a great mattress which is that if you've gotten

into a new relationship do you really want to be sleeping on on on on an on an old mattress with your soulmate do you really want to be laying on a semen stained crusty old sex sponge with your new lover no press reset get a new mattress this is a quick way to do it eight hundred and fifty bucks get the new mattress is a celebration of your new relationship and then you could make sweet love with your soulmate on a mattress that has been untainted by your past fornications you foul foul man or woman casper.com forward slash family hour fifty dollars off much thanks to them for supporting the duncan trussell family hour podcast we're also brought to you by amazon.com there is an amazon portal located at duncan trussell.com i'm sure sure

you've heard me yapping about this before but i love not having to go to the store it's great i don't like going to the store generally some i like going to computer stores because i like technology but fuck going to some of these massive chain warehouses where you are inhaling measles where you can actually see a fog of measles rolling towards you down the aisles as children just spray and belch and burp and launch measles out of their mouths assholes and nipples as they are dragged down the aisles by their stressed out mom screw that if you you can get anything you need by going to amazon.com and if you go through the portal located at duncan trussell.com you will they will give us a small percentage of anything you buy and it's a

great way to support this podcast all you have to do is go through the portal located at duncan trussell.com it's simple and it doesn't cost you anything extra so bookmark our portal the next time you're going going to amazon go through our portal when you're buying your textbooks or whatever it is that you're happening you're you're going to buy your gloves 50 valentine's days coming up so a lot of you guys probably want bonded ropes and leather executioner hoods and nipple clamps and butt plugs it's all there at amazon.com along with the swiffer refills so everything that you need is there i just actually ordered a motion detector so that i can bust my little poodle gatsby when he's pissing in my dining room that's that's my plan

anyway where i'm going to set up motion detectors in the place where he likes to launch piss and when those things go off i'm going to catch him in the act and i'm going to crucify him or not really but i'm definitely going to yell at him so looking forward to that go through our portal please we also have a shop located at dunkintrussell.com where there are enneagram t-shirts along with some other shirts these are designed by ron rigi go check them out show people that you are a dunk intrussell family hour listener and doors will open for you like they have never opened before hidden doors doors in the sidewalk that you walk down near your house that will lead you into a beautiful underground world populated by wood nymphs and satyrs and

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of the dunk intrussell family hour podcast you can see all the dates by going to dunkintrussell.com they're all listed there i'm going to be in coming up i'm going to be in winnipeg st paul madison chicago columbus i'm also going to be at the bell house in brooklyn and a lot of other dates on the east coast some of those have not gone up on my website yet but they have already started selling tickets the brooklyn show is 100 percent definitely going to sell out so if you're in new york and you want to come see a live taping of the dunk intrussell family hour go to the bell house website and get tickets right now because they're definitely going to sell out we're already over halfway sold out and the thing isn't until april so make sure you go there also

uh something i'm particularly excited about is i'm going to be doing live podcasts at the ramdas spring retreat in maui so if you really really want to dive into the ocean of novelty then i highly recommend going to ramdas.org click on the events link click on retreats link and you'll see spring on maui retreat april 29th to may 4th ramdas will be there with krishnadas roshi john halifax you can listen to her on a past podcast um dr saraswati marcus that saragu marcus's wife and mirabai star are all going to be there i'm also going to be doing podcasts there i love these things they have become my favorite thing to do and if you want to come hang out and maui with me uh then sign up for the retreat they're a blast and uh i know some of you have already

been doing that so let's do it come hang out with me in maui in the spring i get to do a live podcast with ramdas and some other folks so that's gonna be that's just gonna be i'm super excited about that so uh there it is though there's all the advertisements now everyone please really put down the other thing that it is that you're doing uh if you're at work right now and you're uh distracted i never say this i never say this but get to a non-distracted uh place in your life and listen to this podcast because tim ferris is the real deal he offers some very efficient easy to bring into your life tactics and techniques for amplifying and enhancing and upgrading your experience of being a human being on this planet so now everybody please get

those third eyes dilated and allow tim ferris to download this high tech info deep into your astral body's brain welcome to the duncan trussell family our podcast tim ferris tim welcome to the duncan trussell family our podcast i can't believe you're sitting here with me i got a tweet from you and was blown away that you listen to my podcast because i've been reading your stuff for a long time haven't fully been able to bring it into my life so i think it's a little bit of a miracle that you're sitting here with me because it really is thank you so much for coming on the show oh my pleasure i uh i'm thrilled to be here love your stuff so i it's it's entirely my pleasure you are somebody who not only talks to talk but you walk the walk you're somebody who

has managed to optimize your life and to you are really good at articulating ways for other people to optimize their lives as well and a lot of people it must be incredible for you to see these transformations happening all the time that you are inducing into the biomass that we call humanity how does that make you feel it's it was an accidental career never planned on being a writer of any type and it's hugely ratifying i mean it's it's incredible to have someone for instance recently i i came across the first person who's lost more than 200 pounds on the slow carb diet from the four-hour body and when you see the impact that back and have on someone particularly when they have areas that are so easy to improve low hanging fruit whether it's sort of

in the the productive the productivity work realm or in the physical realm you take someone from not being able to tie their shoes to being able to tie their shoes right it's like all right yeah if you go from you lose 10 pounds and you get a little leaner that's an incremental gain but seeing some of those changes is is really the only thing that keeps me writing because i find writing extremely difficult and it is isn't it i'm a i'm a hugely plotting writer i remember reading a quote from kurt vonnegut which is you know when i write i feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth and that's generally how i feel yeah it is really a vicious thing isn't it it really is uh do you have have you discovered any it seems the way that your mind works is by analyzing systems

and making those systems more efficient not just cutting out the fat from people's bodies but just cutting out the fat from the process itself if you found any tricks in your writing that we could use or definitely absolutely and and the rules or the principles apply across the board so for instance in writing if you want to journal regularly and you haven't been able to or you want to write regularly and you haven't been able to lower your quota so what i mean by that is write less than you think you can write and make that your pass fail mark so i think what happens whether it's people are making new year's resolutions for the gym or making resolutions for business or career or whatever it might be writing in this case they'll say okay i'm gonna write

five pages a day and they've never sat down and written right five pages in the morning for instance yeah it's too high of a threshold to have as a pass fail whereas if you say okay i'm gonna write a third of a page and if i write more it's bonus credit but if i'm rigging the game so that i can win if i pass that one third of a page then i win and that's the positive feedback that'll keep you writing and i know someone who's written continually in their journal in the morning for ten years straight rarely misses a day and prior to that they were not able to journal and that's the only reason they said it very small and it's the same reason for instance way back in the day that ibm salespeople uh outsold all of the competition it was because their their quotas

were low they weren't intimidated to pick up the phone they didn't procrastinate right and that is so cool yeah yeah because that is the it's almost as though a function of procrastination is creating an expectation that's so high that you could never meet it and so you just give up and then you get to not change at all definitely yes it's on a daily basis how do you reduce that performance anxiety so you pull the trigger on more things and i think symptomatically people tend to and this is true for me too of course i have my own daily struggles of all types but we tend to overestimate what we can do in a single day and underestimate what we can do in say a month wow and cool uh so rather than trying to do the five to ten pages day every day it's like no no no if you just do that third

of a page and that'll probably bleed into a page or two every once in a while yeah and you do that every day for a month that the cumulative impact on that on clarity of thought on putting your anxieties on paper so they're out of your head for the day is massive much more so than if you just write five pages a day for the first three days and then quit for a month and then try to resolve to do it again oh wow that's cool and i love that you mentioned clarity of thought because i have noticed that when i am regularly writing that bleeds into every other aspect of my life there's more focus i feel more articulate uh inspiration comes more often is there some sort of neurological uh explanation for that do people understand what's going on is your brain isn't

