In this episode, my guest is Tim Ferriss — a five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, technology investor and host of the iconic podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. We discuss Tim’s process of exploration, experimentation and mastery — themes that have spanned his career that have placed him on the cutting-edge of many important fields. Tim explains what questions to ask when approaching any new endeavor in order to maximize success. He also explains how to incorporate structure and playfulness into skill and knowledge mastery, how to find and work with mentors, the key importance of location and networks in creating truly impactful things. We also discuss Tim’s philanthropic efforts to support research on psychedelics for the treatment of mental health challenges and we discuss his latest creative endeavors. This episode should be of interest to a wide range of listeners, as Tim’s mastery and wisdom spans athletic and mental pursuits, business, media, technology and the arts. What distinguishes Tim is his ability to thoughtfully deconstruct these processes in order to teach others how to do the same. 

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Tim Ferriss
Podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast
Books by Tim Ferriss: https://tim.blog/tim-ferriss-books
Blog: https://tim.blog 
TED talks: https://www.ted.com/speakers/tim_ferriss 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tferriss
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/timferriss

Resources
Peter Attia ‘Studying Studies’ series: https://peterattiamd.com/ns001
Peter Attia episode: https://tim.blog/2023/03/14/peter-attia-outlive 
The Slow-Carb Diet: https://tim.blog/2012/07/12/how-to-lose-100-pounds
How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days: https://tim.blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise
Seth Godin episode: https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin 
Suicide article: https://tim.blog/2015/05/06/how-to-commit-suicide
Healing After Childhood Abuse episode: https://tim.blog/2020/09/16/how-to-heal-trauma-transcript
Dog Training episode: https://tim.blog/2016/11/14/susan-garrett
Saisei Foundation: https://saiseifoundation.org 
The Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR): https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/research/the-project-on-psychedelics-law-and-regulation-poplar 
Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship: https://projects.journalism.berkeley.edu/bcsp
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS): https://maps.org 
Waking Up app: https://www.wakingup.com 
Cockpunch: https://cockpunch.com 

Books
Built to Move: https://a.co/d/0z5Q6pu
Why We Sleep: https://a.co/d/2Ff5QHH
The Art of Fiction: https://a.co/d/1SCNIzl
Bad Science: https://a.co/d/iv5SM24
How to Lie with Statistics: https://a.co/d/dhbEsUp
Brain Energy: https://a.co/d/bt8hTLU
Gold: https://a.co/d/1sWaF1i
Don't Shoot the Dog: https://a.co/d/d5zOjgH

Timestamps
00:00:00 Tim Ferriss
00:04:08 Sponsors: Maui Nui, LMNT, Levels
00:07:43 4-Hour Body & Development Mindset
00:15:22 Origins of Good Ideas 
00:20:06 Writing & Structured Thinking
00:27:58 Writing, Night Owls
00:33:06 Sponsor: AG1
00:34:21 Investigating Outliers; Social Media & Smartphones
00:40:37 Scientific Literacy, Randomized Clinical Trials 
00:45:09 Supplement & Experiment Fails; Cold Exposure & Hyperthermia
00:50:46 Slow Carb Diet & Adherence
01:03:35 Morning Protein Intake; Fasting
01:08:48 Sponsor: InsideTracker
01:09:53 Power of Place; Building Your Network & Volunteering
01:21:43 Developing Skills; Examining Motivation & Good Questions; Simplicity
01:33:32 Early Psychedelic Exploration, Depression
01:45:38 Psychedelic Research & Mental Health Funding
01:59:00 Saisei Foundation, Journalism Fellowship, Law & Education
02:08:22 Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), Psychedelics
02:13:28 Meditation, Transcendental Meditation, Nature 
02:18:50 Extended Nature Retreats & Integration Period; “Generative Drive”
02:28:05 Mentors
02:34:53 Mind & Attention Allocation, Social Media, Boredom
02:44:12 Cockpunch
03:00:23 Suicide & Depression, Sexual Abuse, Vulnerability 
03:14:22 Making Meaning from Suffering
03:19:32 Role Identity, Future
03:27:38 Parenthood, Animals & Training
03:32:21 Podcasting, Experimentation
03:36:52 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter

Disclaimer: https://hubermanlab.com/disclaimer

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Tim Ferriss is an author, a podcaster, an investor, and is known for having a near supernatural ability to predict the future, which has allowed him to obtain success in a huge number of different endeavors.

