Tim Ferriss

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Mr. Mouse.

Hi there. How are you? I'm great. We have a gentleman on today.

Very well. By all accounts is a rival. Well, we don't look at the world like that. No, we do not.

But he has a very prominent podcast. He does. I'm very proud of him. He's been doing it longer than us.

Forever. Nine year anniversary when we were talking about him. Yeah. Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss. I adore Tim Ferriss. We developed kind of a texting friendship.

That's fine. Because you were on his show. I was on his show. You know what happened?

I think originally he, back when I was on Twitter, he posted a few things over the years that have been really kind of us. In his own post, you should listen to this interview. And through that, I think I reached up to him and said, thank you so much for that. And then we developed this kind of friendship.

And then, yes, I was on his podcast. And he's so smart. Extremely. Yeah.

He's really, really smart. Really, really fun to talk to. But of course, you know Tim Ferriss as an entrepreneur, investor. He's a bestselling author and a podcaster.

The four-hour week. That's what took the- Four-hour work week. Four-hour work week. And the four-hour body.

I'm fucking him up. This should be on the list. I'm really disappointed. Rob, he's fired.

So he's gone. But Tim's here. Four-hour work week. Four-hour body.

Four-hour chef. There it is. Four-hour chef. I need to read that.

You should. And I enjoy the shit out of him. And so will you. So please listen and enjoy Tim Ferriss.

Okay, forgive me. My daughter's obsessed with this. Groot stuffy. When she left her school today, she had a little anxiety.

But what was Groot going to be up to while she was gone? Groot just said with me. Okay. I wouldn't like that makes it into a photo just so that she knows I actually took him to work.

Oh, you want to hold him? Yeah. Okay, great. Even better.

So I promised I'd keep an eye on him. And I said, I might even take him to work. And she told me, that would be great. Groot wants to be a podcaster when he grows up.

Look at that. He has to learn. There's still time. There's still time.

Doesn't Groot just say Groot? I think that's the only word Groot says. Yeah, it does make a question. Do you think you could potentially get through an interview only saying Groot?

I think if you're the interviewer and you had somebody who could really improv and just run with it, you could get away with it. Or even, and I wonder if you run into this often, the older and more esteemed guests are, I find the more into legacy preservation they're in. And it's really now just rolling out this really fine-tuned and whittled story of their life. It's kind of in stone now.

Meaning there's sort of a refined TED talk of an obituary that they've rehearsed? Their whole story and how they got the United States. Let me tell you the Genesis story the way I would have it written. Yes, and I don't dare deviate from that because I'm not trying to create a new storyline.

I want to die with the one we've created. I don't want to put my foot in the mud right at the finish line. So do you find that with some of your more esteemed older? It's like, you could probably just interview yourself.

I don't know that you need me. I think in some cases you find folks have their 60 minutes set down and maybe it's that they want to tell the story a certain way. Maybe it's that they've been playing the same greatest hits like the Rolling Stones for decades. That is just their set of material and they know it works.

Why fix it if it's not broken? Do you catch yourself doing it? I catch myself doing it quite a lot. Occasionally, if I find myself going into autopilot, usually I try to change how I am, say, formatting the podcast or choosing my project so that I can shake up that snow globe a little bit.

I'm very cognizant of becoming calcified in that way. And that's actually why I stopped doing speaking gigs for close to 10 years because a friend of mine said to me that he had stopped, which seems strange because he was getting paid so much. And he said, well, I found that I was repeating the same messages over and over again. And to deliver a high volume of speeches, you end up having canned goods that you repeat over and over again.

And he said, that felt very inflexible to me. And I found that I was not deviating from these messages I'd created years before. I said, Colter, I stopped doing speaking engagements. And that's part of the reason I stopped.

There's so much there. You freeze frame your thinking, polish it, and then serve it over and over and over and over again. And I think there's a place for that. And there may be room for that in many careers.

For me at the time, I felt like it was too early. It was way too early. That was probably, let's just say, the first time anyone offered me real money to speak, which was very unexpected. It was probably 2007, 2008, in that range.

And it was so shocking to me that I would get offered anything to speak. I just said yes to everything. Right. How many do you think you were doing a year at your peak of that?

Pulling a rabbit out of a hat at, say, 25 to 30. Wow. Okay, so a couple of months, basically. Yeah, which means you are traveling all the time.

Yeah, yeah. You become a traveling salesman. I have a few engagements this year. They will all be different.

Right. What you realize, though, is if you're going to be on the circuit and you pass a certain volume, you have to start repeating. Yes. Or it is your full-time job.

Yeah, for survival. But you know, there's another element that I try to police myself on. I think it even happened when you interviewed me, which is I'm pretty reluctant to talk about my relapse much more than I have. Not because I'm at all ashamed of it at this point.

My fear would be, man, if that becomes one of my routines, it'll feel so dishonoring to the experience and so bullshitty. I really know for me, if I tell any story seven times, I'm going to nail the story in a way that it'll become at some point really a performance of something that was sincere. So in that vein, I wonder if you have dicey feelings when talking about depression and, of course, your own personal depression. Do you feel that little tingle of like, oh, where am I spreading the message and where am I now?

This is a routine. I've thought about it a lot because what I've noticed, especially living in Austin, for whatever reason, there's a high density of this. There's a lot of trauma performance. The lack of small talk is viewed as a virtue, but I think there's a place for small talk.

But I need something within five minutes of telling you about their childhood abuse and this and the other thing. There's trauma vomiting all over you. So I want to be cautious of not doing that to people, number one. Number two, I would say I have fewer misgivings about talking about depression simply because I'm involved with it so actively also on, say, funding early stage science through my foundation and looking at novel therapeutics.

You donate $2 million to the study of psychedelics. Is that possibly true? I've donated a lot more. Oh my gosh.

Wow. Okay, hold on a second. Yeah, a lot more through the foundation. What is the money doing?

I think people experientially can understand or think they understand what these things entail. And I've spent a lot of time also with groups in South America, Central America, et cetera. So there are people certainly in groups of people who have used these things for hundreds of thousands of years. But if you want to convert something like psilocybin in this molecule that is found in psilocybin mushrooms, more commonly known as magic mushrooms, if you want to make that available to millions of people in a way that is legal, you have to check certain boxes.

Dose and dosage and all that. And also clinical trials, phase 1, 2, 3, and that takes money. And to do that, you also need an indication. So if you look at, say, after Nixon and the Controlled Substances Act, when a whole slew of things were put into Schedule 1, which would be the same schedule, say, heroin, we now have a whole host of classical psychedelics that are in that Schedule 1.

They're defined as, and this is simplifying things, but high potential for addiction and no known medical application. If you can turn either of those upside down or invalidate either of those, you have a scientific path towards reclassifying these things to make them say prescribable, potentially. Do we know really quickly then why cocaine is a Schedule 1 or Category 1 when it did originally have a medicinal? It's a good question.

And it may be either or, not a both end. Maybe if it's either of those two, we'd have to double check. Because cocaine and coca does have some interesting applications, medicinally speaking. Yeah, the Germans, I don't know if you read that awesome book Blitzed about drugs in the Third Reich.

Oh yeah, they love the drugs. Yeah, and they had, like, the purest cocaine on the planet. They're using it surgically everywhere. It's not currently used.

It was so recently used as a topical insect. It's a nummy. It's just like novocaine. Very helpful for altitude sickness, too, but that's not a common use in North America.

But the point I was going to make is that if you, for instance, through the research of Johns Hopkins and then moving into others, NYU right now for alcohol use disorder, as an example, find an indication, meaning a condition, so a psychiatric disorder, let's just call it, like, major depressive disorder, then you can begin to map, say, psilocybin in this case, to a very expensive, difficult-to-treat psychiatric disorder. And at that point, you can potentially enter a process through which these things are available to, say, psychiatrists with proper training so they can administer them to their patients. And that's what I'm focused on. I got you.

And does that require, I imagine, philanthropic funding? Because ultimately, there will be no patent on this because it is a natural-occurring compound? So that's one aspect to it. Another aspect is that there is quite a lot of stigma still associated with psychedelics.

They are actually very poorly understood, I would say, from a neuroscientific perspective. And we have learned a lot in the last, say, five to ten years with increased funding using tools like functional MRI for imaging, things like that. But they don't create clinical outcomes. Whether we're looking at MDMA, we don't consider classical psychedelic, but MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for complex PTSD, the outcomes are beyond belief.

You see some similar types of outcomes for, say, psilocybin, but what makes them so unique is that rather than a maintenance, and this is not to malign SSRIs, I'm just using them as an example, I think they can play a very important role for a lot of people. But rather than taking something like an SSRI several times a week or every day, four years on end, you see people experiencing benefits from one to three sessions of psilocybin, and there's a durability of effect that can last, in some people, six months or 12 months. Probably like a biannual... Yes, pharmacologically that makes no sense, right?

Because half-life is so short, four to six hours. The reason that philanthropic funding is so important is that there's very little federal funding as it stands right now. Because large institutions are very powerful, very important for a lot of reasons, but they tend to move pretty slowly. The national conversation and international conversation around psychedelics and therapeutic possibilities have changed a lot in the last few years.

I think that's in large part due to some of the science that has been funded. And Michael Pollan. And Michael Pollan. And I've done a lot with Michael.

He and I actually have collaborated on a journalism fellowship focusing on psychedelics at UC Berkeley. But the philanthropic dollars are important because really at this point there's not much federal funding. So part of what I'm focused on, there's just a few things, because you can't boil the ocean at once, at least I don't think it's a good idea. One of the things I'm focused on is trying to pull different levers to hopefully facilitate funding for the federal government.

Because ultimately, I think that's critical if we want to address some of the indications that are super large-scale, like opioid use disorder, as an example. People are using ketamine now, too. That's a whole thing. I've watched some dudes in the program through a psychiatrist's assistance go down the ketamine route.

In my humble and anecdotal opinion, I'm not a doctor. Very, very easy to abuse. Yeah, so I'll second that. Oh, you will, okay.

And I actually did a really long, exhaustive conference episode on ketamine with Dr. John Crystal, who's the chair of the psychiatry department at Yale. He was one of the principal investigators on a lot of the seminal human work, looking at its antidepressant possibilities or potential. And I would say a few things about ketamine.

So ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. And if anyone has had a history of abuse with dissociatives or anesthetics, let's just say, like many people recreationally, this includes friends of mine, who say, I no longer drink booze. I just use ketamine three to five nights a week. That is going to end in tears.

And I'm not a doctor. I should make that clear. I don't plan on the Internet. But based on what Dr.

Crystal has said and others, that absolutely can cause damage. And there is a high potential for abuse. If you have chronic pain or acute suicidal ideation, I do think intravenous or intramuscular ketamine, with the help of a professional, is extremely interesting. Well, there's so many rivulets we could throw our boat in.

But I will just say. I like rivulets. I don't even know if I ever use that word. It comes up often.

That's what's curious about alcohol. In many ways, if you were to measure the cumulative outcome of it, it's the most dangerous substance we have. If you look at ER visits and cirrhosis, all these things. And agreed, it's weirdly the most damaging drug we use.

The upside of alcohol is it doesn't really have the diminished effect the way most other drugs do. You mean like the development of tolerance? Yes. Like at any point when I was an alcoholic, I could get too drunk.

I could decide in nine minutes to get too drunk. And every night the alcohol works the way it did the previous night. Sure, there's some kind of plateau when you first start. But you get that stride in your 20s.

And you pretty much, you know whether you're a 6 to 10 cocktail a night person. And it pretty much stays level and has the predictable outcome. It's not diminished. All these other drugs.

If you take ketamine three days a week at a dosage, you're going to increase that dosage. If you take any benzo at any dosage, you will have to increase it to get the same effect it had initially. Opiates, having discovered that late in my addictive life, is the worst that you can make. And then when you learn the mechanism by which your tolerance is going up, which is, sure, you've blocked your pain receptors.

Your brain is brilliant and makes more pain receptors. Now you're a human carrying around 10x pain receptors, so you need 10x of what you know. And you're not going to overcome that. So that's my hesitation reservation about ketamine.