getting muscles how is that working i think what it comes down to and i don't know the neurological basis for it but which i would hope to know at some point i'm doing all sorts of weird experiments we could talk about with neuroimaging and brain stimulation but the i think what it comes down to for me they're they're two pieces of it the first and i'm borrowing this from a friend of my name kevin kelly he was the founding editor of wired magazine and uh fascinating guy he's one of the best sort of techno predictors the world has ever seen in terms of predicting what will happen 10 years hence you look at videos of his from you know five 10 15 years ago they're on point but he spends a lot of time with the amish to look at how they adopt or reject technology and he's an

amish beard he's such a fascinating guy but he writes to figure things out he doesn't write to present the perfect explanation of something he writes to work through his own thinking so there's that aspect of it where you're you're you're crystallizing your thought on paper so you can examine and dissect it which i think is very valuable that is so cool can i stop you there for two seconds just to uh make a comment on that i'm reading this um uh book uh by a pema children which is an analysis of a very famous buddhist scripture which is the scripture that where the idea of the bodhisattva comes from which is the notion of the person who's decided to in the big term procrastinate their enlightenment until every sentient being in the universe gains enlightenment

so it's this idea is i will put off that final merging into all things until i have moved every other thing in that direction first so it's a crazy giant giant idea but this book which is considered one of the great buddhist scriptures it starts off with a forward by the author the initial versus is the author saying i do not consider myself a teacher i'm only writing this in the hopes that i can understand these ideas better it's pretty cool yeah just what your friend is saying yeah which is a great way to teach by the way right to to offer people a window into how you're refining your own thinking about something because ultimately thinking is well there's kind of slow systems and fast systems uh but if we're looking at our analytical mind it's

really the process of asking and answering questions so that could be god damn it why the fuck didn't i mail the blah blah blah earlier oh jesus and or it could be uh why am i letting that you know kid with the iphone at the table next to me at the restaurant bother me so much or yeah and uh when you when you see someone on paper working through their own thinking you're able to borrow better questions and uh even if those questions are or are effectively in between the line so coming back to your question like tricks with writing number one is i write i make my pass fail mark very low uh so my rule is and i borrowed this from another writer i can't remember the name at the moment but two shitty pages predict okay so that's my quota uh also very often what

i'll do is write down the questions that i want to answer for myself write down the questions that my friends have asked me most most consistently in conversation about topic x and then i'll just fill in the answers and then you're and then you're raised the questions genius and there you go that's genius that's so fucking cool man that's the coolest thing i've ever heard about writing and i've read a lot of books about writing that's bad ass wow that's so exciting holy shit that's really cool that like yeah when sometimes i'm doing the podcast what i'll do in the opening monologues when i'm rambling is i'll be talking to myself about things that i think i should be doing or learn you know what i mean like i'll be where i'm at right now and then like talk to myself

like but it sounds like i'm like giving advice but i'm not it's just like be less of an ad you you know some version of can you please be less of a selfish asshole but it's just me talking to myself yeah that's cool man i love that because you're sort of you're you know you're like because where do where do ideas come from you know we don't know where where does the answer to those questions come from where where where is that place there is a singularity that exists somewhere in the mind that has a like a liminal place where you can kind of feel an idea pop in usually the idea just pops when someone asks you a question there's an answer right away and there's a singularity between when the answer comes yeah and when the answer wasn't

there you know there's just this line that you can't go past and i'm really curious about that what is that place that these ideas are coming from what is that it's a it's a really important question if we could answer it if i mean imagine if there was a epiphany dial or some way to like crank that meter up that makes tesla uh in einstein and edison and all the great thinkers of the world the flowers grow out of them faster if we could do that as a species god knows what we could create no i agree and i think i've i've i've thought about this a lot uh just experimenting with for instance the the podcast and interviewing these these friends of mine some of which are doing crazy stuff like a peter diamandis for instance uh he's the chairman of the x prize but

he's co-founded a company called planetary resources and their entire purpose is to design space vehicles that can land on resource rich asteroids and mine resources yes yes i write about so wow so how do you get to that point right or and i think there are a few ways to tackle the problem what i've observed with peter like uh with people with people like peter is that they ask themselves better questions so i think it's for me this comes back to writing too which is applicable to people who do not view themselves as writers the first is can you borrow better questions or come up with better questions and in the case of say uh peter teal he was the first outside investor in facebook co-founder of paypal and i interviewed him as well and one of the

questions he asks is why can't you do why can't you do your 10-year plan in the next six months wow and it's just a seemingly absurd question but it's an amazing thought exercise and then uh peter diamandis would ask you know instead of aiming for say a 10 improvement in x whatever that might be it could be anything could be your job performance it could be your client satisfaction rate it could be uh podcast downloads doesn't matter instead of aiming for 10 what if you had to aim for 10x how does that change your process how does that change yeah that's cool how you approach things and like gun to your head like if you're kidnapped by isis and they say you out if you don't get 10 times your podcast downloads in the next month we're blowing your brains out you'll

figure it out you would figure it out you figure it out it would and i think the the so that gets to a really important uh point which is incentives right yeah so what that does is it gives you a clear goal and it makes it your priority so i was reading recently that priority was singular there was no plural priorities until something like 200 years ago and we sort of co-opted it to allow for multiple priorities but what is your one priority that incentive i not having your head blown off would make it your number one priority so the i think that good ideas or breakthrough ideas breakthroughs often come about when you borrow better questions then create incentives whether that's a reward or punishment and punishment tends to be very effective by the way

i'll give you an example that that i've that i enjoy which is a friend of mine his name is a j jacob's he's a writer who lives in new york he wanted to lose weight at one point and he was not morbidly obese but he would he would describe himself as a he had a a python that swallowed a goat physique and he wanted to lose weight he he never was able to lose weight so he's a jewish guy and he wrote a check to the i think it was the american nazi party and or the kluklux guy one of the two for a thousand dollars in his name gave it to one of his very cynical friends and said if i don't lose x number of pounds my y point in time i want you to mail this to the party and it will be on the public record that i don't need money he lost the weight wow no new techniques no new magic potions

an incentive a strong incentive holy shit that guy's got balls that's crazy he does have balls of steel wow yeah i love that man i think i think that's an incredible way in uh to expanding yourself you know i was just uh i i love being around very successful people who like uh who have really like done it figured out like you or like my friend abry marcus i was just yeah very smart really smart guy and like yeah you know i took a tour of his on-it place and you know he's like suddenly you see like oh this guy's got like a batman level complex with like an indoor volleyball court and like he he he got to that level in his life of that kind of crazy crazy success you got to that level you are a renowned author you have you like your p you resurrect people from

the debt or your techniques if people utilize them they kind of like you raise the dead in a way like a lot of people are deeply lost can use what you're teaching even now like i already am like oh shit i gotta go i'm gonna go fucking write a shitty page right now like you're very inspiring but um do you acknowledge that there's a little bit of fear involved in reaching those kinds of peaks in life like it's not just a laziness or procrastination or asking the wrong questions but isn't don't you think there's a little bit of like i would be terrified to have that much responsibility or i'd be terrified to experience that kind of acceleration i think fear is a constant for almost everyone and i've talked to some some a number of people

across the board you know hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars and it's not a drive to success that fuels them it's a fear of failure or embarrassment now is that a good or bad thing maybe we should suspend that judgment and ask instead is it useful right so uh and can it be made positive so i think that uh i have fear there's things that i'm afraid of there are things i've been afraid of for ages i didn't learn to swim until i was 31 for instance i mean that's that's pretty embarrassing for someone who grew up on long island and i think that the the just to maybe talk to addressing those fears the best way to address fear is that i've found personally and this is a constant in my journaling when i journal uh is to define your fears like

