Please enjoy this transcript of an episode in which I answer the most up-voted questions from subscribers to 5-Bullet Friday, the free newsletter I send out every week. Transcripts may contain a few typos—with some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it’s difficult to catch some minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode here or by selecting any of the options below.
DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.
WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO:
You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.
WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED:
No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.
Why hello, Warlocks and Druid Elf Princesses. If you know what that is, you get +1. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types in interviews where I tease out the habits, routines, etc. that you can use. This time around, I’m going to switch things up a little bit and answer a bunch of your questions. These have been updated and suggested and starred and so on. They come from subscribers to my 5-Bullet Friday newsletter. Every Friday, I send out a newsletter. It is five bullets of the coolest things that I have found or enjoyed that week. It’s free. It’s one of the most popular newsletters on the interwebs. You can check it out. It’s free and free and free.
Tim.blog/Friday. That’s it. Tim.blog/Friday. You get all sorts of exclusives like chapters on books that I’m working on and blobbity, blobbity, blah. You can check that out, but that’s where I got these questions.
Let’s just jump right into it and I’ll try to give a bunch of tactical specifics that people can use. All right. No. 1. This is from Bran Becket. Question: “I moved to a big city and know no one. How do you find great, like-minded people? How did you find some of your friends?” So there are a few different approaches here. I would suggest checking out a post I did, called “How to Build a World-Class Network in Record Time,” or something like that, which would seem appropriate to the question. But the first step that I took in Silicon Valley when I landed here with my shitty hand-me-down green minivan and nobody in my network, was to look for organizations to volunteer for that features speakers and so on or members who you would like to get to know. In Silicon Valley, I identified a few early on. TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs. At the time, the Silicon Valley Association of Start-Up Entrepreneurs.
What you realize very quickly is when you’re volunteering, the majority of your fellow volunteers do the absolute minimum required. Which means, for instance, if you notice that water jugs are empty for attendees and it’s not your job, so to speak, but you go out of your way to fill them up and so on, you can very quickly be the A+ student who gets noticed. Then over time, you’ll be offered more responsibility and within a matter of a few months, I went from lackey peon volunteer to helping to organize the speakers and the panels, which put me in contact with many people, including folks like the co-founder of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins, I think that’s his last name if I’m getting it right. Ed Byrd, who is referred to as Mr. Creatine, the founder of CLIF Bar, and Jack Canfield, among others, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, 100+ million copies sold.
He later then introduced me to my book agent and many other folks who made The 4-Hour Workweek a reality. That’s No. 1 – volunteer. No. 2 is going to conferences. Be very strategic and engage with moderators and ask a handful of questions. But I will let you just search “How to Build a World-Class Network,” and my last name and it will come right up. All right. No. 2. How am I going to say this? Let’s see. Wayne Tumaturoa. “Hi, Tim. The blog, books, podcast, and TV series. What are you most proud of and why?” I am most proud of if I had to be proud of anything, which I think is sometimes dangerous, but I would actually be proud of a blog post and a talk. They’re closely related. The blog post is some practical thoughts on suicide, which is the hardest thing I’ve chosen to write, certainly, and to hit publish on.
You can check it out at Tim.blog/suicide. It is perhaps not the most uplifting thing in the world, but I think it is extremely important as a pattern interrupt and has caught some people who were right at the precipice, where I have been myself. I similarly made the decision to get on the TED main stage and really just bludgeon people emotionally right at the beginning of my talk to discuss some very stigmatized and important topics such as depression, manic depression, suicide, etc. That can be found – sorry for all the URLs, but I want to get through as many questions as possible – tim.blog/TED if you want to check it out. It’s been watched more than 3 million times already and it just came out a few months ago.
Next question: Josh M.R. Allen. And just to revert back to the question I just answered. It’s easy to talk about the highlights. It’s harder to talk about the lowlights.
I think that is critically important so that we don’t put the people we idolize, whether they be on magazine covers or at the top of Hacker News or whatever it might be, on a pedestal that leads us to judge ourselves too harshly against some type of flawless, Platonic ideal which does not exist in real life. There you have it. Josh M.R. Allen, “How do you recognize and change a personal, irrational rationale? In other words, how do you tell if you’re just being crazy?” Well, this is timely because today I was trying to make a very nuanced, or at least from my perspective, complex investment decision. I called a friend of mine who is a very good BS-detector and also, as he might put it himself, doesn’t immediately go to math optimization. He wants to talk about the human element and underscore some of the maybe common sense aspects of a decision.
