Tim Ferriss: Smart Drugs, Insect Protein, Sex, and His 3 Top Tips for a SUCCESSFUL Life : 1220

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You can kill someone through over consumption of water. If you do an IV drip of vitamin D and you put 100 grams into someone over a short enough period of time, a lot of people will go into diabetic coma. Even people who write early tend to do it before the rest of the world wakes up. So it's this kind of 10pm to like 7:38am range that seems to be very consistent across all of these top writers, musicians, artists.

What's your experience on the flip side as a male in terms of energy, creative force, and all of that when it comes down to sex?

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

Today's guest needs no introduction, although I'll introduce him briefly. He is Tim Ferriss, the New York Times bestselling author of three books including the Four Hour Workweek, Four Hour Body, Four Hour Chef. He's been all over the media, more than 100 outlets. He lectures at Princeton. He's a world champion tango guy, Chinese kickboxer, an actor on a hit TV series in Hong Kong, and basically an all around ass kicker. Tim, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

I have this theory that, that like a gazillion years ago, we won't go into exactly how many years ago there were like these two cavemen and one of them came back with fire from a lightning strike and he said, I will keep cave warm OG and or grock actually, and a shout out to Mark Sissen there. So. And then the other guy was like, that might not be safe, let's not use it. And like one of those two cavemen is our ancestor, right? Yeah, definitely. Side. So are smart drugs like fire?

I think they actually are. That's a great analogy. I think they're like fire or they're like a really sharp chef's knife. I think that they can be used for benefit and they can certainly be used to severely damage yourself and other people. I think that the, the dose makes the poison. Right? So a controlled fire is one thing versus a fire that consumes your house and Everyone in it. The judicious and intelligent use of say a scalpel or a kitchen knife is one thing as opposed to running with a pair of scissors and landing and having it go through your head. And you can look at use of smart drugs and find both good examples, informed examples of use and very haphazard examples of use. And a lot of it comes down to number one, doing your homework and number two, experimenting and having some ability to track. And in my case, I do very extensive blood testing among other things and tend not to go more than four to eight weeks without blood testing.

You're that often, huh?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do it really, really frequently.

Is that the full, the full Wellness FX panel? I know, we're both advisors. Wellness Effects. You do their full one?

Yeah, I do. I do the full Cadillac everything. And I'm doing another draw this Friday, for instance, because I did all of last month without alcohol. To come back to something else that you mentioned also I think that the way we're talking about smart drugs and as you know, I mean, I've tried a million different things as have you, so ranging, I mean we can get into it, but I mean, vasopressin, hydrogen, you name it, modafinil, I've tried a lot of these. I generally have two assumptions when I'm doing experiments. The first is what I mentioned, which is the dose makes the poison. So there tends to be a, let's just say an inverted or no, it's more of a bell shaped curve of effect and side effect. And in my mind they're typically rather correlated where at some point the dose to benefit ratio is off and you could take something that's thought of as very innocuous like water and you can kill someone through overconsumption of water. It's actually very common in marathons because people view dehydration as this demon which has been of course propagandized by a lot of companies like Gatorade. So they over consume and then dilute their electrolyte balance to the point where their heart can no longer function. Vitamin C and other examples. So I'm a huge proponent and consumer of vitamin C. But the fact of the matter is if you do an IV drip of vitamin C and you put a hundred grams into someone over a short enough period of time, a lot of people will go into diabetic coma and potentially die from the experience. So the dose makes the poison is kind of number one and then number two is. I just assume, and this may be accurate, it may not be that there's typically no biological free lunch. So if there's a strong effect, there's typically side effect or side effects or unknown effects, you might want to say, which can be beneficial or be very deleterious. And if you don't know what they are, it's your job to figure out what they are. So that's, that's, that's typically how I think about these things.

It sounds like you come from a world of lots of experience experimenting with smart drugs. The one I was most concerned about was Modafinil, because I took it pretty much daily at varying doses for eight years.

