Chris Williamson

Speaking of shiny heads. Yeah. Tim, have you ever been to South Korea?

Tim Ferriss

Yes, I have.

Chris Williamson

Okay. Would you like to go back?

Tim Ferriss

I would, yeah.

Chris Williamson

Well, South Korean president calls for hair loss treatment to be covered by insurance, suggesting that government funded Lux maxing may increase the birth rate. His interesting proposal characterizes hair loss as, quote, a matter of survival. How do you feel about that, Tim?

Tim Ferriss

I think that is not the right solution to the problem. They have, they have tried a lot in South Korea, so I have spent time there. I would love to go back.

Tim Urban

Back topic that is often very distressful to people living with it.

Tim Ferriss

There you go. How do you feel? I. I am not distressed because I shaved my head, starting with wrestling at like age 12. So I got used to it, thankfully.

Chris Williamson

Oh, you opted in.

Tim Ferriss

As soon as I saw the option to white knuckle or shave my head, I decided to shave my head. But the, I think the stickier part here is actually some systemic issues related to things like rent in South Korea, because they tried a stimulus of something like $2 billion to encourage procreation. Didn't work. And when you look at some of the issues in South Korea that are not obvious originally because people point to idiocracy, like comps, where they're like, well, everybody's waiting later, they're getting more educated. But in South Korea, for instance, if you want to build a family, meaning you're going to need a larger apartment, there are very straightforward things that are a problem. Like your safety deposit or security deposit for the apartment is like 12 months rent rent, and people can't afford it. So they're like, I can't, I can't afford it.

Tim Urban

I can't so much so so many months rent versus it is.

Tim Ferriss

And they're like, I can't afford it, therefore I can't have kids who can,

Tim Urban

who can afford a year of rent if they're renting.

Tim Ferriss

And I may be getting the month slightly wrong, but I talked to some Koreans, they're like, no, it's like, I want to have a kid and here are the reasons I can't. So I don't think fixing hair loss is going to actually solve that type of problem.

Chris Williamson

Look, Tim, we're. We're playing in the margins here because we can't get into the housing problem, okay? And the margins happen to be the top of the head. That's what matters most. The most interesting explanation I've heard for South Korea is K Pop. In order to become a K pop star, you have to sign your agreement, your artist's agreement. Says that you're not going to be in a relationship while you're doing it. So they have created the most popular cultural export and import I guess or internal stars have no families, no kids. Think about what happens when you do that. It's just so inversion. Easy as fuck. The only way you can become a K pop star is if you've already got kids. That's my solution anyway.

Tim Urban

That's what I'm doing. Yeah. Fucking dumb role models. And now these role models have no kids.

Tim Ferriss

Those kids don't need rooms.

Tim Urban

What are we talking about here?

Chris Williamson

They can go on the road on the tour bus, right? Well there was that guy in Georgia.

Tim Ferriss

So to try and fix the country or the state.

Chris Williamson

The country of Georgia. In an attempt to try and improve the birthright there. It's very religious. I think it's very Roman Catholic. And there is a rock star preacher guy and he said I will personally baptize the third child of any family in the country. All of these families speed ran children to get to the third. And he's had a meaningful increase in the birth rate because these families wanted this guy that was basically the most popular person in the entire country to do the thing on the kid.

Tim Ferriss

Or you could just do it. Certain billionaires like the CEO of Telegram has done and say I will pay for IVF for as many women who

Chris Williamson

would like to have my sperm donoring his way to 100 plus.

George Zaidan

Well this.

Chris Williamson

He's a 2026 Genghis Khan.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, yeah. He's doing it the nicer way.

Tim Urban

It's weird that most people don't do that. You know it's a programmed to. It's like you're. It's like we're programmed for the instrumental part of it. Like the sex but like not actually the actual like evolutionary goal is not part of the programming. And if it were, it would be insane. You'd have every rich person would be sperm donating. Crazy would be like all these scandals. It would be people with thousands of kids.

George Zaidan

It's more ideas guys than operations guys. I guess you know one of the. Have you seen the documentary of the guy who had a thousand children?

Tim Urban

No.

George Zaidan

So he started off as a sperm donor.

Tim Ferriss

The doctor or.

George Zaidan

No, no, it's not a doctor.

Tim Ferriss

It's just one of those too.

George Zaidan

If you could search it. Jared, it's this big thick like Dutch looking guy and he started off local sperm donning. But I think in the Netherlands the limit's 20 and just started going to different jurisdictions like playing around with it in The Netherlands.

Chris Williamson

Was it not a guy that switched out the sperm for his own.

Tim Ferriss

There was a doctor.

George Zaidan

He was a doctor.

Chris Williamson

So we've got.

George Zaidan

He's like a Harold Shipman of.

Chris Williamson

We've got two guys trying to achieve the same thing, but very different routes in.

George Zaidan

Correct, correct. And this guy, because there's a limit in the Netherlands of I think of 20 children that you're allowed to do it because they're then concerned of inbreeding. Inbreeding, that may happen. And this guy ranked it all the way up to a thousand. And then when he got banned from the Netherlands, he started going, I believe, to Kenya just to.

Chris Williamson

You're really gonna stand out in Kenya if you're a guy from the Netherlands, aren't you?

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Chris Williamson

When the kids come out, you're really gonna know that that's not somebody.

George Zaidan

Kenya. Yes. Yeah, yeah. There's a Mr. Beast of everything. Guy's gotta win, you know, but like

Tim Urban

when you have a guy like that, you really want him to be. Have a really, really good DNA. You want him to be like high IQ and good disposition.

Chris Williamson

You want Formula one drivers to be doing this. We need Max Verstappen to be like lighting as a spur.