Whether that be sort of emotional resonance or regret or anxiety and so on, not just the finetuning of some arithmetic. In this case, for investment. He gave me his argument. The next thing he said was very striking, I thought. He works with some of the best investors in the world. He said, “Okay, now that you’ve heard my suggestion, what assumptions of mine might be false?” So he jumped right on his own assumptions and started putting them under a microscope. “What assumptions of mine might be false?” You could take this tack with friends. For instance, when I spend time with, whether it’s Naval Ravikant or Kevin Rose, many of my friends, I will ask them, after giving them an argument of some type, “Hey, man. If you had to pick that apart or challenge it, how would you?” Because I don’t want to go through life with fragile collected illusions that are going to mislead me and cause me harm.
If you had to pick this apart, how would you? If you want to practice that yourself, one thing you might look up is “steel-manning,” which is an alternate to “straw-manning” an argument, where, in fact – and Charles Darwin was actually an expert at this. He did this in his writing, where you create the strongest version of your opponent’s argument or counterargument and present it so that you can then effectively present your own argument. So look up “steel-manning.” Then there are books that can help you with avoiding cognitive biases. Think twice would be one. There are other books, for instance, Seeking Wisdom, which is about Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, and others, including Darwin.
Poor Charlie’s Almanac or reading some of the commencement speeches of Charlie Munger, who is the right-hand man and investing partner of Warren Buffett, famed for his mental models, which are very much rudimentary in the sense that many of us have accumulated a toolkit as early back as high school, but not applied it regularly in what we perceive as the messiness of real life. So there you have it. Those are a few options. You can, at the very least, look up “cognitive biases” on Wikipedia. If they’ve taken down summaries for whatever reason, you can go on the Wayback Machine and find it there.
Next is Mike Mullens. “Hi, Tim. What processes do you use to break a bad habit or convert a bad habit to a positive one?” This could take hours in and of itself, but I’ll try to keep it simple. I talk a lot about this in The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef. In the beginning of The 4-Hour Body, I talk about this a lot. There are a few chapters in particular. The Harajuku moment I think is extremely critical.
In The 4-Hour Chef, I talk about tools like stickk.com. You can take a look at the site and that will cover a lot of the explanation. S-T-I-C-K-K.com. There are a few elements that you need to pay attention to. There’s certainly the how-to, the instruction. I walk you step-through-step towards, say quitting smoking. But you also need a sufficient why to, and that’s the incentive, which is either a stick or a carrot. Economics, certainly, or the study of human nature, more broadly speaking, is a study of incentives. Check out stickk.com. Also look up a gent named B.J. Fogg. Formerly, maybe currently out of Stanford, who talks a lot about how to start with a small version of a behavioral change, so let’s say rather than flossing your entire mouth, you start with flossing your front teeth and use that to lead into something more comprehensive.
I would say take a look at that, but certainly, I’ve written quite a bit about this in The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef. Retired Man, next one. “I love the ‘what I’m eating’ segments of 5-Bullet Friday. Any simply chef secrets to change food from good to great?” Yeah, I do have a couple of recommendations. There are a few. No. 1 is that if you look at professional chefs versus home chefs, they have an acute understanding of how to use acid in food. So if you need a flavor to pop a little bit more, very often it just requires a little bit of lemon juice or some type of acid; it could be a vinegar, to really balance out or make some of the flavors pop. Salt can sometimes serve this function, but I have a bottle of unsweetened lemon juice in my refrigerator for this purpose exactly.
You can also use lemon zest. Lemon zest really works extremely well on a lot of dishes. And, of course, these are broad strokes, folks, so it’s going to work a lot of the time, not all the time. Get a microplane. That is fantastic for making it easy to put lemon zest on things. Caramelized onions – so allium from the allium family, you have shallots, onions. Caramelized onions fix just about anything. Very often, I’ll just get some onions, chop them up, do a little bit of knife work, which is not very hard. If you want instruction on knife skills, check on Jacques Pepin. But Jacques, like Jacques Cousteau, P-E-P-I-N. The dude is a master and he’s incredibly good at teaching. So check out knife skills there. But chop up some onions and just as I’m prepping other things, have it on medium heat with some olive oil and let it caramelize over the next 15, 20, 25 minutes while I’m prepping other things. Caramelized onions go a really long way.