really in the highest resolution possible what am i really afraid of because i think that that just as we often fail to achieve our goals because they're nebulous they're not defined well right they're not measurable they're not dissectable i think we fair we fail to overcome our fears because they are equally nebulous undefined uh yeah so it's like we're afraid of breaking up right we're afraid of breaking up in a relationship we're afraid of quitting our job that's a great one so it's like all right we make if you actually sit down and in your journal you were to create say three columns and the first column is what are all of the worst things that could happen in detail if i quit my job what are the worst things right so like the just go through the list

and get really specific then the second column is for each of those what could i do to minimize the likelihood of them happening and then the third is if they happen what would i have to do for each of them if if this happened what would i have to do to get back to where i am now worst case scenario and when you lay out that that that sort of anatomy of a fear yes but not it literally nine times out of ten i mean 90 plus times out of 100 people go oh this is no fucking big deal at all i mean i've been running circles in my head you know that's like a devil with a pitchfork chasing me yes day and night over something that is completely reversible yes that's right yeah that's cool man and that it's like what you're talking about there

it reminds me of vipassana it reminds me of a form you know vipassana meditation and it reminds me of that that kind of analysis of these sort of uh good and bad constructs that are inside of everyone and the going into the fractal level of them and quickly you realize that they're formless or that you have really just you know i there's a actually i just read this great story in goldstein's book uh mindfulness and the buddha tells the story about how there was this hermit monk who went into a cave he was an artist and he spent day after day for years planning this very very very detailed painting of a tiger and finally when he was done the thing was so terrifying he had to leave the cave but you know it's the comparison is that these these feet these mental uh constructs

are the very same thing they're not real at all we've just painted this picture of some ridiculous probability because the stuff that gets us is not ever what we expect it's the shit that gets you is can't usually comes out of the blue definitely and uh i think that you know there are few tools that have been very helpful for me and some of them are very very old i mean they're uh a good companion by the way to a lot of buddhist thinking in my opinion i think they're very close cousins and so i i've i've read a lot of stoic philosophy oh yes and i think that whether it's marcus aurelius or senica the younger and there are many other writers of course epictetus my my favorite is senica because he's the he's the best writer uh and also writes

i think he wrote in latin instead of greek which was easier to translate into idiomatic english but it's it's this the understanding of impermanence the you know he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than it's necessary uh and these pithy these pithy lines or parables i think that that buddhism is better at providing parables than than stoicism um so you can combine the two and uh you just you come away with these very pragmatic gems that allow you not to fall prey to the the the sort of formless nebulous anxiety in our heads which we all have which i think is fed by a lot of technology uh so how do you think it's fed by technology uh well if it bleeds it leads and i think that if in a way that that in a in a in a in an ecosystem where a very high

percentage of the participants are rewarded with page views uh it's a shock in all campaign every day oh wow so i for that reason tend to avoid a lot of news and a lot of my friends do that too who are very successful what they do nasim talib wrote the black swan i don't think he's read newspapers since some point in the 80s and yet he's massively successful has been massively successful in uh different types of bets on in the stock market for instance uh but the the um i find stoicism buddhism to be very uh very it's a it's a very potent and helpful combination and so for instance in when i journal in the morning uh they typically i'll i'll try to revisit a few lines from either stoicism or buddhist thought that uh that helped me to correct self-defeating impulses okay so for

instance i i've always been very aggressive and uh that's true and the sports i've chosen and i think just i've been rewarded in life for being like a hard charging bull in a china shop and that's that's a useful tool but it's only one tool and i've i've i tend to overuse it and the way that manifests is i can get very angry and and anger is this and that's part of the reason i loved that episode you did with salzman is salzberg i'm sorry salzberg i know another salzman my bad um but uh the is the anger is this sort of default response that i often have and so i'll take a line like and this is paraphrasing but uh do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence and wait can you go say that one more time okay do do not attribute to malice that which

can be explained by and oh wow that's good man that's really good yeah i say that to myself because you're not going to get malice is what pisses you off right yeah if someone it's if when i get all wound up and excited and piss away all my energy on being like the container for anger it's when i feel like i have been wronged on principle yes and me too but then you realize like no this guy just has is completely disorganized idiot it's not that he is he's not thinking about fucking me at all right i just like doesn't know how to use outlook right or something right who knows but it's it's that's amazing assuming incompetence before malice yeah changes the whole framework and the way you view a million things in your life yes um and uh so so i've been

you mentioned past now you know i meditate uh uh every morning and uh i i highly encourage people to to sort of seek those types of anchors those types of uh whether it's epigrams or parables from buddhist thought and stoic philosophy i think they're so compatible in so many ways i was definitely definitely check out cynica i i've you know i think i've read some quotes by him just i'm sad to say like on twitter like maybe someone tweets these quotes in our mind it's always like holy shit that's incredible yeah and definitely um meditations i've i've read i think you can actually if you guys are interested in that you can actually get i think that there's a free kindle download so you can just easily grab that if you can find almost everything there's a public

domain version but that book is my deepest encounter with stoicism and to me what was really amazing about it was how timeless it was how it didn't date it didn't feel antiquated at all at all not at all i mean you could have just swapped in a couple of like jane and you know richard yes for the names and you'd be like oh yeah no like you nothing would have indicated that it was written 2000 years ago and what i like about some of stoicism particularly when you're reading from people who are on the front lines like marcus realius who is literally taking some of these notes for meditations in his journal never intended for publication and you have someone who is at the time probably the most powerful person on the planet yes and the roman emperor for those of you

don't know exactly and wasn't that book written for the next emperor isn't that that was the idea is it the training manual to be an emperor i have friends who would be better qualified to to to comment on the purpose my understanding was it was literally his mortal his journal so that he could reflect and remind himself so himself of things and what i like about it and i think sometimes and this is not true all the time but in in some buddhist writing there is a a very heavy emphasis on compassion which i think is absolutely worthwhile but without the caveat that allows you to prepare yourself not to react with anger instead of compassion what i mean by that is if you read marcus realius you'll come across all of these passages that you can tell

he's writing in the morning before a really hard day and it's just like today you will deal with rude ungrateful bastards all day long do not expect otherwise it is their nature you know prepare yourself so it's not he's not going into it giving himself the positive psychology like stewart smalley affirmations he's just like look you're gonna deal with a lot of idiots today yeah and do not turn against yourself by responding in the wrong way i love that though yeah it's you know what by the way no offense to all the people who are interested in meta and compassion and loving the whole planet but it is if i'm going into a forest of cunts it's gonna be easier for me to think this is a forest of cunts like creatures are gonna come out

and do awful things to you for the next couple of miles but you gotta get through that force if somebody just if i'm with a guy who says that yeah it's gonna be easier for me to get through then if i'm with a guy who's like listen these creatures are gonna come out they're all cunts and they're gonna fuck with you this entire trip just love them just love them as we walk that's a little more difficult right it's it's really difficult i think you know sometimes you need a cunt axe right yes and you need to arm your psychology with with a repertoire that can like deal with being on the front lines and having these people hurl stupidity at you or just you know or just untrained responses and of course sometimes sometimes we're the guy walking through

the cunt forest and other times we're just one of the cunts in the forest uh that's that's the whole that's the whole rub of the thing didn't marcus earliest say that that's i think that's verbatim that's i think i saw that on instagram recently cool man uh the the uh you were mentioning earlier that you have been doing uh neural imaging is that what you were saying yeah i've uh so i i really believe that uh with most things if you can't measure it you don't understand it if you can't measure it you can't manage it and for that reason uh to especially to separate fact from fiction uh i find blood testing imaging of all types very very helpful and uh in this particular case uh i've uh i'm a huge fan of a lab at ucsf uh called the gazali lab run by a very very smart

guy named adam gazali and they do uh they have been on the cover of i think it's either nature or science which is like being on the cover every major newspaper in the united states at the same time for scientific discovery it's that's the that's the winning the super bowl uh but they do functional mris and eegs uh for for all sorts of different experiments and uh they've they've looked at for instance using video games to basically and this this is i'm obviously paraphrasing here but rejuvenate cognitive performance and they've also looked at using something called uh i think it was tdcs that they were using but trans cranial direct current stimulation where you take basically a nine volt battery and have a current that travels across the scalp uh between

