The Blueprint for living a Dope Life | Tim Ferriss

we have a bunch of friends, not going to name names, but they've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life. And so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars, which is like such a wake-up call of a bad trade to make. Once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want, then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit.

Sean, you want to kick things off?

Uh, yeah, where to start? It's so funny. I did a pod with Tim, I don't know, last year or something like that, and I hyper-prepared for it because I was like, oh my gosh, Tim Ferriss, this is the guy. This is the reason I did a podcast in the first place. I wanted to be a Tim Ferriss. That was a, that was a, that was part of the North Star. This time I had the exact opposite opinion. I was like, I don't have any agenda coming into this, meaning like, I just want to know what's up. I want to know what's new, what's exciting. What are you nerding out about? I just kind of want to hear what's going on. Like, what is Tim Ferriss up to nowadays? And I have your game here. And actually, you told me about this even when we were doing that last podcast. You said, I just spent a few days with one of the world's best game designers. I didn't realize that was our mutual friend Elon. And, uh, yeah, he's the man. He came on this podcast too recently. He's the man. So you went and did a— you went and made a game with him. Maybe just, I don't know, let's start there. Why'd you— why'd you make a game?

Yeah, 2 years in the making, believe it or not. So I grew up with D&D. I still have all my original modules, Dungeons Dragons, and played a lot of video games. And as I was looking at what to potentially experiment with next, because every few years I try something that's very much off menu or unrelated to what I'm currently doing, right? So there was the first book and then the angel investing was sort of a wading into identity diversification so I wouldn't get pigeonholed in one place as a business author, for instance. And then The podcast after 4-Hour Chef, and there have been a number of other examples. Some work out, some don't. In the case of the game, this came about, I think, pretty naturally because as I was kind of late to therapy in life, but better late than never, I guess. And when people do a lot of therapy or they do psychedelic experiences, or when they've just had a couple of glasses of wine with friends at a certain point, what comes up a lot is, yeah, you know, I just take stuff so seriously and it's so heavy and I'm constantly doing A, B, or C. I just need to have like more play, more play, more play. And it's like, and if I look back at the books I've written, it's like, yeah, okay, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, learning. There is a serious tinge to it, if that makes sense. But I feel like analog, getting off of screens and play is more important than ever, and trying to find something that's a lighter lift than Dungeons Dragons seemed like a fun challenge. And I love Ilan Lee. The guy is such a polymath of epic proportions who worked on the first Xbox, Halo, has created entire genres of gaming, has not just one hit, but it has a track record of creating hit after hit after hit with tabletop games. And love the guy. He's just a sweet, soulful, awesome, hilarious guy. So to be able to develop a friendship with him, I was like, all right, if I'm choosing projects as I usually do based on skills I'll develop, knowledge I'll learn, and relationships I'll build that could translate outside of that project— because a lot of projects are going to fail— so if it's setting it up in a how-do-you-win-even-if-you-lose, I was like, this seems like a very good bet. It's something that's kind of near and dear to me. Something I want more of in my life. So if you're going to make a game, what do you have to do? You have to play a lot of games. So it's also a way of just forcing myself to get off of laptops and phones, spend time with my friends. And, uh, here we are. It's, uh, it's, it's landing in like 8,000 retail locations, Walmart, Target, everywhere. It's been exclusive to Walmart for a few months, has been a bestseller, 300 million plus social views of gameplay, which is nuts. And, uh, we'll see.

By the way, you, in 2014, you had a guy working with you named Charlie Hoan that I've talked to a little bit. Charlie's really cool.

Yeah, Charlie's great.

And I remember he wrote a blog post on play.

Yeah.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, totally. I do.

I absolutely do.

Yeah.

And the whole point of the blog post, I was like, these guys are idiots. They don't know how to have fun. You can't just go out and play. And then as I've gotten older and I take things way more serious, I, it's very strange that I have empathy for that now. And I feel that where I'm like, Oh my God, like I need to go out and have fun. It just like, not everything needs to make money or not everything needs to have a purpose or be an ice plunge that helps me optimize my morning. And I just need to do stuff just because it's fun. That's what I used to do.

Oh, totally. And it's, I mean, all of, I shouldn't say all, but a lot of the sort of socially reinforced drivers and behaviors and so on are around this. They're orbiting around this emotional valence of taking things seriously, and there's a place for that. There are a lot of places for that. But what I've also realized, if you're serious all the time, you're going to burn out or implode or just wear yourself out before you get the truly serious stuff done, right? So it's like, right now I'm dealing with family medical crises that I don't want to get into, but I'm dealing with that. There's a bunch of hairy shit going on, and obviously the state of the world is pretty exciting, to put it one way. And having some type of recreation play for play's sake with social interaction, right? It doesn't have to be a game. It doesn't have to be a card game or a tabletop game. Could be playing tennis, could be anything. Watching UFC with your friends doesn't, it doesn't really matter, right? I think as a psychological release valve and as a way to recharge your batteries so that you can get back into the fray, fully charged and resilient is super, super, super important. So for all those reasons, and frankly, it's like, look, I want to have a family, I want to do all that, it's my top priority. And there's certain things you want to practice before you need to have them, right? And I feel like getting back into exploring some of the things that made me so happy gave me so much joy as a kid makes some sense. And the older I get, the more I realize how reliable a lot of that stuff is, right? I wanted to be a comic book penciler forever, and just getting into digital painting on an iPad and taking— walking through some tutorials on YouTube with Procreate, it's like, oh wow, how did I forget about this? This is just so nourishing for me.

Is this going to be like a good moneymaker for you? Like, is this a good business decision in addition to a good kind of life, fun, creative quest that you went on, a creative side quest?

I think it could be, if it's successful, a nice little annuity that rolls in that is reasonably passive if it hits escape velocity. Uh, if I were just trying to make money, this is not the way to do it. Like a low-priced physical product that is shipped from overseas, particularly with tariffs and everything. Like this is not, if you, if you're trying to make make your riches. I would put this kind of in the same category as like streaming music on Spotify or writing books.

Do you care about making money? Like, are you motivated for more?

Not really.

What did that— do you remember when that happened where you're like, I have— my cup is full?

Yeah, it was probably when I had my first one or two real startup exits.

Which was what? That's, that's, uh, Shopify? What was the—

where were the first— uh, the first few hits that were meaningful were like Shopify, Uber, both of which were, were, were sizable, right? For me, for me, it's not like, look, I'm not going to be subsidizing a presidential campaign or buying, buying a mega yacht, but I don't, I don't want to do any of those things.

Are you comfortable saying publicly a number where you're like, you know, I don't, I'm not motivated by more because a lot of people will listen to this pod and they're like, when will I ever feel like that? And I'll give you an easy pass if you don't want to say that number.

Yeah, I don't want to say it. What I will say is that the number for most people will move. And I think that's both unsurprising and dangerous. So a lot of my friends were like, once I have $5 million, I'm gonna create a woodworking shop in Oregon and just do the things I really enjoy doing. And then they get to $5 million and then it goes to $10 million, then it goes to $50 million, then it goes to $100 million, then it goes, it just keeps going. In part because they haven't developed other gears and other interests. The only thing they know how to do well, where they feel confident, and furthermore they have their self-worth wrapped up in, is putting points on the scoreboard in the, in the form of money. And that's why I think identity diversification and trying other things where you can feel good about yourself and chart progress, whether that's piano, archery, any number of other things, doing complete off-menu weird stuff like making a board game or a card game. It is also insurance against having a fixed-gear cycle, a fixed-gear psychology, right? That is a risky, risky, risky place to be. And for me, I think I'm maybe fortunate in that I was raised in a family, didn't have a lot of money. We were always looking for interesting adventures that didn't cost very much. And as I've gotten older, when I block out, say, a week to do stuff with my friends, uh, these are my very old friends in some cases, and some of them do not have or make much money. And that's totally fine. I mean, I pay for stuff in some cases, not always, but the stuff that we actually want to do together is some type of activity, right? It's doing wilderness training in the Rockies, which I'm doing in 2 weeks. It's Going on a ski trip doesn't have to be to Niseko in Japan. You can do it— you can go to Colorado, Utah, whatever. It doesn't need to be crazy. Or it could be backcountry skiing where you're touring, in which case you have many more options. Does not have to be expensive. And the stuff that we talk about, the WhatsApp groups that started for an event that are still active, are always some activity like that. So the stuff that I spent my money on is stuff like that. It's like, I'm not afraid to spend money. I don't think money is evil. I think it's a great tool. Um, but it took me a while to psychologically get comfortable with a bunch of other gears. It wasn't the number, right? Like, I passed my number and I felt like I needed more. I didn't have a fixed number, but I felt like I needed more to have some degree of psychological safety, and then everything will be okay, right? And then my problems will go away. And then you realize That's bullshit. Like, money solves money problems. Like, you got plenty of work to do.