A few of my favorite herbs and spices that I think are underutilized and generally inoffensive: ginger and cumin. Ginger and cumin are really versatile. Turmeric is also very versatile. There are others like tarragon or dill, which can be really overpowering. Marjoram also. If you don’t use them correctly or have the right type of protein. By ginger, cumin, and turmeric I find to very flexible. Butter solves just about everything, so I’m not even going to bother talking about it. Last, I’ll just say as a tool, if you want to experiment with sous vide, which much like sous chef. “Sous” is under, so sous vide means under vacuum. You could look at a device made by a friend of mine, a whole group of friends.
It’s called the Joule. As in the measurement of energy, I believe. I’m no physicist. It’s a simple, little device that allows you to use other pots and pans you might have, or even a kitchen sink for that matter, to experiment with sous vide. It enables you to cook proteins perfectly all the way through, every time, and then finish it on a stovetop or under a broiler. So you can check out the Joule, which has been just a godsend. It’s very easy to use. The app that they have is spectacular. J-O-U-L-E. All right.
Next one. Mickey Mayer. “Hi, Tim Ferriss. What’s your next book? You mentioned book deadlines a few times.” Yeah, I just finished my new book. Literally, it is printing as we speak. You guys can check it out. It’s called Tribe of Mentors. Subtitle – Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. It is the collected wisdom of about 130 people I was dying to reach out and ask a lot of questions that had bubbled up to the top of my mind. I just turned 40. My first book had its tenth anniversary. A number of friends had either died or been diagnosed with terminal illnesses in the last 12 months. I had a lot of questions on my mind. So I reached out to these folks for help navigating life and it turned out better than I ever could have expected. Thank you, Universe and everybody for that. You can check it out at Tim.blog/tribe or just on bnn.com or amazon.com or wherever, you can just look up Tribe of Mentors. It’s currently on sale now.
All right. Next, Irene Hackett. This may harken back to an earlier answer, but here’s your question. Your latest TED talk is important. What specific self-talk keeps you from that precipice now? This could help others.”
The TED talk I referred to earlier is about an exercise called fear-setting and tells my personal story of battles with depression and also a really close call with suicide in college. As a side note, I didn’t mention this in the TED talk, but I was always fearful of being diagnosed with a label of, say, manic depression. I didn’t want it to absolve me of the responsibility of still trying to change and improve my behavior and so on. I didn’t want to default to pure self-medication as a way of avoiding certain changes to my thought patterns and behaviors and so on. Then I had my full genome sequenced. There were only a few things that stood out. One was on a scale of 0 to 10, the genetic predictor for manic depression was at like an 11 or a 12.
It was like Spinal Tap. I was like, well, I can only dodge this for so long. It had the opposite effect. Rather than making depressed about being depressed or pre-disposed to being depressed and absolving myself of responsibility, I really didn’t expect this. It lifted a huge burden because it made the point, I suppose, that I have programming, I mean, in my code base, I am hardwired in a sense, and I’m mixing a lot of technology metaphors here, to experience manic-depressive episodes. Although I don’t really get manic, so more depressive episodes. That made me feel as though I was actually doing a pretty good job with the instructions that I am actualizing through my DNA.
I felt better about myself actually learning this, which was very unexpected. But I’m not directly answering your question. What specific self-talk? I’m going to expand that to exercises. No. 1 is fear-setting. People can learn about it in the TED talk at Tim.blog/TED, where I run through it. If you go to that page, there’s also a text version and an explanation of fear-setting pulled from my previous book, Tools of Titans. You can check that out. That is going to be the most comprehensive and I do that all the time. Another question which helps prevent overwhelm, which I think is at times, not a prerequisite, but an antecedent to depression. If you end up feeling as those there are too many inputs or balls to juggle, that can lead to overwhelm, which can lead to feeling helpless, which can lead to harsh self-judgment, which can lead to depression if that makes sense.