Yeah.

And it really, I mean, it changed my world because I did not understand the core biology about why I wasn't performing the way I wanted to. I was going to Wharton. I was working full time at a startup that we sold for $600 million. And I was, you know, burning the candle at both ends and two places in the middle. Right? Yeah. And I felt like maybe I am cheating. So before, like a test, I would put like the vasopressin and the hydrogen and then what happened, like on the desk in front of me and like, it's only doping if you don't tell everyone. So they have a fair advantage. And whether some of my colleagues in school might have occasionally taken some non prescription spar doctors from me is up to them to talk about. But I didn't want to be that guy who was like, you know, cheating. So I decided to be public. Like, Modafinil was my LinkedIn profile 10 years ago. I'm like, I'm just going to put it in here. Like, like all things disclosed. Right, Right. What do you think the downsides of Modafinil are? If you're familiar enough with the pharmacology. But I don't, I don't know.

Yeah. You know, I've looked at Provigils, Modafinil, I've looked at Nuvigil.

Yeah.

I'm honestly not familiar enough with the pharmacokinetic from the actual biochemistry of Midafinil to have a fantastically informed conversation about it.

Okay.

I do recall at one point, and I'd love for you to correct me if I'm wrong, that this is the case. Oftentimes with even prescription medications, sometimes the mechanisms are not entirely understood. I mean, they are hypothesized to work in a certain way, but not exactly understood. And that that can also relate to, say, a new target of some type. Right. So they act as an agonist or antagonist for Receptor. They may be poorly understood or partially understood. Modafinil I've used before, and it has spectacular results. I mean, it really does. It performs as advertised. And I actually became familiar with it a long time ago when it was being used by sprinters with narcolepsy. And. And also you. Since that run. Those two correlate so highly. And military, who, of course, are very well known for using uppers and downers. I mean, they use, like, greenies, so, you know, methamphetamine, plus any number of different sleeping medications to turn them off. And the. But Modafinil is one of those drugs that I seem to have a certain sensitivity to, much like. And this is very common Viagra. You have to be very careful with. With, say, vasodilators or constrictors. I get a very sharp pain, like a very acute migraine, like pain from using Midastanil for more than one day. And that, to me, is a cue just to be very, very careful and particularly when it relates to any type of cerebral sensitivity. And of course, you know, this. But that's been really brought into sort of high def for me with the unfortunate passing of Seth Roberts recently.

I was. I was shocked to hear that.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, very otherwise healthy guy, from all outward indications, like drops dead on a hiking trail in Berkeley from what appeared to be. And there may be more information that's brought this to light, but I think it was a cerebral hemorrhage or some type of aneurysm. And there are. There are a lot of theories as to why this may have happened. One of which is that it appears he was consuming 10 times the. The sort of suggested higher tolerance dose for flaxseed oil and other types of oils, which can be dangerous. I mean, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to support increased frequency of, say, intestinal bleeding or stomach bleeding if you consume massive, massive quantities of fish oil, for instance. I'm particularly sensitive to Modafinil. So it's not something I use on a very highly frequent basis. Oddly enough, you know, I get the question, what's your favorite smart drug? A lot. And I've tried, you know, you look at them. Yeah. You look at my. My pharmacy I have in my house, and it's like, well, what are you feeling like today? Would you like, you know, phenylpiracetam or aniracetam or maybe you don't want the rest. How about, you know, whatever? Like, I have all of them, but for creative work, for synthesis and Connecting dots I might not otherwise connect. Yerba mate is still my favorite. I mean, yerba mate tea and consumed over a long period of time. This is another point I'd encourage people, yeah, this is another point I'd encourage people to think about. Is chemical is highly, the effect of a chemical is highly dependent on its means of administration. Right? So you take for instance, testosterone, you could have a gel, an injectable, an oral. The way that that affects your body, the way that affects your liver, the way that determines dosing, side effects, very, very different. And similarly with yerba mate, you have, let's say bagged yerba mate for tea bags, you have iced yerba mate that you can get in ready to drink packages. Neither of which give me the effect of filling a gourd. In this case, I actually have a metal container, a small metal container with the yerba mate leaves and then sort of sipping it over the span of say an hour or two, which is how they traditionally consume it in Argentina or Uruguay or any of these places. And, and it has, at least based on my understanding, the, the, it has the stimulants you would find in coffee, right? So methylxanthine, green tea, theophylline, and then dark chocolate like theobromine.