Yeah, ketamine I think people should be very careful with. And you might bump into people who say, I don't have an addictive personality. I would never get addicted. And my response to that is maybe you've just not met the molecule.

You've fallen in love with your chemical soul sister. And you should be really, really careful. It's like saying I've never had my heart broken. Yeah, you will.

Yeah, eventually you will. And so in the case of ketamine, I went through two weeks of infusions. I did that not because I was going in to treat a clinical condition, but because I knew I was going to get a lot of questions about it. And I wanted to have the first-hand experience, so I could speak to it.

What I realized quickly, just based on very cursory research and also looking at the behavior of my friends, is that I did not want to take the route of having lozenges or anything in my house that I could self-administer. I wanted to make it as inconvenient as possible, which is part of the reason why I chose IB. I can't remember whose book I was reading, but they talked about the value of roadblocks and how much of our behavior really does depend on how many roadblocks are in the way. Like, you don't eat a bag of potato chips, don't have it in your house.

You can try the willpower route, but it's a lot harder. Like, maybe push a rock downhill instead of uphill. And critical mass is really precarious. It's like, I don't know, yes, maybe the shot administered by someone else once a day will not trigger anything.

And then maybe a shot plus one gummy, now I'm fucked. Finding that sweet spot, or at least me, the tiger's not out of the cage devouring everything in its path, could be really minute, the final straw. It's entirely possible. My interest in medicine, neuroscience, also psychedelics, but other things like TMS and different types of brain simulation stem from personal experience and also the experiences of people very close to me.

So my best friend growing up died of a fentanyl overdose. How long ago? This would have been probably four or five years ago. Okay.

And yeah, it's terrible. My aunt died of percocetal alcohol. My uncle died of alcohol and dyscardiomyopathy. So a lot of addiction in the family.

Nice, congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my own personal experiences with congenital depression does run in the family.

So I do pay attention to the sort of addictiveness profile of drugs very closely. I will say part of what makes, at least the classical psychedelics, and when I say classical, just think LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, beaners, a number of different forms. I'll give you the street names. Yeah, there are hundreds and thousands of psychedelics and new ones being synthesized every day.

You know the one I still would try? I'll include this in my writing. Have you ever seen the Anomamo? You know the fierce people as studied by Shagnon?

They spend most of their day, the men, blowing this green hallucinogen up each other's nose. They have this long pipe and they blow it hard up their nose. In most of the photos that Shagnon took of the Anomamo, the dudes are all just, it looks like they opened up a bank die pack, but it was green and exploded in their face. And they are riding fucking raw.

I don't know what it is, but I knew at one point when I read it that I had never heard of that. Nor did I see it, I don't think, in the Terrence McKenna. What's that famous book? He's got the Archaic Revival.

That's probably what I'm thinking of, Archaic Revival. I don't remember it being in there when I was really young, 19, I read that book. I was all in the civil silence and shit. But I didn't see it in there, but that still interests me, going down.

And also, heightening the experience would be just partying with the Anomamo, because they get those boards out and hit each other in the head. I mean, there's a lot going on in the Anomamo party. I mean, look, you want unusual things blown into your sinuses. South America is a good choice.

Okay, so I'm curious, walking into this setting, knowing how I operate, you're one of the most linear people I've ever spoken to. And the way you conduct interviews is very linear, in a very satisfying manner. I am the opposite, right? It's kind of all over the map.

I like improv jazz. Okay, okay, good. I wanted to gauge your comfort level, because even as you're talking, I wanted to blast over to nine different topics. Because you're into so many big global view of you and your work and addiction.

And I say this as someone on the same treadmill, so there's zero judgment here. Probably, yeah. What a practice. Here we go.

Yeah, because I have this debate with myself. I am, in many ways, like you. I have a cold plunge. I sauna every night.

I exercise every day. I am a dopamine pursuer, adventurer, and one that's tenable. That's my goal. Most everything you talk about, I'm interested in as well.

