Please enjoy this transcript of my recent subscriber Q&A. We explore what The 4-Hour Workweek looks like in the age of AI, rebuilding momentum when you’re stuck, navigating friendships, making room for serendipity, and much, much more.
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Tim Ferriss: So let’s hop into it. And the first question I will attempt to address is from Val N. The question is, what does The 4-Hour Workweek look like in a world of agents? Some of you will be familiar with the first book. 20th anniversary is coming up in April of 2027. And here is my answer because I have been asked this in private settings and I’ve thought about it a fair amount. The book structure is laid out as a four step process and that process is D-E-A-L. So the acronym is DEAL. And those letters respectively stand for definition that is defining exactly where you want to go, pointing yourself in the right direction, then assigning or calculating the total monthly income and other numbers that are necessary to design a particular life or lifestyle.
Then, E is elimination, that is removing using 80/20 analysis and other things, all of the trivial many so that you can focus on the critical few. Then there’s automation. We’re going to come back to this, which as the word would imply is using processes, technology and so on to automate as much as possible. When the book came out initially in 2007, that was focused in some respects on virtual assistants, but that gets too much airplay. They are a means to an end. And I still use plenty of humans, but really it is defining the rules and policies that govern your life and your business. And following those with very pristine categories of what you will do and won’t do and only optimizing the things that have been pre-identified and then left with room to breathe as the critical few. So that’s D-E-A. And then L is liberation, which is taking advantage of things using the time and the void that you’ve created in the most enjoyable, but also high leverage ways possible.
And my feeling is that in a world of agents, in the world of AI, and I’m invested in a lot of the frontier labs, I have a lot of exposure to behind-the-scenes conversations with smaller companies that are at the cutting edge, I would say that the first two steps, definition and elimination are going to be more and more important because technology tools and AI in particular are accelerants. They make more of whatever is. And if you do not first identify the critical few, the very, very limited set of things that stand a chance of making a huge difference, AI and so on simply multiplies the useless. It multiplies the unimportant, the trivial, the distracting. And you can end up then trying to automate all of those things.
So far with, I would say the vast majority, and by vast majority, I mean 90%-plus of the use cases I’ve seen, people are taking things that probably shouldn’t be done at all and they’re doing them very, very quickly and using AI to create more work, not reduce work. That is why AI creating infinite leisure time where people spend all of their time basket weaving and painting with watercolors is, I think, a completely false promise. No technology has ever delivered that. Many have been ushered in with that promise, none have delivered. And I think AI will be the exact opposite when used as a blunt force instrument. It will create much more work, much more stress, and you will drown in the unimportant. So definition, elimination, and I would say I’ll stop there for now, but nothing in that book from a principle perspective is new. It was a collection of best practices from, you could say millennia, but certainly several hundred years. And I was acting as a curator of those concepts and they were included because I expected them to age very well.
The tools will change, right? Whether you learn to draw or not, the basic principles of drawing, metaphorically speaking, remain the same. If you then want to use a pen, a pencil, watercolors, acrylic, you still need the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are definition and elimination. All right. I’ll add one resource to that. Read old books that contain principles like The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker would be one that stands out. It’s very short. It is very, very tactic and principle dense and you can update the things that are outdated very easily.
Next question is from David J. Of everything you’ve put into the world that gets quoted back to you, which piece do you wish most people would stop following and what did it cost you to realize you’d got it wrong? I went through all of my books thinking about this question and I would say that there is not a whole lot that I could identify as a blanket answer to that question. And the reasons for that are several. The first is that I really try to write books that will be durable and evergreen. So I am, in the editing process, looking for cuts I can make with anything that is overly timely. I do that in the podcast also most of the time. However, however, however, I would say that it’s important to keep in mind, not just with my book, but with all books you read, in what chapter of life the author was writing said book.
So if for instance, you’re reading many books written by an entrepreneur, you may want to pick up the book that corresponds to your particular chapter in life. I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek when I was 29. I am now 49. And as you approach the tail end of your life, and I’m not quite there hopefully, but with the experience of friends and family passing, with accidents claiming the lives of friends as a plane accident, plane crash did with a friend not too long ago, you reframe things as your responsibilities change, as you have say a spouse, family, grandkids, whatever it might be, as you retire. When you hit these particular milestones, the lenses with which you view the world, the way that you value different things changes of course. And for that reason, I would just be aware of where someone is in their journey when you read books. So that is the caveat that I would add to what I have put out in the world.
There are things that I think are neglected that I wish people would pay more attention to, like the Filling the Void chapter in The 4-Hour Workweek. That I think is a critical step for preemptively heading off a lot of the digital malaise and overwhelm and sense of meaninglessness that is ramping exponentially as we certainly, I imagine, most of you have felt on one level or another. But I will stop there for now and keep plugging through.
Next one is from Daniel and I’m going to try to summarize this because it’s a long question, but Tim, I’m 46 on difficult crossroads. I’ve built businesses, led teams, et cetera, et cetera. He’s had a lot of professional and personal setbacks. He’s found himself in a state of paralysis. And I’ll skip ahead. I’m highly introspective. I journal, read, exercise, and spend considerable time trying to understand my behavior, but I’ve started wondering whether all this introspection has become another sophisticated form of avoidance. Pause. Tim, interjection. I catch myself often doing the same thing. Here’s back to the question. My question is, when someone has lost momentum and confidence in their ability to execute, how do they rebuild trust in themselves and regain agency over their life? More specifically, what would you recommend doing in the first 30 days to break the cycle of overthinking avoidance and inaction?
Of course, it’s hard to give a catchall answer to this, but I have spoken with friends who are in your situation. I have close friends who have been in your situation. I have friends who are currently in your situation and I’ve been, I think, psychologically in a somewhat similar situation. And what I have seen work is a bias towards immediate small actions. What I mean by that is, and Atomic Habits by James Clear does a good job of outlining this. I think BJ Fogg out of Stanford also does a good job of describing this, is starting with small actions that cumulatively, inevitably will have a larger impact and simply beginning to put action on your daily menu.