anona cathode and uh not at adam's lab but in some some separate studies you have people who are say in the military and their their accuracy in a first person shooter game will just jump by you know double digits and no yeah way yeah it's not crazy um so i do not despite how easy it is to to diy this type of kit i strongly discourage people from doing it's a terrible idea i mean it's easy to make in the same way it'd be easy to pour like hydrochloric acid on your face just because it's easy doesn't mean you should do it don't do it doesn't matter someone's gonna do it i know don't do it because how many times in my life have i heard don't do it but it's easy it's like i'm immediately in the basement gathering the chemicals together to try to do whatever it is

yeah so the uh but but um what are the dangers if you rig this yourself i mean wow that's it's how what's that so the scary thing is people don't know that's that's the scary part for me i'm okay with known quantities as side effects so for instance i mean i've been very upfront i wrote about this in for our body where i went into a full chapter on the the fact versus fiction when it comes to say uh anabolic agents like uh anabolic androgenic steroids which i think are ridiculously politically maligned and actually have some amazing applications for say post surgery or wasting diseases like like hiv in any case um you know what the side effects are with those right it's the mobs you might get mobs uh for instance but you you know what they are and you can manage

with something that's brand new uh relatively brand new like tdcs never heard of it at all yeah like who knows if you if you so there are people on youtube you can find who have accidentally switched the heat sort of the positive and negative on their head so they got the locations semi correct but they they switched they they they switched the positive and negative poles and they're just like i feel really dumb like i don't know what's happening so it's like something is happening to your brain it's not and it's such a sensitive instrument uh with so many negative feedback loops it's just so insane to think that at this moment yeah there is at least one gamer who is has a battery kit shooting electricity into his brain right now to play call of duty better

for sure for sure oh hundred percent for sure and uh you know the question is are they gonna have and this is complete speculations making this up but are they gonna have say early onset of Parkinson's like 20 years advanced because they do that every day unsupervised have no idea what they're doing right who knows this is you know i i have read that tesla uh did us would do similar things with electricity he thought that it had a rejuvenating qualities he thought that running it through your body somehow you know helped in a lot of ways and it's crazy to hear that they this is being shown to be correct i don't know if he's running it through his brain yeah but i do know that he was very vocal about the therapeutic benefits of some form of

electrocution also there's electroshock therapy to treat depression sure so there have died what did they don't have any idea why it works though right now you know i'm not i don't have deep familiarity with electroshock therapy i prefer just cold exposure for anti-depressant purposes oh wow which works spectacularly well those cryo chambers is that what you're talking about cryo chambers or uh you can use cryo chambers like tony robbins does in the morning he has a huge crowd chamber at his house uh or you can do what i typically do which is i'll do ice baths at the end of the day and you can among other things i mean with certain types of cold exposure you do ice baths i do yeah so you fill your bathtub with water maybe yeah a ton of

ice in it yeah it's it's just like sort of dropping ice cubes into a cup of water it's easier if you put the uh less messy if you put the ice in first usually about 20 pounds in a standard bathtub 10 to 20 pounds and then fill it with water and i have a whole protocol that i would use and this came about initially from competitive sports because it was it basically gave me uh the equivalent of a day or two of recovery it was amazing and made me sleep like a baby so i'd finish training i'd go home and then i would fill the bath with ice typically do about uh 10 minutes i'd i'd only be in the ice up to like navel level or or mid mid torso and i would read and i would just read for about 10 minutes can't you die uh people should do this with uh caution and consult your medical professional

i'm sure there are ways that people could die doing this uh you can't get hypothermia from 10 minutes sitting in ice very unlikely if you follow the protocol just so i cover my ass the protocol is pretty well laid out in the four hour body there's a whole chapter on it because you can you can you can also two to three x your rate of fat loss doing this but the my protocol is say 10 to 20 start with 10 pounds um if you're going to do this and ask your ask your doctor i don't play one on the internet uh the read for 10 minutes then i would go down up to my neck i wouldn't submerge my head with my hands out this is key because your capillary density is so high on your hands uh you can stay in a lot longer if you keep your hands out so you kind of go into like lego

figure uh position with your hands out of the water like yeah i was just saying and uh then i would stay there for about another five minutes uh and then i'm out that's it uh recently i've been doing on and off so i do say sauna or hot bath and then cold and back and forth contrast therapy yeah but if you if you look at uh cold exposure on pub med for instance and uh or search anti depression or depression therapy and cold exposure there's there's a lot written about this and it is i found very few things that are as effective and uh why why does they have any idea why it works i don't know the exact mechanism i'm and i'm not sure people do it affects all sorts of things like i don't know they're they're hormones like adipinectin that it affects uh certainly

affects probably norepinephrine and things like that but i don't know i don't know is is the short answer uh not sure um now i i want to get back to this electrical brain stimulation that you're talking about only because i've never heard of it before and the implications to me are astounding to imagine that what we're talking about is a a future where people have some form of helmet or some kind of headpiece or just an implant an implant that is modulating electricity through your brain to enhance mental performance sure so you're talking about a true comic book cyborg that is being stimulated with electricity to to yeah on on demand and be like hitting the turd the the booster rockets i i don't think we're that far away i'd say certainly within the next

10 years maybe within the next five i don't think we're far from those types of implants wow yeah man we are in such fascinating times aren't we oh yeah absolutely i mean they're already people i live in san francisco and in silicon valley they're people with experimenting with implants of all of all types and i mean i think we're going to find you know continuous glucose monitors they're already uh i think it might actually be nike or google i think it's actually google who's working on contact lenses that can track your glucose levels and this is for diabetics is that what that what is that for probably intended for diabetics i would use it anyway why because well uh i've had i've implanted in myself actually a continuous glucose monitor intended for type 1 diabetics so

that i could look at my glucose variations glucose is sugar right that's right blood sugar i could look at that over a day and try to correlate it with a food log uh to see for instance like does taking a small amount of lemon or vinegar or cinnamon prior to a meal lower my glycemic response does it uh yes you can use cinnamon you can use uh i think i think it was vinegar i'd have to go back and look very closely my girlfriend puts lemon in everything she's she's like always squeezing lemon into just about every yeah i love lemon lemon actually for those people interested also appears to and maybe somebody can call bs on this but i'm pretty sure it's right make the catechins and whatnot in green tea more bioavailable so if you put lemon into green tea it's a good

combo holy shit yeah and it tastes good too what's what's your take on um you you have all of these amazing cutting edge high-tech life improving tricks what's your take on some of the research that's coming out as far as treating depression with psilocybin or ketamine or all the psychedelic research have you looked into that field at all i've looked into it very deeply oh cool and i mean i'm an avid uh i don't i don't know what the i mean i'm an avid uh experimenter when it comes to all of that so i i think that the the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and the uh sort of the post timothy leary uh you know the wake of of the sort of you know the the dropout movement and they're tremendous therapeutic applications of psilocybin uh lsd some of these

these uh such psychoactive compounds uh what people probably don't want to hear is that i think there is tremendous therapeutic and cognitive value in micro doses that are sub perceptual so for those people are just like sweet i have i have i've permission to go trip my balls off every day it's like no no no no you could you could actually use these some of these compounds in a non hallucinatory way for tremendous uh anxiolytic meaning you know anxiety reducing results and effects for creativity especially psilocybin micro doses of psilocybin yeah for writing or for creativity i've never experienced anything like that before the you know and not tarence mckinna talked about that um he talked about the effect that