For instance, he is a five-time, number 1 New York Times bestselling author.

But perhaps equally or more important to that, he's also exceptionally good at teaching people how to write, the entire process of writing and marketing a book.

His books, The 4 Hour Chef and The 4 Hour Body and The 4 Hour Workweek, not only explain his own exploration of how to optimize and prioritize his time and learn particular skills, but he teaches you those skills as well.

He is an exceptional learner and an exceptional teacher.

And in a characteristic Tim Ferriss way, he explains the process in a way that you can apply it.

He lists out, for instance, the specific questions that you should ask when approaching any endeavor in order to get the information that you want and to make the process of learning and getting better at something and achieving great success in something that much more likely.

That ability that Tim has to identify the specific questions that 1 needs to ask and answer and the specific action steps to take in order to achieve success is really what I believe sets Tim apart from everyone else on the internet or on the bookshelf that's giving advice as to how to become good at something.

Tim Ferriss is also dedicated to various philanthropic efforts, the most recent of which is the donation of several millions of his own dollars to research on psychedelics for the treatment of otherwise intractable psychiatric challenges, such as major depression, suicidal depression, eating disorders, and addiction.

And he's also brought together other philanthropists, which has really galvanized the whole field of psychedelic research for the treatment of mental health, transforming it from what was recently kind of a fringe area of science to a mainstay that's actually funded not only by philanthropy, but by the National Institutes of Health.

So he's really transformed this entire scientific field into 1 that now is transforming the laws around psychedelics and is providing mental health treatment for people that would otherwise suffer.

Today's discussion was a particularly meaningful 1 because not only is Tim a pioneer in the world of podcasting, but it also marked the 9 year anniversary of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, Tim is known for being able to see around corners or predict the future.

He really does seem to be about 5, if not 10 years ahead of everybody else in thinking about tools for optimization in particular domains of life.

And so we were very fortunate that during today's discussion he shares with us his current creative endeavors and how he's thinking about and approaching those.

And he also breaks down for us the process of how to think about and prioritize one's schedule.

Not just on the order of the day, not just on the order of the week, but really thinking about one's life as a journey and how to organize and go about that journey.

So today's discussion will provide with you tremendous insight into who Tim Ferriss is and how that incredible mind of his works in order to do all the amazing things that he's done.

And of course, he teaches you how to do it.

He will tell you the exact questions that you should ask and that you should answer and how to step back and think about those questions and then prioritize so that you can decide how to best invest your time.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Tim Ferriss Show.

However, if you're not already subscribing to the Tim Ferriss Show, I highly recommend you do.

I still go back and listen to early episodes of the Tim Ferriss Show, and I'm a weekly listener to the new episodes.

We provide a link to the Tim Ferriss Show in the show note captions.

Also in the show note captions, you'll find links to Tim's many New York Times bestselling books and a link to his excellent weekly blog.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring 0 cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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And now for my discussion with Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss, I am nothing short of thrilled to have you here.

I've been reading your books, reading your blogs, listening to your podcasts for a very long time.

And in preparing for today, I was thinking, who does Tim remind me of?

Cause I knew you reminded me of somebody, but I didn't know who.

You remind me of the neurobiologist, Ramon y Cajal.

He won the Nobel prize in 1906 for essentially describing the structure of the nervous system.

He was the first along with another guy to define synapses, like this fundamental connection in the nervous system.

But The reason that you remind me of Cajal is that it's a well-known or not so secret secret in neuroscience that if you want to pick a really excellent project to work on, you simply go and look at what Cajal talked about or hypothesized, and then you work on that.