So for instance, five pushups before each meal, right? It could be 10 minutes of meditation immediately before bed using an app like The Way or anything else. It could be, and I think this is one of the stronger tactics in the beginning, making an effort to brighten someone else’s day and express gratitude by reaching out, say via phone call or text, better phone call, and thanking someone because the question I think implicitly acknowledges something that is for people like me, for many of you listening or watching perhaps is easy to fall into and that is the trap of self-help becoming self-fixation, which is a recipe for self-recrimination and I think poor mental health overall. So adding in something that is as simple as a call to someone else once a day or in person, could be a barista at a coffee shop, thanking them, introducing yourself, et cetera. Starting to layer in being very conservative, small actions that allow you to rebuild trust in yourself as an agent of change. That’s probably where I would start.
I would do less than you think you’re capable of doing so that you are able to do it daily, do it daily so that you are able to convincingly reclaim the story that you are a person of action. It is rebuilding your identity and you start simple and then over time, as you develop confidence, it’s very hard to trick yourself at the deepest level, so you need proof and the proof is daily action. So as you rebuild that, then I think you will find it easier to take a slightly larger bite and then a slightly larger bite, but do the minimum effective dose first. Start small. As much as it might feel like there’s a rush, you have time over the span of several weeks to develop that muscle. That’s what I’ve seen work for me and for others who are close to me.
All right, next one. This is from, and I apologize if I completely butcher this name, Murod. I am a professor of research of communication in Japan and have been following you for many years, including professionally. My students and I often discuss metacognitive aspects of your podcast in our seminars. And I’m going to skip to the last question because we have a lot of questions to get to, but the question is, if possible, if your podcast was one question only podcast, what question would you end up asking your guest and why? I’ll stick with that. There are more questions, but again, we have a long list.
Well, at first thinking about this question, my question that I came up with was what are you most excited about and why. And then a follow -up, if I had one, would be what keeps you up at night and why? But I revised those and I think you’ll understand why, so I won’t belabor the point, but it relates back to Daniel’s question about action. I don’t want high concept abstract discussions, so I would rephrase both of those. And again, I’m cheating. I could ask either one of these as a one question as long as I’m allowed to ask follow-ups and I think we could have a very fruitful conversation. So rather than what are you most excited about and why, I would ask, what are you most excited about and what are you doing about it? Similarly, what keeps you up at night and what are you doing about it? I’m more interested in when the rubber hits the road what actions is someone taking or what are they considering doing with whether it is the excitement or the concern, the worry, et cetera.
This is from Victor T. Tim, the forces pulling people apart feel bigger than any of us. Old friends are deep in their own rabbit holes with different feeds, values, even realities and AI will probably widen the gap. Tim, interjection. To state the obvious, not only are old friends deep in their own rabbit holes with different feeds, values and realities, so are we. Sad fact, but that is also true. You’ve said, back to the question, you’ve said your best years are the ones where you’ve spent the most time with your favorite people. How do you stay close to people whose world has drifted from yours and how do you decide what’s worth the energy? What’s worth the energy is a much bigger conversation and in the book that I’m about 80%, 90% done with now, codenamed The No Book, right now I really spend a lot of time on that. But let me give you an answer.
And the first is, in terms of staying close to people whose world has drifted from yours, I would say number one, hone your ability to communicate, sharpen the saw, that is your responsibility. So read books, whether that’s like crucial conversations, for instance, there are many others I’ll probably mention later in this Q&A podcast. And then, if you’re trying to, I don’t want to say stage an intervention because that implies a certain level of moral superiority, but if you’re trying to reconnect with friends who you feel have drifted maybe into the land of nihilism or pessimism or complaining, let’s just take that as an example, then my suggestion is rather than giving them advice from on high, which very rarely goes well, I would take your own advice first and tell them what you’re doing and/or you could suggest doing things together like social media cleanses, deleting social media apps from your phones. Trust me, you’ll survive, probably thrive in response to that.
Experimenting with things like 30 days or 20 days of no complaining. If you search my 30 day no-complaint experiment and my name, you’ll see how I’ve approached that in books that support it. Could be language, right? You could ask them to check you, raise a finger maybe every time you use an absolute, everyone, no one, A, B and C always does X, A, B and C never does Y. Finger. Ask them to correct you when you mention absolutes because you think it’s reflective of stories you’re telling yourself that are disabling that cause stress or upset you, et cetera, et cetera. And if they’re paying attention, they will get the message without you explicitly judging them, let’s call it for what it is. So that is one of my recommendations. And I suppose to also be Caption Obvious, I will say sometimes people drift too far and it’s very difficult to reconnect. The good news is that there are amazing, thoughtful people all over the world and that is still true and sometimes paths diverge and not all of them are worth trying to salvage, nor are all of them salvageable.
I will say, just as a side note, and it’s going to be a while before this book is out, so I don’t want to tease something so far in advance, but The No Book is in some ways the spiritual successor to the The 4-Hour Workweek really built accidentally for the world of AI. I think that it will really help with the definition of elimination and question of what to put energy into because humans are not evolved to deal with infinite optionality and that is what these tools seem to provide. It’s actually very, very, very dangerous. Not dangerous in the world exploding, humans turning into paperclips kind of thing, if you get the reference, but precarious for the human psyche.
All right, let’s keep going and I’ll take a break for live questions in just a little bit, but let me keep running. Next one is from Powell and the question is, how do you distinguish between this needs more time and this is never going to break through and what’s the earliest signal you can act on before you’ve wasted another year? So for many of these questions, I will try to grasp the spirit, the gist of the question and answer it in that fashion. So a very good question. In other words, what do you decide to further commit to even though you’re not seeing obvious fruits from the labor? That could be professional, could also be personal. And how do you separate that from the things that are on some level never going to work?
