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Stress-busting psychedelics, weight loss shortcuts, muscle-building accelerators. Biohacking pioneer Tim Ferriss, author of the new book Tools of Titans, reveals his peak performance secrets in a wide-ranging, 45-minute conversation with Menâs Health editor in chief Matt Bean.
Matt Bean: Iâm at The Cannibal in New York City with bestselling author Tim Ferriss, who joins us fresh off the launch of his new book Tools of Titans, which you can check out at toolsoftitans.com.
Tim, this new book is the distillation of your hugely successful podcast series, which guys definitely should check out on iTunes.
Letâs just break it down: What can people expect to find in this book?
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Tim Ferriss: The book is first and foremost something I made for myself. After The 4-Hour Chef, I promised myself I wouldnât write another long book.
It didnât quite work out. I set aside an entire month to go through all the transcriptsâabout 10,000 pages of notes from guests like the Arnolds, the biochemists, and filling the blanks with Jamie Foxx or whoeverâto find the things I learned. It just turned into a notebook for myself, because the Cliffs Notes version of the tactics, morning routines, and everything else, I would want to test.
I got about 70 percent through it and realized that it was exactly the Cliffs Notes my fans has been asking me for. Because whoâs going to go back and listen to 600 hours of audio?
Matt: You can try.
Tim: You can try, but most people wonât do it. They want the notes. They want the explanation, they want the context. What people can expect is three sections: healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Sound bites of very specific advice that you can test today or tomorrow or next week. Then you just develop your toolkit, so whether you want to address some insecurity, some weakness, some problem, or some grand ambition, thereâs an example for almost every possible situation you can imagine.
Matt: I want to dive into just how you got started in this line of work. Itâs certainly a unique one. You hold a Guinness record for the most number of spins in tango.
Tim: I did, at one point. I may have been dethroned. I canât imagine who else would want to do that to themselves.
Matt: I donât know. Weâll just see. The day is young, my friend.
Tim: [laughs] The day is young.
Matt: Take us back for a second to the first experiment youâd say you carried out in your pursuit of self-improvement. What was it? What was that âurâ moment where you said, âThis is something Iâm interested inâ?
Tim: I think it started with wrestling. I was born premature and had a lot of physiological problems growing up. Lung issues. I was in the ICU for a long time.
The only sport I could do was wrestling. They put me in the kiddie wrestling for something that was weight-class-based. So 60-pound weaklings could battle other 60-pound weaklings and develop some semblance of confidence. I realized at one point that I didnât have stamina due to a lot of those problems, but I could look at technique and I could also cut weight.
By the time I got to high schoolâIâm not recommending this to anybodyâI developed a good understanding of potassium, sodium, how your kidneys function, how dehydration works. And I was cutting from 178 to 152-pound weight class twice a week. I saw such huge returns on that and it was something that was underexploited.
I think at that point, the only way that I was able to identify what worked or didnât work was by keeping notes, and then doing this tiny task on a daily or weekly basis. That ended up jumping over to language learning in college. I applied the same type of thinking to language learning. Then by the time we reach, itâs called âadulthoodââŠ
Matt: [Laughs] When does that happen?
Tim: I donât even know.
Matt: When does adulthood begin?
Tim: I do not know if Iâm there yet. By the time I graduated from college, I was applying to everything. In business, every conceivable situation. It was just a type of experimental mindset. Started with wrestling and I donât want to get pinned and embarrassed in front of my family and âfriends.â
I say that because there werenât many. I had a couple of nerds who played Dungeons & Dragons with me, that was it.
Matt: There you go. What do you think it is in the air, in the ether that has led to this collective obsession with self-improvement and life hacking? What is it about the world that gives us this introspective improvement bent?
Tim: I think itâs been around a long time. Going back to, certainly, Ben Franklin and then even further back to the Stoics and so on. Humans are designed to be dissatisfied, I think, and competitive, so weâre very hierarchical.
Matt: Happiness has a very short half-life.
Tim: It has a very short half-life, and we are very hierarchical creatures. If you look at any of our close cousins in the animal kingdom, thatâs the way things function.