What would this look like if this were easy is a question that I constantly ask myself. It’s a question that I explore a lot in Tribe of Mentors, this new book which I just finished, which I mentioned earlier. The last piece I would say, and there’s a lot more to this because it’s not just self-talk. In fact, we get ourselves into trouble when we try to rely in isolation on our own self-talk to address depression. I think that it’s very difficult when you’re caught in those circular thought loops to disengage from that. So community, exercise, getting into your body to get out of your own brain, and spending time with other people who can, for instance, and this comes back to an earlier question, who can test your assumptions and show you how all is not lost.
When you’re saying always and never, these absolutes, in fact, do not apply. This too shall pass often requires other people. But I’ll give you one more question that I apply in my own head in these circumstances. That is, so what? I actually learned this from Richa Chadda, who is an Indian actress who uses this herself. If you have a given fear, you ask so what? This is best done, for me at least, in journaling. When you write down the consequence or whatever. Is the answer to so what. Then you ask again. So what? So what? So what? When you do that four or five times, which is not entirely dissimilar from how Ricardo Semler, a Brazilian-born entrepreneur, uses why. Or Ray Dalio, same story. The founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, asking four or five whys to get to the root cause or the root belief. When you ask so what? So what? So what? And you answer it each time earnestly, you realize at the end I’m actually fine.
So what? Nothing. Everything is just going to be totally fine and it’s manageable or reversible at the very least in many, in fact most cases.
Next question. Hope that helps. Matches Malone. Question: “Your top three to five books read this year.” All right. That’s more of a statement than a question, but I’ll take it as a question. A few that come to mind I’ve alluded to earlier, I would say Poor Charlie’s Almanac by Charles Munger. Although Seeking Wisdom by Peter Bevelin, in many cases is a little more easily digested, I believe. That’s one. That’s actually a book that I’ve revisited. I’m counting books that I’ve revisited. The next would be closely related. Both of these really drill on mental models and rules for making decisions and avoiding common slips and cognitive biases.
Principles by Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Capital. Check out the cover blurbs. One from Bill Gates, one from Tony Robbins, if you want to know the type of people who listen very carefully to his advice. And his investment returns are just crazy. So there you have it. I find investors and poker players very interesting to study for thinking systems and mental models that apply everywhere. The third I’ll mention is completely unlike the others in most respects. It’s The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce his name, but that’s how I’ll pronounce it. G-I-B-R-A-N. This is, for a lot of people, going to be really woo-woo, semi-religious, mystical nonsense speak. But it’s beautifully illustrated. I recommend getting the illustrated version. I read it a few pages at a time in a sauna every night over the course of one or two weeks. It may or may not have been after reading a lot about different psychedelics.
Authored by Terrence McKenna. But that probably puts it in the proper context for why I found it so insightful. A lot of it, I think, is a little too high-falutin’, but the latter half, in particular, I found very insightful and it helped me to work through a number of different emotional questions that I had on my mind.
Next question is Diviea. “Why is worldly success apparently so important to you, as evidenced by it being a primary focus of your podcast?” Okay. So “apparently” is an important modifier here, so I’m glad that you included it. “Why is worldly success apparently so important to you as evidenced by it being the primary focus of your podcast?” We would need to define “worldly success.” I assume you mean business building, entrepreneurship, etc.
There are a few ways that I could attempt to answer this. The first would just be to observe that I have a very large audience comprised of entrepreneurs, self-described CEOs, founders, etc. These are the tools and tactics and stories that I feel best service them and help them where they are at the moment or where their priorities might be in either initially building, growing, or selling a business, for instance. I should also simply point out that there are other interviews I’ve done, with Tara Brach and many others that focus on the more, I’m not going to say esoteric, but perhaps “spiritual” – which is a word I don’t like; I’ll put it in quotation marks – aspects of life. That is all well and good. But people don’t generally come to me for that.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – that’s my dog, Molly, doing self-defense. Thank you, Molly. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is helpful for putting this in context. I feel like most of my audience is well-educated with a decent household income and I am helping them with business building and things along those lines. But I’m also pushing a little higher up and talking more about the things that would be of interest to those who are reading things like Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, which by the way, is the single book that pops up most often across all of my podcast guests and the 100+ people in Tribe of Mentors who have not been on the podcast. There you have that. I also would say that the question implies some mutual exclusivity.
In other words, that worldly success is focused on to the exclusion of something else. But I think that if that is when you meant to imply, that is a false dichotomy. You can very much have both. Just because you do very well in the private sector or make a lot of money does not, by definition, mean that you lack the other things or don’t place an importance on them.