Well, I think in the case of say a business, I’ll just use that because it’s simpler to unpack, you could borrow say a question from Peter Thiel as a thought exercise first. I know he’s controversial, but he is very smart and has placed a lot of very good asymmetric bets over decades. His question is roughly, and I’m paraphrasing, if you had to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months, what would you do?
Okay, so applying Parkinson’s law, creating a very tight deadline for yourself, and I know this seems impossible, even if it’s just as a thought exercise to journal on or to speak into Wispr Flow, for instance, so it transcribes your 10-minute brain dump and you can throw it into something like Claude for cleanup, how would you answer that? And the point of a question like this is not to produce an answer automatically that allows you to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months. It’s to force you out of your routine ways of thinking. It is to free you from constraints that perhaps you’ve artificially applied to the situation. It’s a way of finding perhaps the non-obvious or as one of my questions I repeat often would go, “What might this look like if it were [inaudible 00:23:06] these go together?”
And then, I would also spec out in advance, are there milestones that I could reach, say in the next six months, that are guaranteed to give me much more energy? And I say that because that is the fundamental currency that gives you endurance. And if you don’t have endurance, you have no competitive advantage. So that is, I think, also a key question. And last but not least, I would ask friends, and if they’re truly kind, not just nice, you can ask them to do this, ask them to red team. Red teaming, you can look up this concept. It’s applied in many different circumstances. The red, back in the day, referred to the Soviets because it was used in a military context, but effectively, I’ll give another example, you could hire hackers to try to break into your corporate system, but they’re still good guys. They’re on your payroll because you are asking them to act as an opponent or a bad actor, right?
So you’re asking your friends, in other words, a question like the following, which I learned from one of the best CPG investors, so consumer packaged goods. Think about anything you might buy in a grocery store or GNC, drinks, food, you name it, right? Very, very, very good. His track record is absolutely absurd, and he’s also built multiple companies to huge exits. And one of the questions that he always asks founders is, “If you guys fail or have a huge breakup in three years, what are the most likely reasons?” The breakup question can really open up a can of worms, but you could ask your friends, “If this company, if this project, if this relationship failed in two years,” you have to force their hand because most people want to tell you what you want to hear. They want to be encouraging even if you’re going in the wrong direction. So you have to force them, you have to paint them into a corner.
So, “If this company, if this relationship fails in two years, what do you think the most likely reasons would be?” That does not give them the option to back out. If they try to back out, then you ask somebody else. But I would really try to force the issue because it is common that friends, thinking they’re doing you a favor, will encourage you to pursue something even if they think you’re terrible at it. Maybe you’re… Who knows? You are hoping to be a professional musician as a vocalist, but what your friends aren’t telling you is you’re actually terrible. This happens all the time. Or behind closed doors, they’re like, “Man, I can’t tell him, but nobody’s ever going to buy that.” You want to take all this stuff and bring it to the surface if you can, and questions like that are very helpful.
Okay. Next question is from Brandon D. What is your latest toolkit? Any updates or items I’ve discarded related to age-related vision problems since your interview with Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg? Now, this is going to sound a little funny. I have found things. Now, you’ll notice that I’m wearing very, very minimally magnified glasses at the moment. That is because I am on book deadline and it gives me another two hours of endurance, and it is a game of tonnage on some level to finish a book. It’s a lot like a marathon. It’s like,” Oh, you’re 90% done. Congratulations. You only have 50% left.” It’s one of those situations. If I were not on book deadline, I would not be wearing these.
The most interesting technology, the most interesting tool that I’ve come across is something called Oryx, O-R-Y-X, and it is software that allows you to, it’s pretty incredible, fix your near-term vision without changing your lens or anything else. As you get older, your lenses stiffen and they have less accommodation, therefore you end up holding your iPhone and so on at arm’s length and then, you run out of length in your arms, and that’s why you’re turning on the light on your iPhone at restaurants to read the menu and so on. I used the Oryx software, and I’m an investor in this company, which only happened after I tested it because I used it for 30 days, eight minutes a day, and I went from not being able to really read anything at this distance to being able to read a menu with tiny font at night in a restaurant with very dim lighting, and that is fucking bananas.
So the tool is not widely available. They’re still piloting it. It’s based on very good research that has been published. However, if you guys want to try it, I mean, look, there aren’t many spots and it’s not cheap, but I’ll tell you what the deal is, and that’s why I have iMessage on because I wanted to tell you about it. If you go to tim.blog/oryx, O-R-Y-X, and if you’re hearing this after the livestream, you can still sign up for the wait list, so I would encourage you to do that if you’re interested. It works, and for a lot of people, it’s durable, meaning it lasts months, years.
It’s something I’ve never seen before, but they’re basically training your upstream visual processing to get better at distinguishing blurred images and constructing a reality that is sharper. It’s kind of like that fake tool in all of these police crime scenes and television shows where they’re like, “Enhance image,” and you’re like, “Come on.” It’s pixelated. In reality, you wouldn’t be able to enhance image, that’s ridiculous. But with your brain, it turns out that you can do this. And I was so, so skeptical, but if you go to tim.blog/oryx, the use of this on a tablet is usually 1,300 bucks and they’re offering 100 spots for 9.99. So if you want to try it, give it a go, zero pressure. But that is, I would say, the most interesting thing that I have found. There are eyedrops you can use, certainly, that give you a temporary increase in accommodation of the lens. I think there’s a place for that. You just have to be careful with the version you use because you can increase the risk of certain types of injury. I will leave it at that.
