Tim Ferriss reveals his hacks for staying in shape, fighting stress, and living a happier life

Matt Bean: I’m 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.

Let’s just break it down: What can people expect to find in this book?

Tim Ferriss: The book is first and foremost something I made for myself. After The 4-Hour Chef, I promised myself I wouldn’t write another long book.

It didn’t quite work out. I set aside an entire month to go through all the transcripts—about 10,000 pages of notes from guests like the Arnolds, the biochemists, and filling the blanks with Jamie Foxx or whoever—to 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 who’s going to go back and listen to 600 hours of audio?

Matt: You can try.

Tim: You can try, but most people won’t 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, there’s 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. It’s 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 can’t imagine who else would want to do that to themselves.

Matt: I don’t know. We’ll 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 you’d say you carried out in your pursuit of self-improvement. What was it? What was that ‘ur’ moment where you said, “This is something I’m interested in”?

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 didn’t 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 school—I’m not recommending this to anybody—I 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 didn’t 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, it’s called “adulthood”…

Matt: [Laughs] When does that happen?

Tim: I don’t even know.

Matt: When does adulthood begin?

Tim: I do not know if I’m 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 don’t want to get pinned and embarrassed in front of my family and “friends.”

I say that because there weren’t 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 it’s 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 we’re 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, that’s the way things function.

I think in the modern day, certainly, people see what they don’t 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. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We look at, say, disappointment or shame and it’s a very negative thing, but you can use those to your advantage. On the flip side, in a culture where we’re inundated with information and generally feeling overwhelmed, we want small, actionable pieces of information.

That is maybe the niche I’ve been drawn to, because that’s what I seek myself. It’s part of the human condition and I think it’s 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: It’s that the less input you receive, the more creative output you’ll be able to produce. That maybe it’s 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.

Tim: I have more than 3,000 unread emails right now! I’ve 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 don’t 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: It’s a superpower, and if it’s not in your calendar, it’s not going to happen. A lot of the titans I interviewed would block out very frequently midweek for whatever reason, like, “From Wednesday from 9 to 1 p.m. is…” fill in the blank: reading, learning, or in my case, creative writing or podcast reporting. Something that’s nonreactive.

If you do that once a week, you’re ahead of 99 percent of the people out there.

Matt: 100 percent. That’s 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 there’s a program you can follow to look like a Men’s Health cover model. We talk about it every week in the magazine.

I’m sitting here as the editor of Men’s Health and I will confess it is really hard to stick to some of this stuff, and you seem like a guy who’s either got it figured out or there’s 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 it’s often a slippery target. For me, I’ve 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.] You’re 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 you’re on camera and on video, that’s going to be very humiliating. There’s 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 whatever’s painful enough to motivate them. Then three months later, they track it with, let’s 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 don’t 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 can’t confirm that you’ve hit your milestones or goals, that money gets immediately released to this anti-charity. Then you’re publicly on the record as having given money to…take your pick.

Matt: Dire methods.

Tim: Dire methods. It’s not that we need more; it’s not that we always need more how-to information.

A friend of mine, Derek Simmons, who’s been on the podcast, said, “If more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect dads.” It comes down to motivation and incentives. If it isn’t a punishment or a reward, then it’s just talk.

Matt: We’re animals beneath all of this demeanor.

Tim: It’s just handwaving. Here’s another one that I’ve seen people use effectively for, say, New Year’s 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, that’s your “before” photo. Front side and back, and if you don’t hit your goal, your friend puts that on Facebook. I guarantee you you’re going to figure it out. You will make miracles happen.

Matt: I love this. This is the dire measures and medieval punishments portion of our conversation.

Tim: Look, this is human psychology. It’s 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 don’t love stretching?

Tim: No. If it’s up to me, I’m 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 don’t 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.

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 bull’s nose every—not 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 you’ve 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.

Related: Do You Really Need to Floss?

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. That’s it. That is “success.” Start with just flossing your front teeth. Anything else is extra, but that’s 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 I’m 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 they’re literally meant to be poured into a rocket’s 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 you’re 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 it’s important for people to know where they can use moderation and where they’re just binary.

Matt: Right.

Tim: For me, it was binary. So I did a meditation retreat that didn’t 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.

Matt: Were you fiending?