And then I step back and I go, this is all the same thing. It's all trying to... regulate the insides with some external things be them philosophies or actions or whatever and i'm still trying to regulate i'm endlessly trying to regulate this this body of mind with all these things and i'm doing it compulsively and habitually and some are less detrimental objectively but i might be missing the overall big universal question which is like could you ever just exist without the endless exploration and kind of compulsive and obsessive methodology of feeling good does any of that hit you sure okay yeah what are your thoughts on that global yeah my thoughts are fuck you i'm out of here i'll be in my trailer no it's important to me and i think it perhaps should be important to a lot of people to just spend time sitting without constant stimulation without all the interventions i have especially as i've gotten older done more and more of that i was literally supposed to leave tomorrow to be off the grid for three weeks and unfortunately due to some extreme weather that may not happen where were you going that's going to have extreme weather i was going to head to suriname which is in south america tiny country relative to others like brazil super deeper south is that why it is right at the top crest of south america oh kind of what are problems they have there extreme rain and flooding which if you're landing on unpaved runways is a problem yeah you may end up staying there for a few months yeah there are all sorts of challenges with that so i do think that's important i would also say my overall thought that jumped to mind when you're talking about the cold plunge and the other thing and maybe if i'm understanding you correctly the question of can i just sit with myself and regulate these things internally the vast majority of us are very well adapted to a really sick society and really new circumstances from the perspective of evolutionary biology and stressors that are so brand new on the time scale of homo sapiens that people are not doing well and that i don't say desperate times call for desperate measures but things are so unusual and maladaptive that i think it's okay to use some of these tools yeah different wiring requires different toolkits and so for me if the option is self-medicating cold plunge or self-medicating with another prescription medication i would rather try the cold plunge first yeah because the downside risk is so limited listen i'm with you i kind of reverse engineer that like you know without this system the alternative for me is self-medication which is incredibly disruptive and i can't function really and i won't be here long so yeah ultimately i stay the path but i also have a voice that's says monitor your quote healthy obsessions monitor the illusion that there's a solution monitor these things because they too will tip like all things in your life can tip right back into the addictive freeway that i'm hardwired to be on it's certainly more challenging to evaluate the quote healthy alternatives than it is the destructive ones those materialize really quick the wreckage and the problems the other things are a little more subtle but you know you hang out with people like us you're going to hear about all this crap we're doing and even that minimally might be a little bit of a barrier between interpersonal connection or we could be exhausting i guess for people when i'm hanging out with other people who are wired the same way i don't think it's exhausting or maybe we just mutually exhaust one another to such an extent that we don't even notice it especially when i was let's just say a bit younger 10 years ago 15 years ago yes i think i was probably quite exhausting for a lot of people to be around you even use the term evangelizing yeah and i was still am i mean pretty high rpm pretty aggressive especially circa 2007 to 2012 very focused on in part because it was my lane to be fair which was found the first part before our work week of optimizing efficiency looking for elegant workarounds that maybe people hadn't spotted before or that were not well distributed so i could highlight them and that has taken a passenger side seat in the last five to ten years as i've paid more attention to psycho-emotional health also some of the biological correlates looking at microbiome and other things that can inform our perception of mental health and being i have taken the foot off the gas with a lot of the optimizing you just nailed it that word in itself optimal optimizing the notion that we should be optimized right the notion that we should be working as efficiently as possible it's like optimist for what exactly gets lost yes we forget the bigger global question then going back to where we are at historically versus what we were designed to live in and the notion just pretty much consensus and answer which is like hunting and gathering folks did about four hours of work a day the other time was fucking laughing shooting shit fucking doing hallucinogens sitting on a campfire dancing all these things so it's like by our current evaluation we would never look at someone that's spending 14 hours of their waking hours partying and go you're optimized as a human we would probably think they were hedonistic or impotent something but we were designed to be kind of non-optimal in that way or at least optimizing for different things yeah i think the u.s is particularly problematic here although the sort of protestant work ethic and hyper workaholic culture has been exported pretty well my feelings on large blocks of empty space have changed pretty dramatically and i think things have changed for me also just as i've reached certain levels of in quotation marks success realizing that more of x is not going to fix whatever problem still exists yeah and a handful of years ago i realized that any of the internal struggles i felt persistently were not going to be fixed by more professional well ultimately we could at least concede that a big chunk of it is just distraction oh it's absolutely right and distraction is quite comforting there's an altruistic distraction which is like i concern myself with your problems tim's which i find great relief in because i'm not thinking about dax's problems to make dax happier from one minute to the next right there's like a really nice reprieve when i'm focusing on you but it doesn't tend to be where we encourage people to put their aim it's more like well i'll focus on those things to make dax happier and get so distracted in the pursuit of that that i too will have some relief from that madness which brings us to elegantly i would love for you to break down stoicism for us because i watched your ted talk i encourage people to watch it it's really really good first of all you're very comfortable up there 36 speaking engagements a year will probably get you comfortable yeah there's a whole story about that ted talk but it's a very compelling illusion of ease that i produced on stage but you know i'm curious hey i love them i've watched a bunch of them but they out index with people who are not extroverts let's just start there right so you're watching the hardest thing for these experts is to get up and be a show business person yeah and so it's an interesting format and i generally go into them with a good deal of performance anxiety for the day like i'm watching stand-up or something oh yeah and so when i see someone who's kind of caught their breath and is in a rush it's very comforting so just performance wise right there it's great yes but also it's called why you should define your fears instead of your goals which is really a great position to take but in it you kind of explore stoicism i think you know certainly a lot more than i knew about it yeah i find myself drawn to it so tell me a little bit about stoicism yeah the last couple days have been a good opportunity to practice stoicism in my life but stoicism is a very old philosophy let's call it and the academics out there who really get into the fine details will probably dislike my summary that's okay it's very nuanced and there are many different players and there are different varieties of it but the basic idea is some form of the serenity prayer you are learning to separate the things that you can control from the things that you cannot control and then to exercise calm influence over the things you can control and to largely disregard the things that you cannot and for that reason i've sometimes described it to friends who have an immediate allergic reaction to the word philosophy as an operating system for functioning in high stress environments so if you want a set of rules a set of principles that allow you to keep yourself regulated and make good decisions in a non-reactive way in a fast-paced or stressful environment stoicism has a lot to offer and they're different tools and they're different thinkers so some people really like marcus aurelius and say meditations that book and the origins of it are fascinating in itself it's never intended to be published it's kind of like if your morning pages or diary were something published like 200 years now that's kind of what happened to marcus aurelius and then you have seneca seneca has always been my preferred writer these are greeks too right these are like 300 bc romans oh romans but one long time ago long time ago seneca was at the time one of the most famous playwrights he was very wealthy he was an operator he was involved in politics which also appeals to me because many of the modern day philosophers are sort of like lazy boy quarterbacks in the sense that they're not on the playing field they're not practitioners if that makes sense yeah same complaint for academics yeah they're not operators or competitors in so much as they haven't had the personal opportunity to succeed or fail or get beaten up by the world or the arena in which they might play when you look at say seneca when you look at marcus aurelius he was emperor he was the last great emperor by many accounts these were people with real obligations real responsibilities who were not interested in flights of fancy conversations for hours around what the definition of this is they wanted tools they could use because they had to go to the senate the next day and deal with a bunch of fucking headache yeah very pragmatic and if you look at say george washington thomas jefferson bill belichick some people might know very very famous book and many others use the tenets of stoicism stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare you read this but another great little statement that comes from stoicism is we suffer more often in imagination than in reality yeah i think this is one of the most profound observations and i've experienced it so much in my own life i always get the examples like when you are asked to imagine a loved one dying or aiding or getting them across the finish line it's insurmountable but i've done that i've done that twice and within that experience was tons of levity and laughing and fun and connection and reminiscing and healing and i've yet to walk through one of the experiences i feared where it ever matched how fearful i was of it and that's the function of this fear setting exercise that you mentioned which i'm happy to lay out yes i would love the columns and the yeah exactly there is a focus on achieving and i think there's good that comes with that there's often this focus on goal setting and making sure they're specific time down achievable etc and people set out their timelines but fear is often left float around in this nebulous form unpinned down in the brain and that can contribute to anxiety it can cause all sorts of issues it can prevent you from taking needed action so fear setting is very simple idea and this is borrowed directly from stoicism stoicism has this i'm not a fluent latin speaker so i'm not going to get it right but premeditatio malorum which means it's a premeditation on evil are you sure that doesn't mean hunger is the best spice yeah actually yeah i can you mess that up i may have we just talked about that one time ago tough universities crest i might have messed things up i'm not sure sorry so premeditation on evils or bad things is negative visualization so visualizing the worst things that can happen and there's tremendous value in this so the basic idea of fear setting which is just of course taking goal setting and swapping in fear is something that i ended up doing starting around 2004 that allowed me to make some very pivotal life decisions in my personal example i was running a company i felt completely trapped and hadn't taken vacation and god knows how long years and want to take a four-week period out of the grind to try to figure out a b and c so you have your fear it could be a relationship issue it could be breaking up getting together someone proposing starting a business ending business doesn't matter whatever the thing is that's causing you stress that's sort of at the top of a sheet of paper and then you just break it into three columns the first column you write down all the worst things that could happen if you take the action that you're considering come up with at least 10 so for me i was like well i'm gonna miss this letter that gets mailed to me by the irs and then oh my god like it'll be this huge disaster right if i'm traveling you'd be getting audited yeah right number two the business will fail and the manufacturers get shut down and then number three i would need to leave my apartment because i wouldn't be able to pay for the rent that's about that i went through and i listed a ton of these things in the second column you go item by item and this is the column of what you could do to help minimize the likelihood of these things happening right so what can you do to possibly prevent them from happening or these can reduce the likelihood so in the case of the mail right there are forwarding services that'll scan your mail and email with you okay pretty straightforward right or just have everything sent directly in my account for four weeks like very straightforward preventable and then on the other side of the manufacturing let's just say there's certain choke points certain materials that were more likely to be problematic than others i could stockpile those in advance and maybe i understand a little bit extra but that would dramatically reduce the likelihood of an issue and so you go point by point through this entire list and then in the third column this is if it happens what could you do to reverse the damage or at least get back on your feet okay if you get audited what could you do well you go through the audit and if you have penalty you pay the penalty you remind yourself they don't jail debtors yeah yeah right size the fear yeah that could also be the name of the exercise and then when the manufacturing piece it's like well i could take a lot of credit doing this i could do that and the other thing and in many of these cases when the stakes are pretty low let's just say you're young and you're considering to go to this so-called safe job with some predictable income or start my own gig it's like well if you tried your own gain to fail like worst case even if you got a fancy degree from a fancy college you could get a job as a waiter and pay some bills for a while maybe ask your friends for a loan put some money on a credit card there are ways you could get back on your feet and so just to recap column one is all the worst things that could happen and like really let your mind go crazy trap it on paper so you can examine it attacked by sea snakes bitten on the face by a feral cat whatever it is you know write it all down number two yeah number two are the things that you could do to minimize the likelihood of each of this happening and number three if each happened what you could do to undo some of the damage or get back on your feet and once you do that nine times out of ten you realize this isn't a big deal you know as you were laying that out i noticed i'm not gonna claim i'm great at doing that with my own fears but i will say one time i was talking to my mom and it's probably the 10th or so time she told me she's like to go sailing with my stepdad back in michigan they live in this little lake and she was expressing that she had increasingly become overwhelmed with fear that the boat was going to capsize that he's not the sailor he once was you know it's kind of rooted in a little bit of reality and it was just getting worse and worse and she you know i can't even really enjoy these things i'm worried about the wind and then this whole thing worked up and i asked her well mom let's say this boat tips over what do you think you'll do and she goes we'll be in the lake and i go right you're a very strong swimmer and she goes yeah and i go yeah so you'll swim to shore you're not in the ocean you're not in like michigan you're in the lower long light and literally like a light bulb she at that moment remembered she could swim but the fear was so powerful that she didn't go past what happens when the fear comes exactly and the initial event right like the initial thing but as you did with your mom then you ask and then what right i think we all do that i forget it too which is why it was helpful for me just to have like a codified exercise that i could use what are like people who are afraid of flying right the fear is dying i have the best stoic opinion on flying i've had it forever which is what a waste of my time if something goes wrong in the air i will not be a part of the solution although you know what you think i would be but i have no illusion that hold out the whip it casters and just go to town he wants to fly the plane you think if they said you know are there any pilots on board and there weren't then the next round is anyone just really good at driving and feels confident to try this anyone has 20 20 vision i think at that point i'm a really good candidate but that's i don't want to snare you in a five-year debate i think he's a good candidate cheer me on as i went down that one i'm at such peace with because i have no illusion of control i entered that plane and i go you know we're in god's hands now because some people won't fly they don't even take that step you don't have the fear enough that'll stop you from the thing but some people do your setting doesn't apply to every type of fear for sure okay yeah in the case of flying i think this also applies when someone is fearful of taking an action right that they assess the risk of action right so they think oh my god something goes wrong i'm dead without doing a few things so one is just looking at whatever numbers you can look at because statistically speaking if you're driving every day much more dangerous than flying infrequently like a thousand x ten thousand so much more so the other one though is people don't assess the cost of inaction or not taking action right and not just once so let's just say it's my mom and i don't have kids they have kids and she's afraid of flying i would probably say well if you've decided you're never going to fly what does that mean let's flash forward five years how often are you going to see the grandkids how often are you going to feel an ocean breeze on your skin exactly and if you're getting older there will be a point when you can no longer travel at all and that decision be made for you yeah that's a good way of looking right the cost of inaction yeah this is the second part of your ted talk and that applies to so many things and looking at the case of trying something entrepreneurial right it's like can you undo this and in a lot of cases you can you have a job you try something doesn't work out you go back and get a job yeah i would just say fear is so scary because it is so undefined most of the time so just take this same tools that same analytics the same googling that you would apply to trying to figure out how to achieve a goal and apply it to your fears and oftentimes it's not pressing on the gas to get to a goal that is your problem or the lack thereof is that you have the emergency brake on which is some form of undefined fear there's an interesting parallel to this approach that exists within aa or at least my understanding of the fourth step of aa and i would say if there was a single step that i would hold on to if they all went away it'd be the fourth it's the personal inventory step again columns are really good hacks they slowly lead you to a place you probably wouldn't get to otherwise was it bill wilson who was one of the yeah he also at least based on some of my reading wanted to incorporate one of the steps as psychedelic compounds because i think it was actually a fairly dangerous psychedelic experience that he had i believe it was with bell it down i don't recommend anyone try that but it was with one of these sort of european hexane herbs one of these unusual plants i think and that contributed to his sobriety i believe he did do lots of psychotropic therapy he did lsd therapy yeah this is in sobriety yeah which has actually been a huge challenge for many folks in the sense that if these compounds let's just say cell 7 it's the friendliest it's also the easiest for researchers to work with right now outside of mdma for legal reasons because they have to go through the dea and so on and so forth just to get a tiny amount of any of this to work with and it's within a box it's locked within a box it's locked within another room it's like it's the whole process the fact of the matter is pre-nixon so 50s and 60s lc at that time showed incredible promise for alcoholism for alcohol use disorder and that is now being examined anew and the data are holding up at nyu but what happens then if these tools become available well that means that people who are in a have to have some very uncomfortable conversations with sponsors if they want to if they want to consider using these compounds and i have a number of friends who've done this and i think that's a helpful hurdle but some sponsors have been understanding others have said if you pursue this i can't be your sponsor anymore we're in a real interesting phase of a this is kind of one of the first big pressured tests i think that's come at this leaderless group right yeah because there won't ever be a unified declaration made it's human sharing their experience and some human beings are going to share their experience of having gone to a doctor and had a supervised psychiatrically observed experience in the pursuit of mental health and some people are gonna think that's horseshit and some are gonna be open to that and everyone's free to do that but it is a very interesting like i have my own little agenda right i'm against addicts doing ketamine i'm against addicts using benzos for anxiety i'm for psilocybin use i'm for probably monitored lsd use i'm open to ayahuasca i'm personally going on those things but i think there's a big time place i also and it's so personal i've done so many mushrooms in my life i mean it was my drug i loved it i bought a half pound in santa cruz and just stayed in my freezer yes two ziploc gallon bags is a half pound so much never during a trip did i think i need more never at the end of the trip i think i want to do that again and never did i wake up the next day and desire to do it and that's so opposite of any experience i've ever had with anything i enjoy for me personally it's pretty anti-addictive even in animal models and animal tests these psychedelics and i need to be careful that term so the umbrellas become a little too big but if we're talking about lsd as an example highly anti-addictive if a mouse hits a dispenser and uses lsd once they're like no thanks i'm done i need to do that again whereas you can certainly model cocaine addiction you can certainly model addiction with so many different compounds and i'm not in a i've never participated but in case it's helpful i would second what you said about ketamine i'd be very cautious with ketamine especially if you have a history of alcohol abuse i think they are different species of a similar experience you're able to hit pause or stop on feelings or thoughts you don't want to have it has the numbing quality we desire yeah exactly i would also say and this may not be by some folks but i would probably be cautious around mdma also yeah yeah now again i did a lot of fucking ecstasy in my day and i always wanted more and i want to do it the next night yeah i would be cautious around that even though it has tremendous applications for ptsd whether that's for veterans victims of sexual abuse or otherwise and i really recommend folks even if you have read paul's book how to change your mind the netflix miniseries i think there are four episodes very easy to digest the episodes on mdma and psilocybin are particularly strong and they include session footage actual footage i am so immersed in this world and i have been funding various studies and so on since 2015 or so and i still saw a lot i've never seen before it's very well done so i encourage people to see that if you want to see what the before and afters can look like which it does not mean that they're representative but it's remarkable for conditions that are incredibly poorly treated yeah i guess probably my only knee-jerk hesitation to it is too simple which is i don't mind anyone trying to take a substance to deal with their addiction to another substance yeah i'd really prefer it be in concert with a lot of actionable status for sure i think a lot of people want to take something to cure them of something else it kind of reeks of this american like let's get a disease by this thing and take another thing and then take another thing yeah and it's just like you just enter this path that never ends yeah i've thought that you should think of it the way you would think of a complete hip and knee replacement or neurosurgery and how seriously you would take brain surgery in terms of finding the practitioner vetting the practitioner getting background checks or at least referrals and looking at their medical intake looking at their patient outcomes and also paying attention to a lot of prep right so prehab in the case of the orthopedic example and then what you would need to do after the surgery to recover just a baseline and then to sort of hyper recover and hopefully have some new programming that is going to help your future self you need to take it that seriously because if you don't these are very powerful compounds and people don't automatically turn out better you are creating a window of incredible plasticity within which you can potentially step outside of yourself see the behaviors thought patterns beliefs that are governing your behavior including maybe your compulsive behavior in a way that you can't when you're kind of trapped behind your eyes and in doing so you can begin to edit and sort of author the beliefs that are more enabling and i think that's why these compounds can have such durable effects but if you do it in an uncontrolled environment if you source in a way that is impure and let's just say in the case of mdma at least 60% of street mdma is adulterated you can be very careful can be cut with things like fentanyl or this new weird thing that trank that's like going everywhere there's so much bad stuff you can end up if you don't have the proper plan for post-surgery in the case of psychedelics you should have a therapist you have developed a relationship with in addition to the clinician or psychiatrist who provides the service and in session is there as a safety net for you afterwards if you uncork a lot or have difficulty so that you can process with someone you don't want to end up spinning out and then trying to find help that doesn't work well so i take these things very seriously and surprisingly to a lot of people i probably talk more folks out of psychedelics than i talk into right right because they want to ride casually and i just fundamentally disagree with that as an orientation doing it when you hear the amount of homework you're requesting someone to do it gets less appealing to them which is a pretty good indicator of how severe the condition is really yeah that's kind of the point for me too that's where i sort of test people i'm like before you consider it i would do this this this and this and they're like okay well this person's never going to do the rehab after the surgery therefore this is a bad idea and to use the medical analogy it's also like physical therapy absolutely works and you can relieve pain through increasing muscle with the exact right program if you're back hurts and you decide well i heard this lifting weights and physical therapy works i'll just start lifting weights randomly a really high likelihood you're going to exacerbate the situation yeah so there is a right and wrong way to do all these things and i think psychedelics can also be a trojan horse for other good behaviors in the sense that if someone has never meditated but i make it a prerequisite my recommendation to them that you should follow let's just say waking up that with sam harris do the introductory course 30 days minimum before you schedule any type of psychedelic assistive therapy it's enough for a lot of people to get them to do it and then i say in addition to that you should read this book awareness by anthony de mello that will act very synergistically with sam harris and this this and this and what i've seen is that many people end up feeling better even before they do their session there are plenty of studies that look at variants of this like sham knee surgeries so where they have two arms in the sense that they have one group who's getting the knee surgery the other who's getting anesthetized put under cut open but then they're just stitching it back up and not fixing the knee but then they follow the same rehab program and in many instances the people who receive the fake surgery still end up with comparable levels of recovery because it finally got them to do the damn exercise exactly i know i'm observing this in my room like somebody's like you're not for the third round i'm like you gotta do this physical therapy we got it yeah okay so you've had such a fun and colorful i guess we're going on now well 23 years since you graduated college you've had a million different identities in that time frame right i mean you go there for east asian studies to princeton you come out and you take a sales position at a data storage place in silicon valley and then quickly into that job you start a supplement company and then during the supplement company you take this extended trip and discover the blueprint for the four-hour work week and then in doing that it leads to the body it leads to all these different things it leads to a podcast it leads to a television show it leads to public speaking yes and so i'm at a phase of evaluating my life that i've accepted that i'm prone to every five years get kind of bored with whatever i'm doing instead of seeing that as some kind of like lack of conviction or lack of direction i've kind of come to think like oh yeah man i'm a taste tester in life i'm like i'll take a la carte that i'm gonna hop over here maybe i want to live there i've kind of embraced it what's your experience with it do you have full acceptance of it do you feel like you're still fighting it i think at this point i have full acceptance of it for a while i had mixed judgment about hopping around would it induce feelings of fraudulence not so much fraudulence but i would look at whatever i was focused on for say five year period and say okay this is not true for everything by the way i think i get to the top 10 percent in the world or the u.s in this field if i just focus on it really intensely for x period of time and then i start getting to around that point and either i get bored or my learning curve starts to flatten out a bit and the novelty has worn off i don't feel like i'm growing very much and i want to move but i have friends who are a counterexample and will focus on one thing for say 10 years and they become top one percent which is a different species of animal it is and i think maybe i should be that person don't you think silently we're programmed to aspire to be michael jordan not steve kerr but damn good life steve kerr yeah and i would say also i think mark andreason very famous entrepreneur and venture capitalist at andreason horowitz right now i think he wrote about this but i could be mistreating in any case the point is if you're aiming for top one percent it's a bit of an all or nothing proposition especially in the world of sports right you either make it or you don't so the downside is actually very high to be hyper specialized i think that's true in other places as well and if you're say top 10 or even top 25 maybe even top 50 in a few areas that are rarely combined now you have a really attractive competitive advantage warren buffett of course people know warren buffett as a phenomenal investor he's the best friend right yeah he's one of those guys all shucks grandpa who's secretly a cold-blooded killer warren buffett has said his best investment was in the dale carny speaking course because when you take compelling communication your ability to speak to groups or even to one person and you layer it on top of something else you now have a sort of combinatorial advantage that a lot of specialists do not have so if you're a really good engineer let's say it's the only thing you do you're a very good coder you can play that narrow track and some people do and they become the michael jordan equivalent but let's say someone wants to broaden their career options and they develop some soft skills they learn how to manage at least within a lot of companies let's just say facebook google etc they now have 10x the number of options available i think there's a real compelling logic to that i just decided i don't need to be these friends and if i follow it what gives me energy and what excites me it seems to work out over time as long as i'm doing it in a somewhat systematic way and the degree of distraction is not a new shiny object every day but it's sort of a new project every say six months the fact that i had the ninth anniversary of tim parachute last saturday congratulations 10 years next april of an average of 1.4 episodes a week is shocking to me that i've done it for this long yeah but i think the reason for that is that it's broad enough that i can kind of talk about whatever i want to talk about yes the gift of it is the guests are ever-changing it's hard to get bored of guests it's like a hack of all hacks yeah it would be a supreme failure of imagination on my part if i got bored of my guests but do you think that type of lifestyle or following moving every five years or whatever do you think that affects your relationships with people in those environments we just talked about this where dex was like maybe i'd want to go back to parenthood the show not parenthood right and i was like that makes me feel unsafe that like at any moment like you can just be done with this yeah totally i've been ruminating on that conversation we had there's one more article of evidence it's not just two shows i did during this there's three i was in the top gear i was remembering yeah but what i didn't say when you were saying that is that did make this harder to do oh sure so i just feel like does that do the people in your lives have this uneasy feeling that you're about to change directions at all times this is a great question and i think undergirds a lot of decisions i make around building teams i have an incredibly lean team and they are multidisciplinary so they are involved with whatever shifting sands of projects i may be involved with contractors less so right so contractors may be at risk but i'm also not their sole client i actually get very nervous if i become too much of any contractors business as a percentage and i want to even introduce them to other people because i don't want to leave their kids hungry if suddenly it's too stressful it's too stressful i don't want that responsibility i do think about that that's a variable i consider for sure you know while you were talking about it i don't know that i've come to this conclusion personally but i was thinking it is really easy to actually not even know what you're pursuing at one percent right so as you're talking i just start kind of fantasizing about how i like to pop around why do i like to pop around super into motorsports those people are not into danny kahneman you know they've not read sapiens and then i'm in this group and i actually think my great passion and maybe a negative word a pejorative for this would be maybe i have an entitlement i don't know but i don't like if i haven't experienced every little subculture i see a group of people and my first thought is like i want to be able to interact with them but i don't like this to not be able to connect with anyone that to me is like very unsettling there's only one person snoop dog the only person i've ever been talking to where i was like i just can't do this like i sound so fucking white and dumb i'm so self-conscious talking to him this is a disaster i don't know how he's getting through this but that's it that was my one experience so in some bizarre way it's like we're evaluating the success of this pursuit and it's yes how good of a podcaster am i i don't know what percentage it doesn't really matter but if my life seen in its totality and seen as a pursuit of getting connected to as many things as humanly possible on the short trip i have maybe i'm one percent like maybe i'm the ultimate specialist maybe i can drop into any subculture better than 99 of the people and i don't even know that's my pursuit yeah totally there's some very well- one of many many examples the second is there are different ways to be diversified you can do a lot of different things with no plan no pattern no cohesion no skills or relationships that translate or you can do something that might have a little more coherence to it i tend to choose my projects based on developing new relationships or deepening current relationships and developing new skills so that even if that project fails all that i just mentioned can build over time and translate to other projects for instance when i started the podcast it was because i burned out on a huge non-fiction book and i wanted to try something new and i thought to myself well at the very least podcasting will be a very good way to get better at interviewing because that's what i have to do for my non-fiction books anyway if this podcasting thing goes nowhere which at the time i assumed was going to be the case i committed to doing six episodes just to see how it felt if it didn't work out it didn't matter really because i would have skills that i could then take back and apply something else and then there are just the broader patterns so if i look at a lot of what i do whether it's in the business realm and entrepreneurship realm before our work week or before our body or the angel investing or podcasting it's an attempt to learn something very quickly and i'm versus myself and experts and interview those experts that is the pattern over and over and over and over again so even though the topics the subjects the subcultures just like you i mean i love diving into subcultures whether it's this weird underground tango scene in argentina did you know tim was a competitive tango dancer he moved to argentina learned spanish and fucking got real competitive with his tango dancer wow i did i would love to see you you know tim is it i would love to see you is this weird kind of a little jack I had gone down because a friend of mine who was half Argentine, half Panamanian said, you need to go to Argentina. He said, best wine in the world, best steak in the world, most beautiful women in the world, and you can live like a king on pennies.