So as soon as I’m done with the book, I’m going to take these off because you want to abstain from using glasses for a period of time to the extent possible to derive maximum adaptation. But I will say I’ve never seen anything like it. It is something that kind of defies belief. So I’ll leave it at that. For those of you who are interested, there are hundred spots, so you can take a look at that. Let me hop out of iMessage and back to our live chat. I’m going to answer a few more questions and then, we’ll come to the livestream. I’m going to plant a seed for you all because I’m going to have a question later that I want your input on, and that is related to doing more unscripted podcasts like The Random Show. I’m interested in knowing what formats you would like to see or that you would watch or listen to. Okay? Don’t post your answers now, but I’m going to ask that later. So we’re going to come back to that, and I’d love to get your comments in the live stream of comments, and people will also have the opportunity to put on X if that’s easier for some reason. Okay. Next question. This is from Luke O. Great question. All these are great questions or I wouldn’t even be reading them. Here’s the question. At this stage in your life, what are you deliberately choosing not to optimize anymore, and why? Well, it’s good to define this term, optimize. I would say that often, it can be thought of as bleeding the stone. I mean, you’re really trying to wring every last drop of efficiency and improvement out of that wet towel. And I still do that in some areas. But your question, I’m going to answer perhaps in a slightly odd way. Rather than telling you what I’m not optimizing anymore, I’m going to tell you what I’m overinvesting in.
Because when you overinvest in things, they crowd out a lot of the things I would put on that no longer optimize list. And I’ll borrow a heuristic from Ramit Sethi, who is better known as a sort of finance guru of sorts, has a great podcast where he interviews couples about various money problems and so on. He’s very, very good at what he does. And I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact wording, but he’ll ask people what would it look like to invest 10 times more in one or two areas that matter most? He is not focused on ultra frugality, or foregoing your lattes, or anything like that. So for me, I am trying to invest 10 times more in my health. What would that look like? This is another absurd question, like the Peter Thiel question. Even if you don’t have an immediate answer, it forces you to think differently about your life.
Investing 10 times more in health, what would that look like? Investing 10 times more in relationships, what would that look like? Those are the two big ones. And if you invest 10 times more in your health and 10 times more in your relationships, there’s not a whole lot left over, which is a good thing. You have less free roaming time to completely burn on wasteful activities that might have a veneer of productivity. So I’m going to leave it at that because I think that is the most high leverage way to approach these things, at least that I’ve found. So focusing on your more to do 10 X list as opposed to your not to optimize list. I will revisit this with a question that comes up a little bit later. I’m going to do one more, and then as promised, I’ll get to the live feed. So don’t post your questions yet, but get ready.
This one is, and I’m going to butcher this name, Ridika H. asks the following question, and I’m going to… I’ll read most of it. There’s an appealing idea that the good life is something we can consciously design, identify our values, understand our priorities, eliminate the unnecessary, organizer circumstances accordingly. That would echo certainly the emphasis on the DEAL and the DE of that. That’s my comment. But so many of the most meaningful experiences in life seem to arise from things we couldn’t have planned or optimized for. Do you think there’s a point at which being too deliberate about the life you’re building makes you less receptive to life that might emerge unexpectedly? How do you leave room for serendipity when you’re naturally inclined to be intentional? I do 100% agree that if you over engineer your life, you are almost definitionally less receptive to life that emerges. And first and foremost, I’d say there is no magic answer for this that you apply every day in an ongoing way, at least not for me.
You can have periods of heavily engineered focus and you can have periods of, in my case, reasonably engineered serendipity where I am placing things in my calendar that are likely to produce these chance encounters. And I would say that my approach to this is one that embraces the belief that these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, I may very deliberately try to interview, and by the way, that’s just talking to people, but interview in my case, people who completely disagree with me, have totally different sets of opinions. For instance, someone I know in Austin, perhaps not surprisingly, is politically, from a voting perspective, on the far right. I am not on the far right. I’m not on the far left. I’m very issue by issue, but this particular friend is very, very smart. So to dismiss him as some type of non-thinking knuckle dragger doesn’t hold water.
He’s very, very intelligent and he’s very good at questioning assumptions. So sitting down and asking questions there opens me up to ideas and opinions that are not going to get served up in a feed that has been personalized to reinforce my own biases, which is by the way, every feed on any platform. So that would be one example. And there are, and very interestingly, this is what makes me think sometimes that I’m in a simulation. I wrote down a book I wanted to mention and then someone else asked about the author 10 questions later, of course. I read a book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. This was recommended to me by Kevin Rose. And it was deliberately to offer me a counter example. I didn’t know before I read it if it would be a good or bad example of less over-engineering with intention and planning and blueprinting of your life.
Very much enjoyed it. I think that if you squint a little too hard, you’ll see that Michael must have said no to many, many, many things in order to focus on some of the things that are outlined in the book, which raises questions about overall surrender versus selective surrender. So maybe that’s a conversation I’ll have with Michael at some point, but it’s so extreme in counterbalancing my default way of being in the world that I read that book and I did find it very helpful. Coming back to the over-investing, what would it look like if you invested 10 times more in health and relationships? These are also two things that open you up to serendipity, at least how I approach, let’s just say health, which includes group fitness activities and things like that, coaching and so on, interacting with people I would otherwise never meet in a professional context. So these are all, I think, attempts at coming at your question or the problem that you’re underscoring.
But I do agree with you that yes, if you are overly deliberate, if you indulge too heavily in the illusion of control, you make yourself blind to things that are around you. And it’s a fine line because you can certainly, if you take on the identity of someone who goes with the flow and simply surrenders to everything, you can end up a floating generality as Seth Godin would say, where you indulge every distraction as an opportunity. And I’m certainly writing a lot about that right now and what the sweet spot looks like for me and some people that I know. But I will stop there for now and let’s hop into the live feed. So let me see if I can answer some questions here. It’s going to take me time to read. So there will be some type of delay.
Oh, Rob. Rob M. This is a perfect question actually. “Tim, what do you get from these live streams besides content, et cetera, et cetera?” Part of it is serendipity. I don’t choose the question you guys submit. I’m usually in the business of asking questions. So for me, this is a way to get a gestalt of what you guys are thinking about. I respect and I do respect you guys. My audience tends to be very well read, very curious, often has a bias towards action. And I was able to look at, for instance, I mean, I won’t show this because it’ll dox a bunch of people, but patterns using LLM analysis of the questions that come in. And then I’m able to answer or attempt to answer some of these questions. So for instance, AI comes up in roughly one of five submissions and then it goes into the reasons for that.