Tim: Yes, I was definitely going through…it wasn’t 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 “normal life.” Every day at lunch [before the retreat], I’d 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, “Oh my god, like, was this my normal before, that 12 of these did nothing?” 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, they’ve all, I’m sure, given you some amazing advice. But I want to know about the single worst piece of advice you’ve ever received.

Tim: Sometimes this is actually good advice, but I’d say 99 percent of the time it’s “Don’t rock the boat.” You need just a fear-based recommendation. It’s not doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people long-term. Usually there’s some sacred cow that someone doesn’t want to kill because I think they think they’ll be yelled at or judged by the public. Don’t rock the boat. Maybe this is a bad habit, but that usually just makes me want to immediately rock the boat. I’m like, “Wait a second. That makes me think that…

Matt: The boat was made to be rocked.

Tim: There’s 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. That’s 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 I’m doing whatever for four hours of the week and then I’m 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 it’s 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.

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 that’s the biggest misconception, that I’m 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. There’s a concept called punctuated evolution. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Essentially, things are the same for a long time and then some sort of genetic adaptation happens and boom, we’ve 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, let’s 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 don’t 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 I’m 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 I’ve 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, it’s a Schedule I offense.

Matt: Not legal. Don’t try this at home.

Tim: Don’t 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 who’s out on the trail right now trying to learn more about this.

Tim: Very powerful and extremely effective for addiction in particular. Now let’s take addiction and make it a little broader. Compulsive behaviors. Let’s 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 too…not sanctimonious, but dismissive of therapy.

When someone sat down and tried to dig in my head, I’d be like, “Do we have to do this for the next hour?” I was just so impatient. It wasn’t viable for me, but I realized that I would do a few things. Like retreat into stories. I have stories I’ve told myself since I was a kid that are just untrue. You are impatient. You’ve always been that way. It’s hardwired and it’s a huge asset and always has been. Not true.

Matt: Interesting.

Tim: You’re a loner, things related to depression and I’ve certainly had my own dark periods. Retreating into this “Don’t retreat into stories” has become a line I taught myself. When I’m not here, I’m 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 don’t 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 is…and this is not my phrase, but if you’re stuck in the past, then you’re depressed. If you’re stuck in the future, then you’re 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 enjoying…this sounds so clichÃ©, but I’ve never enjoyed writing a book before this one. I’ve never enjoyed a book tour or a book launch before this ever. I’m always a nervous mess.

This time I’m like okay, Two questions that I ask myself a lot now are, “What would this look like if it were easy?” and “How might I enjoy the process?”.

Matt: What would you say that the threshold is for you when you’re evaluating a new approach, treatment, or supplement, anything like that? When is it too weird for you to try out?

Tim: It’s too weird or risky for me if the downside is completely unknown. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily mean a randomized placebo-controlled study, but if I don’t 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 they’re obsessing on or what they find interesting that’s on the fringe. If the same answer comes back a few times, I’m like, “Okay.”

Matt: “We might have something here.”

Tim: Yes, let me take a look and see what there is. If it’s something that has a significant potential downside or, worse yet, if it’s something that, for instance, is in pharmaceutical, a drug or a supplement and people say, “There are no side effects.”

Matt: Well, “No rectal bleeding or intestinal distress?”

Tim: There’s no biological free lunch, so if you take something, like the pre-workout stimulants that we’ve 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 don’t. This applies to many things. Provigil has become something that people pop like candies and they say no side effects.

Matt: Yes.

Tim: I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. I might still try using this as a tool but I’m not going to use it regularly.

Matt: Somewhere, there’s a little organ that’s getting shortchanged, it’s turning black and about to atrophy.

Tim: Yes. Like your pancreas is growing horns or something. You don’t know something is happening and you’re not going to know until perhaps it’s 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 you’ve ever performed? You’re not Bear Grylls, but you’ve done some gnarly shit.

Tim: I’ve done some wild stuff. Let’s 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, you’ll 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.

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? You’re 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 it’s like a wallwalker. Kind of like that. It was just terrible.

Matt: You totally should make a doll.

Tim: The Tim Ferriss Wallwalker. That’s 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 centrifuge—you don’t, a scientist does—to separate out the growth factors. Then you inject it locally to…

Matt: Accelerate repairing.