I'm there. So I went down. I was at one point in this location called Avenida Florida, which is this pedestrian walking area, kind of like 3rd Street Promenade in San Monica. And it was so humid and hot.

I was waiting for a friend. I had a couple hours to kill. And I wandered into this tango music shop that was open because they had AC on. And I was just loitering for maybe 45 minutes, kind of pretending to look at the various albums and the chain-smoking woman downstairs I ended up becoming pretty good friends with later got really annoyed.

And in Spanish, I was like, hey, Val, if you're just going to dick around here and not buy anything, you might as well pay for a class upstairs. It starts in 15 minutes. And that's how I started. And it was nine gorgeous women and one bored-looking guy.

And I was singing all the time, and I thought, okay, here we go. This is interesting. And then I fell in love with tango because, in my opinion, the best tango is improvised. It's social.

It's not choreographed. It's all the lead and the follow. And it is absolutely mind-blowing what you can see good dancers do. They meet for the first time.

You see them dance for 10 minutes. To the untrained eye, you would look at it and say, they've been rehearsing that particular routine for six months, and it was the first time they ever met. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. So it's interesting to me that the things I'm now learning that you are drawn to, they seem to have a little bit of a pattern.

I'm sure you're already aware of it. But you love control. You love methods. You love format.

And yet, you're super drawn to psychedelics, which is fucking the opposite. It's blow the lid off the volcano. We don't know where this is going. Oh my god, I've let this go.

And this is elation. This tango thing. When you first said tango, I was like, this makes so much sense for Tim. It's like prescriptive.

You can master it, it's got moves, blah, blah, blah. But then here, the actual appeal is, no, you have to surrender to it and follow or lead and it's improv. That weirdly, in this crazy pursuit of systematic functional behavior, your greatest joys are ones that that can't be done. That's curious.

Yeah, it's spot on. The hyper-vigilance that I have is there for a lot of reasons through a bunch of childhood events. I'm constantly scanning for threats. In that arousal state.

Yeah, like physically, in email, whatever it might be. Yes. And the level of default cortisol is not great. And I've done a lot to attenuate that, but- Attenuate?

Yeah, there we go. You used rivulets, so I had to use attenuate. Hey, I don't even know this anyway. I'm 48 and I haven't heard it.

This is the only day to be alive. I need to listen to it. So, yeah, where I find some of my deepest moments of peace and well-being are in these spans of time, when time disappears, when I'm less in my head, I'm more in my body, and things are unpredictable. You have to adapt.

You can plan, but the plan is always continued. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That could be in sports. That's why I'm drawn to a lot of sports.

Do you experience it on your show a lot? I do experience it on the show quite a bit, which I love, because I don't over-script. I tend to have a handful of bullets that I will get to if the guest doesn't take us somewhere different. Tatango in Argentina.

Yeah, exactly. They don't open a different door. I have a tentative plan. We could call this the safety net, right?

I think you want to talk about this a lot. This is a safety net I'm holding. I looked at it one time to find out the name of your TED talk, but that's it. So, I have the safety net.

It does happen in the show, which is really fun. I've been paying more attention to these things. And then, except it's not in my calendar, it's not real. I think that's true for most people.

So, getting blocks of time in advance in my calendar for the year that provide opportunities for that experience. That's where I fall off. I know it's good for me, but I don't plan what's good for me, per se. Yeah.

I know it'll get crowded out because it's happening. It'll get crowded out with nonsense. Or even just the kind of cool things I say yes to, I will lose the ability to block out meaningful time for these things. Well, it's also a magic trick in that if you ask me to go to dinner with you tonight, I'm going to say no.

I always have something tonight, or today, or tomorrow. But if you ask me to go to dinner in September, you're going to be like, of course I'm going to say yes. What do I have in September, right? But that works for everything.

That was not positioned like I'm trying to get out of it. That's just the reality of life, which is like, I can say yes to skydiving in a year, because I don't know what the fuck. Yeah, there's some weird magic trick. You'll say yes to more things if it's in theory down the road, and then those things arrive.