Right.

And you get therefore three very different pharmacokinetic profiles, meaning for those people who don't know the term, the rate at which those peak in your blood plasma. And so for me, I get a two to three hour steady, even keeled, moderate high cognitively from sipping yerba mate. That is just, it's the perfect storm for me for writing.

You've inspired something. I've enjoyed the taste of yerba mate, but never gone after the high from it. So one of the reasons bulletproof coffee works is when you're blending the butter and specifically the brain octane, you get small micelles that cross the gut barrier more easily that carry in the. Basically the pharmaco active things in the coffee, you know, the coffee oils and the other chemicals. I'm gonna try it with yerba mate and blend it up that way to see if basically I can boost the levels of those things that get past the gut, which is intriguing and exciting.

Yeah. So I, so I'll tell you, actually, I've done some, I've done some experiments. Not. Yeah, surprise, surprise. Not with, not with yerba mate, but there was a period of time where I was traveling quite heavily and I love, I love pu Erh tea and I also love green tea. Pu erh, despite the fact that it's dark, tends to be lower in caffeine or stimulant properties. So I would combine the pu erh with the. With the green tea and then I would blend it with Kerrygold and a small amount of mcts.

Okay.

I mean in this case coconut oil. I ended up later experimenting with caprylic acid. I'm not sure how much you've played.

Around with that is my brain octane is made out of. It's actually tricopylate. Like you need to have all three molecules in the right place.

But yeah, so that, yeah, the adjusting for gut tolerance, which is this to say, you know, adjusting to avoid disaster paths.

Right.

I sort of ended up with this, this fat tea concoction that really seemed to magnify the effects of the tea so I could get by. I had my stash of tea and it was going to last a very limited period of time. So I was sort of extending my stash by combining them. So it should work. The challenge I'd be curious to see with Yerba Mate is how good it is for creativity, simply because to get enough volume of Yerba Mate tea to blend it with the butter or the mcts would sort of necessitate a higher dose at once, if that makes sense.

Right.

So you'd have to steep it for potentially longer period of time anyway. Yeah, I'll read about it. So definitely.

All right, I'm going to give it a try because I never thought of that until you just mentioned this. So thank you, Tim.

Yeah, of course.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah.

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When I'm doing writing, probably well, Bulletproof coffee. For some reason, I get most creativity at night, so this is biologically destructive. But if I just really want to just like do 10,000 words, it's like 11pm Bulletproof coffee. Andiracetam stacked with phenylpiracetam and some siltap. And like I've been helping Abelard Lindsay out on, you know, promoting siltab and that whole combination. I'm like, I'm good to go. And it's like I just disappear. And then like eight or nine hours later there's all these words and they're good, right? Yeah, that kind of flow state.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And siltap is great stuff. I originally connected with Abelard. I ended up mentioning the siltep stack in Wired magazine. This was well before that, well before he was producing it with I guess, natural stacks as the brand. And he's close by, obviously. He's kind of in the backyard up in norcal. And I'm a huge fan of the stack. What I find personally, and again, so much of this is dependent on your individual biochemical signature. I love siltep. If I use it, I just need to ensure that I can budget for like 10 to 12 hours of sleep that night because I need to replenish whatever is being put into hyperdrive. But for writing, it's fantastic. And I've found also in terms of peak creative states, and I tend to use the word synthesis just because I realized for book writing myself, I could do the interviews, I could do the research, I could do the gathering throughout the day, but the only time I actually put out good drafts of finished content the synthesis was between say 10pm and like 5am oh, so you have. Yeah, it's horrible for your social life or any of your relationships, but what I noticed is that even people who write early tend to do it before the rest of the world wakes up. So it's this kind of 10pm to like 7:38am range that seems to be very consistent across all of these top writers, musicians, artists. And actually one of the books in my. I have a book club and one of the books that struck me was Daily Rituals, which is about 200 of these people. And it's extremely consistent. Like, you almost never find someone who's like, yeah, I do my best work after lunch. Almost never happens.