You know, he had this almost supernatural ability to look at fixed stain tissue of the nervous system, much of it is incredibly beautiful, by the way, and think about how it worked when it was alive.

And he's considered the greatest neurobiologist of all time, without question.

And it's really this feature of being able to like, see around corners or into the future that establishes that link for me.

It's absolute truth that if you look back to what you were doing 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the kinds of things you were doing, the kinds of questions you were asking, that translates to much of what people like myself and people in the fitness space, tech space, investor space, mindfulness space, psychedelic space, all these different arenas, what they're doing now.

So it's not hyperbole to say that you are the Ramon y Cajal of all those different spaces.

And podcasting, of course, is 1 of those.

So I owe you a great debt of gratitude and many others do as well.

So my first question for you is, What was your mindset around the time that you wrote for our body, for our work week, but in particular for our body, because the protocols in that book are so very useful.

They were at the time it was published, they still are now.

And so many of the things like ice baths, the discussion around brown fat thermogenesis, resistance training in its, you know, kind of basic form of just providing enough progressive overload to get an adaptation, not excessively long workouts, weight loss, slow carb diet, and on and on and on.

If you can think back to then, what were you foraging for?

What were you thinking about when you woke up in the morning thinking, oh, I'm going to go find all this stuff that at the time was really esoteric because it is all played out very well.

What I'm basically saying is if you want to know what's going to be happening hot and useful in 5 years, 10 years and onwards, just look at what Tim's doing at any moment.

you for the very generous comparison and intro.

And the four-hour body represented an opportunity for me to do a few things.

The first was to diversify my identity from outside of the realm of the, say, business category.

So it was a deliberate move since the success of the first book bought me permission to do something else that publishers would still want to gamble on.

I wanted to see if I could maybe like a Michael Lewis take my audience with me to other topics.

So that was a lateral move that was very deliberate from a career optionality standpoint.

And then I was doing I think what I've done for a very long time and what I enjoy doing, which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field.

If anyone says always, never, should, I pay attention and take note of that.

They may very well be right, but if anything is said in absolutes, I like to stress test.

And in the case of say physical performance or physical manipulation, tracking,

was a very interesting time because a number of different technologies were coming online meaning being adopted by small groups.

You had very early stages of say accelerometers as wearables.

You had a number of different innovations and means of tracking that had never been available before.

You had, for instance, and this took a bit of ferreting on my side, it wasn't immediately on the roadmap for the For Our Body, but continuous glucose monitors.

At the time, that was, I want to say, exclusively limited to type 1 diabetics or maybe type 2 diabetics, but largely type 1 diabetics.

And what captured my interest, and I can't recall how I came across it, but it was probably through the very earliest iterations of what later became the quantified self movement.

And I remember attending the very first gathering at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica, California.

people, 13 people to discuss quantifying health.

But the example of a professional race car driver, I can't remember the form factor, whether it was F1 or NASCAR or other, who was using this continual glucose monitor for paying attention to glucose levels while driving.

And I thought to myself, would that not be useful for healthy normals?

If this is being used by a high performer in this type of context, might it have other types of applications, which then led me to use the very early versions of Dexcom, which were really painful to implant.

And I wanted to see how I might be able to find a handful of different categories of things.

There's the new, like the genuinely new, like CGM at that point was genuinely new.

The very old that might have some room for scientific investigation.

And I would say when I say scientific, I don't necessarily mean randomized control trials at a university.

I do think as an end of 1, if you think about study design, and you can even blind, you could even placebo control and I knew people in the small subculture of quantified self who did this, you can I think approach things in a methodical way, where you can make a lot of progress in trying to determine causality or lack thereof?

Looking at very old things, looking at orphaned things.

So for instance, there are many examples in the world of doping, where you have say, balko back in the day, where famously Barry Bonds and others purportedly used things like the cream and the clear.

And these were based on anabolics that were sourced from Soviet literature or older literature from the 50s and 60s that might not be on the radar of say the anti-doping groups that would administer the testing.

So all of these different buckets were of interest to me and I begin where I usually do which is interviewing folks.