I think in the modern day, certainly, people see what they donât have on a regular basis due to the Internet and just media consumption. That reminder compels people to want to climb a ladder in some direction in which you achieve greater financial success, greater physical achievement or appearance. Thatâs not necessarily a bad thing.
We look at, say, disappointment or shame and itâs a very negative thing, but you can use those to your advantage. On the flip side, in a culture where weâre inundated with information and generally feeling overwhelmed, we want small, actionable pieces of information.
That is maybe the niche Iâve been drawn to, because thatâs what I seek myself. Itâs part of the human condition and I think itâs just magnified by unending streams of digital data and images and so on that we see and covet.
Matt: That is one of the tropes of your advice that to me is most fascinating: Itâs that the less input you receive, the more creative output youâll be able to produce. That maybe itâs okay to set your email aside for a while, not let the world take control of your agenda, but take control of it in a way that allows you to produce more meaningful content.
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Tim: I have more than 3,000 unread emails right now! Iâve learned that if you want to get the really big, positive things done, the force multipliers, that one thing that will make everything else easier or irrelevant, then you have to become okay with and condition yourself to be okay with letting the small bad things slide.
People feel personally slighted if you donât respond to them in 30 seconds and treat email as instant messenger. Those are things you condition yourself toward, but it takes practice.
For sure, I think that in the world we live in now, the ability to single-task, to block out two to four hours to focus on one thing, is critical.
Matt: It is the new rich.
Tim: Itâs a superpower, and if itâs not in your calendar, itâs not going to happen. A lot of the titans I interviewed would block out very frequently midweek for whatever reason, like, âFrom Wednesday from 9 to 1 p.m. isâŠâ fill in the blank: reading, learning, or in my case, creative writing or podcast reporting. Something thatâs nonreactive.
If you do that once a week, youâre ahead of 99 percent of the people out there.
Matt: 100 percent. Thatâs why the start of the day is often the best time to get things done. This is somewhat related to willpower. We all know that thereâs a program you can follow to look like a Menâs Health cover model. We talk about it every week in the magazine.
Iâm sitting here as the editor of Menâs Health and I will confess it is really hard to stick to some of this stuff, and you seem like a guy whoâs either got it figured out or thereâs some gland in there that is just full of this stuff, or you have strategies and systems that you use to keep yourself honest. Tell us about some of those.
Tim: Sure. I think about willpower almost never. I realize for myself, trying to be more disciplined is pretty nebulous and itâs often a slippery target. For me, Iâve just thought about incentives. You need either a carrot or a stick or both to get yourself to do what you want to do. It can come in a lot of different forms. [Laughs.] Youâre in some ways the name and face of this magazine that purports to teach people to be in good physical shape, so if you turn into a fat slob and youâre on camera and on video, thatâs going to be very humiliating. Thereâs an accountability built into that.
Similarly, I know a lot of people who will form betting pools. Five friends who all want to lose fat will each throw in $100 or whateverâs painful enough to motivate them. Then three months later, they track it with, letâs say DEXA scans, and whoever has had the most profound body composition change gets the $500.
Matt: Cha-ching. What are you going to spend it on?
Tim: You could use resources like stickK for instance. If you donât have those friends, stickk.com will actually let you put money in escrow, and you choose an anti-charity. This is a nonprofit you would rather nuke than give money to. If you canât confirm that youâve hit your milestones or goals, that money gets immediately released to this anti-charity. Then youâre publicly on the record as having given money toâŠtake your pick.
Matt: Dire methods.
Tim: Dire methods. Itâs not that we need more; itâs not that we always need more how-to information.
A friend of mine, Derek Simmons, whoâs been on the podcast, said, âIf more information were the answer, weâd all be billionaires with perfect dads.â It comes down to motivation and incentives. If it isnât a punishment or a reward, then itâs just talk.
Matt: Weâre animals beneath all of this demeanor.
Tim: Itâs just handwaving. Hereâs another one that Iâve seen people use effectively for, say, New Yearâs resolutions.
They want to get ripped, get huge, lose fat, whatever. You have your most merciless friend take some photos of you, like in your tighty whities in the most unflattering light imaginable after a bender of a weekend.
Matt: The before?