Tim: …tendon damage or connective tissue damage. You can see a nice scar there from surgery that ensued. It wasn’t 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.

This one doctor who I won’t name said, “You need to go to the ER immediately, here’s where you should go, I will call them ahead of time,” and I went in and they were just, “What have you done to yourself?” 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 you’re 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. Let’s 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, “Oh, your testosterone’s low. Let’s put you on whatever drug “Well, hold on a second, like what happened the two days prior?” 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 one’s going to pay for that, except me. I’ve decided that if you’re getting your car checked up more than you’re getting your body checked up, you need to rearrange your priorities.

Matt: Well, on the subject of mortality, I’m 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. It’s a tie. I would say Ben Franklin, merry prankster—a 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. Seneca’s such a…I 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. It’s like, “What the…?”

Tim: Yes, so they didn’t have it all figured out, but I think Seneca would be a fascinating one to talk to, and he’s 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: He’d be like, “Oh no.” Yes, exactly.

Matt: You’d communicate through the universal language of one. All right, I’m 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. It’s a book by Lewis Hyde which is just fantastic. It’s 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. That’s what I’m currently reading. That’s on my Kindle.

On my nightstand would be Morning Pages, a journal that it’s actually a companion by Julia Cameron. Morning Pages are creative exercises that help you get unblocked. It’s 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: It’s part of journaling exercise as part of organizational exercise to get you focused?

Tim: It’s 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: Let’s talk a little bit about your favorite apps. I’m sure a ton of them are on your phone. What are you using now? What do you love?

Tim: Okay. Full disclosure, I’ve worked with a lot of these companies. Probably my fourth biggest expense every month is Uber. I use it for everything. I don’t own a car anymore, and I don’t 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 you’re doing this—if 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, you’re either all in or all out. There’s 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 didn’t 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. There’s a game called Flow, it’s super old-school, that I would use to kill a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Tetris. Okay, here’s a new one. This is actually in Tools of Titans. Tetris has been studied, I’m not kidding you, for alleviating PTSD and also for curbing compulsive eating and insomnia because you’re effectively overriding visually whatever you’re obsessing about. Using Tetris, just a free version is fine. Five to 10 minutes before bed.

Matt: Just to be clear, you’re not an investor in the original Tetris, are you Tim?

Tim: That’d be amazing.

Matt: And you don’t find that having that screen time keeps your brain awake and prevents you from sleeping?

Tim: Here’s a related tip on that front. There’s an app called f.lux. I think it’s 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. Let’s 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. I’m generally doing sumo deadlifts to the knee and that’s it. Then dropping the weight. This is from a sprint coach named Barry Ross.

I’ve 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: You’re like a Gumby doll or something. Top three supplements?

Tim: Top three supplements, I would say omega-3 phospholipids, curcumin, that’s 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. It’s 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. I’m just not that worried about muscular and joint function.

I feel like that’s a very manageable homework assignment, The brain is where most people really screw up. By the way, Alzheimer’s is called type-3 diabetes by some scientists, so you can think of that as brain diabetes.

Matt: All right, we’ve 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 on…

Tim: You’re talking to the guy who writes 700-page books, okay, I’m kidding.

Matt: Single…I’m going to edit you down, that’s 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 haven’t 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 I’ve been taking Metamucil, other stuff, the whole nine, but they’re chock-full many of them with aspartame and sucrose.

Tim: You can just get Castle’s psyllium husks.

Matt: 30 grams, okay. Being productive, productivity.

Tim: Being productive, I would say try the five-minute journal. I have no affiliation, it’s five minutes in the morning basically pregame prep and then five minutes at night, which is your postgame analysis.

I’ll 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: That’s 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. I’m going to give a wacky one. I don’t 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 don’t know why it works.

It’s super-simple: two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar plus one tablespoon of raw honey and hot water mixed up.

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 Brach’s guided meditation for free, but meditation in the morning so that you’re less reactive.

Matt: Zen out. Learning.

Tim: Learning. One sentence: Ask yourself routinely “What if I did the opposite?” 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 eleven— next you know you’re not breathing at all.

Tim: Next thing you’ve grown gills.

Matt: You’re 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. It’s really dangerous for you just like success. Scrap it, find a different term.

Don’t chase happiness, that’s it. That’d 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 you’re 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.