mushrooms have in high doses he said that they could actually cause glissolia speaking in tongues and they create such an out rush of creativity that if you take super high doses which i've never taken mckinna level doses i've been there you've been you've spoken in tongues before so the heroic dose level yeah will flatten the most resistant ego yes wow for sure and i don't necessarily um endorse doing that uh certainly without supervision um and mind your mind your local jurisdictions legal restrictions obviously i like i like to imagine the list of questions that people listening are going to bring to their doctor after this which is like so i want to go i want to take a heroic dose of mushrooms and sit in an ice bath is that okay while running

electricity through my brain right so i think that uh psychedelics are very untapped and under researched partially because they have the label psychedelics right i think it's a very maligned term that is that has developed a lot of negative connotation and we need replacements for that yes which is why and i don't want to call it plant medicine i know you don't like that term either huh i don't like that term it gives me the like i don't know why but like no offense to those of you use that term but it just it definitely feels i don't know you're trying too hard and i think it's it's uh i've used that term before myself but it it bothers me it feels like a dodge and i don't want it to be a dodge i just think we need a clearer unbagged term which is why i would

usually say you know psychoactive psychoactive hallucinogens i like hallucinogens more than that that's a scary word for some people it's it's scary i like that more than psychedelics but we need we need to we need better labels we need the people who come up with the names for the weird antidepressants out there that are nothing like their chemical name right you know are like ambient yeah ambient sounds so so comforting comforting the research department came up with that name it's so good i i love to imagine all the names before ambient was chosen because ambient you've got am the morning worked in ambient it's in it's like the morning you're gonna feel good but it's like and also their campaign is so amazing that i whenever i think of

ambient i still think of that fucking firefly you know the ambient firefly wait are you thinking about lunesta you know what's lunasta i'm thinking same idea though right same idea ambient scares a shit out of me i've never taken it berry there are lots of reports of people who will get up drive around you know cook things in the kitchen get asleep and have no recollection this is any of their behaviors a lot of there's a lot of uh people who work in the airline industry who it's their least favorite thing to deal with is that people get on the airplane at night and take ambient and they start sleepwalking or they start ordering weird shit it doesn't make any sense because they're asleep but yeah that's a fascinating that's a anyway off track a little bit um so it

seems like you you don't have a you it doesn't feel like you have a this is good or evil this is you don't you just want you're so open minded that you are into you know trying anything that creates an enhanced would you consider yourself a transhumanist you know i'll i'll admit something here i've heard that term many times and i don't know what it means so i might i don't know if you could tell me what it means maybe i would so here's the concept the concept is so a lot of people when they hear about um life you downloading your consciousness into a computer or when they hear about the you know life extension technologies or when they hear about neural implants or when they hear about anything that involves taking technology imbibing it and putting it into our bodies and

radically transforming ourselves Kurzweil talked about the potential of uh nanobots yeah nanobots that replace our the our blood like blood cells like robotic blood cells that would make it so that we could run a million times farther without having to arrest more like so it's like use merge the merging of the human body with technology to create a super being and transhumanists are people who say oh that's our right that's what we're here for we're not here to die we're not here to get old old as a disease old isn't a natural thing old as a disease that we haven't cured yet old age is a disease and we will cure all diseases we will cure old age we will reverse the aging process we will merge with computers and we will explode out into the universe because we have figured

out a way to free free ourselves of biology that's it i would say so few things um as context i've been an advising faculty member at singularity university which is based in nasa ames co-founded by Kurzweil and peter d amandis i would say that i am a a pragmatic experimentalist and if that process of experimentation and observation leads me to implants and transhumanism then that's fine i'm all for it but i don't preclude the possibility that we're better off focusing on things that have existed for thousands of years and dying a natural death i don't i don't have any any currently any particular agenda or value judgment related to say death uh i might as i get older certainly i'm yeah but uh i am and maybe this makes me a transhumanist i'm less concerned

with extending life than i am extending functional high performing life so it's not the dying that worries me it's the slow descent into death that worries me and like oh the back gets a little more achy the shoulders stop working quite as well i i want to go skiing but my knee isn't quite what it used to be i want to fix all that so if i can if i can look at a couple of case studies talk to good scientists uh find a way to say maybe experiment with an exoskeleton before it's made uh i guess what an endoskeleton uh cool i'll i'll experiment with that and uh the but i will use all the tools in the arsenal and that that is not limited to microprocessors that could include low doses of different substances it could include uh meditation heat treatment uh body work of various types

surgeries of different types that may or may not include synthetic components but it all comes down to forming hypotheses and doing short-term tests you're the least depressed person i've ever met in my life you are so motivated and focused so many people don't value their lives so many people they just you know they they like my there's a comedian uh who i used to do a podcast with natasha legero and she's got a great joke which there's already on an album so it's okay to blast it on a podcast i think which is like it seems like some people wake up in the morning look in the mirror and think as little as possible you know like you know today as little as possible i probably butchered your joke natasha sorry if i

did but the the that but i've i've i have been one of those people sure it's that the it's like you feel like you're stuck on one of those sticky traps that mice get stuck on definitely and that and and and that the effort to get out of bed is incredibly everything has a higher gravity when you're depressed sure and getting out of bed is difficult but the getting to the gym come on man that's a fucking miracle or like taking a cold bath that's a fucking miracle or any of these things that you're talking about man they're so they're so uh tricky to get to that place when you're down when you're deep down so what do we do those of us who are deeply enmeshed in the sticky trap of depression and not just depression i don't even want to use that word just the sticky

trap of depression or a rather distraction or just the general foggy fuzziness that can overcome a person who has not achieved that initial spark which blasts you into the stratosphere of self-improvement or self-optimization it's a very good question i think first i need to confess that i'm i'm actually a member of that same tribe so i've had repeated serious bouts with depression and uh that seems to be uh number one biologically hardwired in my just my bloodlines but secondly um i i i think that uh when you have fast turnover of thought there's a higher propensity to depression i think when you have a a high volume of internal dialogue it's just it always goes sideways somewhere and uh so what i would say is what i found personally

very helpful and what i try to convey to my readers for instance who who find themselves in in these difficult places and i found myself in this place too where it's like i just don't want to get out of bed yes literally keeps hitting snooze because i don't want to get out of bed and uh that might be because of loneliness it might be because of overwhelm the there are a few things i have found to help tremendously and generally they're not additive what i mean by that is if someone needs to lose a hundred pounds or even 30 pounds they have a bad diet to tell them to go to the gym five times a week is going to fail and the reason it's going to fail is they have to create new time to do that whereas if they're overweight well clearly they've been fucking eating

so you can just replace the default meals that they eat in the same pockets of time that's actually that's a lead domino that they can tip right and similarly with with depression i think there are a few things like okay hopefully you're showering maybe once a day or every other day instead of that shower take a nice bath right and use something like if you don't want to go to the grocery store no problem like call a friend or call something like or use an app like instacart to have a bad ass i just found out about instacart holy shit so i use instacart almost exclusively to have ice delivered to my house literally like 40 pounds of ice and it'll just like whoa it'll show up like whatever a couple bucks as a delivery charge a total game changer for ice baths because it's

actually kind of a pain in the ass to get like hot down bags of ice sometimes no kidding but um the the so i ice bath is big the other one i would say is even if you go to bed very late and a lot in my experience a lot of depressed people do yes they tend to be night owls i've always been a night owl me too um and you know one of the tips for writing also is a side note is to figure out where what is the three to four hour block of time in your personal bio rhythm where your best at synthesis we can come back to that but for me i was always a night owl and uh so i would go to bed at like four or five super late and i'd be like well like everybody says i should get eight hours of sleep if i don't get eight hours of sleep this is my depressed self-talking right if i don't get eight

hours of sleep i'm gonna be a mess tomorrow so then i wake up at god knows what hour and i feel like i have a gun against my head or i'm dodging bullets all day long yep wake up earlier wake up before most people are at work so even if you are so especially if you're self-employed wake up at for instance say seven o'clock even if you fucking go to bed at five wake up at seven and then take a nap in the afternoon wow cool you know i mean and if that means you sleep from three to seven so be it man that is so badass i you know i have noticed that it's a weird thing that if i wake up at seven a.m even if i haven't gotten enough sleep yeah i feel so much more awake than if i wake up at 11 a.m what is that hard to say but i feel the same thing i think it could be