Tim: Yes, thatâs your âbeforeâ photo. Front side and back, and if you donât hit your goal, your friend puts that on Facebook. I guarantee you youâre going to figure it out. You will make miracles happen.
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Matt: I love this. This is the dire measures and medieval punishments portion of our conversation.
Tim: Look, this is human psychology. Itâs nothing new, so use it. It really comes down to incentives. Very frequently, I will hold myself accountable by, say, booking gymnastics strength training. I do not like most mobility/flexibility work. Just not a fan.
Matt: You donât love stretching?
Tim: No. If itâs up to me, Iâm going to skip it. So I would schedule and pay for sessions with one or preferably two coaches who I know are going to A, give me shit, or B, be pissed if I donât show up.
By doing that, I have some cost. I have paid for these in advance, and lo and behold, for eight to 12 weeks just completely reinvented and resurrected my hip strength and flexibility because I put it on the counter and I paid for it.
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Matt: Awesome.
Tim: I think willpower is very valuable.
Matt: What would you say has been the hardest habit for you to kick, or the most difficult redirection?
Tim: Flossing. I hate flossing so much, and my gums hate it too. They just bleed like a raging bullâs nose everyânot every time, but in the beginning.
Matt: It cut me.
Tim: Yes, exactly. No mas, no mas. With flossing, I figured out a few things, and this applies to exercise too, I think. You have to make it until youâve logged, say, five to seven sessions. You need to make part of your automatic routine. You need to make it as easy as possible. Rig it so you can win the game.
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B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford, did a lot of work in this area. He would have people flossing each night just their front teeth. Thatâs it. That is âsuccess.â Start with just flossing your front teeth. Anything else is extra, but thatâs a successful flossing. How could you make it even easier? Well, instead of using these tourniquets on your fingers, i.e., normal dental floss, you could use those disposable picks that make it a little easier. I took it a step further and I used a Water Pik.
This is a lot easier than using normal dental floss. I started with the Water Pik, and now Iâm flossing. I flossed this morning, I flossed yesterday, and that has been one of the most difficult for me to change.
Another was, honestly, stimulants. By that I mean pre-workout stimulants that I used. I was introduced to in high school, ephedrine-based, that I became so dependent on that I then started and continued to use them for many, many years as my daily pick-me-up.
Matt: Really?
Tim: I think that did a lot of damage.
Matt: You mean the bottles that look like theyâre literally meant to be poured into a rocketâs engine?
Tim: Yes, yes, that kind of stuff.
Matt: Super nitro oxy metabolizer!
Tim: Yes, exactly. When you feel like you can barely keep your feet on the ground because youâre so jittery! Those. That was also very difficult and I think a part of what helped me there was not titrating back slowly. This might sound funny, but itâs important for people to know where they can use moderation and where theyâre just binary.
Matt: Right.
Tim: For me, it was binary. So I did a meditation retreat that didnât allow any caffeine consumption. I put it on the books and paid for it well in advance. I went in and had four days without any caffeine.
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Matt: Were you fiending?
Tim: Yes, I was definitely going throughâŠit wasnât quite as bad as Ray Charles going through heroin withdrawal or anything like that, but I was not a very happy camper. Toward the end I started to rebalance and calibrate, and then I went back to so-called ânormal life.â Every day at lunch [before the retreat], Iâd get an unending supply of iced teas. They would just refill, refill, refill. I might have 12 iced teas.
I remember [after the retreat] I sat down and I had three iced teas and felt like someone had just stuck an EpiPen in my neck. I was so jittery, and I thought to myself, âOh my god, like, was this my normal before, that 12 of these did nothing?â It just shocked me so much that it forced me to change my habits.
Matt: Yes, come to Jesus.
Tim: Yes, those were two.
Matt: You had the good fortune to sit down with entrepreneurs and artists and world leaders, theyâve all, Iâm sure, given you some amazing advice. But I want to know about the single worst piece of advice youâve ever received.