All right. I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see what mistakes did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just want to avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in 2025. And I did that. And so I listed out 7 books that made a meaningful difference in my life. And I explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's 7 books that had a huge impact on my life. And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it, or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the 7 books that had a massive change in my life this year so far, and then also how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below. Well, have you guys read that? Um, I think Bloomberg has this great article where they had high, uh, ultra-high net worth bankers survey their clients, and it was fairly consistent at $50,000 in net worth all the way up to $50 million in net worth, the answer to when do you think you're going to have enough was almost consistently always 2 times more than what they currently have. So if you have $50,000, you think when I have $100,000, I'm going to be able to breathe. I have $1 million. When I have $2 million, I can breathe.

Yeah. So when I had heard that, I, I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Relatable. I've been there and I could see that. But it also left me defeated. Like, okay, so then what is there? Is there simply no answer? Is that the right answer? And I think what Tim is saying is kind of where I've landed, which is for most people it's an imagination problem. They haven't spent the time to think about what else they want in life, and therefore they just move the goalposts a little further on the, on the money game or the success game that they are super familiar with. And so it's not even a question of hitting a benchmark. It's simply like you have, you have not put sufficient resources into thinking about the other things that will give you that same sense of purpose, of progress, of achievement, fulfillment, you know.

But what framework, Shawn, do you use? Because like, I mean, I struggle with that where I'm like, well, I don't know what to do. I've been doing this.

I've got one. I've got one. Okay. That's maybe a little less visible, which is the, the social traps involved with making more money. And here's what I mean by that. As people make more money, sometimes they end up hanging out with people who have more money. And a lot of humans, if they have enough wherewithal to make like $100 grand a year, they want to make $200 grand a year. Now they start hanging out with people who make $250 a year. Okay. And now those people have new toys, new goals, more ambitious fill in the blank. And it becomes this social relative wealth slash competition. And I've seen this over and over again. Then people kind of trade up again in a sense. They start spending more and more time in wealthier circles. And now people are comparing which jets they have. And, oh really, you have that place in fill-in-the-blank state? Oh yeah, well, if you ever were interested, right, I think there might be one lot left at the Yellowstone Club or fill-in-the-blank, right? And there's a social risk of having people who are at your level of wealth or above, because the natural inclination is gonna be to roll uphill. And for that reason, I try to spend a lot of time around people and with people, not just old friends, because some people are like, hey, where I grew up, it's like we diverged so far in our paths, I don't have those friendships anymore. That's fine. But spending time with some of the world's best fill-in-the-blank, right? Archers, swimmers, super high-level piano players who make next to no money, but who you can respect really, really, really deeply, who are fun to spend time with, who seem to have in many instances great lives and are more content than the rich people who are chasing the next phantom, whatever that happens to be. And there are well-adjusted, awesome people with wealth who don't suffer from this keeping up with the Joneses, but they are actually very few in my experience. So the social piece is really important. Like, who are you spending time with? And if they're all at your level of, of income, net worth, or higher, the very natural evolved instinct is, I think, going to be to roll uphill into more and a more and more expensive and money-dependent path.

Yeah. What's your answer to that, Sean? Do you have a framework or anything to say about it?

Well, the first was kind of the wake-up call, right? Like, I would say like beginning a career, 20s, it's— I don't even have the ability to get what I want regardless of what I wanted. I didn't have the skill. I was too feeble. I was too passive. I was too dumb. I was too unskilled. I didn't have the, you know, the hustle. I didn't have the marketing chops. I didn't know how to get even what I wanted. The first part of my career was just to actually figure out how to even get what you want. And I started with a very simple want, which is like, I want to be successful, I want to make money, I want to be financially independent, right? And I looked around and I saw that, okay, most people, most people are, you know, on a bit of a financial treadmill. They're never going to make enough where they can be financially free to have total freedom to choose what they want. And they seem to be dreading going to work. They didn't seem to be enjoying the thing they were doing either now. So they couldn't get out and they didn't like where they were. Uh, then you saw, you know, a few people made a lot of money, but they didn't really like the way that they had to make the money. These are the bankers, the consultants, and the people who were, you know, they were maybe traveling a lot. Maybe it was low creativity type of jobs, but hey, paid, paid really well. And then there was the lucky few who seemed to have both, right? It's like they were making gobs of money doing creative work that they loved, and they forgot what day of the week it was because they were just so excited to get, get up and do their projects. And I just was like, okay, cool. That's kind of the first thing I That's the first thing to want. Now, when I, when I got to that point, then I realized and looked around me, you and a bunch of our mutual friends, Sam, like, you realize that some people never, never went back and asked the question, what do I want now? So that maybe that was the right thing to want when I was 20 or my best idea then. But when I turned 30, that wasn't the best idea anymore of what to want. And we have a bunch of friends, not going to name names, but like, they just keep putting points up on the scoreboard. They've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life. And so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars, which is like such a wake-up call of a bad trade to make. Um, and you know, at least they have fun doing it and they do feel like a sense of, you know, power and autonomy and, you know, creativity making it happen. But it became pretty clear that once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want, right? Or you, you believe in yourself to be able to make it happen, then the, then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit. You know, what do you, what do you actually want? And, you know, I looked at myself and I was like, cool, my bank account got fat, but then so did I. So it's a new thing to want. I want to, I want to not be embarrassed at how I look. I want to feel proud of myself for, you know, having self-control and like break some of these terrible habits that are going to cut my life short and, you know, make me sort of, you know, immobile, you know, as the older I get. And so that became a thing to want. And then why did I pick the piano this year? Because I was like, I don't know, what are the, what are the real joys that make me happy? I love playing basketball. I love sport. The other, I think, thing that like people really can get lost in and like get into a flow state and just truly enjoy themselves is music. And like one is either, either I'm going to go to a bunch of concerts, but I got 3 little kids. It's probably not in the cards for me to go on tour and go, go to a bunch of festivals this year. But what if I played music? What if I made a little dad garage band? That seems like fun. And, and I stole a word from Tim on this. He, I think, was talking to Balaji and he said he called him post-economic. And I don't know if Tim, I don't think you had ever used that before. At least I hadn't heard anyone use that before. Did you make that up?

No, I didn't make it up. I heard it from somebody in Silicon Valley.

Oh, we totally got it from you.

So we stole it from you and sort of almost like as a joke, it's like, it's just like a cool, it's like people who instead of being, you know, investors, they're capital allocators or like, you know, the aioli versus mayo. So I was like, oh, post-economic is a great way to say I'm rich.

We had an MFM t-shirt that said post-economic.

So I kind of laughed about it.

It had eccentric versus fucking crazy.

Yeah. So then I was like, well, what does that actually mean? What the definition of it is, isn't that you have all the money you ever want, it's that you you no longer need to make decisions based on money as the primary, like, motivator, which is how I had made a lot of decisions. So Sam, to answer your question, I think it's all of that, getting to the point of realizing that the most important question now is what are the right things to want? Realizing that the decider of what to want isn't money anymore. And maybe, maybe that was right when I was in my 20s, maybe it was wrong, but at least it's no longer needs to be the case. And now pick a new word. Mine is fun. So I want to do the things that I enjoy, the act of doing them, um, not like doing them for some future payoff. Uh, and I told you this, uh, you know, piano is a great example of this because I thought, oh man, it's so cool to be able to play this song. And I realized nobody gives a shit if you could play the piano. Like if anyone could play the piano, they just start, they sort of nod like, oh, you can play the piano. Cool. They've moved on. They don't want to sit there and listen to a 7-minute, you know, Beethoven's, you know, second minuet. Like they don't care about any of that. So you literally can't show it off even if you wanted to. It's only fun. Because it's really fun to play. Um, and it's a great, like, you know, so pick things that are in that category. The other thing, Sam, the other trick is writing it out. So like, I think when you write, you force in a level of honesty in yourself if you do it right. If you write something that doesn't feel true, it stands out to you as soon as you set it, uh, as soon as you put it down on paper, and then you can, you know, sort of edit that. And I find that most people do not edit their thoughts very much, right? They're only the author. They're rarely the editor. And I sort of just take most of the things I think and do as first drafts that need a really great editor to come back in and try to make this good. And so I try to edit it. Like, I have a post on Medium. I don't use Medium anymore, but I wrote what I want out of life, age 28. And I wrote like a stream of consciousness, a ramble. But I write that, like, I kind of wrote that every year. Even in, in the post, I wrote, I want to rewrite this every year so I can see myself evolving and figuring out what I actually want out of life. Right. Like, I think being intentional in that way has helped.

Trading great hours for useless dollars. That's great.

That's cool.