So by the way, how can people find out more about your book club? Because I just got your quarterly co package that you just sent kind of unexpectedly, and it was an awesome selection. And like you're curating amazing stuff there and I'm walking around all day long learning about grip strength. You know, look, there we go, the beginner one. I can do it. Anyway, so, like, you pick out good stuff. Where can people learn about the books you're recommending? Because I'm totally going to read those. I'm joining your book club.

Yeah, the book club is. The book club has been really fun. I've been basically acquiring rights to books that I think are underappreciated and then promoting the living hell out of them and in some cases producing audiobooks and things like that. So if you just go to the blog is4hourblog.com F O U R H O U R b l o g.com and then just either search Tim Ferriss Book Club and there will be a dedicated page shortly or look under topics and click on on Book Club. And there are four or five books thus far. And you know, you mentioned something. I was, I was worried about maybe getting hungry while we were doing this. And you. It's so crazy that this ties into your. Your cool fact of the day. But so I have, I have these things. I've been experimenting. I'm not sure if you've seen these. Yeah, yeah, the. The Exo Cricket flower bars so I'm.

Meeting with those guys, I think in New York or somewhere in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Gabby and Greg are great and they're working with the former head of R and D at the Fat Duck, which is the number one ranked restaurant in the world, to develop insect protein into an American sort of mainstream food product. Which is a huge challenge. I'll be helping them. But these may, these may or may not pop up in your next, in your next quarterly box. There's going to be a lot of fun stuff coming.

I just gave my kids cricket bars for the first time. I found some up here in Canada. It's not the XO brand, but the next time I'm in the States, I'm definitely going to be getting some of those because it's, it's a good idea. And I'll tell you, compared to like soy or tofu, I'll be eating crickets all day long. Like. Oh yeah.

Well, what's, what's so cool about cricket or insect protein in general? And I think the, whatever they were not the witchetty grubs, but like the weevil worms or whatever they were that you mentioned, they're actually nicknamed jungle bacon, which I could see a brand, but the can sell it to Paleo people across the country. What's so cool about insects? And I, and I did a lot of research with insects during the Four Hour Chef. I mean, I bought live insects of all different types and made food for them is that unlike a lot of, say, isolate products there's, which I also consume. But crickets are very minimally processed. So you basically just take live animals. This is very hard to do with cows, for instance, and you just grind them up and then you, and then you have this end product that has a complete amino acid profile that lacks the, you know, phytoestrogens and other things that might be of concern. Concerned with a lot of common sources otherwise. And it also straddles this really interesting world where paleo people and vegan people generally do not get along. And this is one of those rare food sources that might actually straddle both of them. So I'm curious to see how people respond to it.

I gave a talk at David Wolf's conference recently, who's a raw vegan kind of guy, and I've got a lot of respect for him. I used to be a raw vegan and raw vegans care as much about food quality as you or I do. Like it really matters what you put in your body. They might Just like their vegetables, not compressed as meat. But I stood up and I said, guys, just a confession. This is my opener. I'm a lacto ovo beefo porco vegetarian and I'm like, I'm either going down in flames for this 90 minute talk or they're gonna love me. And they were like, the audience was really cool and I talked about like butter and salt and why they have a place in the human diet. And end of the day, I think there's more commonality between vegans and paleos than either side wants to think about. And I mean, I've made fun of vegans every now and then because they're so fun.