Next question is Ian Philpott. “What recent apps/technologies have made your life easier?” There are many. If we look at technology as any type of tool that helps you to solve a problem in any respect. I like the momentum extension for Chrome, which can help mitigate procrastination. That’s a really easy one. I like Egg Timer, another browser-based tool that allows you to set a timer.
You can just search egg timer online timer. I am doing a bunch with WeWork and exploring having an office and set hours for doing certain things, and location. Thank you, Tim Urban, the writer of Wait, but Why? for the inspiration there. If you’re looking for something a little more expensive – I’m not sure you would be, but if you’re allowing something a little more expensive – a Miele dishwasher with a rack on the top for cleaning silverware is just incredible. It’s not cheap. Last but not least, I would mention a protein. They have since become a sponsor of the podcast, but that’s not why I mention them. I’m looking at it right now across the room. It’s Ascent protein, A-S-C-E-N-T protein, which is a native protein and doesn’t, for me at least, cause any of the gastrointestinal distress that whey protein sometimes can. It is very minimally processed.
Next question. Nico Errola. “If your podcast format allowed only one question, a la rapid-fire question with lengthy answer, what would the question be?” I think it would have to be, can you please tell us about a dark period that your experienced or one of the darker periods you’ve experienced, how you came out of it, and what you learned from it. I think that question gets all of the ingredients for something that people will retain. You get a real story, you get real-world details, and you learn how they solve a problem. Very often, I think, podcast interviews can focus on how people seize opportunity, find opportunity, create opportunity. At the end of the day, I think that’s the easy part.
It’s not finding an opportunity that’s the challenge, it’s overcoming the roadblocks, opponents, and competition, and self-sabotage, quite frankly, that you’re going to face if you choose something with a high degree of uncertainty; which entrepreneurship certainly entails. Can you please tell us about one of the darker periods of your life and how you came out of it and what you learned from it? I think that’s a solid question that gets’s at a lot. Two more questions.
Derek Miller is the next one. This is a good one. “What advice would you give a 24-year-old male struggling to control his sex drive?” Well, let’s see. No. 1, maybe get rid of broadband. Turn off your WiFi so you cannot compulsively visit porn sites. But I want to actually dissect the question because my answer may not make sense if I myopically look at this and assume that it’s an issue with sex drive.
If you have an issue with controlling X – so in this case, a 24-year-old male struggling to control his sex drive. If I wanted to give the sort of handwave dismissal answer, I would say enjoy it because it’s not going to get better. But I would say that if you look at overeating, someone could ask the same question or a similar question and say, what advice would you give to a 24-year-old who’s struggling to control his appetite? There could be biological causes, so certainly get some blood work done and see if you have out-of-control testosterone or luteinizing hormone or FSH or something like that. But across the board, we could just be asking how should I control poor impulse control? I think that is generally going to be the answer, right? So if someone is obese, for instance, or just 20 pounds overweight, they might have some biological determinant that’s causing them to overeat.
So maybe they’re hypothalamus is all screwed up. Maybe they have some weird Leptin or Ghrelin levels. Who knows? But more often than not, it’s just their environment is set up to defeat them. So say they have junk food all over the house. Or they haven’t set up systems and rules to prevent themselves – incentives, we already talked about – to prevent them from overeating. Across the board, I would say the most useful tool that I have found for impulse control or emotional reactivity where you get steered by your emotions, as opposed to the other way around, is looking at Stoicism and something called CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. There’s actually a great book on this, which I recommend called – it’s a bit of amouthful, so don’t mind the title – The Philoscophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Subtitle: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy.
It’s written by Donald J. Robertson. You can just look up Donald Robertson. The cover has what looks like a bust of Marcus Aurelius in the middle of two chairs, one on either side. But it’s a fantastic book. I would suggest people check it out. If you want an overview of Stoicism which is used by top NFL teams right now, a lot of the CEOs I know of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley because it makes them better competitors, you can check on Tao of Seneca. It’s a free introduction to all of this stuff that I put out there, which has no trick, no nothing. It’s just something I think is valuable and should be out in the world. You can check that out at Tim.blog/Seneca. As far as controlling the sex drive goes, you can also check out an experiment I did called knob nom, which is a 30-day no booze, no masturbating experiment.