Yeah. Tim, you said this on the last pod. You go, I've been around, I've met enough wealthy people to know it's like food. You know, you could be starving. You can eat, you can eat till you're full. You can eat till you're stuffed. You can eat till you make yourself sick. You know, it's not— money isn't the answer. And it's sort of obvious, you know, once you say it like that.

Yeah.

Let me— I'll just riff on that too, because as, as you were mentioning how you think about this and approach it, a couple of things pop to mind. Just having seen, I mean, dozens and probably 100+ people go from not having money to having more money than they'll ever need. And also just seeing people do well. They don't have to be millionaires, but it's like they've done really well for themselves, right? They have enough. Is the first I would say is Much like you hear, it's the economy, stupid. Duh, it's the economy, stupid. I think it's the relationship, stupid. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you want to be— everybody wants to be happy. That's a very ill-defined term oftentimes, but it's like, spend— try to spend your time around happy people. That's it. I mean, it sounds so dumb and obvious, but it's like, it took me a while to figure this out. It's like the most reliable way to make yourself happier more upbeat is to spend time around default upbeat people, right? It's like, it works all the time. And similarly, it's like, if you don't want to complain, don't like spend time around people who don't really complain, right? If you want to be around people, if you want to make a lot of money, sure, you can spend time around people who make a lot of money, but those are often not the same people. And For me, when I'm booking these trips every year, I'm blocking out time to be with those types of people because my defaults historically are like hypervigilant, super focused, obsessed with detail. I generally, I would say, like a lot of humans don't love the overwhelming uncertainty of the world. So I like to exert control on something to feel like I have a toehold. And if I can't find anything else, it's probably going to be investing, making money, who knows, right? For lack of a better option. And so blocking out that time where it's like, it's the relationship, stupid. If you want to have a low-conflict life, spend time around low-conflict people.

Have you, um, because of your job, and I mean, we experienced this, but to a minor, uh, a bit, but because of your job, you're able to meet like, you have the best fame, which is you're still famous mainstream, but the famous people, the cool people, the experts like you, uh, they, they love you, which is really neat. Who would you put in like the top 3 of like your best buddies that are from your podcast?

Ooh, good question. Uh, well, I mean, just because it's top of mind, uh, Alan Lee, honestly, we've become super close and that is hard for me as an adult. I've also been very— I've always been very guarded and slow to trust. So even when I was in college, I didn't make a lot of friends. I mean, I was very hesitant. So the fact that we gelled so well and have become really close is just awesome because I, if you had asked me like, you think you're going to make any super close friends, right? If you had a parking lot of 20 spots of your absolute closest friends in the world, is anyone new going to potentially take one of those spots? I'd be like, absolutely no way.

So, uh, Alain was on the pod probably 6 months ago. So if you're listening to this, go back and listen to it.

Check it out.

He's the man.

He's awesome. Uh, so he would be one. Uh, I would say there are a lot of friends with whom I've just deepened relationships. And the podcast has been a pretext to just hang out, right? And like, in person, we'll have dinner the night before, hang out, do a podcast. But there's all of this social interaction around it. That's true for a lot of my friends. I mean, I will use the podcast just as a way to ensure that too busy friends actually remain friends.

Who's on your list?

Oh, there's so many. I mean, Josh Waitzkin would be one. If people don't know who he is, they should check him out. Absolute masterclass in just about every type of skill acquisition. I mean, just the people who come to mind, like someone like a Scott Belsky, maybe like, you know, having Chase Jarvis, Kevin Rose doing the Random Show on a regular basis, which is this format where we just catch up. I mean, kind of like we're catching up right now, talking about what's new, what's going on, what's on our minds, new technology, whatever that we've come across. So doing that regularly with Kevin. Is like a foundational way that we actually keep connected in real time, right? Because we can— I mean, I probably text with Kevin every other day, but it's not the same. It is not the same as like sitting in person or even on video and having a real conversation, long form. It's not the same. So I'd say I use the podcast for that. Trying to think of some other folks. I think Rick Rubin's first long-form podcast ever was on my podcast. We did it in his sauna at Shangri-La before it burned down in Malibu. And I had met him prior to that a bunch, but, you know, we became pretty close. We're not in touch all the time, but like, we're definitely friendly. People like Laird Hamilton, the surfer, and Gabby Reece. I'm just thinking of Malibu now. The list is really, really long. It's like if you look at the people who I initially met during the launch of The 4-Hour Workweek, I try and— I mean, I'm borrowing from Naval Ravikant here, but it's like if you're not going to work with someone, I think he says for a lifetime, don't work with them for 5 minutes or something like that. And Naval, I would trust to actually stick to that. I think mine is a little softer around the edges, but it's like if you can't see yourself spending real time with someone for 5 years, it doesn't have to be personal, but like professional, personal, or combination, like don't spend 5 hours with that person or 5 weeks with that person. And there are going to be exceptions, of course, that you have to make just to make life work. But I really try to, I really try to select my guests that way when possible.

You also, one of the things you just said about like you do the podcast, but you get dinner the night before, you hang out, maybe you work out together, you do go for a hike, whatever, those types of things. One of the great, I think, hacks, uh, is you had this term lifestyle design, but there's sort of like lifestyle sampling. Because when you go hang out with somebody, you go into their world for a little bit.

Yeah, totally.

You get to see like, you know, what are they thinking about all the time? What do they do? How do they interact with their family? Like, how do they— what is their day-to-day? Because I think from the outside, it's pretty easy to see what somebody's accomplished after like a 10-year arc or like what they have. Versus like how they live. And I think how they live is much more informative to picking up, like, you know, you're sampling at Costco, like, ooh, I like that actually. I wouldn't have ever really thought of it. I couldn't have really experienced it, but once I saw it, I couldn't really unsee it. And so I think like figuring out how to sample from other people does a lot for that, like imagination. It does a lot for you figuring out what you really want or, or a contrast. It's like, oh my God. I thought that what this guy's done is so respectable and admirable, but I would not want to live this day. This is his day. He lives this 300 days a year. I would not want this day for 3 days. Uh, but he does. Sure. Great for him. But I now know with absolute clarity, it's not an intellectual exercise. Like I felt it. Um, I know it viscerally now that that's not what I want. Yeah. Yeah.

The, the sampling and window in is incredibly helpful also for Deciding who you actually want to model, also who you might want to imitate, because it's very easy to look at such and such. And I know some amazing, awesome, say, hedge fund managers, but there are also a lot of very, very wealthy, miserable cunts out there. And, you know, like one guy carries divorce papers in like his briefcase around just in case.

And it's like, wait, what?

Yeah, incredible. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, okay, you could look at the—

what a douche.

Yeah, I know. But you could look at the scoreboard, right, if you just read the profile on the Midas List or whatever, and you'd be like, oh my God, I want to— I want to get that guy's playbook. I want to imitate it. But there might be side effects to that playbook, right? Like, sure, maybe the guy's a douche out of the box, but it could be also that the behaviors and the habits and the way he or she has built their company and managed their people also directly contributes, like, all of the family strife and multiple divorces and disasters, right? It could be that they're actually— there's a causal link, not just a correlation. So for that reason, I mean, I really do try to spend time getting into the personal with a lot of my guests. And I spend a lot of time with people who have cross-functional ability professionally and personally. So when, when— so people, for instance, like I mentioned Laird and Gabby, like amazing parents, really tight family. And I, I really like their dynamic as a couple and their parenting style. I've seen it. I've, I mean, I've seen a lot of it. Uh, Kelly Starrett and his wife Juliette Starrett, who's like a powerhouse behind the scenes with everything, the way that they've raised their kids, who I've known since they're really small now, and they've turned out like they're in college, and it's like, okay, they've shipped a fully awesome human and they have a very tight relationship with them. That is not the standard, at least in the United States, from what I've seen. And for that reason, it's like, okay, we might as well take whatever their professional accomplishments are. And I mean, I, I, if they had 10, 20 times as much money, it would not change. It would not necessarily increase the amount that I want to emulate them.

Sean and I reference this all the time. We're like, whose life do we admire? Like all facets of it as a whole. My answer was Laird. Did you have an answer, Sean?

Jesse Itzler.

Yeah. Jesse Itzler would also be— yeah, yeah, yeah.

I hate to say a name because it's like, I'm not trying— I don't know the guy that way, you know, and I'm not trying to like— he's my friend. I'm not trying to make him a god. But like, but if I think about blueprints, he has this, you know, he has this approach to like just adventure that I didn't have in my game. So you see it and you're like, oh wow, this guy's really got just more unforgettable days. And so I have this, like, this is cheesy, but I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to debut this. I'm going to take this out of the closet. All right, Sam, this is how I've been living my year. Okay, Sam, you're not a, you're not a real sports guy. You're like, uh, skateboarding and like, just like only lifting weights. Like, but in, in real sports where people play games and there's, you know, like the guys who, who, who are famous that we all admire. Uh, there's these stat— there's these statistical clubs. So like in, uh, in baseball, there's the 30/30 club, which is like you hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases. Two things that usually don't go together, power and speed. And this year, like, I haven't even cared about baseball for, you know, 10 years, but Shohei Ohtani, I'm like, oh, this Japanese guy hit 50— he hit the 50/50 club, first guy ever. Oh, and he's actually a pitcher too, like Babe Ruth. I gotta—

what?