Right.

But at the same time, I've been one. So, like, it's a little bit of self referential. So.

Yeah, no, agreed, agreed. I mean, I think the sort of polar extremes have more in common in almost any place.

Yeah.

Than they have in common with the moderates in between. That's true for fans and critics as well. I mean, I find, for instance, the, if you look at your fan base or my fan base, you find these polar extremes of people who love everything you put out regardless of what it is, and people who hate everything you put out regardless of what it is. And what I've noticed is that, and this is not always the case, this isn't necessarily true in veganism and paleo, but they're the fastest to switch. So if you slight or if one of your die hard fans has the perception of you having slighted them or mistreated them in some way, they can become your absolute worst nightmare. Conversely, one of your die hard haters, if you manage to convert them, can become your biggest supporter and more vocal supporter. So it's been very fascinating to watch that kind of stuff. And people, you know, I get a lot of weird stuff in terms of, yeah, I've had death threats and all sorts of craziness and people ask me like, oh my God, like, are you worried about your haters? And I'm like, well, I am, but you know, on the other hand, I'm actually equally concerned for the fans who, who try to follow advice without doing their own homework and due diligence.

Oh yeah, Tim, it, it's worrisome, right? Like I had one, one guy who's consuming 22 tablespoons of brain octane a day and I'm like, he's asking me for advice. I'm like, dude, I have no idea. Like, like you could, you could melt into like a jellyfish substance tomorrow. Like like no one's ever done this in history. And I don't think you want to do that with your body, but I can't stop you. Right, so you kind of, you're holding a mantle where if you recommend something and then it doesn't work or it harms people, do you feel personally responsible for that?

Well, you know, I try to. My general process for testing this stuff is, number one, I test everything myself. And then once I've tested it on myself for safety first, efficacy second, then I will test it with other people who are sort of my core group of testers, which is a small group of people, men and women of different ages and ethnicities. And typically the tests themselves come from a hypothesis that is formed after reviewing studies on, say, PubMed or something like that. So there's some kernel of research or data in the beginning, and then only after that will I make recommendations. There are. What I've realized though is that if you provide anything that can be remotely hazardous and you include instructions and warnings for how to avoid it being dangerous, you should assume that 10% of the people who read it are never going to pay any attention or any heed to the warnings. And that's why, for instance, I had a chapter on breath holding. David Blaine taught me how to hold my breath in the four hour body. And it was. And I personally, it was not anyone else asking to have it removed. I asked to have it removed because a number of people, nothing catastrophic happened, but people were not paying attention to the warnings. And I said, look, do not practice this in water. Like, if you're ever going to try it, you sit in a chair and see this, how you practice. But needless to say, there are people who are like, oh yeah, I'm going to go out to the public pool and try this tomorrow. And I'm like, no, because if it's six inches of water, six feet or 60ft, if your face is immersed, it doesn't matter, they can all kill you equally. So I had it removed. I feel a responsibility to teach people how to be good citizen scientists and how to judge and separate good science from bad science. Once I provide that toolkit, I hold them responsible for what they do. And I can point the direction and say, I find this interesting. I have tried this. But I do take the responsibility very seriously. So I do believe that with great audience comes great responsibility. And you have to assume that one out of every thousand fans or readers or customers you have is completely batshit crazy. So you have to account for that. And if you have a million of million people. That's a small army of crazy people. And then you have to assume that at least 10% are not going to read the directions. So I keep both of those things in mind when I'm trying to design protocols that I might explain to people because it is scary. It can be. It can be scary unleashing these things into the world that you hope will be sort of consumed, you know, literally or metaphorically the way you intend them to be consumed.