Yeah, so a tip that has come from a few different friends of mine, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, also says this. To more effectively say no to things, pretend like it's next Tuesday. So whatever someone asks you to do, you want to speak at this event in September, and you ask yourself, this for next Tuesday, would I be looking forward to it, or would I go, ah. Yeah, so this is your personality type as well.

This is something that Kristen has to be reminded of, because she's like, say yes sir, pathologically. That's not my hurdle. I can say no pretty good. What do you say yes to that you shouldn't say yes to?

Do you say yes to too many things because there's an element of building that? The podcast has cured that for me. Because you have the outlet, or you have like a vehicle? This is all in my head.

Let me be very clear. Reality is all in my head. So in my reality of my head, I had been acting for 20 years, writing for 20 years, and directing for 10 years, in the hopes of conveying my point of view. And it's not the most efficient medium to do that in.

I have felt that total embodiment of that happening here. That the goal I set out to do is being accomplished. And it's very curious. I don't know why it clicked, but it was like, because I'm doing the thing I wanted to do, and I'm actually validating myself now, when the flashier things come my way, I just don't need it really anymore.

I'll give you a crazy example. And objectively, we should go and support. But my wife goes, we're going to this science thing. We have to go, because other fancy friends of ours are going, and you're supposed to support these scientists, and we care, and we want to show support.

I said, I don't want to go, I don't want to go, but we're going. We go. Sure enough, bump into Ashton and Mila. Fucking love them.

Get to talk to them. That's really fun. A couple other hot shots I get to see and chat with. It's good for my ego.

It's good for her ego. We're coming home. And so yeah, that was fun. And I go, it was fun, but here's what's disappointing to me about it.

What was fun was hanging with Ashton and Mila. I would have preferred to have the full three hours with Ashton and Mila at an actual restaurant and not a place that was a field of positive approval from other fancy people. I'm disappointed, but that's the nature of when we'll see these people. And if I really care about the sciences, I'll pull up my checkbook and be a part of a grant, be a part of an award.

Me showing up and hobnobbing with other fancy people and having my ego stroke, it doesn't sit as well with me anymore. It's like, I'm just like, yeah, I know why I'm there. And I know why that felt good. I don't want to feel good for that reason.

But what a great place to be that you have the podcast that also is the salve that allows you to say no. And I'm so spoiled as you are, Tim. So it's like, well, I'm going to go up there and see someone make a speech for three minutes that I likely can have on this couch and really learn about. I'm so spoiled.

Now, really quick, knowing this about you and the joy you get out of these breaks from control, I don't know anything about this. We've never spoken about this. But my guess is that you might pick romantic partners incorrectly. Okay, tell me more.

Because I think what you'd be attracted to is someone who is predictable, good communicator, can work things out safe. And you'd be afraid of the kaleidoscopic twirling hippie. But bizarrely, that's the thing you're actually happiest when engaged with. Yeah.

We have a phrase in A, which is like contrary action. Whatever thing you think you should do, literally opposite. What do we think of that? Do we have a pattern romantically?

I've tried long romantic relationships with both archetypes that you're describing. Okay. I am almost certainly attracted to the more free-floating twirling hippie type. Patchouli oil, one dreadlock.

I got you. There are limits. But that type of free spirit was unencumbered by the agony of overthinking and overplanning in the way that I am, perhaps. And that's a very dramatic way to put it, but you get the idea.

In practice, that can be great for a very short period of time. Day-to-day, week-to-week, over years, I prefer clear communicator, consistent, which doesn't, to me, mean the same thing as predictable, right? If someone is boring, that's not good. Yeah.

But if someone is incredibly inconsistent, it's kind of like a child who grows up, I did not grow up this way, but grows up as an alcoholic parent. They don't know which version of dad is going to show up. There's no security. Yes, yes.

That is not a feeling I want. I've had enough of that. Yes, yes. I don't need more of that.

So, from an attraction perspective, I have to be careful about taking incredible traction as an indicator of compatibility. Oh, it's the biggest mistake. My take on that is, what you are interpreting as attraction is actually familiarity. You're heightened because you recognize it.

You know it. You're the pattern, you know. Yes. And it's actually your mom or your dad, really, that is so familiar to you.

I just think attraction is very misleading. I think often it's just you're recognizing something you already understand and you're familiar with. It could be. I think it might also just be animal lust with sexy ladies.

Sure. That's definitely a component. But for me, I mean the love. I can fuck anyone virtually when I'm drunk.

Let's just say that. Too bad we get to dinner tonight. Let's push this to the max. Let's see.

Let's find out the limits of it. I more mean the feeling of kind of that instant love feeling. Not horniness per se, but that like, oh, I think I'm in love with you. Yeah.

The soul connection piece can be misleading. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And I think even on very deep levels, this is where I've made missteps in the past. Even if you really do seem to have an unusual, extremely deep connection with someone that manifests in unusual ways, that does not mean you should be like partners.

Yeah, totally. That's hard to admit. I think there's phases and I think your list of priorities should be flexible and change. So I think it's totally fine all the way up to your mid thirties to have one set of criteria.

But I've urged other friends of mine who claim they want families, which is different to claim it and to really go get one. But the first thing I'll say is like, you've got to move number one on your list. Literally when you're shopping for a mate, number one list has to be great mother or great father. You shouldn't be in your twenties.

Don't even bother with that. But you've got to be trying to isolate different things. If you don't evolve that list of priorities, you're going to repeat 100%. What are we in the market for right now?

What am I in the market for? Do you want to have a baby? Would you like to have a baby with Monica? I don't have her many eggs left.

His burn down isn't great. This could be a match made to have him. Oh, cool. That sounds like great for a swim team.

My swim team has made a rebound. They're doing all right. And I stopped microwaving twice a day. It's really working out for me.

I do think I want to have a family. Yeah. I think that's the next big adventure. I think you will do so well with it.

As someone else with a really busy monkey brain that's always up there. It's so insanely powerful to have someone else's comfort and future at top of mind above your own. That's my ayahuasca. Yeah, the me-me-me song gets really fucking boring after a while.

We were just talking about it. But it's like we as humans have the tendency to make our lives more and more and more comfortable if given the opportunity to do so. And we actually don't know what's best for ourselves. And like you were saying that, what could be the hottest, esteemiest love thing isn't necessarily what is good for you or going to be productive for you.

Very infrequently. Yes, yes. And then similarly, it's like if we are privileged enough, we start designing our lives to have the least amount of friction as humanly possible. And then on the other side of that is not happiness.

Ironically, it's endless wanting. Yeah, I think the rugged individualism, self-sufficiency myth is very problematic from a mental health perspective. And there's something to be said for developing skills that allow you to feel safe and well-resourced, yes. But when you look at the statistics in the U.S.

related to depression, related to teen suicide, et cetera, they are not good and they're not getting better. There are many factors that contribute to that. But when you look at places, let's say, like Costa Rica or certain Scandinavian countries, and I recognize there are many differences, the social cohesion time spent in groups is so prevalent that I happen to think spending more time metaphorically kind of grooming one another like primates makes a whole lot of sense. And it's not going to happen by itself.

Unfortunately, here, even though I do think the U.S. is a land of opportunity in a million ways, but in most parts of the U.S., you have to engineer that and take steps to make it happen. Yes, you have to be active about, God, who were we just interviewing? They were making the greatest points.

It's like, oh, it was Stutz. It was like, go to lunch with the person you don't want to go to lunch with. It's not about how stimulating the experience is. It's about the base foundational thing that that solves.

It's so powerful. And we're designed to live with 100 people that we know pretty damn well and rely on. And we've designed the perfect system here to never have to have a partner, to not have to have an extended family, to be a one-man show. And the results are in, and they're not right.

Yeah, bad news, bad news. GDP is up, bad news. The health is way down. So you can, I think, address a lot of these issues pretty easily.

Putting families that apart, I mean, I do think, for myself, if I just have group dinners two or three times a week, all of these issues with some mental dog chasing its tail in my head just resolve themselves most of the time. But, you know, the family piece is attractive for a lot of reasons. And I recall this story. A friend of mine told me he's in his 70s now.

He's a grandfather. But when he had his first kid, he had his first kid quite late. His brother clapped him on the shoulder and said, welcome to the human race. You've just fulfilled your single purpose on this planet, by the way.

You can feel it. No, no, no, no. We don't need to get, like, as an animal. Every animal on planet Earth's singular job is to reproduce.

But I, for most of my life, was very hesitant to say I want kids. Yeah. And there were a lot of reasons for that. State of the world.

Family history of depression. Not sure if I would be a good dad for any host of reasons. And this might seem like semantic niggling. But I don't think it's enough to say, I want kids.

I think that's very different from, I want to be a parent. Exactly. Right. And the latter implies a level of responsibility and engagement that I think should be a prerequisite for having kids.

And sacrifice. Yeah. We've worked through the same system of hurdles you've incorporated for psychotics. Let's demonstrate that you have...

It's very similar. Yes, I have a kid, but also, you know... Yeah, I think it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's just like, you know, I have a dog, she's seven now, but I got her when she was two or three months old. And I went through a very similar process. I was like, alright, am I committed to doing what is necessary to make this a happy dog? In part, which is making myself predictable, which means training her really well.

Let me talk to trainers and figure out what that actually entails. Yeah. And it's... Wow.

I love an unexpected pun. And it's not complex, but it requires consistency. It's a reasonable amount of time, and it can get monotonous at points. And I also wanted to do that, and I ended up saying yes, and Molly's incredibly well-trained.

She hasn't barked once in this interview. Yeah, yeah, she's very impressive. Noticeably quiet. That has not happened yet.

What? No one's brought their dog. I thought about bringing her. Wow.

But I didn't want to throw a curveball. That would have been... I have to get to know her first. Oh, it's not alerted.

Has it been her dog? No, just psychologically alerted. Oh, she is the perfect gateway dog. Oh, that's nice.

Okay. Yeah, she would be as quiet as we were pretending that she is right now. Is she a doodle type? Is she hypoallergenic?

I wouldn't say she's hypoallergenic. She's a rescue from a shelter. And best I can tell, because we did the cheek swab analysis, she is mostly Labrador bloodhound and then pit bull. She looks like a Labrador with Rottweiler colors.

And he's like, you're not going to believe what Benny is. He's 80% boxer. And I'm like, the fuck he is. He's not.

He's not a people dog. He's a corgi. He's a little rods walking around one inch off the ground. He's not a boxer.

He sent me the thing. They got either mixed up or this is bullshit. One of the two. Anyways, I think 60 minutes is ripe to do whatever these gotcha pieces.

They need to send off like 10 swaths from the same dog. It's possible because the first time I did it, it came back and it looked like a Wikipedia printout of just dog. Oh God. I was like, what the fuck is this?

And so I tried it a second time. I was like, at least this one, I can suspend disbelief. I can kind of see it if I squint. Yes, sure.

I'd like to start one over just like, please include a picture of snappers so we can have it on our wall. And I'll just look at it. I was like, corgi and a fucking Irish setter. That's what you got there.

Well, Tim, I had such a good time on your podcast. You are so great at it. It doesn't shock you that you are nine years in and approaching a billion downloads and been so successful. And I hope everyone checks out the Tim Ferriss show if they don't already listen to it religiously, which would shock me.