Who is this guy? I, I must know. Who has put this, like, on these things that each individually are great, but it's like ambidextrously great, right? He could do it with both hands type of thing. And so in basketball, there's the 50-40-90 club. It's like, who's truly an elite shooter? You can measure it statistically. And so I created the 20-20-20 club for myself, and it was basically—

hold on, you're going to make fun of me for exercising, but you can have your own 20-20 club that you've written down? Come on. These are of similar levels of nerdiness.

Of course, if you spot it, you got it, baby. So my 20/20/20 plan here is it's lose 20 pounds. That's the fitness side of where I'm trying to be greater than I was last year. There's 20, which is like a business term, is to add $20 million of equity to the, to me and Ben's like small boy portfolio. And then there's 20 off-script days. And this is what I really stole from Jesse and got me like excited about doing this, which was basically just, I love my routine. I love my normal day. But it's like you said, like what any extreme strength carries with it, an extreme weakness. I can just live a routine life and all my days blend together and I just do the same shit. I really have low adventure because I'm so, I'm so comfortable and so, so pleased with my, so content with my day to day. So creating these like 20 off-script days where I'm like, no, I'm going to throw away the routine and I'm going to plan out 20 off-script days this year. And I've been doing it and I'm like, This has led to a different, like, I don't know, level of intentionality of how to live life that's been good for me this year. But I felt so cheesy about it. I didn't tell anyone.

That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

How do you have an unscripted day? What does that look like?

It's off of my normal script. You know, it's, it's, so you know what I mean? It's like, I have a script. I wake up, I go work out, I do this, I do that. And I like that day that I've architected. Yeah, but I need some serendipity. I need some forced adventure. And so, but it's not just going to happen by default. By default, I won't do it. So I have to like block out the day, be like, oh, that day on the calendar, it's blue. I know what a blue day is. Blue day is I got to do something I totally wasn't going to do. I totally never do.

So what's an example of, so that's every 2 weeks basically, or something like that.

Roughly every 2 weeks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Give me, what was your last 3?

Okay. So my last 3. The last one was on Friday. I, I hired a professional basketball trainer to take me through a workout that he puts pro basketball players through. So I woke up and I cleared the calendar. This is why I missed the podcast, by the way. I cleared the calendar. I woke up at 6 AM and I went and trained for 3 hours.

Sam's like, you said you were sick.

Yeah, like I was late, uh, because I was doing this and I lost track of time because I was so like engrossed in it. You know what I mean? Another one, I again cleared the whole calendar and I just read all my favorite fiction books as a kid. So I read two, two Harry Potter books basically in a two-day span to totally just let myself indulge in something that's fun. That's kind of like nostalgic. I would never have the time to go do this, but oh my God, I had, I had such a blast doing it. Another one, I tried to make a song. I've never made a song before. I was like, today I shall try to make a song. And in some ways inspired by Tim, when we were hanging out, you said something like, I was like, so what'd you do today? Like, what's a day in the life? And you had told me you had, I think you had been painting or like archery or something like that. Some like totally random fun pursuit. But the way you said it in like classic Tim Ferriss fashion where it's not just like, yeah, I just did this because I liked it. It was like, well, if you think about it sort of systematically here, and he was basically like, I have like a creativity gym. It's like a place I go for an hour or 45 minutes and I get creative reps. And it just helps me be more creative. And I thought, well, that kind of makes sense. I kind of like that. I like that justification. You know, I'm good with that. And so I started doing a creative gym. So Tim, this year I picked a, you know, a misogi. Jesse Itzel came on here and talked about the concept of misogi, a challenge that sort of defines the year. And I should have done it in something that was practical. I think when I sat down with the pen and paper, I was like, cool, this is definitely going to be something about getting in shape, or it's going to be something about making money. It's just going to be something about growing the podcast. It's going to be something like that. And then I just decided, and then somehow 30 minutes later I was like, I'm going to learn to play the piano. And suddenly I'm going to piano lessons.

I think that's going to be so much better for you.

Well, it already is. I mean, I'm 6 months in now, but I've been going to these lessons. I go to my teacher, I walk in with my Beginner's 1A book. I'm like giving Brandon like, you know, a fist punch, fist pound on the way in. Like, you know, everyone else in the room is 7 years old. You know, there's other parents there, but they're with their kids and they're like, where's your kid? And I'm like, no, no, I'm the kid here. And I just started taking this philosophy, you know, more and more seriously. My trainer says this great thing. He goes, kids, dogs, and dead people. And I was like, what does that mean? He goes, that's who you want to, like, spend your time with. He's like, dogs have it figured out, dude. Dogs, you know, dogs are unconditional lovers. They're, you know, they're here for play. They're loyal. There's so much you can learn from a dog. Kids, you know, like our kids, my kids come in and interrupt our workouts all the time, and they want to play obstacle course. They want to play this, they want to play that. And like, and we actually integrate it into our workout. But because my trainer wants to spend more time with kids. And the last one is dead people, which is like, you know, the wise people who've written books over time. Like, how do you spend more time with the timeless versus the timely? And so, you know, it's easy to get caught up in the news versus, you know, go read Seneca or something like that. So, you know, those have been a little, I don't know, parts of my compass of like, where do I put my focus? Where do I put my attention?

Yeah, yeah, totally. I have just a quick sidebar story that's similar to your piano story where they're like, where's your kid? So I have, as you alluded to, been taking archery super seriously. I mean, it's fun, it's definitely not practical, and I also like trying to figure out a system for training and all of these things, right? So they're not mutually exclusive, and I just love archery, and I've had the the opportunity to train with some amazing folks like Jake Kaminsky, 2-time silver medalist. And I've trained with a number of kind of legendary folks in short stints, right? So I flew to California and trained with one such person, and he invited me to his house. He's like, come train at my house. All right, so I show up at the house, and every single person shooting on the line is somewhere between I would say 6 and 12, right? Every single one Asian, right? Because a lot of the Asian countries, especially South Korea, just dominate everyone, uh, historically. There are just many, many standard deviations beyond anyone else. It's, it's pretty phenomenal. Uh, South Korea on a million levels is an interesting case study, kind of like Singapore anyway. And at one point I'm doing my thing like off to the side because I'm still very remedial. I'm like the short school bus version. And these kids are just slaying. They're all training to compete and stuff. And at one point, the coach pulls me over and he's like, join the circle, join the circle. I'm like, okay. And so he pulls all the kids together and he's giving them this motivational speech, but it's a very, like, tough love East Asian motivational speech. Anyone who's listening who has, like, first generation parents or parents who were born in, like, Korea, Japan, China will know what I'm talking about. And he's giving this sort of tough motivational speech. And then he turns to me and he goes, He goes, this is Tim. He is an old man, very old man, but he is taking this very seriously and training hard. And I was like, oh, I see the case study old guy. And I was like, I'm good with it. I'm totally good with it. And I find that freeing though, right? Because it's like I'm not competing against these kids. These kids are going to grow up to be far better than I am. And so that kind of I need to do this to be the best is something you just can't even justify as a delusion or an obsession. Do you know what I mean? So you have to just figure out how to enjoy it for what you're able to do.