Health questions, asking about my protocols, the frequency with which different types of questions come up, and so on and so forth. So these live streams are an opportunity for me to do something I know I enjoy doing. I get energy from these while also being forced out of, I don’t want to call them ruts, but patterns of thinking and asking questions by virtue of getting a bunch of stuff thrown over the transom that I cannot predict. So that would be my answer for that. That’s funny. Somebody’s asking me. “Crimp, sloper, or pinch. How’s climbing going?” I would say pinch. I’m working on my extensor strength after my elbow surgery from a year ago. So I’m very focused on pinch, slopers, still my nemesis, true for so many. And crimping I have to be a little careful with because I got to strengthen the DIP, PIP joints and all of that jazz in my fingers, which I’m working on.
If you’re interested in how to strengthen your fingers, revisit my episode with Dr. Keith Baar, B-A-A-R. His stuff really does work. Who would win in a fight between Tim Tim and Kev Kev? You see more battle tested, but Kevin’s got that old man dad strength. It’s an open question. I think I would immediately go for Kevin’s ankles. He’s got huge triceps, but I feel like I could work on those ankles. So TBD. This is a question, “What type of OCD treatment did I mention in a few of my episodes that was helpful?” I mentioned accelerated TMS and you can get it from reputable providers. I’m involved now with a company called Ampa Health because I think their device is very, very interesting for targeting and therapist and user friendliness.
But a lot of ketamine clinics and mental health clinics, let’s just say writ large, will offer accelerated TMS. The protocol that I’ve used, which it was developed by some folks, I’ll probably have on the podcast at some point, is called the ONE-D protocol, O-N-E hyphen D protocol where you preload with a drug called D-cycloserine. It’s a very mild neuro… Well, I shouldn’t say mild, neuroplasticity agent, but it increases neuroplasticity before you go into the stimulations and they’ve compressed from say a three to four month duration of protocol down to one week, which is what Nolan Williams and others did at Stanford and elsewhere. And then they have since with this drug assistance, which makes you just more malleable for the changes, compressed it into one day. And Jonathan Downar at Ampa Health was one of the pioneers behind this.
And it is, I would say, most established for treatment of depression. It has also been applied to generalized anxiety disorder, GAD, and it would seem like there are also other applications to OCD, which is in my case, a close cousin of the GAD, and sleep improvement writ large. So that is the protocol. You’re looking for intermittent theta burst, intermittent theta burst. And I could give more specifics, but I’ll probably save that for another time. You can do some homework though. There are places that offer this. It doesn’t have to be the Ampa Health device. There’s Brainsway, which is, I would say the market leader as far as hardware goes. Then there is MagVenture as far as hardware again. But you should find someone, I think, who’s familiar with accelerated TMS and ideally, and this is based on my personal experience, familiar with the ONE-D protocol and using this D-cycloserine, which is sometimes abbreviated to DCS because most people cannot take five days off work or it’s very expensive to do that or they use up a bunch of their PTO, et cetera.
And the more time you have in the clinic, the more time you’re using clinicians, the more expensive it’s going to be. So those are, I suppose, the main points that I would make on that before getting to other things. Okay. Let’s see. Oops. Milonga Tango or Waltz. I loved the Waltz, which is a very circular form of Tango. I just love the Waltz music. Corazón de Oro, there are many, many songs that I could listen to. I don’t generally listen to Tango music in my off time, and it’s been a long time since I’ve hit the dance floor, but I would say Waltz, Tango, Milonga in that order. I always found Milonga very difficult for some reason.
All right. Okay. Related question to the earlier ones from Daniel. Any developments on medicine is electricity? Yes. Bioelectric medicine. Certainly I mentioned the accelerated TMS. I do think Kevin Tracey and vagal nerve stimulation, most of which is bogus and nonsense online, frankly.
I hope to have some announcements related to that soon. But if you’re getting the cymba concha on the ear, you are able to access some limited portion of the vagus nerve and there’s interesting stuff to be done there. You can also use box breathing or other cold exposure, other types of combinations to improve vagal tone. I recommend The Great Nerve, which is a book by Dr. Kevin Tracey for diving more into that. And then the conversation with Michael Levin out of Tufts I have on the podcast is a great one to dig into. Susan, “Do you see yourself becoming a parent in this lifetime?” Yes. 100%. 100% without any shadow of a doubt. And, “You’re very kind. I think you would make a great or a wonderful dad.” Thank you, Susan. Yes.
Did you see there was a device in Time Magazine 2026 Top Inventions? I assume you’re talking about accelerated TMS and yes, I believe that was Ampa Health. So you can check it out. Ampa Health has a website. You can also take a look at it. Lots of questions about kids. Yes, I’m still keen. 100%. Okay, here’s a fun one. Jacob, “You’re good at answering questions. How have you honed your ability to craft good answers quickly? Do you have certain framework structure for answering questions?” Well, yes, I do have some heuristics that I find helpful. Generally I approach it, and this is borrowing from Tony Robbins who I’m sure was informed by other people, a progression, and I use this for everything, including writing, including working, hard conversations, and that is state, story, strategy. In other words, most people hop straight to the, “What should I do?” Which is the strategy, but let me give you two contrasts.
The first would be, “I am tired. I didn’t sleep well. I’m feeling shitty. I haven’t had coffee.” Fill in the blank. That’s my state. It’s a negative state or a low energy state. The story then tends to be disabling. I can never this. Oh, I can’t focus. I can’t this. I’ll never that. And from that, if you try to sit down and journal on what should I do, you’re going to end up with a poor outcome. You’re not going to get good answers. So in my case, let’s just use your specific question. If I want to be fast in answering, I need my biochemistry to be dialed in. I need to have reliable source of fuel. I need to have stable, either blood glucose or some other form of energy production. And for podcasts like this, I take exogenous ketones about 15 minutes beforehand. You have to be very careful with this stuff.