just circadian and light triggers right and all of that which i think is very uh understudied actually that that i think is the key to a lot of modern problems uh but for those of you who might be in a hole i would say consider just two things waking up at seven and then if you're having an app at say three o'clock if that needs to be for an app so be it but wake up at seven so that you're you don't feel like you're you're losing the game of life yeah when you wake up and you're like wow everybody's been working for four or five hours holy shit look at my inbox yeah fucked yeah wake up at seven have a cup of tea transcendental meditation that's additive so maybe it comes later but you do tm i do tm my friend johnny pemberton does tm he raves about

i've been thinking about getting enrolled in the program because he just says it's the most incredible thing i would try it and there are things that i dislike about tm but net net what makes it very effective for me and the reason it was effective for me is that they force you to take a course i think they charge too much but that's fine uh you take a course and you're held accountable that is the genius of it when we cut and this comes back to what i was saying earlier about incentives you don't want to look like an asshole and have somebody waste their time with you who's an authority figure i teacher you're going to meet them for four or five days and in between each meeting you're supposed to meditate twice on your own and then report back for an hour you

sit there and talk about it uh and if you haven't done it it's going to be very uncomfortable so people do it cool and once once i was sort of had the training wheels off and don't get me wrong there are times when i when i when i when i miss it but i found tm because of the accountability that's built into the structure to be very very uh effective and also there there is a little bit of guru worship type stuff that is in tm but when you get past that after say the initial meeting they give you the history it's like okay fine i got it then it is very secular uh and for the same reason that i've always and people are some people are going to hate me for this i've generally if i'm doing something body weight oriented as exercise i would prefer pilates to yoga because

there is yes there was less woo woo new age shit right which i've historically had some trouble with and for the same reason i think tm didn't hit that hot button you know like the mantras no the i was actually okay with the mantra because i have no idea what it means and i i the the tm folks might you know hunt me down for this but i think that there are i think the power of mantras is huge the word mantra i dislike in the same way that it dislike the word psychedelic and it just makes me sound like some fucking lunatic and uh you know we need new words man we need new words so mantra for me uh god you know you could you could call it uh let's give it a new word right now so you could call it repetitive queuing so um there we go it's very unsexy but

repetitive keying uh i will also when i write oftentimes listen to the same one musical track over and over and over again hundreds or thousands of times and i think what that provides is a level of white noise yeah that calms the mind and allows you to focus uh or to at least turn down the volume on negative self-talk and um you know there's an expression of nature a pours a vacuum i think the mind a pours a vacuum it's like oh you want you you're gonna think about nothing good luck with that right you know yeah uh but you have a mantra that displaces right for a period of time the negative self-talk right um yeah we need we need new terminology and you know that with the with the mantras it's really interesting because if i i i am obviously i know nothing about

neurology or very little about how the human human brain functions just what i've seen on i don't know cosmos or whatever you know and i i i got a ba in psychology a long time ago but i kind of i somehow got out of taking one of those classes where i would have learned that stuff and i wish that i'd taken it but we do know that you know as a mantra is a sound vibration and sound vibrations have some corollary shape to them like when you see the the weird experiments people do where they pour baking soda onto tinfoil on certain tones and it will conform to a shape i haven't seen that it's really interesting that sounds kind of cool create shapes sound will create shapes and so that means that the mantra as you as it's going through your mind it must be creating some sort of

neurological shape in there like whatever the circuitry is it's making the sure the electricity fire in a certain way will be creating this repetitive shape inside your mind as you're creating a sonic circuit up there by doing this repetition so may and i think that maybe that by doing that you are taking all that extra fuzzy energy and sort of bringing it into that circuit which would mean that you would be able to focus more because i know when i'm chanting i've become far more focused in other things in life and yeah you know i do but i'll i must confess to you i love the woo-woo shit i think it's so cool i love some of the woo-woo shit what what i how can i explain this is like such a visceral uh judgmental prejudice that i have and i'm not

sure exactly where i picked it up to be honest yeah i i think it's because i have uh developed i have an aversion to most organized religion and so i find when and if you combine that with my strong dislike for undefined terms poorly defined terms oh yes then it's like i got you i'm all for the new age shit if we've just we've agreed on what something means got you but if someone's like no no just be one with god but god means whatever you want it to mean and i'm like no i do not accept that right right stop using that word like all right sure like yeah thank the rougher rougher rough and like the rougher rougher rough i'm like no no no like no no no it bothers me you know yeah i want to know what these things mean i love it i love

that no i think that's good that reminds me uh god i wish there isn't there a form of yo there's a form of yoga called and i will mispronounce it because it's felt like j-n-a-n-a nana or gana or i don't know it's so it is a the yo it's the yoga of an exercise exercise is involving deep analysis of all things just like what you're talking you're already doing but you know all these it's not as though they invented this stuff it's that they recognize that there's certain personality types who tend to function in different ways there's right like people like me who like will get sappy and and i have no problem thinking oh yes the entire universe comes from the love making of krishna and his lover raterani and the orgasm is the big bang that created all of this and we're

all sort of the orgasm of god i can think that to myself and never have to be like yeah but what do you mean by god dunking like what is that you mean i think there's really like a blue guy who's jizzing right now and it's creating the universe i don't go into that part i just like get to the place you're like god that's awesome and then that's it and i forget about it but uh and then that's bhakti yoga you know and from that it induces a kind of like uh ability to sort of connect with the universe because now if i'm going through the forest of cunts that we've discussed before and i realized that the forest of cunts is actually a merge from god forgive me for using this term but from the cunt of god so to speak and all these things are just sort of byproducts of this

eternal orgasm then i can somehow move through the forest maybe with a little bit more love i still like you're just being like it's just there but but you know i i have to uh i'm glad you mentioned this because i i find tremendous power in myth and right uh i i read i think joseph cambell has some incredible writing and looking at the mono myth and what that means for the needs of human beings like why have we all created over millennia the same archetypes the same story arts what why is that that is a very fascinating question for me and i love myth i love parable uh but i guess it's just like 530 and i'm going to like a yoga class and somebody's really just got off on some self-indulgent soliloquy and i'm just like god damn it lady like please i just want to stretch man

exactly can we stretch now please and and now on the flip side though it's like if we do uh like deep restorative yoga which was actually kind of very mind-opening experience for me when i was i was in balia one point i was actually living with a a family of farmers which is a whole separate story but uh i did yoga once a day and the one class i could make and i was like what the hell is this was like deep restorative yoga where you hold these very completely non-strenuous poses with uh i guess they call them bolster pads and whatnot for five ten minutes at a time and that ended up doing more for my posture and flexibility than all the grunting and sweating i've ever done in any other yoga class um and there's a lot of like breathe in and feel the blah

yeah and in that setting because i wasn't there to like grunting sweat yep i was totally cool with it i got you yeah because yeah because you're i get it i know i totally get what you're saying man i know what you mean there is a time when when those symbol systems just don't seem to mix in with whatever's happening uh you know yeah it's cool and also i don't think i think not like you know people think i get offended when they accuse me of being like woo wee or whatever that they i think it's i think there's so many different lenses to look at the universe through and the you know the if you want to go to the extreme docking's lens and look at the universe in that way or if you want to go through to the hitchhens lens or if you want to look at it through the um sam harris

lens or if you want to look at it through the razor aslan lens they're just all lenses to like gaze into this thing through the question is what mental state is being induced i was just gonna say that i'm sorry to interrupt no please continue no that's that was the i was and it's like if you look at people with all these lenses try to choose a person to emulate who has the emotional state you most want to borrow right and that's cool man do you know what i mean yes and because you can look at let's just say within a group of people labeled atheists right so you can find uh like sam harris very happy guy uh and uh on the flip side though you can find very nihilistic pessimistic nothing fucking matters we're all going to dust this is bullshit right versions right within the