Dude, I still haven't left like the Uncle Rico phase where I'm like, you know, I was pretty fat. I could still— I might be able to make the Olympic team in the bobsled. Like, I still like, you know, like, am I— like, it's— I'm not old. I'm getting to the point now where I'm about phased out of that, where it's like, dude, you're past your prime. Not a chance. But I still am like, I could— I think I could probably do that, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And it makes exercise not fun sometimes because it is like— because you are always so serious. I need to. But in about 2 years it's going to be like well past my prime. It's like you don't have a chance. But I do find it hard. And you, you did something funny. One of the first times we hung out, I asked you— it's very similar to what Sean just said about how you had a very specific reason about something. I said, you know, that's a cool dog leash. And you're like, oh, this dog leash? You see this dog leash? It's made of horsehair and it's perfect because it doesn't have any allergens. There's like a— you had a very specific reason for like something like relatively small. And I was like, that's exhausting. Have you had to tell yourself sometimes like, I need to be— it's hard. The reason you are where you are is because you are so precise and so exact, which I don't think a lot of people know this. Like I've worked with you and I've quoted you on like in The Hustle before, and I think I messed up in a pasta-free and you got on me and you're like, no, I said it this way. And I was like, you're totally right. And you are, this is why you are so who you are is because you are so precise. And also that can wear you out sometimes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It can be exhausting. I mean, I have, I think, a certain unusual endurance for that type of thing. And I mean, I'll read legal documents that 3 or 4 lawyers have combed over and like within 30 seconds I'll spot stuff. It's just I have an eye for that, which is a blessing and a curse, right? It will go— like if I walk into a room and something— I remember this is going to be— this isn't really selling it, but I remember at one point did this renovation in a bathroom and I walked in and my girlfriend at the time loved how everything turned out. And I walked in and I was like, mirror's off center. And she's like, what are you talking about? Like, how? You can't even tell that. It's up to stand like 15 feet away. And I was like, no, it's an eighth of an inch too far to the left. And then she— we measured it and it was an eighth of an inch too far to the left. But it's like, so the downside is that kind of stuff can drive you crazy and exhaust you. You also caught me with the dog training. That would have been right in my, like, obsessive period of trying to figure out dog training with my first, first dog as an adult. So yeah, I would have had a reason for everything. And, and what might be unexpected for folks is like, I actually, as a kid, and certainly with my friends, if I just had a gathering of friends, 5 days ago, like a couple of my oldest friends. Like, I'm a goofy motherfucker, but it doesn't come out that much. And I subconsciously or consciously don't let it come out a whole lot. And when I've asked, for instance, something I've done with friends in the past is we don't do a whole lot of New Year's resolutions and stuff like that, but occasionally for New Year's resolutions and also if there's a word to focus on for the year, we'll be like, okay, we get to assign each other those things.

Right?

Like, I'll give you a New Year's resolution, you give me one. You give me a word to focus on, I'll give you one. And two, one of my friends was just like, goofy, that's your word for the next year. He's like, I see that side of you. Nobody really sees that side of you. He's like, for you, for not just other people, but especially for you, you need to do more of that. And so I have really tried to block out time, especially weeks with friends or a long weekend with friends. That's one of the first things I do every year is I block that out. I reserve something, I pay for it, and I'm just like, you guys just have to show up. And it's a sunk cost. It's the right kind of sunk cost, right? Uh, so I do think about this. And yes, the precision and the anal attentiveness and all that can be exhausting.

You know, at least what I like about you is you don't do the Elon Musk thing where he's like, you don't want to be me, it's painful being me, right? He like almost like martyrs it up where he's like, You know, yeah, he like looks off into the distance and pauses dramatically and then just sort of, you know, really hams it up about that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A more balanced thing is like, well, it really serves me in this way.

Yeah.

And it's not fully true. I also do these other things and I'm working on that. It's like a, I don't know, just a much more human way to deal with it.

Um, yeah, yeah.

It's a useful tool. I mean, it's like a really sharp knife, but imagine if you had a really sharp knife that was all blade, no handle, right? It's like if you squeeze that too tightly, you're gonna hurt yourself. And I feel like that's true with a lot of superpowers. Like when you find somebody who seems to have a strong power, whether that's nature, nurture, or some combination, the biggest weaknesses or the biggest curses are typically sitting right next to it, or just the other side of the same coin. They're typically very, very closely related.

What do you think was your superpower? Because you— for anyone listening, I assume you're definitely still a big deal for the 20-somethings. But when Sean and I were 20-somethings, you were the guy. You still are the guy. You inspired all of us to do this. And it sounds funny to say it because what you were doing now or then is so common now. But it was, it was so weird that when you wrote, you wrote some of these things that were like, oh, that's so obvious. You taught all of us how to do it. And you sort of coined a lot of terms. You invented a lot of the stuff. What do you think was your superpower to, if you had to pick one that allowed you to kind of be, I mean, you're, you, Tim Ferriss is like a noun that we, you're the Tim Ferriss of this. I mean, that allowed you to become that.

I think there are a few things. I mean, one, that comes to mind is, uh, I was born premature, had a lot of health issues as a kid. So when my mom put me into, say, kiddie wrestling, I couldn't thermoregulate. I would overheat. Uh, and that's still true to this day. So I started trying to experiment with different ways to train, different ways to compete. Didn't do that seriously until maybe like 12 or 13, but wrestling has weight cutting, so you sort of have an inbuilt experimentation at a certain point. And then I was like, oh, okay, well, how can I wake up more effectively? I need to figure out how to lose water weight. Okay. The things that you do to help with water loss are called diuretics. What are the risks of diuretics? Okay, let's figure out, is there anything over the counter that I as a high school student can get that acts as a potassium-sparing diuretic? Blah, blah, blah. By the way, guys, don't do that. Terrible for your body. But I, I think that that experimentation became a habit really early on. And then for, for instance, for The 4-Hour Workweek, I mean, I wrote and tossed a lot of that book multiple times. And the only way I was finally able to write it and feel good about it was to sit down and write it as if I was writing an email to two very specific friends. One friend who felt trapped in a job that he didn't like, which was like a finance job, and he was— had golden handcuffs, basically. I mean, at the time, it wasn't a lot of money for a recent grad. It was not bad. And he felt like he knew he was going down a path that he didn't want to travel, but he couldn't extricate himself. And then the other one was a friend who had started his own business and felt the same way. He's like, I've created this thing. I can't just quit like an employee. Now what? Now what do I do? And I sat down and basically wrote the book as if I'd had 2 glasses of wine and was emailing 2 friends, which meant like all the warts, all the worries, all the petty concerns and the weirdness that they would be familiar with. They would know all of that about me. I just put it out there. And I think that that contributed another, another piece. I think that contributed a lot, frankly, like the personal being the most universal. If you're writing and you try to sound smart, you're, you're almost I mean, I, I think it can be a huge handicap, like big possibility of dead on arrival is high for something like that. Um, so embracing your weird self I think can go a long way. And then the last piece is I'm— I am naturally very, very, very curious, and I do have that tolerance for monotony and repetition that a lot of folks have trouble with. Whether that's language learning, archery, or just in the early days before Oura, before Whoop, before any of this, like my patience with doing something like trying to find a first-generation continuous glucose monitor, which was in The 4-Hour Body, which came out 2010. So I probably started messing around in 2008, 2009. As far as I know, I may have been the first non-diabetic to use one of those. And then to deal with all the pain and frustration using this basically beeper side holster to like capture data, export the data, and comb through it. It was so manual, but for whatever reason, that kind of stuff doesn't bother me. So I was, I was able to run experiments I think other people would find torturous. And then I'll just add one more thing. And look, I'm guessing to the best of, of my ability, right? It's hard to say exactly why things turned out the way they turned out. The last one is I do think I'm pretty good at identifying trends and also identifying trends that are going to converge in interesting ways. I don't know why that's the case, but I do think that I'm pretty good at it. Being in Silicon Valley, or, uh, well, to my generation certainly, you're like relatively early, getting there in 2000 and staying through 2017 also allowed me to just have a very, very, very high density of of serendipity and seeing technology, even if you're not a venture capitalist or an angel investor, it's like if you live right there in the switch box, it's in the air, right? You just hear conversations, you bump into randos at cocktail parties or whatever. So you, if you're really paying attention and taking notes, you can sometimes figure things out. So I'd say those are a few that come to mind.

When you create content, or you blog, you write, you podcast, it seems like you make a, uh, you make a decision and that decision is about what you're interested in, but also kind of who would be interested in this is kind of baked into it. So for example, there's things you can do that might get more views on YouTube, but it might be views of people who you're not that interested in attracting, right? Like, um, whereas I've seen that for you, the people that probably you respect and I respect, they respect your work. And that you've gotten to this like wonderful outcome there of what I call like, sort of like, I don't, I want to call it like luxury content, but it's definitely like upmarket in a way, right? It's not, um, kind of just lowest common denominator content. Is that, were you intentional about that? Or like, I guess, how do you think about that? Because I don't think this is a bit of content nerdery, but like, you know, from one kind of creator to another, like, how do you, how do you balance those trade-offs or think about that, those, those opportunities, those options, those forks in the road of like, I'll give you an example. Uh, we just had Alex Hormozi on the podcast and I think he's doing a great job on YouTube, but there was a season where if you looked at his YouTube, like thumbnail history, his title history, it was like, if you're broke and do this, if you're totally stuck and like, you know, do this and every single title had, if you're broke, do this. And then he was like surprised that, you know, he was attracting a bunch of people who were broke to, you know, his content. Well, you kind of, that was the magnet you created. Um, whereas I think other people do it, do it. Slightly differently. He's made adjustments, by the way. He's— that's not his whole thing, but as just as an example.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so it has been super, super deliberate on my side, not to aim upscale, but never to deliberately dumb things down or pretend to be interested in things that I'm not interested in. Uh, I would say also one thing I left out of maybe that that prior list of factors is I took and still take, but especially during the, let's just call it kind of 1998, even prior to that, but especially like 1998 to the publication of the first book, I took writing incredibly seriously. Incredibly, incredibly, incredibly seriously. And I don't think that is a skill that is going to go out of style, even with AI. I really feel like, and part of that is the practice of writing makes you a cleaner thinker, a crisper thinker, a more capable thinker, even if you never share what you're writing.