It’s not good to take it all the time. Every once in a while for a recording, I will do that. I use Delta G ketones. There’s some concerns around the 1,3-butanediol, which is the most commonly used ketone, let’s just call it for simplicity in the commercial products. But in this particular case, the delta G has the 1,3-butanediol bound to BHB, which is then liberated and you get some interesting effects. I do not take more than 15 grams at a time. I think it, in this product, corresponds to the milliliters. So I use the health version of Delta G. I have no affiliation with this company. And that is very helpful. In the afternoon, I don’t like to re-up with caffeine. I also will use though, now I’m going to immediately prove myself a liar. There are, I think they’re called Nootropicks, P-I-C-K-S, that Chris Williamson manufactures, and they’re these toothpicks that have 25 milligrams of caffeine and it hits you immediately, right?
So I’ll take 25 milligrams, not a nitro cold brew. Let’s just say it five to 10 minutes before I sit down. And I had a meal two hours ago. So I’ve basically provided myself with a slow carb form of glucose supply. I’m taking the ketones on top of that. I have a small amount of caffeine and I got a little bit of movement in earlier today for lactate, which is also something you can use as energy, it turns out. And that’s stage one, that’s the state. And then for answering questions, I would say rule number one is do not rush. And as a counter example, in the podcast when I first started, I would use filler words. So buying myself time as I thought. You don’t need to do that. You can just pause and you can either be silent or you can say, “Give me a second to think about that. That’s a good question. Let me give you a good answer or try to give you a good answer…”
You’re buying time. By the way, you may have noticed that ChatGPT and other LLMs do this. You ask your question, they’re like, “That’s a really smart question. I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Bullshit. Doesn’t care if it’s a good question. Hasn’t been thinking about it. It is buying the entire machinery time to do what it needs to do on the backend, right? So humans, machines, same trick. And then in my case, look, I’ve got copious notes. I’m not doing this off the cuff. I prepared myself for your written answers or… See, I stumbled too. I prepared myself for your written questions. Live stream’s a different thing and I mostly lean on the biochemistry and state for that.
All right. Which film do I re-watch the most and why?
I mean, I’ve seen Spirited Away probably a hundred times. Snatch, probably 100 times. Babe, about the little pig, masterpiece, probably 100 times. These are movies that I play on mute while I’m writing books. So for each book, generally, I will do a lot of writing late at night, but that can feel very lonely, very isolating. So I will throw something up on the TV, and it has to be a movie that I know inside and out so I don’t get distracted. I will let it run, but mute it. That gives me people in the room. And then I will put on my headset, usually over ear. I use my Bathys… Where is it? Headset that’s sitting somewhere around here, expensive buggers. And I’ll listen to music, typically something without vocals, like a deadmau5 Work Moar, M-O-A-R playlist, which you can find pretty easily. And then I’ll rock and roll and I pay attention to state there as well.
But that’s why I’ve seen those movies. I loved them in the first place. Then I was like, “Let me pick something that I will enjoy just having on an endless loop all night long.” I might watch Babe, for the four hour body, I watched Babe like eight times an hour, something like… I’m sorry, not eight times an hour. I watched Babe like eight times an evening. That adds up real fast.
All right. Jonathan, “I thought you looked a touch jittery.” Yeah. No, I’m not jittery. I am just coming into today full of energy. I’m not shifting around too much, although I am having a major back surgery next week, so some of that could be the pain in the low back.
Let’s see. Nora, “Do you meditate? You do TM twice a day for 20 minutes before meals. Great way to go about it.” I do meditate. Right now I’m using The Way app with Henry Shukman. I am involved in that app. I’m a small investor, but I really like a single dedicated teacher with a logical progression of skills.
And I keep them short. You can make them various lengths. I do 10 minutes. I try to do it twice a day. And the twice a day really seems to be the force multiplier for many, many other benefits. And TM first demonstrated that to me. I still use TM on occasion and doing it frequently seems to matter more than doing it for a long time. I’ve chatted with a few people about this. There is an argument to be made that it’s having an effect on vagal tone. So it could be breath work. It doesn’t need to be something that involves you sitting in the half lotus or full lotus with your eyes closed focusing on a candle flame. It could be the breathing alone done twice a day. And the reason that I connected these dots, which could be spurious, maybe I’m making a mistake, is that when you do vagal nerve stimulation, you’re doing it twice a day.
You’re doing it on the same cadence, given the durability of the effect on HRV and so on. So it may not be the exact, and probably isn’t the exact content, of the form of meditation, but something that as a cocktail affects vagal tone. Who knows? There’s a lot more to it. I mean, I certainly think the explanation of skills separating, say, the inside from the outside using labeling, being able to observe things without trying to change them, even if your mind is going insane and your monkey mind is ricocheting around in your skull like a bullet, these are all valuable skills that you can then take outside of meditation. So for me, using something like The Way makes sense. I want skills that can be translated, not just the 12-hour improvement in HRV.
Let’s just say that that is the guarantee for many, many different types of what we would put into the category of meditation. But I think if you were to do box breathing in a cold bath or something like that, which I also do, I think you get some of the same, but not all of the same benefits.
Wow, we got a lot of questions. I’m going to do a few more and then I’m going to hop back into the written questions. Okay, this is a good one. It’s a business name, so I’m not going to read it. I apologize. But what are your thoughts on the book Healing Back Pain by John Sarno? So I know this book very well, and I will say to kick off that I have multiple friends who were plagued by low back pain. In some cases, they couldn’t walk several blocks and they fully credit this book, Healing Back Pain, with fixing them. And that’s non-trivial, right?