Tim: Sometimes this is actually good advice, but Iâd say 99 percent of the time itâs âDonât rock the boat.â You need just a fear-based recommendation. Itâs not doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people long-term. Usually thereâs some sacred cow that someone doesnât want to kill because I think they think theyâll be yelled at or judged by the public. Donât rock the boat. Maybe this is a bad habit, but that usually just makes me want to immediately rock the boat. Iâm like, âWait a second. That makes me think thatâŠ
Matt: The boat was made to be rocked.
Tim: Thereâs something very conventional being protected here that should probably be questioned in some way.
Matt: What do you think is the most common misconception people have of your work?
Tim: Biggest misconception by far is that people who have not read The 4-Hour Workweek think I promote idleness or inactivity. Thatâs not true at all. I just want people to try to 10X their hourly output. You only do that by asking uncommon questions and doing a fair amount of analysis, 80-20 analysis and so on.
The biggest misconception is that Iâm doing whatever for four hours of the week and then Iâm just watching paint dry or taking acid and walking around museums or throwing pebbles at pigeons.
I have no problem with hard work as long as itâs applied to the right things, which is why, for instance, my main financial gain is working with startups. I kind of retired two years ago, but I was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, Uber. These are companies that are not working four hours a week. They are working 8,000 hours a week.
Matt: Maybe four hours of sleep a week.
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Tim: Yes, four hours of sleep. The processes they go through to try and become maximally effective, number one, and then efficient, number two, are exactly the same whether you want to cut down your work hours or just get 10 times more out of each hour.
The process is the same. I think thatâs the biggest misconception, that Iâm wandering around with a finger up my nose for four hours a week.
Matt: See what kind of gold I can find out from the Yukon. Thereâs a concept called punctuated evolution. Iâm sure youâre familiar with it. Essentially, things are the same for a long time and then some sort of genetic adaptation happens and boom, weâve got opposable thumbs.
Tim: Boom, the Cambrian explosion. [The period 540 million years ago when most animal phyla appeared.]
Matt: Boom, and there you go, it all changes, but you can apply that on an individual level as well. I think it happens to a lot of us. What was the most recent moment of punctuated evolution for you? How did things change?
Tim: Well, letâs see. Psychedelics fair game?
Matt: Absofuckinlutely.
Tim: All right. With the judicious and supervised use of a number of psychedelics, which is a term I donât like very much. A lot of people call them Entheogens.
Matt: I was thinking of Timothy Leary spinning around in a carnival tent back in Woodstock or something.
Tim: Exactly. Right. What Iâm referring to is more research is being done at Johns Hopkins looking at end-of-life anxiety in terminal cancer patients, or alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, PTSD in veterans using compounds like psilocybin, a treatment associated with magic mushrooms.
For opiate addiction, ibogaine or iboga, and Iâve had some real breakthroughs with supervised use of a number of these things, including ayahuasca, which like all of these things can be very dangerous if used improperly. For people in the United States, itâs a Schedule I offense.
Matt: Not legal. Donât try this at home.
Tim: Donât try this at home. The legal consequences are very significant.
Matt: Nonetheless, clinically and in research settings, these are actively being studied right now. In fact, we have a reporter whoâs out on the trail right now trying to learn more about this.
Tim: Very powerful and extremely effective for addiction in particular. Now letâs take addiction and make it a little broader. Compulsive behaviors. Letâs make that even broader: compulsive thought patterns. I think there are other avenues you could use, like therapy, but I was always too skeptical and tooâŠnot sanctimonious, but dismissive of therapy.
When someone sat down and tried to dig in my head, Iâd be like, âDo we have to do this for the next hour?â I was just so impatient. It wasnât viable for me, but I realized that I would do a few things. Like retreat into stories. I have stories Iâve told myself since I was a kid that are just untrue. You are impatient. Youâve always been that way. Itâs hardwired and itâs a huge asset and always has been. Not true.
Matt: Interesting.
Tim: Youâre a loner, things related to depression and Iâve certainly had my own dark periods. Retreating into this âDonât retreat into storiesâ has become a line I taught myself. When Iâm not here, Iâm going somewhere else in some very self-handicapping way.
Another big piece, somewhat related, is that I realized, partly from interviewing 200-plus people for Tools and Titans but also through my own experiments, many of which were recommended by these folks. I think the two longest chapters in the book are actually about psychedelic research and psychedelics, but I realized that if you donât want what you have, what you get is never going to make you happy.