same so-called camp and i would encourage people not to emulate those people right uh and uh you can also and i i also don't make the distinction necessarily between you know rational and irrational in that context meaning like everyone who has a deity is patently irrational right in every way no i think we're all almost without exception a rational and certain aspects of our lives and you can see you see this all the time where it's like people who are just incredibly professionally successful yet like they cannot haul their ass to the gym twice a week to save their life right you know or uh i know people who are so incredibly gifted as leaders and uh CEOs and they have the most compulsive irrational eating behaviors you've ever seen

i mean they're going to eat themselves to death yes uh so it's um but ultimately comes down i think to choosing mental models uh and people you want to emulate right yeah and this is in that you know what you you're just describing there is something and you will will deplore this term if you haven't heard it before so forgive me in advance but it's the foundation of something called chaos magic have you ever heard of that before no i haven't so chaos magic is a actually if you look behind you there next to that cat if you grab that candle will you would you mind grabbing it so this candle was sent to me by someone who practices chaos magic chaos magic is the concept that there is no such thing as magic and though like harry potter way right that that's or rather

that definition of magic is fantastical and mythological but that magic is uh the process by which you make your whatever the contents of your will are manifest in the world and so magic then is the various processes to you know bring whatever it is that you're wanting to bring into the world out into the world in a in a super efficient way kind of like what you're talking about but in a definitely a more wooly way so chaos magic says listen take the concept of ganache right the elephant god ganache who brings good fortune uh we don't how are we gonna understand ganache i wasn't raised in india you weren't raised in india i like the image of the elephant god it's like a beautiful image i have it on my phone it makes me feel a certain way when i look at it but i don't

understand about ganache who can shrink himself down and rides around on a little mouse and all the stories that go around with ganache i think it's a beautiful thing but i'm not going to connect to it uh maybe in the same way somebody raised in india would connect to that symbol now take roland from the dark tower series by steven king the gunslinger have you ever read that i haven't oh please do it's so great but roland is this sort of like tortured hero on the a quest to get to this thing called the dark tower there's like i can't remember how many books in the series but they're all wonderful but he's a wonderful hero because he's not all good he's fucked up and there's parts of him that are just like that are just terrible and parts of them that are incredible

and he's a cold-blooded killer and uh there's like all these wonderful sayings in that book about how to shoot a gun like you know we don't oh god i don't have it memorized so forgive me gun dark tower fans but there's these beautiful verses like the gun slinger a gun slinger does not kill with his gun he kills with his heart if you have forgotten this then you have forgotten the face of your father like it's very samurai yeah very samurai right so this chaos magician knowing i love roland sent me this candle because their idea is look it doesn't matter that there's no real gun slinger it's the feeling that the energy that that brings into your life when you consider what you would be like if you were that hero and so chaos magic is all about just forget the obviously the

shits there's no obviously there's no whatever the fucking crazy symbol is that you're burning candles to that's probably not real in the sense that there's nobody flying around through space who's like doing this stuff but what is real is that feeling of like oh wow that emerges in you when you see a good movie and the hero does some incredible act the feeling is real and that's all that matters well i think that you you take an image like that whether it's the gun slinger or ganesh or ganesh i'm always unsure of how to say that yeah i mean uh what i love about mythology or characters like that and the imagery is that it encapsulates and can represent so much with so little and so i so i so it's of course on one hand i say i'm not woo now

i'll tell people on the other hand i have on one wall in my house a chalkboard wall and i hired an artist an amazing artist i'm blanking on his name currently to come in and there is a six foot tall ganesh on my wall specifically but it's there for a reason and the reason is he's holding an axe and of course he's taken off his tusk to be described it's to remind me of uh severing attachments yeah and that's the purpose it's right there when i walk in my door but of course anyone who walks in it is very woo indeed yeah but it it it represents a lot of internal dialogue problems i've had mistakes i've made things i want to correct correct resolutions that i've written down in one image that is just a quick flash and reminder every time i walk in

the door that's it man it's a data packet it's a condensed fractal that contains within all this information in a visual form and um there's so many you know there's so many other representations of that and that to me the very frustrating thing is that people they don't seem to understand that they just say look man there never was a fucking elephant god there's of course it didn't exist like of course there wasn't there wasn't a there wasn't a jesus and if there was whatever the jesus was who the fuck knows what that guy was but there's a data packet that looks like jesus that contains within it this idea of like die for love you know you can sum it up into that and then you can keep unfolding it unfolding it and it gets more and more you know it can go in any direction you want

so yeah jesus no there's no jesus but there definitely is uh these condensed idea structures embodied in these symbols and that's what i'm that's why i think it's totally okay to worship those things also it's a it's an archetype that you aspire to and so i use visual cues i have them all over my house um for different archetypes that i want to emulate what are some other ones uh wow we can get really trippy real fast here um well i have for instance i have a picture of coyote on my phone and the coyote is this is the native american god god trickster god yeah in many different cultures low key yep absolutely low key well we can go down that rabbit hole too low key was a mean motherfucker yeah and like and that's i'm not going for the mean but i it's very easy for me

to default to being very serious you know and extremely just like data driven efficiency effectiveness cyborg yes and when i am happiest it's when i'm just not giving a fuck or doing something just for the fuck of it right like i have two glasses of wine i go on twitter and i'm like let's fucking let's roll you know i got two more glasses coming so like fucking i love that bring it you know and i feel so alive after that type of experience which is spontaneous or just stupid but the the real the real adjective is playful it is playful it is being playful in life and that's very easy to lose so i have this coyote on my phone to remind me of that among other things be playful it's not that fucking serious whatever you think the meaning of life is probably not right

so stop taking yourself so goddamn seriously and uh there are other examples but that's that's one i have a living wall in my house to remind me to get outside so it's just a wall of plants and which is actually not that expensive to do but an entire wall of plants to remind me to get outside because this is also i i was a little i was a runt growing up and just got the shit kicked out of me until i was in uh up to about sixth grade and there was a whole transition that was that was really hilarious but uh up until sixth grade you know i was the kid who wouldn't go out on the playground to play with kids i'd get the shit kicked out of me so i would sit on the stoop on long island right outside of the door of the classroom and just read and that is a behavior

a sort of an isolationist behavior a reclusive behavior that i still have it's very easy for me it's like even if i wake up early like i'll it will get to god knows what o'clock six seven i'm like i have not stepped outside do the same thing so unhealthy yeah so having that wall of green is basically just beckoning me to go outside so cool so i have these visual reminders man that is so badass you are so cool man i already knew you were because i've read your stuff but wow i like i yeah you're a life changer i'm so glad that you exist it's so cool that people like you move through the world and create the kind of ripples that you create because it just it just makes the world a much brighter place thank you it's it's it's i just want to emphasize

something to people this is not it's i've been i've had a very fortunate number of years but i view myself as an incremental work in progress still with many flaws many jimmy rigged sort of band taped you know band aid band aids holding all sorts of broken gears together yeah and uh it's uh i've had many dark periods i've had extended dark periods for months i mean there i've had some really some could say self-inflicted but for those of you who have had severe depression i mean it's a fucking thing it's a real that is a real demon to grapple with yeah and uh there's there are ways to incrementally pull yourself out of that and exceed your previous highs um in a way that's sustainable um so so i i mean very kind of you to say i just want to encourage people to realize

hey we still love gandalf brother yeah yeah gandalf the great went into the minds of moria and fought that fucking thing fell down the darkness with that demon for a very long time when he fell into that he was gandalf the white when he came out he was gandalf the gray because some weird shit went on down there yeah but we don't want what we're we're tired of whites you know what i mean and it well whites fucked everything with segregation we don't want anymore what we want grays i think people want grays and i think that our heroes now our heroes who have the courage to come out and say listen i'm as fucked up as you are and you know and i will i have to swim down in these holes i think that the reason you're such a great teacher is because not just that