That is legitimate. I also know acolytes of John Sarno, and I know people who had rigorous debates with John Sarno directly, and I’ve read the book. Here’s my take. And for people who are not familiar, I would say that the synopsis of the book, and this is going to sound unfair, is that almost all back pain is psychosomatic and that you should go about resuming all of your old activities and its outdated belief system. And if that weren’t the case, back pain wouldn’t move around from location to location, et cetera, et cetera. And he’ll go through the mechanical explanations for back pain, ruptured discs, bulging discs, et cetera, and to his satisfaction, but not mine, knock them off as irrelevant. And he’ll cite research, and I have question marks around this research, that show people with what appear to be mangled spines on MRI are asymptomatic, where people with much fewer injuries, let’s just call them, or deterioration, which he would put in quotation marks, like disc degeneration, are symptomatic, therefore…
And I disagree with that. And I’ve had conversations with some of these folks who are really hard liners and Sarno maximalists, maybe you might say. Sometimes I get frustrated and I’ll say, “If I took a ball-peen hammer to your L5 and just whacked on it like I was trying to chop wood, would that cause pain? Would it cause long-lasting pain?” And they have to say yes. They have to say yes. Not everything is internally generated from the mind. I know people who have had life-changing, durable effects with interventions, whether that’s… And there are risks with some of these interventions, of course, whether that’s fusion, procedures like intercept or others. Some of it can be PT resolved, depends on the nature of your low back pain. What I would say is the low back and low back pain is, as far as I can tell, the Bermuda triangle of effective diagnoses.
And whenever you’re trying to navigate a complex medical issue like this, in contrast to something like my elbow. My elbow blew apart because it got snapped backwards in jujitsu ages ago, and it turns out my extensors were just torn. This is a carpentry problem. Any decent surgeon can go in and piece it back together and your elbow heals. The low back is a much trickier animal. This applies to many, many, many different medical issues, by the way. I’m not a doctor, don’t play one on the internet, but as a layperson who’s reasonably scientifically and medically literate, I’ll say, when you meet with specialists, they know their tool and therefore they’re going to default to recommending or finding a solution within their tool. The tricky part is that there’s often at least a sliver of truth to what each of them say.
So the PT will say, “This is a muscular problem. It’s not a skeletal and nerve problem.” And they will give you exercises. And some of them might help. The neurosurgeon’s going to want to do what a surgeon does, right. The acupuncturist is going to want to do what an acupuncturist does. If you talk to a Hakomi therapy practitioner or someone in psychotherapy, they’re going to land on the mental or psycho-emotional. They’re going to want to work with that tool. And it’s a case of the multiple blind men holding onto different parts of the elephant. And one says, “It’s a snake,” because he’s holding onto the trunk. The other one’s like, “No, it’s like a rat,” because he’s holding onto the tail. The one holding onto the leg says, “It’s a tree.” And that doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t make them wrong. It just makes their portfolio of techniques and expertise siloed, is limited. So it’s taken me fucking forever to finally land on some converging diagnoses and I’m going to pursue that path.
I feel very good about it. I’ve done six years of due diligence. For God’s sake, it takes forever. And look, I’m going to be very transparent about how it turns out, but I will say that I think John Sarno’s work is very valuable for a lot of people. But I take major issue with any type of largely one-size-fits-all remedy, which implies that in this case, there are almost no mechanical causes of pain. And also on a person-by-person basis, for instance, just to address the MRI argument, different people are differently sensitive. Some people have better smell. Some people are more sensitive to light. Your composition of nociceptors, people can look that up, that’s a fun rabbit hole, nociceptors is different. So the way you feel pain can be very different from one person to the next. And how you magnify or interpret different sources of pain can be very different.
How you think about it, your belief structure, what you avoid, et cetera. I mean, all of these constructs that you develop to cope with pain are real. That is not to dismiss the mental component, but as you’ve probably picked up, I think that Sarno is good at what he’s good at, but he’s holding onto one part of the elephant. And I think it is insulting to imply that it’s all in everyone’s head. That’s where I’ve landed, so … Thanks for coming to my TED Talk on Sarno. And again, I have multiple friends who 100% credit that book with solving longstanding back pain that never recurred. So there’s something there.
Let’s see. Stuart McGill, Back Mechanic. Great book. I’m a fan. I’ve spent time with Stuart. He’s very smart. Do I have flat feet? Yes, I do. There’s all sorts of stuff going on. Egoscue Method, yes, it helps. I do use The Egoscue Method. I wrote about it. There’s an entire chapter on The Egoscue Method. I’ll spell that for people. E-G-O-S-C-U-E. I do exercises from The Egoscue Method every night before bed so that I’ll have a better chance of sleeping through the night. They are very, very helpful and continue to be. And actually, this is a great segue. I’m going to go back to the written questions because one of the questions, let me track it down here, bear with me, is related to The 4-Hour Body. So give me a second.
All right. This is a question from Duncan. “Hi, Tim. Do you think the basic principles in The 4-Hour Body still apply to those over 40, over 50, et cetera? Specifically, I’m thinking about Slow-Carb Diet, but feel free to answer in relation to other parts of the book. Thanks for everything.” Yes, 100%. There is very little in that book that I would rescind or revise. It has been shockingly stable and highly predictive. If you go back to when I wrote it, 2008, 2009, it was published in 2010. I was using a first-generation Dexcom or maybe second-generation Dexcom continuous glucose monitor. I think I was one of the first non-Type 1 diabetics to use that device. And a lot of what’s in that book has now become mainstream. The Egoscue Method still stand by it. The Slow-Carb Diet, 100% stand by it.
And I still use the Slow-Carb Diet myself if I need a reboot. That is certainly one of my top picks. I will alternate sometimes with the ketogenic diet for coming back to State, Story, Strategy, look up metabolic psychiatry or listen to my interview with Chris Palmer of Harvard for more on that. But for optimizing state, for stabilizing and maximizing energy production, in my particular case, I find the ketogenic intermittently to be very helpful. So my default, however, is actually a hybrid of those two, which is Slow-Carb Diet with intermittent fasting where I am fasting for at least 16 hours and then I have an eight-hour window of eating, sometimes less. So what that looks like on most days is I will fast up until 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 PM and then start eating and that will go for another eight hours until I finish dinner.