What does taking it seriously look like on a daily basis?

Well, taking it seriously for me looked like at the time, you know, I was in school and I took the hardest writing classes I could find and took one class by John McPhee, who's won a Pulitzer Prize and is just this legend in nonfiction writing. And that was an ass-kicking class. Taker of a class. And just to make it really concrete what can happen, I was shocked by this because I didn't expect it.

This was as a kid, a college kid?

This was in college, yeah. This was my senior, I guess it was my senior year in college. And the class consisted of like 12 students. You had to apply. It was hard to get into. And then there was a 3-hour seminar a week where he would talk about, John McPhee would talk about structure. He's very well known for how he structures different pieces of writing. And then you'd have a writing assignment, and then he would do a one-on-one with you to review your writing assignment, which let's just say it's like a 3 to 10 page piece. And he would always hand edit those pieces and give them back to you beforehand. And you might have, let's just say, 3 pages of typed out writing. So, right, printed out writing. And you'd get it back and his red ink would be, it would seem like it's the same amount of ink as your black ink. And most of it was like, this word makes no sense. You have no idea what this means. This is pea soup, which means just like word salad. He's like, this is redundant. And he could make the piece 50% shorter without losing anything. And as I got trained to be more concise and just have a higher kind of density of meaning without the fluff, my grades in all my other classes went up, even though that class took a ton of time. Which is wild. And then taking it seriously otherwise means that I'm reading books on writing. So anything I can get ahold of, like On Writing by Stephen King.

It's my favorite.

Which is not even my genre, right? Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, also not my genre. These are both mostly focused on fiction. Books on screenwriting. I'd read screenwriting to try to understand story arc. By the way, you can apply that to nonfiction. Uh, now you can get all sorts of other books. Draft Number Four by John McPhee, which is based on the class that he taught at Princeton for ages and talks a lot about structure. Uh, I think it's On Writing Well or something like that. It's by William Zinssner. But I just devoured all these books and kept my notes. I still have a three-ring binder with my notes from John McPhee's class from college. I still have all of my notes. And also paying people to review your stuff, or asking people to review your stuff. So even before I had published anything, when I would write something, uh, if you have friends who are in law school or went to law school, even if they don't practice law, great proofreaders. Because what are they paid to find? Anything that's ambiguous, anything that's redundant. If they're accustomed to doing contract review, like lawyers or people who are trained to be lawyers, great at proofreading.

Is this Was it only nonfiction stuff that you were referring to?

I was exclusively nonfiction.

So what does that mean? Like advice? I mean, you're only 21. Were you giving advice or was it just like—

No, no, it could be not necessarily advice. Actually, most of it would not be advice. Most of it would be something like, for instance, a writing assignment might be really broad. So he would say there's a statue in this courtyard a mile from here. Write 3, write 3 pages, and it has to have as a theme that sculpture. And so the students in the class would come at it from every possible angle. Like, you could, you could take it anywhere you want. You could, it could be like the grandson of the person who made it, and you tell the story of the grandson and the, you know, the, the motherland. Or yeah, it could be the aesthetics, anything. So he would deliberately keep it pretty broad, or he would say, have an assignment that's like Interview someone, and I'm making this up because I remember how I executed on it, but he'd be like, go interview someone you would normally never have a reason to talk to. I was like, okay, so like find somebody who's like sweeping the floors and like interview them for an hour or two and write your entire piece on that person. Again, keeping it pretty broad so you'd get a lot of different types of pieces. And so I would have something like that. That you could get proofed. And then when I graduated, I was still practicing writing, but I didn't have a class, right? So I would try to write pieces for, at the time, you know, like Black Belt Magazine or Maxim Magazine. Even as a student, just for fun, I was trying to get stuff published in big magazines. Didn't always succeed, but occasionally got something in. Fortunately now, I mean, you can find the curricula of so many good classes online from so many amazing universities and teachers. It's like, just get a couple of friends and go through it together and then proofread each other's stuff, critique each other's stuff. I mean, it's like you can do that now. It takes some planning, but you could certainly do it. Uh, and then to come back to your question, Sean, uh, I figured out pretty early on, and I'm not sure when I first read it, but reading Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans— I mean, my philosophy was always pretty tightly aligned with that because when I lost— when I launched my sports nutrition company way back in the day, right, the first real company that I launched— I had tried various things before that— when it finally worked is when I applied very tight constraints and I said, okay, I'm not going after X market, which is huge. I'm not going after Y market like sports performance, which is too still too big and too expensive for me to reach with paid marketing, for instance. I mean, this is before effectively all social media. I was like, okay, I'm gonna focus on certain power sports like powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting. I'm gonna focus on boxing, but particularly MMA, which was very early days. I mean, to give you an idea, like, it was affordable for a startup to sponsor the UFC and be on pay-per-view, right? It was early, early days. and I'm just going to go after these very small segments with the idea that, and Matt Cutts at the time of Google had a great presentation on this. I think he called it Katamari, which was a video game reference. But basically you start with something, he was talking about it in the context of a blog. You start out very, very narrow. And then over time, as you build an audience, you can broaden, you can broaden, and this, you're sort of rolling a ball that collects more and more until you have a lot of latitude to write about or do kind of whatever you want, which is fortunately where I feel I am now, more or less, right? But in the beginning, it was very tightly constrained. And I suppose if you're honest with yourself and you're your weird self, the stuff I already talked about, and if the personal is the most universal and you're kind of scratching your own itch, because The 4-Hour Workweek was the book I couldn't find for myself, right? You would go to the bookstore, and either it was like How to Run a Fortune 500 Company by Jack Welch, or it was like The Minimalist's Guide to Convincing Yourself That Money Doesn't Matter. And it was like, okay, well, I'm not gonna like recycle my lint and like do all— make my own sheets and do all this stuff. I'm not, I'm not that person, right? I don't want to be that person with super extreme frugality and sort of, uh, living a purely ascetic lifestyle. But I also have no desire to be Jack Welch. It's like, well, where's the stuff in between that I actually care about? And there were books on small, medium-sized businesses, but I couldn't find it. So when I scratched my own itch, did all these experimentations, and then wrote it— if you are sufficiently authentic to yourself— and that word is so overused— but if you, if you actually are truthful in how you represent yourself and all the quirks, it's not going to resonate with with, uh, you know, 8 billion people, at least not off the bat, right? Your early adopters are going to be pretty tightly confined. And I think there was an element of luck in so much as I was in Silicon Valley, I was tech-forward, I was focusing on new tools. Some of that, some of that ended up after the fact being deliberate with launch strategy for The 4-Hour Workweek, but they also happen to have of incredible capability of broadcasting, right? And that also contributed. But my feeling is, and when I put up a blog post or I put out a podcast episode, and my team has also been sort of indoctrinated into this just because I've been doing it for so long, is I don't want 100% of my audience to like any episode. I want 10% of my audience to love each episode or each blog post. I want a very, very strong reaction. Positive. Like, I don't fully subscribe to the P.T. Barnum, you know, just measure the value of PR by the inch kind of thing. I don't totally subscribe to that. And I assume over time, people are too busy to read all my stuff or listen to all my podcasts anyway. But it's like, over time, if 1 out of every 10 is like a holy fucking shit, this is for me, then if you have the endurance, part of that is scratching your own itch. I think it's very hard to sustain something over— the podcast is 10+ years now— if you're not scratching your own itch, that you end up just occupying a very unique type of mindshare. For your audience, and they are much more interesting, much more powerful as a result of that.

One thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, this is— sometimes we ask you about stuff like basically 4-Hour Workweek, which is—

I don't even know how many years old at this point, but like almost 20 years old.

Almost 20 years old.

That's crazy. Yeah.

And that's like what you were interested in nerding out about then, right? You were interested in nerding out about like, how do I free myself of how do I dissociate my time and my money? How do I automate things? How do I delegate things? How do I do fear setting so that I can live a rich life that I want to live right now? I'd be really intentional about it. I'm sure some of those things, just things you're still interested in, but some of them you're probably like, cool, that's a mountain I climbed 10 years ago and I'm less interested now. So I'm curious, what, what are, what are the things you're just most interested in right now? Like, what are you nerding out about? What are you obsessed with? What do you find yourself drawn to right now?