So I would interview 1 or 2 people in a given field and I might ask them any number of questions.

So 1 is what are the nerds doing on the weekends or at night?

It's like, all right, what are the really technical nerds doing at night or on the weekends after they've put in a really long work day or work week.

Another 1 is, and I'll create a flow for this, but what are rich people doing now that everyone or tens or hundreds of millions of people might be doing 10 years from now.

And an example of that would be, let's just say full-time assistant, virtual assistant AI.

So we've seen the needs and wants being addressed by different technology but it's an iteration of the same thing on some level.

In the case of say using chat GPT tied into Zapier for various functions.

And then where are people cobbling together awkward solutions.

So where are people piecing together awkward solutions and is there room for some type of innovation there?

These are a few of the questions that I would not only ask myself, but ask experts in different areas.

So, if I end up spending time, say, this was a few years prior to writing The 4-Hour Body.

I spent time at NASA Ames and was interacting with a number of scientists, some people who were working on all sorts of biological tests and looking at genomics and had a very frank discussion about where they thought if they had to push, right?

So I'll ask questions like, push a little bit into the realm of science fiction and speculation because I'm sure you can't support any type of projection like that with the literature, with scientific literature.

But what do you think some of the risks are of, say, publishing your genome?

Because at the time, a number of high profile folks had just made their full genomes available.

And they're like, well, I think in the near future it would be possible to reconstruct someone's face based on their genetic data.

And they're like high degree of confidence, like 0 to 100% how confident?

I'm like, okay, I should pay attention to that.

Because if you're making your data available, let's just say, and it's anonymized per se, you still might be identifiable.

It's like, okay, that raises some interesting questions.

Like, okay, well, then how might you get around that?

How might you put in safeguards so that you are the 1 and only keeper of your data, so to speak?

It brought up all sorts of targeted weaponry, bio weapons possibilities that I was interested in.

And then I would ask that person, who's clearly willing to step outside of the box of whatever he's working on day to day, who are 2 of your close friends or 2 thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to something along the lines of the following.

So the very beginnings are usually in some type of extreme case and I think the extremes and this goes for product design as well but the extremes inform the mean but not vice versa.

So you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases.

So race horses for instance, you'll often see things start with say race horses or people with wasting diseases for instance or any type of chronic or terminal illness who are willing to try some more experimental interventions, then let's just take 1 step further bodybuilding.

See a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding and high level athletes, then billionaires, then rich people, then the rest of us.

So my assumption is and was for the four-hour body that along the lines of William Gibson's quote, you know, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

So I'm never predicting the future, I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating that I think are going to bloom and end up spreading really, really widely.

And I assume the practitioners are going to be ahead of the papers.

So studying, say, the coaches whose jobs are on the line, who are getting paid based on athlete performance.

And assuming that a lot of that will eventually, if it holds up, make its way into say the peer reviewed exercise science papers, but it's going to have a lag time of 3 to 5 years.

Yeah, Science is often very slow to catch up.

You mentioned many things I have questions about.

You mentioned paying attention to the new, the very old or the orphaned.

And I just thought I'd tell you that when you sit down with a graduate student or a postdoc and they're trying to come up with a project, rarely do you say, you know, like, what do you want to work on?

And they fire back like a really interesting question.

Sometimes they do, but that's the rare person.

More often than not, you'll send them to the literature and they'll come back with like, okay, there's this new technique that we can use to answer a set of questions better than ever before, or there's a very old theory I want to revisit, or there's this theory that no 1 pays attention to.

In fact, we had 1 guest on here, Oded Rashavi, who is studying essentially inheritance of traits, transgenerational inheritance of traits.

It's a little bit, although different from Lamarckian evolution, but it's a lot like that in some ways.

And, you know, these orphan theories that everyone assumed were wrong and that there is a basis for them.

So I think there's real genius in that analysis.

It also struck me as you were listing off some of your process circa the writing of the four-hour body that I and many other people are probably curious about what the operations around all that looked like.