All I mean by that is I think I, probably you, most type A personalities are very objective-driven.
Matt: Life is a game you got to win.
Tim: Exactly. Second place first loser kind of thing.
Matt: Exactly.
Tim: And what I realized for myself isâŠand this is not my phrase, but if youâre stuck in the past, then youâre depressed. If youâre stuck in the future, then youâre anxious.
Focusing on not just achievement, but the practice of developing gratitude and recognition of what is going right and what is good already without the next next big thing, has been a huge change for me. I try to spend as much time on enjoyingâŠthis sounds so clichĂ©, but Iâve never enjoyed writing a book before this one. Iâve never enjoyed a book tour or a book launch before this ever. Iâm always a nervous mess.
This time Iâm like okay, Two questions that I ask myself a lot now are, âWhat would this look like if it were easy?â and âHow might I enjoy the process?â.
Matt: What would you say that the threshold is for you when youâre evaluating a new approach, treatment, or supplement, anything like that? When is it too weird for you to try out?
Tim: Itâs too weird or risky for me if the downside is completely unknown. In other words, it doesnât necessarily mean a randomized placebo-controlled study, but if I donât have firsthand reports, anecdotally even, of what something does in the immediate or long term, then it gets iffy.
There is an infinite selection of things that I could test in life, so I generally will look for a critical mass of word that comes back to me. At this point I have hundreds of friends who are the best at what they do, arguably number one in the country or in the world. I will oftentimes just kind of throw a volley out to people, ask them what theyâre obsessing on or what they find interesting thatâs on the fringe. If the same answer comes back a few times, Iâm like, âOkay.â
Matt: âWe might have something here.â
Tim: Yes, let me take a look and see what there is. If itâs something that has a significant potential downside or, worse yet, if itâs something that, for instance, is in pharmaceutical, a drug or a supplement and people say, âThere are no side effects.â
Matt: Well, âNo rectal bleeding or intestinal distress?â
Tim: Thereâs no biological free lunch, so if you take something, like the pre-workout stimulants that weâve talked about or anything else and it has a large magnitude of effect, you can imagine and you should assume the side effects are also of similar magnitude and you either know what they are or you donât. This applies to many things. Provigil has become something that people pop like candies and they say no side effects.
Matt: Yes.
Tim: I donât buy it. I donât buy it. I might still try using this as a tool but Iâm not going to use it regularly.
Matt: Somewhere, thereâs a little organ thatâs getting shortchanged, itâs turning black and about to atrophy.
Tim: Yes. Like your pancreas is growing horns or something. You donât know something is happening and youâre not going to know until perhaps itâs too late.
For a little while it seemed like a great idea and then you get crocodile babies. Well, who wants that?
Matt: What is the most dangerous experiment that youâve ever performed? Youâre not Bear Grylls, but youâve done some gnarly shit.
Tim: Iâve done some wild stuff. Letâs see. I would say the one that comes to mind is trying to learn parkour in a week. That was a terrible idea.
Matt: Yes. Of all the things you can accelerate learning in.
Tim: I mean, what I underestimated, youâll appreciate this. Training-specific, right? Okay. Turns out that doing box jumps is not the same as jumping off something 10 or 20 feet high and landing on the ground.
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Not the same. I blew apart my legs, I really blew apart my legs. I tore three of the four quadriceps muscles in both legs in the first two days. Then I continued to train and tore flexors in my forearms. Did a lot of damage to myself. That one was a bit yellow conceived, I would say.
Matt: What was the final shoot like for that? Youâre literally like a rag doll just being thrown against a wall.
Tim: Horrifying, yes. It was like if you take one of those rubber octopus that you have as kid and you throw against the wall and itâs like a wallwalker. Kind of like that. It was just terrible.
Matt: You totally should make a doll.
Tim: The Tim Ferriss Wallwalker. Thatâs how I film. I mean, that was years ago and I still feel the repercussions of that. A few things were chance accidents, one-in-a-million issues that I happened to strike gold on in worst way possible.