I've found people still, I've made videos and all this. Like, to me, making bulletproof coffee is pretty simple. But they put the butter in with the ground coffee inside the coffee maker and wonder why crap comes out. And it's like, guys, like, I don't know how to make it any clearer. But that's, I think, to your point, right. That you don't, you don't know what they're going to do. Well, okay, so then you have these people who are Uber fans and you have these, like, haters. Do you take the hater stuff personally or, like, what's your, what's your strategy for not, like, absorbing all that negative, you know, like this? I know I received similar stuff. Probably not the level you do because I'm nowhere near as, as well known as you are. But I mean, like, like all celebrities deal with this at some level or another.

Yeah, I think that the. There, there are a couple of things worth remembering, and the most important is you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So I do pay attention to intelligent criticism, even if occasionally it is, how should I put this? Less than diplomatic. So it's important not to assume that all critics, especially constructive criticism, is coming from haters and use that label to disregard it. But there are a couple of other things that I think are equally important to keep in mind, especially when sort of every genius and every idiot has a voice on the Internet, particularly with anonymity. And that is, number one, it's not about how many people don't get it, it's about how many people get it. Right. So what is the critical mass of people you want to influence and affect? And how are you tracking that? What are your key performance indicators? What are the metrics you're using to determine whether or not you are sort of achieving your goal? Assuming that it's trying to impact a certain number of people at a certain magnitude? Right. It's about the number of people who get it, not the number of people who don't. Number two is Trying to appeal to all people is a sign of mediocrity. That's actually paraphrasing a quote from Colin Powell. And it's very hard to do any job well if you are fragile in that way. And there's actually a quote that. That I like, which is from Nassim Taleb. And anti fragile stuff. Exactly. And he actually emailed this to me before antifragile came out. And it was. Robustness is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who hate it or hates it. You know, in parentheses, artists.

Wow.

Fragility. Yeah. Fragility is when you care more about the few who hate your work than the multitude who loves it. And then in parentheses, politicians. And I. I think that's very critical to keep in mind as you interact with the world. And in addition to that, I should say, just as a general rule, I don't go out of my way to search for negativity. So on YouTube, for instance, it's fine to enable comments. I'll pay attention to a handful of things once and again. But if you look at any video and you scroll down, within the first 200 comments, Hitler's going to come up. Like Hitler or like racist epithets will get thrown around within the first 200 comments. Does not matter what the video is. It could be a kitten video, it could be a nonprofit video. It makes no difference. So I go out of my way to filter that kind of stuff out. And the rule is, for instance, on my blog, and the blog comments make this very clear. And I think this is part of the reason that my community is very well known for being extremely positive and constructive. Not always agreeing is the. The rule on my blog is you can disagree and you can even attack me, but you can't attack each other. If you attack one another, you're gonna get banned. I will blacklist you. I have no problem with it. And I treat it as my living room. It's like if I invite 10 dinner guests over. There can be a spirited debate. There can be a spirited debate, but you can't call someone a fucking idiot. If you call someone a fucking idiot, you're not going to get invited again. And on the Internet, that equals getting blacklisted. And I enforce that very, very seriously. And that doesn't mean there are no critics. There are plenty of critics on my site who will provide me with very valuable feedback, but they do it in a way that is not insultingly confrontational.

The difference between the facts are wrong or I have doubts about what you said versus I have doubts about what you said. You, you scam artist, truant or whatever. You know, whatever they make up, right? Yeah, I try to do the same thing. I'm not probably as gifted as you are at that, but if there's personal attacks towards others or honestly, if you want to say the same really negative stuff about me, I will delete the comment because it just it brings negativity to everyone. And if you want to say I'm wrong for a good reason, maybe I am wrong and then I want to know it, right.

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I got another question for you. This has to do with creativity and performance and, well, and sex. So you wrote about sex and four Hour Body, which was, which was brilliant by the way. And I've met lots of the characters that you, you mentioned there and we talk about like getting in the zone for writing. So not, not just testosterone levels, but the guy who did first self help book ever Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill is the guy. I'm taking it. Napoleon Hill has a whole chapter on, you know, like basically for guys, don't, don't orgasm too much. So I, I did a craft myself talk a couple years ago where I measured like Taoist frequencies of male orgasm and how they affected overall happiness and thus performance. And so I knew you wrote so much about the woman side of sex in your book, but I was wondering if in the context of all the experiments, have you ever noticed or quantified or seen a difference in your own mental focus and energy with regards to sex?