So are you, or were you at the time, like waking up in the morning going, okay, I'm going to take a walk and think about the new, the old and the orphaned, or I'm going to take a walk or sit in and share and think about like, what are the nerds doing right now?

Was that exploration a structured practice for you?

Or is this just something that was the consequence of being Tim Ferriss waking up in the morning and just like leaning into that?

I mean, there's a lot of mystique around you.

And we're not trying to pry, but- Pry away.

Is the establishment of structure for you, something that's the consequence of structure in the first place.

It's like, okay, now it's time to think, or do you just allow things to geyser up to the surface?

And I would say that in the case of the 4 hour body, it's a bit of an anomaly compared to my later books because I had recorded effectively every workout I'd done since age 16 as a competitive athlete.

I just, I had a lot of records and I kept copious notes on supplement use and everything imaginable.

So I have what you might call hypergraphia.

I just capture almost everything in writing.

And that was very useful because at various points in time, let's just say I looked at a photograph of myself from making this up, but 2004 and I think I would like to look and feel like that again.

Let me just replicate the preceding 3 to 6 months of workouts and look at my intake and my diet at the time.

And lo and behold, more or less, I could replicate the same type of look and feel and performance.

So I had a lot already logged that I thought was worth examining and putting under scrutiny, trying to replicate with other people.

I do think replication is really important.

And then when it came time to commit to writing the book, I thought about what types of mini books would be of great interest to me personally.

And That book, like many of my other books, was written in such a fashion that it could be a choose your own adventure book.

In fact, in many ways, it shouldn't be read linearly from page 1 to the end.

You get to pick and choose which chapters are of interest based on breath hold, vertical jump, endurance, hypertrophy, cold exposure for fat loss, whatever it might be.

And at the at the very outer bounds of self experimentation, at least in the Bay Area, it's a pretty small community.

So you're 1 or 2 lily pads from just about everyone.

And it's not accidental that I put myself in that environment in San Francisco specifically and more generally in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, because there's just a high surface area for luck to stick to because you have so many serendipitous encounters.

You have so many people focusing on different disciplines.

That I think was the fertilizer and the fertile ground for everything else was actually the choosing the where of writing physically being located in San Francisco.

And then when I'm structuring things, maybe I'll get into some of the nitty gritty, but I was using at the time and I still like to use a program called Scrivener, which is actually designed predominantly for screenwriting.

It's used for many things now, novels and so on.

It's expanded its reach quite a bit, but it allows you to gather research and all of your documents and drafts so that you can move them around in very novel ways so that you can view, say, a split pane of your research and what you're working on simultaneously without having to toggle between a lot of different windows.

And I was very promiscuous in my gathering of data.

So I would gather from say the web using a web clipper from Evernote which I was involved with as a company and basically without bias capture as much as possible put 3 asterisks next to anything that I thought I really might want to revisit after I had read something a second time, which I would always do, then I could control F to find just 3 asterisks because they don't occur much in normal writing.

Just like people, authors, writers will use TK, meaning find such and such a date.

Data needs to be inserted later, but I don't want to interrupt the flow of writing, let me put in TK because it doesn't really appear in natural English much.

In terms of structured thinking, the way I approached it was during that period of time in my life, it was interviews, tracking people down, conversations, emails, reading.

So ingestion, let's just say for the work day, then a break for training and, and actually using myself as the human guinea pig for various things that had surfaced that might be on the docket.

San Francisco is not famous for amazing gyms.

At the time I was training mostly at a climbing gym called Mission Cliffs.

They didn't have much, but they had barbells and they had kettlebells.

I also had in the walkway leading from the front door of the apartment I was renting, it was more of a house, the front door all the way to the first set of stairs, there were 30 kettlebells of various types.

And I was training for certification, so I wanted to put myself on some type of deadline with accountability for that type of training to get a better understanding of it.

I also had developed a friendship with Kelly Starrett, so San Francisco CrossFit, who I have tremendous amount of respect for.

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Tim Ferriss: How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future | Huberman Lab Podcast