And also feel free to check out any of the five books you've written at a total of 10 million book sales, which seems impossible. Ted Talk. Ted Talk. Do Boomers.

if you do all the other things you said the foundation if you want to check that out oh and also angel invest in uber that's another thing you should do that tim yeah go back and sign ashton yeah you can engineer that for yourself i recommend that otherwise angel investing pretty risky business let your money on fire on the sidewalk i've been delighted to see you step away and share that because there's a couple of these i almost got tempted by and i literally at some point just said to myself you're lying to yourself if you think you're great at predicting new businesses this isn't at all what you focused on in your whole life and i'm really wrong when i heard the idea of uber i was like never gonna work i hate being a passenger i'm locked into my own ego set i couldn't see that that would work and so i've stayed out of all that i would say to most people unless you're going to be a professional stock picker and dedicate your life to it stick to the basics well that and then also acknowledge you will be fighting a very unfair fight against the much bigger hedge fund all these different things that have sway in the marketplace and leverage and attack it's a whole context for you don't you think tim could be christian's brother yeah you guys look at that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it is a big compliment can you say i wouldn't say okay you wouldn't say everything else i think a new career in singing could really be the next chapter in the tim ferris auto tune index yes everyone's singing now i bet wabi wabi could whip you out a beautiful single well delighted to be with you here in person thanks so much for coming on and i truly adore you i'd say your defining adjective i'd use for you is thoughtful and that's a wonderful one to have yeah yeah thank you so much for having me really appreciate you guys and now my favorite part of the show the fact check with my soulmate monica padman let's get our noises out the water's still too hot good for holding off for drinking for another four minutes four minutes listen to this that's not a commercial level i keep pushing these diaco people they just don't want to bring me on board i couldn't be doing more that's why i feel about cookies but there's no in general yeah do you think there's a cookie lobby they need help because the world is getting healthier and they need me to bring back the cookies are they though is the world getting i think this every stat i keep reading is that the life expectancy of americans is falling i think that's right but they know better to them like buy cookies they should just buy cookies yeah buy some cookies that's a good point you'll be a good lobbyist a lot of people are dying prematurely here in america but i think they should just buy cookies because they're having a good time while you're here no i have a real theory okay tell me people think oh i have to be healthy so i can't eat like a cookie or a cake but i'll have 7 000 pounds of pasta instead okay and they won't have a little treat it's okay to have a little treat for yourself so you're gonna part of your lobbying technique will be to pit pasta against no because i love pasta okay you're also in the pasta lobby it's just more of a moderation lobby well there lies everything isn't it yes and you can have a cookie that's one of the few things i moderate if i'm being dead honest yeah shockingly considering i have no willpower in any other domain you are good at it but i'm only good if i'm militant about it i don't do good at things like i can't like you can have a cookie once a day oh no are you gonna but are you like i'm afraid that i might be taking me out all right go ahead okay so i can't have one cookie a day like you can yes and after i eat the one however bad i want to eat the first one i now want to eat the second one 10x of what i want to eat the first one this is the same nature as drinking for an alcoholic you think you can predict you're like i just kind of want to be so i'll have one but you forget once you have one you're really gonna want the second one you don't anticipate you're not honest about how badly you'll need okay i know i know i have a new business okay tell me okay uh hi mrs fadman we're so excited to have you as you know we've traditionally been against the cookie industry so but we're open-minded we'd like to hear what you have to say well i really appreciate you having me and i know um you took a lot of time out of your day thanks for noticing you're very busy i'm proposing okay that i start a business you started a business yeah congratulations thank you i'm also very busy oh well now you're but um but that's okay i want to start over one prepackaged cookie gets delivered to your house every day okay only one it's daily so you can't okay look i guess you could save up and have five at once but then still that's only five for the week okay okay so we're promoting moderation control quality control a lot of things like qc quality control limited quantities uh feeling satiated having treats treats are so good in life so it's fair to say that this is a part of a much more comprehensive global strategy and that this is just this is an example sounds like you're maybe trying to build a whole way of life off of this cookie consumption which i respect that's a really cool agenda but you did point out one of the potential clauses how i would use the system i would basically not eat the cookies for a mom okay because i'm a good boy yeah and then one night i'd be feeling sad about something sure and then i would have one cookie with the promise of only everyone and then i'd eat the remaining 29 cookies and then i would fall into a diabetic coma all right well look we can't protect everyone because some people are out of control crazy this is for the majority of people not for every single person okay well yeah this sounds very america and the cookies are going to be really good but not that good okay so they're not great cookies that's that helps they're good that's not like an oreo size no yeah it's a substantial cookie but it's it's 200 calories oh that's great so it's not that's not extreme it's only one-tenth of your daily loans you could have nine more if you want oh no don't start thinking about it okay so you already found out okay well okay well i guess yes oh my god thank you passed yes pass okay well thanks for seeing us it's so great to meet you yes you too be careful i mean i don't think you're gonna be able to act this greg uh as scary as it is i don't want you to get the funding to send all 350 i'm very rich i can hear you oh you're back yeah um i was lingering outside the door in anticipation that you would have some thoughts okay oh i'm embarrassed it's okay i just want to let you know i have plenty of investor money great i have my own money and i have also rich friends okay great have a great day it's been great okay goodbye that was a really cool outfit you had on greg did you see that i know we're not supposed to notice that stuff anymore oh my god we gotta call security hit the button on your on your desk yeah okay well that was fun and i think we solved some stuff i think so and i really want to cook now what kind do you want chocolate chip yeah i want a levain they're opening one in march month no way are you so excited how many cookies are you they're really hefty they're girthy cookie yeah it's almost like a muffin like it is so thick so i will say i am good at moderation you really are you somehow drink like three drinks it's amazing i think it's from my dad and my mom actually probably my mom it's genetics i think it's genetics yeah i think that's what i'm observing like you know my eight-year-old's already a little bit of a love i know it she just is you know i know that's the thing like you gotta feel bad for like she's gonna have to try to wrestle that her whole life she's just genetically that's i know you should see okay so i ran into her in lincoln at jenny's ice cream and it was so exciting for all of us but i was with cali because cali's pregnant she put on instagram so i can say so wonderful congratulations really really exciting and the baby needed ice cream right sometimes the baby will tell you like hey we need a waffle cone exactly i went to maru first i didn't see rob which was a shock i would have been scared this was right if i went to maru and i didn't see rob rob's dead what happened to rob no one of the guys who works at maru when i went there they were like we haven't seen rob in a while and they really did seem scared oh he's been out of town was this on his french long trip i think so okay he was gone they were nervous they were of course yeah see a lot of people checking in on you but anyway i must have just missed you probably really quick yeah has it occurred to you rob to approach them about franchising would you love to own your own maru i feel like you could really pour your heart in that i thought about it that would be great we would get free maru anyway we went to maru with matcha she didn't want that the baby wanted ice cream not matcha so we went to jenny's and we were standing like she ran into someone she knew so we were talking to this nice lady and and then all of a sudden i heard um and i turned around and they were standing right behind me they were out and about in town yes lincoln delta and tt they're on their way home from school and it was so exciting they were all so excited but then her level of excitement wouldn't like wouldn't subside she couldn't believe it was happening she's so happy and it made me so happy and then i gave her my gift card oh she got somebody yeah yeah i wish i were the aunt i'd love to take them ice cream when i pick them up i don't know how to do that also it's really sweet i was like oh she's bringing them to the ice cream after school how sweet she really is she's a good auntie and an auntie but i'm jealous too you could do it i can't someone in their life's got a knot yeah it can't be all aunts and uncles and grandparents you're someone's gonna be the parent this is the shitty part about being a parent we're nicely on the topic we are mother's day is that you well that too oh i was more thinking of lincoln nice building project oh sure by the highlight of my 2023 thus far okay let's hear about it about six months ago she said she wanted like a fort in the backyard and she picked a place where she thinks it should be and she needs her own spot without delta you know it's always about like they only already like they're already living four times as much space as i ever did with one less sibling regardless they do share a room they do share room yeah yeah and i think uh christian was kind of quick to say like okay well let's talk about what that would be and then we can hire the gentleman who built the shed and then i said the only way you can have four is if you build it and she said okay she was immediately excited yeah and then i had her draw she's a very good drawer extremely yeah almost frustratingly so well no because it makes sense because again genetics but you're well both of you are very good i'm not a good drawer yes you are stop fishing you're the best drawer listen my point is she surpassed my artistic skills like two years ago which is a weird feeling as an adult she drew a sketch of what she wanted which is a great drawing i don't know how she does these perspectives she wants like a pavilion she wanted a nice deck area and then she wants a roof but she doesn't want walls right so gazebo of sorts yeah but more of a fort variety but yes i guess i think a gazebo octagon or hexagon but at any rate um she drew this up and so i then took that drawing and i drew steps of how we would get there like okay we got to put footings in for these four posts let's do four by eight that's all we have room for up there so the deck will be four but four feet by eight feet and the roof will hang over a foot on each side so the roof will be six by ten feet is it going to be flat no it's going to be angled so that when it rains the water okay great so i drew up the steps for everything and then we took that and we made a very comprehensive list of supplies we needed from home depot this episode is not brought to you by home depot but they were there in a pinch for us is it brought i wish we were not opposed to that yeah but we went on friday and that trip was an hour and 40 minutes now tell me about why because god i wish i had the list with me outside but we needed so much stuff we needed 15 10 foot 2x6s we needed how are you fitting all this i mean when you're walking through home depot with your little cart that's the thing so right out of the gate to tell her you got to find one of those big daddy long legs in the cart return there are ones that have vertical slots and they're the big heavy duty cart that you push not like a shopping cart oh and so we're going there with that first up is paint what color do you want to paint oh you're going to paint it i don't want to do but it's her thing so i'm slowly trying to talk her out she's like i want it to be blue i'm like that's going to stick out like a bunch of people so i'm trying to talk her into a certain color well this green would look great because i'm thinking it'll grass yeah and the lines of picas so maybe you won't even see it yeah and whatever we got paint we're also kind of in love with the way it looks on paint it doesn't matter then we had to get we all wanted her to get her own hammer okay so she got to pick out her own hammer oh we got fun then we got a line chalk unit you know those work no so it's this little metal box with a crank on the side and then you fill it with chalk oh and then you pull a line out if you can imagine just like um like a tape measure ribbon not even like um yeah thin little rope string oh string okay so string comes out and it has a little latch on the other on the end of it and then what you do is that because we're going to make a base with a frame so the outside will have four pieces of wood and then three running in the middle that we're going to put the decking across well once we lay out the decking we no longer know where those two by fours are underneath so you take the chalk and you put it on the screw mark of the one side and then the other you pull it tight and then you snap it and it puts a perfect line where the two by four is under the decking so you can sink your screws in and know exactly where you're at this is so intense so we got that then we went how do you see this is why when you said the vacuum thing you make it sound so simple but you know to buy that i would never know to buy that you would know once you started the project and you're like how the fuck am i going to know where the two by four is under there there must be something okay anyway go on okay then a ton of lumber uh pressure treated lumber and i was saying to her all right we need x amount of these two by fours at eight feet we need x amount of two by fours at ten feet so she has to go there's so much wood there she has to find the label she's okay i got these are ten foot by right so that's wow we're building in time for her to do all that it's not like i'm just going down i'm making her find everything at home and then we gotta go to the fastener's aisle and we're gonna tell her we need three different kinds of screws because sometimes we're going through a two by four into a two by six and those are both 1.5 so we need three inch screws if we want to go all the way we don't need that much you know oh my god screws it adds up to an hour and 40 minutes sheets of plywood so those are sitting in the thing right a few sheets of plywood okay load up the truck that's funny that became its own thing you know there's a lot of dudes hanging in the parking lot at home people they're looking for work and they were all wanted to load the cart into the truck right and i must have said no to four or five of them and then we loaded it all and then i tell her later that day i wanted both of us to do all the work so we felt proud of this but i really regret not giving those guys money to load the truck i should have done that oh there's lessons all along one thing but now it's like i re-evaluated i probably should have given those guys ten bucks to do that so we get everything home on friday night and saturday we wake up we get it right away we're out there and i'm gonna tell you something so we're running a chop saw that's kind of like you bring it down you're cutting right and we got a table saw okay we have a jigsaw we got to use and where we got impact gun because we're bolting everything together so super sturdy we got drills we can draw the holes for the bolts and then we got little impact guns to drive the screws in she did 100% of the stuff wow she had to use a chop saw she had to use everything she sunk more than half the screws into the decking wow she did the impact gun on the bolts she built this thing oh my god and she loved it that is so incredible and i was floating on a cloud the entire time that she was a hard worker engaged busting her ass carrying the lumber up the hill she never said like can i be done now never wow she like me we were pissed we had to go to the richardsons not because we don't want to richardsons yeah there was a wake or memorial we had to go to that so we had to stop our project yeah so all we've built is our deck but monica i want to see i hope you'll go i will of course okay it's so level and you put the fucking level anywhere on that deck in the that bubble is right in the middle it was the greatest it's tied now with my favorite moments with lincoln the other one being trail riding dirt bikes in north dakota lesson but these were two moments where i was like we're a team that's lovely it was so fun that's so fun maybe she could do some work on my house she will want to what's what i loved is she's looking at all this scrap wood that's the excess of all her cuts and she's looking at this pile kind of build up and she goes to me i think we should build some chairs we could build like so she's her mind's already like oh i can turn these shapes into any shape i want i don't know how to fasten everything together and cut and so she's already sewing also kind of a little bit yeah once you recognize like how it all works you start thinking well fuck guy could build anything that's immediately where her mind went that's so cool i'm really happy i love that she little work loves i'm on it oh my god oh my god so cute i'm extremely impressed i'm not surprised at all that she could do all that i'm with you yeah yeah i'm really impressed yeah i knew this little bastard was had this in her she's really like a very very good natural mechanic she is that's what i want her to really there's so much esteem that comes from that i think yeah dang i can't wait to do the roof why are you wearing rain boots today no these are the row but aren't they rain boots no they're regs oh okay sorry you can see where i think it's like a rainbow yeah i guess so but rainbows are not leather because rain isn't good for leather the rubber that's right okay and then yesterday was mother's day this weekend was mother's day a lot of days ago it was mother's day four days ago um and uh you had you threw a little mother's day party for the mothers i did i got uh a manicurist massage therapist and a facial massage you know about them have you had the facial massage where they go in your mouth yeah yeah i don't like it you had it and you didn't like it too invasive i really want to do it it doesn't feel good at all like it hurt yeah they put gloves and they like i'm like it's supposed to loosen everything up i didn't feel any pleasure and i only felt pain she didn't like it the other ladies liked it a lot yeah and regardless um i very much want it i feel like oh you might love it who knows i hate it anyways yes there's three stations and then there's also hot tub sauna salads nice yeah and so that was the offerings on mother's day agenda day and then i took the kids over to eric's and all the other dads took their kids there and we played spades and went in the sauna nice so kind of like a father's day too yeah and i ordered an insane amount of barbecue and we just picked out and so everyone won great yeah i saw your post and it made me sad my post on my mom yeah when your mom didn't make me sad i know a lot of people commented that we were twins yeah which made me happy yeah she's so cool in that picture she's really radical looking yeah yeah wasn't the easiest day yeah tell me about that well a lot of people post that on mother's day you know i know this can be a hard day for people which of course i intellectually understand yeah every time i read that i'm like oh oh yeah if you lost your mother or whatever million reasons but i never felt that until this year uh-huh and i assume it must have to do with the eggs the most recent experience with motherhood was bad and scary and i have a lot of fear around it really yeah i'm not being able to i'm not being able to do that but there's a few potentially exacerbating elements there's it's mother's day so your best friend's about to have a baby you guys have done mostly everything together yeah you went to school at the same time together you moved to la together you became both successful at the same time yeah it doesn't matter if i can get over that you were first who was first yeah because you went to um she went to graduate school oh okay you got more degrees than me okay so and then your age is a component yeah yeah yes yeah i'm sorry you're feeling those things it's okay when's your next release probably july or august i had some blood work done on friday to check out my levels and when do you find out the results of that probably soon i don't know tonight probably call midnight from your doctor yeah this just in i'm holding the results oh my god i hope it's not that intense you're so fucking fertile that would be nice i'm gonna try to do acupuncture for at least a month before i'm out of town in june for a week so i think that would mess up doing it next month so in the next few months i'm gonna try it again your eggs are bunching up on the riverbank like wildebeest waiting for a safe crossing from the crocodilia does that ring a bell yes that was in the nicholas brawn episode another third you said to us you proved yourself by sending us the clip and you were correct i just can't believe neither of you remember there's such a bizarre