You can get a group each other and hold each other accountable with money to lose potentially. You can put together a betting pool. That works very well for losing weight or stopping compulsive masturbation, among other things.
All right. Last question. This is Jasmine Worth. “Hi, Tim. If you were only able to take five supplements for longevity and well-being, what would they be? Thanks for all you do.” Thanks for reading and submitting the question. All right. Longevity and well-being. I’m going to preface this answer with a disclaimer. I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on the internet. Talk to your medical professional before consuming any supplement or medication or stopping any medication or supplement, etc. Also, use your common sense. Don’t do anything stupid, please. It’s a tall order for the internet, I know. But let me tell you a few things that I find interesting.
A few thought I would be very compelling that I have chosen not to use. I think berberine is potentially very interesting for longevity. Also interesting for attenuating insulin or glucose responses after meals, for instance. Much like alpha lipoic acid. That is one. I should note that I cycle on and off any supplement that I take because I assume that there are negative feedback loops. In other words, if something has an effect, say it’s an agonist for something, then it’s probably an antagonist for something else. Or, if you’re taking something like supplemental testosterone, it’s going to affect your HPTA. In other words, your hormonal axis, and then your body will stop producing as much testosterone because you’re getting it from elsewhere. The body is very smart that way about homeostasis. So berberine is one. Resveratrol I was interested in for a period of time.
It’s found in wine.
Although in no concentration really valuable for life extension purposes. A lot of people have paid attention to resveratrol. When I took resveratrol for a period of time, I found, and many people have found this, that it caused joint pain. Now specifically, in my elbows. I decided that was not a good harbinger of things to come and I stopped taking resveratrol. Other people find metformin and rapamycin very interesting. If you want to learn more about rapamycin, R-A-P-A-M-Y-C-I-N, which is a very strong prescription medication that you should not take without doctor supervision, then you can search life extension odyssey maybe? Life extension Easter Island and my name and there is an entire episode where we talk to two scientists, three actually, but two who are very well-known for metformin, specifically in rapamycin.
Metformin is very interesting to me. It’s used by Type 2 diabetics quite a bit. I’m not currently taking it. Also not something you should take without medical supervision, but it has some promise. Fasting is not a supplement, but it’s the absence of all supplements. I do find fasting very interesting and Dom D’Agostino, Dominic D’Agostino and I have talked a lot about this on the podcast. It has some very fascinating implications and applications for both performance and longevity. Well-being – I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the following, which is also something that is typically prescribed with medical supervision. That is lithium. Lithium is a mono-therapy for bipolar depression. It might be prescribed at 1,500 milligrams and it might be lithium carbonate, I believe.
There are people who believe, and there is some good writing in the New York Times, for instance. I think the article is “Maybe We all Just Need a Little Bit of Lithium,” or something like that. If you search New York Times maybe we just need lithium, you’ll find an article that discusses groundwater concentrations of lithium and inverse correlation to, I believe it was suicide, homicide, manic depression, and so on. Based on that and the recommendation of a doctor that I work with (note: even I work with qualified MDs on all of this), I began taking 5 milligrams lithium orotate on a daily basis. It appears to take the edge off and mitigate to some extent anxiety and potential spiraling towards the edge of the precipice, as was put earlier, with respect to depression. Could be psychosomatic, but that’s 99 percent of life, isn’t it?
For the time being, I will continue taking it. But I do, much life everything else, cycle both on and off of these things. Jasmine, hopefully, that helps. I do take things that you might not think of as a supplement. For instance, apple cider vinegar. I’ll typically have a tablespoon of that in water, both in the morning and before bed, which might be considered an old-wives’ tale for boosting immune function, but for whatever reason, it seems to work for me. And when combined with honey, also helps with sleep for thousands of people who have tried it. You can look up Seth Roberts, honey, and apple cider vinegar (abbreviated ACV) if you want to try a very simple remedy for potentially helping with insomnia and so on. All right, folks. That is the Q&A for today. Thank you to everybody who subscribes to 5-Bullet Friday who submitted questions.
If you’d like to submit your own and check out what all the buzz is about, then you can check out 5-Bullet Friday at Tim.blog/Friday. That is it. Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time, be safe, test your cognitive biases and have fun. Talk to you soon.
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with over 500 million downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re rude, we’ll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)