you're willing to acknowledge that but because you've been down there and you've done the you've been a you you admit that you sometimes fall in quicksand pits but you get out and that how are you gonna help anybody if you haven't been down in those yeah yeah no if you haven't been you know in the uh the pit of despair sort of princess bride style how are you possibly going to help a very high percentage of the population who end up there on a regular basis right you're not you're not going to help them i want my firemen to have been at a fire a few times yeah exactly yeah you want somebody who's been to the rodeo the same rodeo that you've been to like has a couple of bumps and bruises that you can you know compare over drinks you want that person that's right uh

and all the best teachers that i've been exposed to and i've been very fortunate to have some fantastic coaches uh it's a there's a there's a profound in them i'm not saying in me but a profound combination of deep empathy and being a severe tough ass there's that combo and i feel like in the us in particular it's become very fashionable to only provide positive feedback and it's like oh well you you got 14th place here's a gold ribbon and it's right that's not always in the service of the person you're trying to help right and i remember somebody said to me recently and god i wish i could remember who it was but that you have sort of mother love and father love and we need both to be happy and mother love is unconditional love no matter what

you do mother loves you yes father love you only get if you've earned it right and i think by constantly giving everyone positive feedback you're robbing them of the opportunity to earn that type of happiness and i just i remember all these these coaches i've had uh john buxton in high school was one of them for wrestling and he would just uh i mean we would train until we puked into buckets but he was just like you know you're going to do this you're going to succeed and i'm paraphrasing here and everything after this is going to seem easier because i will show that you show you that you can do this wow and i mean a lot of this was conveyed through you know commands and orders uh but it was that balance of sort of profound empathy and belief in someone with

being like a ruthless task master who will speak the truth and i think part of the reason for instance like the four our bodies worked so well with people who've lost hundreds of pounds have never been able to follow dietism just like okay look first things first we have to establish your baseline and if you're fat you're fat and you're fat because you behave like a fat person right it's like dinosaurs or big bone people are fat so let's start at that and have like a profound moment of realization and like blunt traumatic yeah self-assessment yeah and then fuck it's all upside and like i've done this before i've seen thousands of people do this you can do it but we have to start with like a heavy dose of reality yeah and what i found is you know

people just to use obesity as an example because people are like oh my god you're fat shaming and i'm like fuck you you don't help people you enable people to continue having bad behaviors until they dive diabetes at 45 so fuck you and it just makes me furious because it's like no i'm helping and i know this works yeah and you don't help people by making apologies for their behavior that's going to kill them sun zu and the art of war he says you know the terrain if you don't know the terrain you're dead fucking meat if you're going into war and you don't know the terrain you're fighting on you're done and if you don't do that analysis which is by the way not to keep going back to magic but alistair croley he recommended journaling he and you can find what he wrote

about himself but one of his the practices that you do is you write about yourself in the third person and you mercilessly describe every single piece of you so that you know exactly what the alchemical matter is that you are about to transform into gold but first you've got to be here's what it is you know in his analysis of himself is like i am cruel sometimes and he describes all these things like it's just this beautiful and trogium trumpa the buddhist teacher says the very same thing and he in buddhism it's not he they call it fertilizing the field which is first know what you are and that's why a lot of these buddhist scriptures they start off with this breakdown of like hey guess what you're gonna die you are going to die and when you die

here's what's gonna happen you're gonna be scared you won't be able to breathe very well you're gonna be in pain you're gonna go they go through all this list your body is going to be this color they go into like all these descriptions and then they go into this also look at the rest of the world look at how rare the human birth is how precious this human birth is and they do not especially the uh bodhisattva scripture i'm reading the very beginning that is not pulling punches it's like hey motherfucker you're gonna die do you realize that you're gonna die maybe sooner than you think you're gonna die so if you're wasting your time right now fooling around fucking off when you are in this vessel that has the capacity to experience bliss that is unparalleled in the

known universe and you're wasting that potential you are fucking up that's the first beginning of it and then it gets sweet again but it definitely starts off with a nice gash to your laziness oh yeah no i uh and i really hope that the pendulum swings the other direction a bit in terms of more teachers and coaches and parents with that that understanding of of that's not not necessarily with these labels but of this sort of mother and father love they're very different and i think people need both to be fulfilled and content human beings and by fulfilled i mean self-actualized also uh and i would encourage people to just ask themselves you know where am i accepting partial completeness and what i mean by that is there are many people who have come to conclusions

at a very young age well i'm just the fat kid or i'm just no good at math or i'm bad at singing or i've always been bad at x and they've they've excelled in in some areas of their life or one area of their life and they've accepted mediocrity or just horribly bad behavior in some other areas yes as uh as a almost a genetic predetermination and i encourage people to test those and you can test those um and uh you know just view your life as a series of of two-week experiments which is basically how i view it my life that is and uh see if you can test those things because i i was swimming same story right like i was like oh well i can't swim i was born premature i can't use my left lung like i can't hold my breath for 30 seconds forget it and then in the process of

doing research for the forearm body you know met david blaine had him take me to the point where i could hold my breath for three and a half minutes three three minutes and thirty three seconds this is the crazy part with like 15 minutes of training to go from a max of like 30 to 45 to beating harry houdini's previous record wow and it's like whoa whoa whoa so once you take one of those impossibles and realize that it's possible right if you've always been the fat kid and all of a sudden your you know two months later if you lost you've lost 40 pounds which is entirely possible if you're a big guy for instance it is such a benevolent mindfuck where you're like okay hold on if that thing that i thought was impossible for 20 years is not only possible

but very straightforward what are the other impossibles that i can test and then just everything changes i mean it's like you know it's it's it's it's stepping into the matrix in a very very sort of heart-rending positive way you know i feel like man i feel like uh i just got to have a conversation with clint eastwood and escape from alcatraz like a you know what i mean only the prison that you are like talking about is the prison of the mind but you are you are someone who has like uh for somebody like me and i know for everyone listening it really is like first realize you're in a prison and then realize that the prison is completely phantasmal and you can easily easily climb out of this thing yeah oh god the feeling of happiness that creates inside of

me is so amazing wow thank you so much for coming on the show man i feel i feel so inspired right now i'm so lucky that uh i get to have this time with you i'm very grateful thank you to me too this was a blast so thank you for having me how can uh people are going to want to connect with you how can they do it uh they they can find me on my my website which is sort of the heartbeat of everything that's just four hour work week dot com all spelled out and uh you can find uh if people enjoy podcasts i'd love for them to to check out my podcast which is the tim ferris show where they where i i interview world-class performers and deconstruct how they do what they do whether it's sort of a you know a billionaire investor or a chess prodigy or an art swords hangar or whatever

and uh i'm hoping to get some really weird ones on which is going to be fun cool that's also on four hour work week dot com twitter at t ferris with two rs two s's and then facebook is facebook.com tim ferris would love to hear from you thank you so much tim howdy christina thanks man that was tim ferris you can check him out by going over to tim ferris dot com you should also listen to his podcast all links will be at dunkin trussell dot com in the comment section of this podcast podcast cast a dot com for supporting this podcast and for sending me my mattress go to asper dot com four slash family hour to receive a fifty dollar discount off of these excellent mattresses go there now they support this podcast and if you need a new bed this is

the bed you should use okay i guess that's it um oh yeah bookmarker amazon portal if you like us give us a nice rating on itunes man i got a lot of great podcasts coming up uh we've got a podcast with ragu and sarah swatty mark is coming up uh and a lot of other excellent podcasts and live podcasts that are coming out uh with johnny pemberton and aubrey marcus and many more are on the way thank you guys for continuing to listen to this show and i hope you have a great week life and uh present moment howdy christina