I had a PRP injection in my elbow, for instance. Platelet-rich plasma. You take a blood sample, pin it in a centrifugeâyou donât, a scientist doesâto separate out the growth factors. Then you inject it locally toâŠ
Matt: Accelerate repairing.
Tim: âŠtendon damage or connective tissue damage. You can see a nice scar there from surgery that ensued. It wasnât done here, they did it just off-base by a millimeter and they pushed staph bacteria and some lower levels of my skin into the joint capsule. This thing blew up to the size of a football, and my joint could have been completely destroyed. I was fortunate that I have doctors I can call at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, and will take my call.
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This one doctor who I wonât name said, âYou need to go to the ER immediately, hereâs where you should go, I will call them ahead of time,â and I went in and they were just, âWhat have you done to yourself?â I ended up having an emergency procedure. Not recommended.
Matt: Yes. I tend to stay away from them myself.
Tim: Yes. Beware of injections, folks, very serious stuff. You always run the risk of a really, really nasty infection if anything approaches your skin.
Matt: Well, can I ask, what does a guy who experiments on his body for a living do for health care? I mean youâre not exactly going to just walk into a local clinic, right?
Tim: No. I have, so my health care is effectively Black Swan insurance. I have obscenely high deductibles, because my premiums would otherwise be, like, 10 grand a month. I mean I get blood tests every eight to 12 weeks, no health bets when it comes to that. I get blood tests all the time because I want to be able to trend.
A snapshot-in-time approach to health care is very, very dangerous. Letâs say a water pipe in your house bursts and you come in, you get your cortisol measured that morning, they might assume you have some type of adrenal cancer or something.
Matt: [Laughs]
Tim: No, seriously, and people get diagnosed that way. They come in, âOh, your testosteroneâs low. Letâs put you on whatever drug âWell, hold on a second, like what happened the two days prior?â Maybe you just went binge drinking.
Matt: [Laughs]
Tim: That, or maybe your test before was at 8 a.m. and now you did it at 11 a.m., those are not apple to apples. I try to trend, but the point is, no oneâs going to pay for that, except me. Iâve decided that if youâre getting your car checked up more than youâre getting your body checked up, you need to rearrange your priorities.
Matt: Well, on the subject of mortality, Iâm sure you get this question a lot, if you could go back in time and pull anybody from any era in history to have them on your podcast, who would you choose?
Tim: Well, this is a cheat. Itâs a tie. I would say Ben Franklin, merry pranksterâa professional amateur who despite the fact that he was in some ways by our standards unqualified, catalyzes incredible breakthroughs in multiple areas. He was a huge pivotal figure in sciences, in diplomacy, all the formation of this country. Seneca the Younger would also be on the list.
Matt: Taking it way back.
Tim: Yes. 2007 years ago, I think both of those cats drank a fair amount of wine.
Matt: [Laughs]
Tim: More like a flask of whiskey that I could give these guys. Senecaâs such aâŠI have a lot of questions for that guy, because he was a very controversial figure.
Matt: One of the Stoics?
Tim: One of the Stoics. I mean at one point, arguably the richest man in Rome. He was a famous playwright, the equivalent of like J.K. Rowling, times 100 in his day. A teacher to many people, including the emperor, who eventually ordered him to commit suicide.
Matt: Why did that always happen?
Tim: Yes, got to be careful. Greco-Roman period, you might have somebody powerful tell you to kill yourself.
Matt: There was a clockmaker they blinded because his creation was so beautiful. Itâs like, âWhat theâŠ?â
Tim: Yes, so they didnât have it all figured out, but I think Seneca would be a fascinating one to talk to, and heâs the Stoic I read the most. Just to meet that person would be really fantastic, assuming we could communicate.
Matt: Yes, that would be a lot better.
Tim: Heâd be like, âOh no.â Yes, exactly.
Matt: Youâd communicate through the universal language of one. All right, Iâm going to hit you with some rapid-fire questions: What is on your nightstand or Kindle right now?
Tim: A book about Trickster god mythology.
Matt: Interesting, like Loki?