And by the way, you should make sure that you stop your clock when you finish eating, not when you start eating dinner, pro tip. And what that does over time is it, in my case, dramatically changes your say oral glucose tolerance test and insulin sensitivity. It is remarkable how little it takes, four to six weeks and my tests were completely a world apart. So I’m becoming fat and keto adapted through the intermittent fasting and then I’m using Slow-Carb Diet for the rest of the time. And people can look up How to Lose 100 Pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet and that’ll bring up a blog post, read it for free. It’s got all you need with photos, before and after photos. It is still, for my money, the simplest, most reliable diet for recomposition and performance change with the highest likelihood of success because the best diet that you follow is a lot better than the perfect diet that you quit.
And I do stand by that. I’m in prep for surgery. I’m using Occam’s Protocol from that book to increase muscle mass with the expectation that I will have quite a bit of atrophy in the four to six weeks post surgery. So I’m still using almost everything in that book. The one caveat is the PAGG stack. This is a supplement combination. I have no stake in any of it. Could have made a lot of money if I had done it, but I didn’t want people to question my motives. So I did not launch a sports nutrition company along with the book. The PAGG protocol, which is policosanol alpha-lipoic acid, decaffeinated green tea extract, and then garlic. The only question mark really that I have in that stack is policosanol. I was on the fence, but slightly over the fence at the time of publication.
I’d have to go back and really look at the research that is not funded by some form of industry to fully assess that. But that’s really the only asterisk that I would add to that book. Everything else in my opinion still applies. Could be missing something, but that’s where I land at the moment. Okay. Here’s a question from Matt. “What tools and approaches besides psychedelics have you found most useful for grieving?” I pulled up a book that has helped a lot of my friends after parents have died, after spouses have died unexpectedly. And I have not personally read this book in a long time. It’s been ages. I did look at it when it was first recommended to me, but it’s called On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. It’s by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, David Kessler, who’s the author narrator for the audiobook.
I guess he is the author, co-author and so on. But On Grief and Grieving, you can find it very easily on Amazon, it has 4.7 stars with almost 3,500 reviews. That has been recommended most by people I know, love, and trust. So I hope that is helpful and I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through.
Coming back to the written list. This one’s from Alice. “Hey, Tim, I had my first baby a year ago and motherhood has kicked my ass.” Pause. Congratulations, Alice. Continuing now with the question, “If you were a new parent, which of your protocols would you prioritize and which would you scrap in the interest of familial, personal and marital wellbeing, assuming you have limited financial resources and minimal family help?” There are two things that came to mind for me, and this should sound somewhat familiar because it echoes my answers to the Ramit Sethi question of, “What would it look like to invest 10 times more in the one or two levers that matter most?”
And if you might recall, my answers were health/fitness and relationships. So here are a few that come to mind. There’s an audiobook called Fierce Intimacy by Terry Real. I find Terry to be a beacon of clarity in a world of hand-wavy relationship advice. He’s very opinionated and has a lot of experience. He’s one of the highest paid couples’ therapists on the planet and you can get a lot of his greatest hits through fierce intimacy. There’s no print version, there’s no Kindle version. It was something that he recorded based on the core principles and tenets and strategies that he uses with his clients. And I have found that incredibly useful. His other books are also very, very good. So that is one that comes to mind. You could also look at Crucial Conversations, which I mentioned earlier, but if you had to pick one, I’d say listen to Fierce Intimacy.
I’m guessing your time to listen is greater than your time to read text. So fierce intimacy would be one. And then from a physical fitness perspective, that’s the next one, is, it is the great force multiplier, not to overuse that, but I recall, and I wrote about this in the introduction to The 4-Hour Body, the first time I spent any time with Richard Branson, well before I interviewed him for the podcast, it was with a small group and somebody asked him, “If you could give one tip for productivity, what would it be?” And his answer was, “Exercise.” And he said, “By exercising every day, I give myself something like three to four more hours of focused productivity.” Now, in your case, it’s not necessarily focused productivity, but it is energy. So I would say from a physical fitness perspective, there are two things you can do that require very little money, no gym membership.
The first I’ll mention that you can check out is from Jerzy and Aniela Gregorek. I’ve had Jerzy, J-E-R-Z-Y, both from Poland who now live in California on the podcast. I was introduced to them by Naval Ravikant. They have a book and a program called The Happy Body, and they’re in their 60s. They can run up trees and grab kites. They can do things that most 30-year-olds cannot do. Jerzy, I want to say he’s now, he’s got to be 70, 71. He can load a barbell, get on an Indo Board, one of those balance boards, and do a full snatch landing ass-to-heels and stand up and repeat while maintaining his balance. I mean, it’s incredible. And they do a lot of things, but they credit most of it to this daily practice of doing a sequence of exercises called The Happy Body.
And you really basically need next to nothing. Maybe a yoga mat, couple of dumbbells, you’re good. Shouldn’t cost you more than $50 to get what you need. And if you can’t afford dumbbells, you can find a way to hold weight, right. You can fill up some jugs full of water or something like that. So The Happy Body. And then the second one is gymnastic strength training, GST. And you can look up coach Chris Sommer, S-O-M-M-E-R. He’s in Tools of Titans. He has also been interviewed on the podcast. A hilarious, salty old dog, just like Jerzy. Kind of specialize in interviewing these salty old dogs. They’re such a pain in my, but they’re so good. Love both of those guys and both of them would laugh hearing me say that. And GST is phenomenal. It is bodyweight exercises. In the modern sort of cool kid YouTube parlance, some of it would be called calisthenics, but it requires very, very little.
You just need a floor. You can do a lot. You don’t need a ton of equipment. And I have been in the best shape of my life in the last few decades when I was combining GST plus The Happy Body plus AcroYoga, of all things, L-basing. If you want to look up that, you can certainly, but that is a little more involved than the other two. So that’s what I would say. That’s what comes to mind.
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