Yeah, we can go in all sorts of weird directions. So I'll also say, for people who might just be curious, like, I still use almost everything in The 4-Hour Workweek minus the tech tools, obviously. Like, Go to My PC is not something people are going to default to, but I still use all that stuff. But it's necessary, not sufficient, right? 4-Hour Body, same story. Like, a lot of that stuff is in the news now. Came out in 2010, right? Like exercise micro-snacks and glucose transporters on muscle cells. Like, that's in the 4-Hour Body. It's, it's making the news rounds now because there's more scientific, uh, literature to support it. But I still use all that stuff, like the kettlebell swing, slow carb diet, myotatic crunches, and all that stuff. I still use it all. Uh, so as I've progressed, I think I've identified more and more for me and maybe for other people missing pieces, right? In the game, right? Coyote is a good example of that, right? It's like, okay, yeah, sure. You can be the, the, this, the most incredible productivity machine of all time and still be miserable and make your friends and family miserable, right? It's actually more the rule than the exception. I mean, it's like there are a lot of people who fit that bill. And, uh, a lot of my exploration these days, I would say since 2015 when I started Saisei Foundation for funding science related to mental health therapeutics primarily, and a huge chunk of that was psychedelic-assisted therapies, starting with like the earliest dedicated centers— Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins, etc. But it's, it's, it's not just that. It's brain stimulation of different types. It's some longevity research, for instance, related to rapamycin and canines, all sorts of stuff. And I'd say these days I am spending a lot of time on the— a lot of it is science. And specifically what I have as a working hypothesis, not the only person, but I think I'm looking cross-disciplinary at a number of different areas and they, they seem to resonate with the same possible commonality, which I'll say, and that's looking at maladaptive or chronic inflammation as a shared underlying driver of a lot of problems that are solved with different tools. So for instance, the psychedelics are now topic du jour, heavily destigmatized. There's a lot of experimentation on state and national levels being done, some super fascinating stuff happening on the scientific front. And some people say, well, it's because of the content. Other people are like, nope, it's because it hits the serotonin type 2A receptors for certain types of psychedelics, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, there are a lot of incentives involved. Like, some people want to strip it out because it makes for an easier business model if people aren't hallucinating. But it turns out that a lot of these compounds have profound very, very strong and in some cases durable anti-inflammatory effects. Okay, so let's put that aside for now. But I do think some of the anti-inflammatory effects of psychedelics could account for a lot of what we see that is now often explained by other means. For instance, if you give people with depression just straight-up anti-inflammatories— and, and you can find this on PubMed pretty easily, uh, frequently you will see an antidepressant effect or reported improvements. So what's going on there, right? If you look at long COVID, you look at Lyme disease, if you look at Alzheimer's, if you look at certain neurodegenerative diseases— so Alzheimer's often referred to as type 3 diabetes, but, uh, there are elevated levels of certain inflammatory cytokines— it— the list goes on and on and on. So I'm, I've been doing a real deep dive on different means of safe anti-inflammatory approaches to address chronic conditions, right? So that could be, for instance, Sam, you already mentioned it, but something like cold plunges. I do think there is a place for that. I am looking really closely. There's a lot of bullshit floating around about this, but I'm going to interview who I consider to be the most credible scientist. In this domain shortly. But vagus nerve stimulators— there's a lot of charlatan action in this particular subject. There's a lot of questionable devices being sold. But I do think there's something very, very interesting with vagus nerve stimulation, which is actually two basic— basically transatlantic cables running down either side of your neck with like 100,000 fibers on each side. And some of the effects that you can see with respect to autoimmune disorders, by the way, some psychedelics seem to help with that. So what the hell's going on, right? Also inflammatory conditions of different types, depression, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So when you look at, say, the effects of psychedelics on, inflamed microglial cells in the brain, which they do a bunch of things, but they're kind of like the cleanup crew in the brain. Well, what happens if they're not functioning properly? Hmm, interesting. You know, I have a bunch of neurodegenerative disease in my family, and the more you look at this, the more it seems— and inflammation, I'll shut up in a second— it's kind of like, it's kind of like saying, oh, do you do business? Well, you're like, what kind of business? There are a million types of business. Same thing with inflammation. There are so many different markers, so many different inputs and outputs. That's currently what I'm going full retard on. Like, I've just been going into all the science, calling, calling scientists, emailing scientists, reading books, going through all the dense stuff. The other piece that I've, that maybe something people are immediately interested in. And again, I think some of the pathways are the same, is fasting. Yet again, I mean, I've paid a lot of attention to fasting, wrote about it in Tools of Titans, and kind of gave some of my protocols that I tend to follow. For many, many years, I was doing a 3-day water fast every quarter and a week-long fast every year. And then I lapsed and I stopped doing that. But, uh, Um, intermittent fasting is, I think, uh, a more easily complied with experiment that people can run. So looking at 16:8 fasting, and there's a lot of good science out, uh, out there about this, uh, related to this. And the person who popularized it is really Martin Birkin, who's a Swedish bodybuilder. He has a, he has a pretty abrasive personality, but he's quite smart.

And I love that guy's blog.

Yeah. And starting back in the day, Lean Gains, he had one of the largest cohorts of people who were experimenting along with him on these protocols, combining weight training with 16:8 fasting. 16:8 fasting just means 16 hours of fasting, 8 hours as a feeding window. So that could be like noon to 8 or 2 to 10. And so credit where credit's due, he, he, he had for a long time, maybe still, one of the most interesting cohorts and data sets of real-world results with this. And, uh, for instance, I mean, I have— I've done all sorts of extended fasting: 3 days, 7 days, 10 days. I don't recommend people just hop into that without proper medical supervision because you can get yourself into some trouble if you're doing that degree of, of pure fasting. But with the 16:8, as I mentioned, my family's got a bunch of health stuff going on at the and there's a lot of metabolic dysfunction in my family, just writ large across the board. And a lot of it seems genetically driven, right? So I can try almost any dietary intervention, I can try almost any exercise intervention, really doesn't seem to move the needle much. And I get, I get comprehensive, like the most comprehensive draws and urinalysis and everything you can imagine, probably every 3 months. And after doing not very long, 4 to 8 weeks of intermittent fasting, uh, my results on an oral glucose tolerance test, just to look at insulin sensitivity and so on, uh, remarkable. Like, the turnaround was just absolutely incredible. And, uh, if you do it right, then let's just say you follow something like what Martin does and you're, you're combining weight training properly, you can gain muscle mass and not lose muscle mass.

Let me ask Sean real quick. Have you— do you know who he's talking about with this guy Martin?

No, I've never heard of this person.

Oh my gosh. This is like, if you're listening to this and you're below the age of 30, you guys should go watch, learn about this person. So this was like right when Tim was in, like, coming up. Martin was a blogger. This was sort of like around like the pickup artist days with The Game and things like this. And he was a guy who taught you how to get ripped and look good. But it was sort of like he was everyone's father and he had this really famous— and it was called Lean Gains, lean-gains.com. By the way, Tim, the website's not even around, but he had a cult following and it was mostly centered around this one attitude. He had a very— he had a strong attitude and he had this famous blog post called Fuck Around Titus.

Yeah, fuck around Titus. Yeah.

And it was this his whole philosophy on life. Was most people have fuck around titus, which is you just go in the gym and you're gonna lift a little however you feel. You're gonna do this, maybe you'll eat a little food, you'll get a little protein, but like, you know, we're just gonna do everything average. And his whole thing was, nope, that's fuck around titus, and that's how you live a life of mediocrity. And if you want to get after it in the gym, you got to get rid of fuck around titus.

This guy's copy on his stuff is great. His Instagram bio, the high priest of intermittent fasting. And then on his, uh, website, his book, I think, is The Lean Gains Method: The Art of Getting Ripped— Research, Practice, perfected. And then he said, I'm Martin Birkin, the thinking man's musclehead. Not my words, but hey, it's true.

Yeah, he's not going to die of lack of confidence.

If anyone is reading this or listening to this and you want inspiration on like how to be a great creator, go back. It's been a long enough time that most people have no idea who this guy is. Just steal a lot of his stuff. I mean, he was, he was really good.

He was ahead of his time. He was also a massively prolific and thoughtful contributor on some of the very, very early message boards alongside Lyle McDonald and other folks. And because this is around the same time that I was getting online, you know, in college and then just post-college. So I was a lurker on a lot of these message boards. And he was very, very, very productive and always tried to cite research when possible, to his credit, and also got but very strong, right? I mean, he also demonstrated some real strength. So the point being, intermittent fasting for a lot of people, I think, is not just something that will be easier to adhere to. The first week is gonna suck. I'm just gonna tell you, for most people, you're gonna be grumpy, you're gonna be pissy. You're— don't send too many sensitive emails because you're definitely gonna regret it. And then after a week or so, your body adapts and you really start feeling very, very sharp. At least that's true for me. And it affected me in a way that the 3 days once a quarter or 1 week once a year, which I think has some benefit with respect to possible purging of precancerous cells and things like that, which is not pure speculation, there's something to it. Um, but the purposes in, in some senses are different, and I would say very much complementary. So the intermittent fasting Uh, Rhonda Patrick has had a number of scientists on her show, Found My Fitness, related to this that I think are, are worth checking out. It's easy to test. Uh, along with that, I've been geeking out on exogenous ketones yet again, so supplemental ketones to make the transition periods a little easier. So, so sometimes I'll just not eat for a day and then eat the next day. Or in the first week of that transition to boost cognitive performance, especially looking at supplemental ketones. There's one that's pretty easy to find called, I think it's just Ketone, Q-I-T-O-N-E, that you can add into your coffee in the morning and treat it as creamer. If you've never had this stuff before, I would recommend— most people are fine. I would say stay close to a bathroom. You may have a rapid onset of possible disaster pants and you'll want to be close to a bathroom. So don't have it for the first time as you're driving to the airport for an international flight. Don't do that.