Tim: Loki would be one of them. Then you have Coyote, you have Raven. Those are both Native American. Raven tends to be Pacific Northwest. Itâs a book by Lewis Hyde which is just fantastic. Itâs beautifully written and I think we need more, in a way, productive trickery, breaking of the rules. Merry pranksters who actually have a good set of values and people who can walk between multiple worlds.
This mythology has become really interesting to me and I think reflective of the human mind and culture in such a core way, much like Joseph Campbell. Thatâs what Iâm currently reading. Thatâs on my Kindle.
On my nightstand would be Morning Pages, a journal that itâs actually a companion by Julia Cameron. Morning Pages are creative exercises that help you get unblocked. Itâs done in the morning and this was brought up by many, many people I heard. I have Morning Pages as part of my morning rituals.
Matt: Itâs part of journaling exercise as part of organizational exercise to get you focused?
Tim: Itâs also part purging your anxieties, worries, and nonsense from the monkey mind that would be ricocheting around in your head, distracting you for the rest of the day so that you can get on with your day and have some semblance of productivity.
Matt: Letâs talk a little bit about your favorite apps. Iâm sure a ton of them are on your phone. What are you using now? What do you love?
Tim: Okay. Full disclosure, Iâve worked with a lot of these companies. Probably my fourth biggest expense every month is Uber. I use it for everything. I donât own a car anymore, and I donât get any of it for free. I pay it myself, so Uber would be one.
Evernote I use for all my book research, all my gathering of, say, articles online that I want to pull offline to go through and edit later. A trick for people actually, if youâre doing thisâif you take any article offline and want to find your highlights later, you can use three asterisks. This is what I do. Then you just do control F and find all your highlights.
Matt: There you go. I Evernote, youâre either all in or all out. Thereâs no middle ground.
Tim: You can find a middle ground. I started by taking photographs and business cards and also photographs of, say, mail that I didnât want to have clutter in my house and just having it all put into Evernote because it OCRs it, so you can actually search the text. I started with that. That was my gateway and now I just use it for everything. Those are two. Duolingo for language learning.
Matt: Yes, I have used it.
Tim: Duolingo for language learning. Thereâs a game called Flow, itâs super old-school, that I would use to kill a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Tetris. Okay, hereâs a new one. This is actually in Tools of Titans. Tetris has been studied, Iâm not kidding you, for alleviating PTSD and also for curbing compulsive eating and insomnia because youâre effectively overriding visually whatever youâre obsessing about. Using Tetris, just a free version is fine. Five to 10 minutes before bed.
Matt: Just to be clear, youâre not an investor in the original Tetris, are you Tim?
Tim: Thatâd be amazing.
Matt: And you donât find that having that screen time keeps your brain awake and prevents you from sleeping?
Tim: Hereâs a related tip on that front. Thereâs an app called f.lux. I think itâs F-period-LUX on a browser and you can install it on mobile and on your laptop, and it will synchronize with your local sunset. It will change the spectrum of light emitted from your phone to have less blue light or your laptop so that it can get to sleep more easily.
Matt: Fascinating. Letâs move on. Favorite exercise.
Tim: I would say deadlift. Deadlift or kettlebell swing.
Matt: Okay. Keep it classic.
Tim: Posterior-chain stuff.
Matt: Keep it simple. Do you use the hex bar or the straight bar?
Tim: I am big fan of sumo deadlift. I do use the hex bar, but the hex bar ends up being quite a squatting movement for a lot of folks. Iâm generally doing sumo deadlifts to the knee and thatâs it. Then dropping the weight. This is from a sprint coach named Barry Ross.
Iâve never gotten stronger faster. Two to three reps with long rest and between like five to 10 minutes. Unbelievable how strong you can get. You avoid hamstring injuries by only pulling it to the knees. No eccentric dropping it.
Matt: You took care of those during your parkour hijinks, right?
Tim: Enough of blowing my life apart now.
Matt: Youâre like a Gumby doll or something. Top three supplements?
Tim: Top three supplements, I would say omega-3 phospholipids, curcumin, thatâs generally thought of as turmeric plus black pepper for bioavailability.
Then anything that has a high composition of medium-chain triglycerides, coconut oil, or if you want to get fancy, say exogenous ketones, so beta-hydroxybutyrate in powdered form, or you can use powdered MCT from Quest. Itâs actually really tasty, tastes like a creamer.