example sometimes we tune you out i think that's what i learned that's just the truth was that in the beginning it was it was oh that's your excuse i'm juggling the line you're doing anything in pictures settled into the episode yeah but that is what i learned that's why i want to bring it up you guys are not you you file me into white noise which is i i'm not against it i think you guys need to for your own survival but it's something to for me to observe no it's like what do i need to process and what do i need to let go white noise yeah only some of it though some of it's relevant anyway so um you know my periods have been weird what version we're back to talking about my fertility yeah i know i'm all ears but what's weird about them they're very light okay i got a big boy recently well yeah they've been really light okay which has been concerning of course because the period is the egg the egg really and that makes me feel like oh there's nothing coming out there's not there's no egg getting released that's just like the lining that's why it's so light yeah recently it's been a bit better i've had two periods that have been more normal but still very short okay so not a full j1 ones yet no but we're moving in the right direction i guess i don't know i just i just feel i don't know i just feel like you feel pessimistic a little yeah of course and at the time when i'm really really coming to terms with the fact that i do want kids right and that a lot of me saying like i'm not sure i mean like that's real too when i start really thinking about it i do think like but i don't know because of this and i don't know and but i also know that me saying i'm not sure is a protection yeah and if i'm not sure and i can't then oh well well i didn't really know anyway if i wanted them yeah but that's all really a lie i'm just telling myself okay because i do it also be both things right what do you mean like you could be uncertain at times whether you want them yeah and you could still be heartbroken that it's not going the way you want yeah for sure it wouldn't have to necessarily be it's no big deal because i'm not sure you could be not sure and a big deal that's what i'm saying making space for you to have all those conflicting feelings yes definitely but i think for me the protection built in is okay if it doesn't happen for me that's okay because i'm not even sure i want them i think that's what i've been doing i guess is my point and i do i do want them so it just makes it harder to to feel okay if i don't that feels like a real loss okay now this is a very dangerous oh my god i feel sensitive i imagine so that's why i think it's dangerous okay um because it what i don't want it to be interpreted as is any kind of victim shaming oh okay because you're i feel very sad for you and you've done nothing wrong that you didn't have a good retrieval last time but you also have been on the pill for a long time i have yeah so that's an important clue for me just on the outside of your situation but what do you think about the kind of overall impact on fertility from your mental state do you think they're related at all let me back up you hear these i've heard a million i've known a million i've known several people that were trying to get pregnant trying to get pregnant and finally they get pregnant i know yes it's very common very yes it seems at least like there's a bit of connection between a lot of stress over the situation and the outcome it's very anecdotal totally but it seems like i observe it and so i'm wondering if you would be open to exploring a different story where you're optimistic yes because i find myself weirdly optimistic i think like oh yeah you got the bad one out of the way and that's a result of all the that yeah and i think we're gonna have a nice hearty crop of eggs next time i hope so i really hope so i'm not walking around thinking oh i definitely like this is over you're not defeated i'm not but i'm more scared now having done it it's a very unpleasant experience yeah already even if you even if you have a very uh good retrieval it's not fun so prep mentally prepping for that and now there's a layer of fear it was different last time because of the birth control and because i knew my count was low and i was like oh it's the birth control yep and i had a place to put that i was like oh this is because of the birth control so that makes sense okay okay okay and it didn't really feel like oh my body is not gonna is not gonna um do what it's supposed to do yeah until i they got six eggs yeah and only two were mature that was a moment where i felt there's an issue right so and you know when i was in my blackout the doctor was sort of telling me stuff and i can like only sort of remember what she was saying yeah she did say something to the effect of sometimes the age of the eggs or that your ovarian age doesn't reflect your actual age and i was like what does that mean and i think she means my ovaries are 50 like what's going and i couldn't really ask because i was so overwhelmed yeah so yes i am gonna be positive i'm gonna try i am gonna be we'll try it again we're just gonna see yeah i just wanna share i'm not an obg yes are you sitting down wow you said that i'm not an ob wow thank you for admitting that but i see massive fertility when i look at you you're would be an outstanding mother thank you you'd be built for it and i think it'll be exactly as you want it i believe you're a healthy girl with big oversized fertile padman eggs i believe that just like i believe you get your house and you didn't i believe that for you yeah i do okay look at me i do thank you i hope so it's like your house you're a good girl and you deserve all the things okay yeah but my house isn't even nice or the neighborhood but one day it'll be nice yeah anyway but a lot of people are in this boat and it's okay yeah um i have a great life regardless of what happens i do yeah but you're a fertile machine okay okay in fact i'd be afraid of you swallowing an apple seed because a tree would grow out of your ass that's how fertile you are yeah yep that's what i think be careful i don't like apples we're fine you don't like apples no oh my god well unless they're in a salad cut very thin sometimes tubed you can't eat apples he'd like to but they give him an allergic reaction oh really yeah what kind i think all apples no what kind of reaction oh guys oh i don't know he's like it's coffee and can't swallow you know yeah not a good reaction not a positive allergic reaction but i think he still eats them occasionally because he wants them so bad oh my god oh erin who did you think i said eric oh no no i think eric can eat anything yeah i was very surprised oh erin erin my son anyway sweet boy he can't eat his apples so he can't keep the doctor away oh boy oh my god um okay okay this is for tim ferris oh wonderful that was really a fun conversation yeah i really like that it was i put him in the um steven dubner where it's like you don't need to think about what you're gonna talk about to show up yeah and they're generators of fun intriguing provocative thoughts i like that yeah you guys gonna date you know people really were going for nicholas yeah the comments were just full of people cheering on a relationship he's in a relationship i think when people were writing that was that you guys had a very playful banter you were kind of making fun of him a little bit and then you make fun of him back which was really fun i was really thinking about like a why people responded that i also observed that while i was here and i thought this is why you can't really make rules about anything like the rules that exist in flirting yeah and make selection and attraction they're their own they don't i think they're independent of all the other rules yeah so it's like that making fun of each other was great right and that's like the foundation sometimes of good flirting oh yeah it's just very playful it's it is making but it's not it's not making in the gross way yeah but it is it that's what flirting kind is it's like i was listening and i'm gonna twist it a little bit and throw it back at you yeah and i don't remember what i said that would have you just had a few of them because i listened to it i listened to it it was really uh quite good i thought yeah it was really good and he was making fun of you too he was some back and forth well i'll record them and i'll send them to you and rob like i did the other parts of the conversation at some point i'll send you guys the whole episode okay since you guys neither of you i remember okay okay oh my god because you were doing your picture taking yeah okay you know what maybe can i just say if these two sat next to each other in a science class in high school this is what would be happening yeah like and you guys would be you're both playful and very clever and sarcastic and you were really both good at like just gently teasing each other yeah i could just see you guys in a class next to each other how the fuck else would you class class is cool yeah yeah okay okay the word rivulet yeah you are i think you're using it right a little off shoot of a river it is a very small stream okay and not necessarily a tributary because i think tributaries yes i think a rivulet kind of cascades off and dwindles in a nothing sweet ran and rivulets oh sweet oh my god sweat that's embarrassing sweat ran and rivulets down his back well i know this one well did you hand select that one to pertain to me so i'd be more interested they just dealt with some rivulets on our previous guest you did you know i didn't put my arm around when i wanted to connect with them so much i wondered that because i didn't i felt strange oh good you did yeah but i felt strange because you didn't do it oh that's great you're floating there too oh no no i think he also didn't know what to do because you didn't have your hand because my back was too sweaty oh my god rivulets not tributaries very small stream i don't think it's coming out of i don't know i think it branches off of it does it it's not saying that but it's got to come from somewhere right okay rivulets a sweat rain blood ran down his face synonyms dribble oh god because who's here that's right i want to hear about the rivers of sweat and blood on your face i wipe the way i kiss your mouth oh my god i'm here now so let's go why does he has to knock he just appears let's get out of here i can play too you're a jerk is that we're doing it right oh my god look at i'm flirting with you you're a piece of shit i love you so much let's get the fuck out of here i'm here finally let's do it oh she's holding a napkin right i've got the screen i go behind now here we go okay just put up my screen knock knock because there's me let's get the fuck out of here i'm finally here let's go jeng zhong the wizard said knock knock i'm here let's go all the way i wonder what his mother was like oh not great i know send him the story of your cigarettes and brown liquor yeah fuck god i raise myself and by wolves that's why i have such a hunger for you let's get out of here you're a piece of yeah that's so gorgeous oh it's not like shit i'm so horny for you oh my god it's like flowers okay wait wait actually all right okay um i put my screen away i put your screen away i actually do smell bad you do what did you do step in some doodles no my shower drain is clogged okay i told you how to fix that i did i tried i put the you took the screen off well the screen there should be a metal screen over the hole or is it just a straight hole into the it's not a straight hole there's there's some kind of a metal break over yeah you gotta take that off oh and then take a coat hanger yeah I did that and when you pull it out what was happening well I left the thing I did that wrong so there was space though so I stuck the coat hanger and I just heard metal I didn't hear like I wasn't getting caught on anything what you wanna do is well first I gotta bend that that hanger part really close so it'll fit down the pipe take the grate off and go down in it because it has a U pipe just like right and that's where it's at so you gotta get it down there and then I guarantee you'll pull a rat out of it so your train's clogged and then what wait no put your screen down I see you picking up your screen I'm not done like who's here back I'm not even saying anything oh my god it's just so exciting okay so do I have to use a screwdriver to get that thing off yes you have them it's no big deal it's two screws the plumber's coming tomorrow that's another way to deal with it too I did put a bunch of Drano in they hate me to do that they do every single in fact you should maybe cut that out of this episode every single lease agreement or rental agreement explicitly forbid you from really oh no I told her I did that uh oh okay well she didn't say that's bad it was weird though because it had already you know there was water there was standing water and I was pouring the Drano away no but I also have that bug issue oh my god things are they're falling apart I don't give a fuck what's happening in your apartment I hope there's wild animals in here like us I'll eat cockroaches if I can just lay with you like us anyway I poured the Drano in the standing water but as close as I could get to the thing and it actually worked that water went away okay so then I was like oh I fixed it then I took a shower same situation anyway so I can't wash my hair or shower until tomorrow tell me more smell like shit I do I think I do I don't smell good anyway um alright when I say the little robot I don't fuck that little robot no no I miss the robot oh I actually had a fact about the robot oh you did yes and I forgot to say it was from a couple times ago it was Gretchen because we were saying he's an obliger personality type he has been programmed that way right and he said he doesn't have any goals because of that but he does to be a real boy big time so he does have his own goals so that's a fact I'm checking oh okay yeah that's true that's right I stand by that okay when do we stop using cocaine for medicinal use well it says to still use sometimes so yeah use as a local anesthetic throughout the history of the Incan Empire of Peru in Europe however its medical usefulness was not fully recognized until Karl Kohler used it to anesthetize anesthetize that's a hard word to say anesthetize I think because it's T-H German anesthetize anesthetize it's just a T anesthetized because it's N-S-T-H-E-T-I-Z-E right and I think that T-H we would say the T okay anesthetize anesthetize no ties is it anesthetize anesthetize I think she's doing a little H she's no Lisp though okay well anyway I love speech impediment so I got one of my own let me show you I hate him but I like him a little bit I know oh my god because nothing you truly don't like sticks around let's be honest I know okay used to anesthetize anesthetize the corner of the eye over the next 20 years cocaine became a popular medicine and tonic in Europe and America where it was credited with curing a wide variety of diseases and illnesses however reports soon started to appear claiming that cocaine was a drug with high social abuse potential and in America it seemed to underpin growing crime figures but so it's used a lot less but it's used sometimes well it nums everything immediately yeah you've never done cocaine no I haven't you know you see people rub their gums right yeah so you make lines right and then that goes up the old and then there's some stuff left over so you just take a finger and you go like that right and then you rub it on your gums yeah why that makes your gums numb why do people like that because it's just part of it again remember how ritualized I said the whole thing it's somehow different from like using oral B or whatever that oral gel oral gel anything bad happening when you put your gums in I've heard but again this is all like drug gossip like when you're a kid and you're smoking weed and you're like go get a seed you'll be sterile I don't know if that's true or not there's all this drug knowledge but yes apparently it's supposed to erode your gums you're not supposed to smell your gums I would guess that's true and I doubt the coca leaf itself which in Peru people chew everyone chews it's like a great altitude sickness thing such a low dose of it but I don't think that is bad necessarily chewing the leaves but obviously it's made with a lot of other chemicals so maybe those aren't great for your gums I also put tobacco against my gums so I'm not really the best person to ask about how destructive things against your gums are if you want to take care of your gums use Arm & Hammer Proxy Care also if you are true to your teeth they will never be false to you oh wow that's my dad's favorite saying okay are the dog cheek swab things a scam are the dog cheek swab things swab oh DNA of a dog test how accurate are dog DNA tests we unleashed the truth that was a pun they did despite claiming you're 100% accuracy companies give completely different DNA results so they did like some tests and it just seems nothing's all that conclusive turns out I'm 100% cockers fan so I moved to the world like a pit bull so good and bad I've never been there with anybody but I'm the best okay you said alcohol tolerance patoes yes it does that's right at some point the tolerance effect levels out and the daily intake of the substance reaches a pato okay and then I was just wondering randomly if we are evolutionarily primed to hear lower voices better than higher voices well lower voices travel further that is more like authority right you trust a lower voice well no no I was really really wondering hearing because sometimes when I talk I think people can't actually hear it oh kind of like when I give an email to you about the wildebeest yeah okay you were talking really high yeah I wanted to know if there was some science behind it okay so I'm going to read an article it's long good longer the better oh my god I'm in the cast of parenthood series regs by the way we're getting to the spots where things are getting like seeds are being planted and it's really interesting because obviously when I was acting in it I didn't know I didn't know I was going to hook up with Gabby I had no idea but we just had the episode where I'm too drunk to pick up Jabbar and she takes me which is embarrassing and I get pushed to the ground by Sekou but then the follow up on the couch I'm asking her if she thinks I'm a good dad and I apologize for my behavior but it becomes this really chargey kind of scene sexual sex tench oh my god and you didn't know that at the time that it was sex tench that's interesting I didn't I just think when I was interacting with her there was like some chemistry maybe or something and who knows maybe those scenes had some chemistry and then they got the idea I don't know what the order is but what I like is I'm watching it knowing what happens and then I go like oh I see that this is potentially problematic because there's some sparkies yeah sparky the dog yeah it's like you and Nicholas oh my god on Spark City Nicholas Sparks Nicholas Sparks okay this is from Forbes I've been posting a good deal recently on research having to do with the voice and a number of readers have asked me about one voice study that seemed to contradict most of the others finding that a higher more strident voice comes across as higher status than a lower one well rest easy we don't all have to become tenors or sopranos that particular study was flawed in a number of ways and other research confirms that it's the range that is more important than the high pitch in other words what audiences are responding to is the emotion and a bigger emotional range is more powerful and higher status than a narrower one but there's more and far more important research into how the voice actually works on the human psyche so far those who want frequency sounds that we are not aware of consciously the researchers are you checking your watch I did check my watch I'm really sorry also wow I don't know how your bad eyes you have to de-spray I don't need to read what you're reading and somebody saw me and I just glanced I was like 5pm oh my god I'm loving it I told you I want you to go all night I don't want this to be the first 24 hour fact check but I just was checking in and you shouldn't have seen that I always see when you check your watch always wow I gotta move my watch somewhere no I'll know you'll put a clock on your head then what'll happen no then I'll know that you're doing this you'll think I'm looking at your eyebrow no I know you'll be looking alright look at me right now and I'm gonna look somewhere you gotta tell me where I'm looking okay hold on I have to blink okay okay are you looking at my is that my face oh you're here oh my god you're so off I am fuck yeah it's 3 feet I'm looking at right where your hair starts right here that's what I did you're touching the ceiling 3 feet from your head oh my god yeah you saw my watch that's really curious I really do notice when you look at your watch I notice it during interviews too and you are quick but I do notice it okay the researchers assumed that these noises were meaningless byproducts of our vocal cords working away as we communicate with one another and shout at passing cars and other annoyances they were wrong those sounds are not only meaningful but they determine who's in charge the good news is that you can learn how to increase your production of these secret influencers in order to make sure that you are the leader of any group you want to control make sure you're the leader of any group you want to control you're getting nefarious how does this unconscious conversation work every sound produced by a human or a musical instrument an animal or a machine has an oral fingerprint that you can measure by charting its frequency responses of units of sound called hertz we can hear sounds ranging from 20 hertz at the lowest end to 20,000 hertz at the upper end anything at about 300 hertz or lower sounds to us like a low bass note or as they go lower not like notes at all but rather like rumbles of thunder it's important to understand that most naturally produced sounds are not pure emissions of one note at one frequency the quality of sound the difference between your mother-in-law's voice for example and a chainsaw is determined by the overtones and undertones that the sound produces a sound gets its quality did you take your watch again? I did it oh, did you do something with your hand? no yes you did no, you know all that happened? what?