Okay, so it related to sex and male orgasm. So a couple of this is a good news, bad news situation. So the bad news is if you look at studies of other species, the, the number of times, kind of the mileage, so to speak, the number of times that the male ejaculates seems to be inversely correlated with lifespan. Yes. So that's the bad news. The good news is, at least in my experience, sacrificing myself for science. And I'm looking at, I want to look at the actual sort of physical determinants of this and I haven't quite pinpointed it, but I think that if you are ejaculating from sex that you can do it fairly frequently and still maintain the type of alertness and drive and sort of practical aggression that comes from very healthy if not optimal sex hormone levels and so on. It would appear that if you're going through the same physical act but using porn as the stimulus, that at least in my experience, very different outcome and actually I think biochemically very different, which, which would make sense on, on some level, but I haven't pinpointed all of the, the realities of that. But I, I don't think that, I don't think that to say aim for optimal cognitive performance, you have to abstain from sex for extended periods of time. Doesn't seem to be the case. If you want. Yeah, if you want to optimize for sperm count and sperm morphology and so on. It appears that around 72 hours is where you get the highest quality of sperm. And, you know, sort of stopping yourself up for two weeks does not improve the outcome. If you're looking to, say, bank sperm, for instance.

Probably lowers the outcome from my infertility. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't a good idea. Yeah. I think if you get into that, Google dopamine sensitivity and porn, I think what's going on there is just higher spikes of dopamine in shorter periods of time. So you get dopamine resistance. Yeah, that's a theory, but I don't know if it's the right theory, but interesting.

Yeah, you know, like that could be it. Right. It's like insulin resistance.

You're just.

It's porn induced dopamine resistance.

There's probably some great acronym for that. Like, we're coming up on the end of the show. Tim, there's a question that I've asked every guest except that one time when I forgot. And the question is, if you had three pieces of advice for people, it doesn't have to be from any of your books or anything like that, but just your entire life experience the three most important things to tell people who want to perform better, who want to kick more ass.

The first would be, you are the average of the five people you associate with most. So pick your peer group. I mean, that's physically, financially, emotionally, all of the above. You are the average of the five people you associate with most. So pick those people very, very carefully. Second would be it's about the people who get it, not the people who don't get it. So related to our conversation about haters, focus on the impact you're making, not the people who are nipping at your heels, who are the detractors. And it's worth watching the movie Ratatouille to listen to Anton Ego's concluding speech to this. And then point number three would be have big goals. Read the book the Magic of Thinking Big. Have big goals that get you fucking excited. I think the. I think the main reason that people don't do amazing things is they aim for what they perceive as realistic in quotation mark and quotation marks, goals. So have. Have some like big crazy goals. Do some, obviously with sort of self preservation in mind. I mean, really, really aim for the. Aim for the stars. Which sounds cliched, but if it was either Larry Page or Sergey Brin. So one of the wonder twins behind Google who said you know, something that a lot of people miss is that it's when you aim really, really big. And I'm paraphrasing here, you can look it up. When you aim at something really huge, it's hard to fail completely. It's like the part that people miss is they don't realize it's hard to fail completely. You usually get some tremendously amazing outcome if you, if you shoot at something big enough. Kind of Elon Musk style, right? It's hard to fail completely. So think big. Those would be my three pieces of advice. Think big.

Well, you're one of the probably top two people I ever wanted to get that piece of advice from, so thanks, Tim. Badass advice, as I'd expect. By the way, the other guy's Robert Green, who's agreed to be on the podcast. As soon as we get our calendars lined up, I think we wrote Mastery. So the two of you, I really want to know what's in there. What a fantastic list. See you next time on the Human.

Upgrade Podcast.

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