There is enough data to support that medium-chain triglycerides and ketones on a regular basis can do really good things for your brain. Most of the supplements I take are related to brain functions at this point. Iâm just not that worried about muscular and joint function.
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I feel like thatâs a very manageable homework assignment, The brain is where most people really screw up. By the way, Alzheimerâs is called type-3 diabetes by some scientists, so you can think of that as brain diabetes.
Matt: All right, weâve covered some of your quick hits here, but now I just want as best as you can do to give me a one-sentence answer on these. Single best tip you found onâŠ
Tim: Youâre talking to the guy who writes 700-page books, okay, Iâm kidding.
Matt: SingleâŠIâm going to edit you down, thatâs my job. Single best idea you can think of for our readers to try when it comes to building muscle.
Tim: Building muscle? Controversial, but I would say compound movements, one set to failure, five seconds up, five seconds down, with a pause in the weakest range of movements.
Matt: I have to talk to BJ and Michael Easter about that when we get back to the ranch.
Tim: Yes, some people hate that one, but for people who havenât tried it, once a week, try.
Matt: All right, losing weight. Not in an unhealthy weight-cutting wrestler sense.
Tim: I would say 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, and least 30 grams of fiber a day.
Matt: I am a lazy bastard, and actually I was going to ask you about that, because Iâve been taking Metamucil, other stuff, the whole nine, but theyâre chock-full many of them with aspartame and sucrose.
Tim: You can just get Castleâs psyllium husks.
Matt: 30 grams, okay. Being productive, productivity.
Tim: Being productive, I would say try the five-minute journal. I have no affiliation, itâs five minutes in the morning basically pregame prep and then five minutes at night, which is your postgame analysis.
Iâll keep it simple, and you guys can check it out, but that has been a huge game changer for a lot of my friends and for me.
Matt: Thatâs separate and distinct from the morning pages?
Tim: Separate and distinct. I will use both or alternate.
Matt: Got you. Getting to sleep?
Tim: Getting to sleep. Iâm going to give a wacky one. I donât know why this works. This is from the late great Seth Roberts, Ph.D., may he rest in peace. This is a cocktail that mechanistically I can guess but I donât know why it works.
Itâs super-simple: two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar plus one tablespoon of raw honey and hot water mixed up.
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Matt: Boom. Say goodnight.
Tim: Take it a few minutes before bed and it is just like a tranquilizer dart for about eight out of 10 people.
Matt: Next, boosting brain health.
Tim: Boosting brain health. I will stick with regular ketosis.
Matt: Regular ketosis. Beating stress.
Tim: Beating stress, meditation in the morning and of some fashion. You could use an app like Headspace, you could use a guided meditation audio like Tara Brachâs guided meditation for free, but meditation in the morning so that youâre less reactive.
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Matt: Zen out. Learning.
Tim: Learning. One sentence: Ask yourself routinely âWhat if I did the opposite?â What if I try the opposite for 24 or 48 hours, which could apply to swimming could apply to your current exercise routines, could apply to anything.
Matt: Except for swimming and breathing?
Tim: Well, not necessarily. With swimming, you can ask rather than try to swim on top of the water, what if I just kept 95 percent my body submerged.
Matt: Breathe every five, every seven, every nine, every elevenâ next you know youâre not breathing at all.
Tim: Next thing youâve grown gills.
Matt: Youâre just living in the water. Last but not least, this one is great, how the hell are we supposed to be happy, Tim?
Tim: My favorite way to be happy is to stop thinking about happiness and chase what excites you. Forget about that word. Itâs really dangerous for you just like success. Scrap it, find a different term.
Donât chase happiness, thatâs it. Thatâd be my success. At the end of the day, success is sleeping well. I think you can judge how your life is going by how well youâre sleeping and how you feel when you wake up.
Matt: All right. Right on, Tim Ferriss, author of the new book out now, Tools of Titans, check it out. toolsoftitans.com. Of course, you can check out his podcast as well over on iTunes. Thanks very much for coming on, Tim, and best of luck with the book.