I haven't changed my physicality one iota not even a micron but in my head I started talking like Frito oh my god, I knew it the sound gets nope, no put it down put down the shield I don't know about going low but I know I go deep I just think at least it's my guess I haven't ever been with anybody but I'm so fast okay the sound gets its quality from the number of over and undertones as well as the intensity of them very broadly speaking we like sounds that are rich in overtones here we go and especially undertones the thinner a sound is the more likely we are to find it irritating there's a wide individual variation in the kinds of sounds we find appealing but on the whole for example a thin nasal voice is less appealing to us than a rich resonant voice I totally disagree did you hear what I said? I totally disagree oops, see, they're right I said I totally disagree oh I'm calling this is my high nasally voice I thought you were going to be the robot no this is the new guy? the high nasally guy yeah, what are you talking about? who else would it be?

do you get a lot of callers? how many callers a day do you get? never mind, I gotta go oh my god, this guy's so rude you don't have any respect it's like you can't even hear me well can you? hello?

he's angry okay, here's the amazing part people who put out the right kinds of sounds below the range of conscious human hearing become the leaders of most groups oh my god that's all I'm going to read there's a lot more so the conclusion is lower voices become the leaders well, it sounds like it's a variation you don't have a thin voice we learned a lot remember Elizabeth Holmes who made her voice deeper? yes, she's starting to do press I know should we tell everyone in the audience? what happened? we should yeah, we can't tell if it's a catfish or not we're leaning towards a catfish although now maybe not because she's doing press but it was still too weird yeah, someone reached out to me claiming to be the husband of Elizabeth Holmes on Instagram?

Instagram, I've been on Twitter I didn't engage with the person I turned it over to Emma and us, yeah the whole gang but knowing that Emma could reach out and find out if it's real because certainly we'd want to interview Elizabeth Holmes yes and then it became like a game of cloak and daggers and ultimately this person was insisting to FaceTime with you and I yes and we were like no, fuck that how about Elizabeth FaceTime with Emma to prove we don't need to prove who we are, we're right here there's no fake version of the show you're going to end up on and he sent a weird picture remember? he sent a picture of himself holding up a sign oh boy I didn't have a paper I think it was strange I don't know about that part and he was being very aggressive to Emma and so ultimately we thought even if you are the right person we don't like the way suck a dick in so many words in a nicer version of that whatever thing you want to not do you don't get to be rude to us anyone on our team but then I saw she was on something she was yeah and the voice is gone she's back to her own voice I didn't hear it I didn't either that's what I had like so I'm assuming that that's we're all victim too it's like gone is the voice gone is the turtleneck some shit like that but it'd be interesting to definitely talk to her yeah it would so maybe we're getting catfish maybe not maybe not if we're not so that we can talk to her we'd love to talk to you Elizabeth Holmes also everyone needs to be respectful of our team yes there'll be no we won't overlook we don't let that slide we've had a couple just tiny some people maybe publicist treating them not so nice they get my wrath when that happens oh good I'm not shocked yeah I come in swoop in oh I bet you do oh yeah maybe Frida should respond to them that's a good idea send voice memos back fuck yours get off talking don't ever I'm the greatest I'm so in love with her don't tell her though oh man all right that's all love you