Hey, have you ever heard this idea? There's like a funny, like, phrase where, um, it's like whatever the Silicon Valley nerds are doing on their weekends, that's going to be mainstream in 5 years.

100%.

You're who they were talking about. Uh, like, you know, like many of the things that you were writing about in 4-Hour Workweek is now, uh, common. Uh, and you were one of the guys, and you also said one of your skill sets was spotting trends. What do you think are the things now, what are the early things now that in 5 years are going to be quite common?

Yeah, I think, I think one is definitely in simple terms, electricity over pills. So different types of whether it's brain stimulation, something like accelerated TMS, people should look into accelerated TMS and take a look at that. The interview I did with Nolan Williams of Stanford, is a good starting point. But the results that a lot of patients are able to get from treatment-resistant depression, OCD, anxiety, etc., with 5 days of accelerated TMS rival a lot of the results that you would see with some of the best outcomes with psychedelics, which are already, in terms of effect size and so on, well beyond most conventional treatments.

That's a great phrase too, electricity over pills.

Yeah, and I think I'm borrowing because I think, I think one of the many things I've been reading, one is from a scientist named Kevin Tracey, and I think he said maybe it was microchips over medications. So I want to give credit where credit's due, but I have been looking at this very, very closely because psychedelics are not for everyone. Let's be very clear. I mean, that is nuclear power within the psychiatric and psychological realm. And people, there are people who should not take psychedelics. There are risks, very real risks. And it's, it's like 17th dimension neurosurgery. There's a lot going on, there's a lot to be learned, and there are certain conditions that typically at this point are exclusionary criteria. So if you have these conditions, you cannot be part of a clinical trial taking psychedelics: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc., etc., etc., right? Borderline personality disorder. There's a pretty long list. And it looks like these conditions might be treatable through different types of brain stimulation. And the safety profile is very, very, very good. Also separately, and it's— and this comes back to the anti-inflammation and all of these things tying together. It's not just anti-inflammation to be clear, but metabolic psychiatry, another thing that is very interrelated. Chris Palmer of Harvard is someone to look up on this front. Basically ketogenic diet. So ketogenic diet at that— people may know the Atkins diet, people may have heard of the ketogenic diet. It was used very effectively, I want to say, in the early 1900s with epileptic children for whom it was devised in, in this particular way with heavy cream. And similarly, when people would be having like a schizophrenic or psychotic break, sometimes hundreds of years ago, they would just be put in a room and fasted. And then lo and behold, after a few days, quote unquote, the demons would go away. Okay, well, what's actually happening there, right? So metabolic psychiatry along with brain stimulation, I think, can address a lot of segments of the population that will not be candidates for something like psychedelic-assisted therapy. Uh, and also, well, I could go on and on and on, but those are a few examples.

Do you have electric Electric over pills, metabolic psychiatry, anything else?

I'm very curious to continue looking at the vanguard of exogenous ketones because getting people to follow a ketogenic diet is very difficult. I have, I think, a lot of discipline in the dietary area, and I've done— I did cyclical ketogenic, a cyclical ketogenic diet for a very, very long time. That has gone by different names. I think Mauro Di Pasquale, if I'm saying his name correctly, I read that book in college. She calls it the anabolic diet. It requires you to be very, very meticulous, and I did that for years. But today, at this point in my life, I find the ketogenic diet, uh, not to get too technical, boring as fuck. It is so boring, and you end up feeling like a human cheesecloth. It's just, it's not that fun. You think it's going to be fun. You're like, oh, cheeseburgers every day, that sounds awesome. Like, yeah, talk to me on day 20. And And for that reason, and particularly when we're dealing with, let's say, older people, elderly patients who are not going to change their ways, is it possible to use supplemental ketones to get some of the benefits? And it seems like the answer is yes. There are case studies in the literature that you can find, but there are some open questions that I have, and this is beyond my pay grade, so I need to talk to someone. But I— if you have really elevated glucose levels and you also have very elevated say, levels of BHB, is that good for you long-term? Like, what are the implications of that long-term, if any, right? Because it sounds a lot like ketoacidosis in diabetics, which is not a desirable condition. So, uh, I, I do think there's a lot to uncover here. Unfortunately, some of the ketones, the higher quality monoesters and diesters, can be very, very expensive. Expensive, but, uh, and by expensive I mean like you're spending $40 a serving, right? Uh, so TBD. I hope more people, um, begin to look at this because the more demand there is, the more people experimenting, the cheaper these things will get with, with, uh, economies of scale. So that's, that's what I'll throw out there. I'm sure we could talk about tech stuff, uh, if you want to talk about that. Actually, I'll give you one more, and that is I am so long analog, like analog and social. I'm super long analog and social. I'm not sure we're gonna have like a full-blown Butlerian Jihad, uh, to refer to Dune, which is the, the rising up and destruction of the thinking machines. But I think there's going to be a lot of pushback and blowback and kind of retro I don't want to say retro, but I think there will be a heavy shift for a lot of people in the world towards human-made analog and/or social interaction. And you already see certain signs of that, right? A lot of younger people are just like, fuck this dating app nonsense and social media stuff. And they're going to running clubs for trying to find people to date.

Have you seen that, Sean? Do you know about that?

Yeah, we've talked about running clubs. One, one I just was reading about recently was book clubs. Book clubs are apparently like just on a tear right now and they're doing kind of like a twist on the book club, which is basically like they'll do silent reading. Everybody gets together. You don't talk. You're just reading together in the presence of each other. Or it'll be like wine and read or beers and read, right? Like just kind of like books as an excuse to go hang out in person together doing this.

Have you guys seen that, um, young kids kids, like the 20 and 19-year-old kids, are using the same cameras that you and I, we all used when we were 17. So you remember when you're like 17 and you use like a Canon digital camera and you make like a Facebook photo album on, uh, whatever? That's what kids are doing now. Like, yeah, like they don't want to use their phone, they want to use—

oh, like develop film, 30 pictures type of thing?

Well, they'll— yeah, no, they'll use like, remember the Canons? It has a much simpler LCD screen, and there's like, when you go out with your friends and you post like Friday, October 14th, 2014. That's like the title on Facebook of like your photo album. That's what kids are doing now. And I think that's just the very, very, very tip of the iceberg of this feeling of less connection or less digital.

Yeah. And isolation, loneliness, all this stuff. I mean, like the younger generations aren't stupid, right? And sometimes there are these sort of commentaries from The older wizened folk are like, oh, those kids don't know what they're doing to themselves. I'm like, oh, I think they have a pretty fucking good idea, probably more so than you do. And other examples would be huge game nights in, say, New York City and other cities, like huge, hundreds of people, right? Started with 2 or 3 people, and now it's at hundreds of people playing games simultaneously. So I find that an interesting thread to pull on. Do I know how to bet on that? No, I'm not in a rush.

Tim, you're— I feel this way oftentimes when I get done talking with you where I'm like, you are cooler than I remember. Basically just means like, like we don't know each other that well, but like I read about you and I listen to your podcast and then I actually hang out with you every once in a while and I'm like, that's why he is who he is.

you know, like, doesn't it feel like you just had a podcast guest from the future come in? Because he's, he's saying words. He's like, oh yeah, accelerated TMS. I don't even know what TMS is, let alone accelerated TMS. I'm writing down words like, I know the, I know enough to know that these are going to be a big deal in 5 years. I should probably start going, paying attention because he's done that 4 times already over the last 20 years. I should just, I should just pay attention to this, this alien from the future who just came in and started telling me things.

You know what it's sort of like? Have you guys ever met? So you watch professional athletes on TV and then you meet them him in real life. And like, I remember like meeting one in real life and he just like jumped to do his warm-up and his jump in the air was like, I was like, oh my God. Like, that's kind of how I feel like when I hang out with Tim where you're like, oh yeah, that's why he's a pro.

Thanks, guys.

It's, you know, you got to sacrifice some hair along the way.

That's—

you look great. Forget that. Thanks.

Thanks.

Thanks so much.

All right. That's it. That's the pod.

Thank you, Tim.