Tim Urban

You're having a meaningful effect on like the whole human gene pool when you do that. Especially like three or when there's a hundred thousand of your descendants in the world and they're procreating and.

Tim Ferriss

Well, what does the future look like if it's the progeny of billionaires plus the hyper religious right? Like, what does that mix look like? You look at certain countries and birth rates by kind of subpopulation, say in certain places in the Middle east and stuff. And it's very much the hyper religious right. So what does that mean in 20 years time?

Tim Urban

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

I don't know.

Tim Urban

It's also the really impoverished people who are in an environment where a lot of kids used to die. Die in childbirth, but now they don't anymore. But the adjustment of fertility takes a lag generation. So you have this huge ballooning usually.

Tim Ferriss

So that's also Tim Urban. I want to know what's on your mind, man. What have you been obsessed with? I mean, we'll get to pianos, I'm sure, but maybe that's for later after a few toothpicks.

Tim Urban

When I'm writing a book, I'm just in it and immersed in it. So I've been working on a book for three years. It's the story of everything. It goes from the Big Bang to the end of the universe.

Tim Ferriss

You Know, I've always wanted to say, I think you should be just a little more ambitious, you know, reach for the brass ring.

Tim Urban

You know, it's like secretly kind of not as hard as it seems because you don't have to go that in depth on anything. So it's little dips. It's like a kind of like 100 blog posts in one.

Tim Ferriss

You're like, World War II. That was a bummer. But it worked out.

Tim Urban

No, no, no. So for example, one sentence. No, no, literally, like, so, World War II.

Tim Ferriss

Sorry, sorry, Japan. We'll make it up to you.

Tim Urban

I was like, what do I do? I have the world wars. I can't not mention them. But like, there's certain things I want to focus on. Things that people are like, I never knew that. Or like, that's so mind blowing. Like, I'm not going to go. I'm not going to. We're not going to go deep enough. Everyone knows the basics of World War, right? So I decided instead I'm going to make it like a two page story that's going to be an allegory, which is a brawl at Denny's, because I used to. Because I got hooked on YouTube. Spiral of Brawls at Denny's. It's very entertaining. And so then I came to my mind, I was like hooked on one that week when I was writing this. And I was like, okay, so you've got like, you know, you've got a bunch of tension in the room and then finally like, you know, Austria, Hungary goes over and just like, you know, slaps Serbia guy in the face. And then, and then, you know, a bunch of, you know, then you have Russia and France kind of are like, you know, these big guys who are friends with the Serbia guy. You know, I just. So I just did this and. And I don't know, a lot of the times I'm like, we. I don't know if that's good. I don't know if people will like this. That's what I just did. I guess that's how we're doing the world Wars. And then I move on because I had to move on.

Chris Williamson

Allegory of Denny'.

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Tim Urban

Because everything I have to think about, how do I get this in there in a way that's still fun and new and different? I don't want you to feel like you're reading a textbook or an encyclopedia.

Chris Williamson

I would love one sentence. Historical event recaps. I think that would be a fucking wonderful idea.

Tim Ferriss

It's like fortune cookie history.

Chris Williamson

Yeah. Because barstool Sports Dave Portnoy does the one bite pizza review. And this is just the historical equivalent.

George Zaidan

It's like that Elton John diary entry. Oh, I think it's Border Rolls.

Chris Williamson

No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, you taught me about this. It's the single. It's a single grade. That or the Hunter S. Thompson one, which like tracked. I guess that wasn't a diary entry. That tracked what his daily routine was. Woke up at 12, midday, two cigarettes, cocaine, whiskey. Cocaine, whiskey. MVMA D, D D D. But yeah,

George Zaidan

oh, here it is. Got up, tidied the house, bought a Rolls Royce, had dinner, wrote Candle in the Wind, had dinner with Ringo Starr. That was one day.

Chris Williamson

Bought a Rolls Royce, wrote Candle in the Wind, had dinner with Ringo Star.

Tim Ferriss

I wonder if tidying the house was meaningful to him. Was that like soothing therapy? Or was that just buying time before he could justify walking to the Rolls Royce dealership?

Chris Williamson

Dealership opened.

Tim Ferriss

I will never know.

Tim Urban

It's also two dinners in there.

Chris Williamson

That's right. I think one of those is an error. I think the middle dinner didn't exist.

George Zaidan

We also used lunch and dinner. We used lunch and dinner interchangeably in.

Tim Urban

It's dinner or supper or something. Right.

George Zaidan

You can throw that, you can throw tea in the mix as well. Tim.

Chris Williamson

Afters is also not bad. Yeah, Afters is dessert.

George Zaidan

Completely, completely gets mixed up. I had to.

Tim Urban

Sorry. I also had to get. Speaking in one sentence. I had to get from. You know, because I'm going, I did like ancient Mesopotamia pretty thoroughly because that's so important. And like, you know, the first empire, which was the Akkadians and you have Sargon the Great, the first emperor. And I did all that. And then I'm like, now I want to get to like the Bronze Age collapse and that stuff, but there's a thousand years in between. So I decided again, I'm like, what do I do? So I just wrote a. I'm going to do this in one sentence. And it ended up being a paragraph a pretty long. It had probably be a full page, but it's a one run on sentence that goes through 2200 BC to 1200 BC. So you got, you know, you really speed run it well, but not usually. Sometimes then I would slow down and you know, spend 20 pages on, you know, the Bronze Age collapse or whatever. But like, but like, yeah, I think

Chris Williamson

one piece around Rome. You did Rome in a single sentence.

Tim Urban

No, Rome is later.

Chris Williamson

Separate treatment. Okay.

Tim Urban

Yeah, yeah, Rome. I had to say a little bit more about. But you know, you can't not going to go through the whole.

Tim Ferriss

How did you choose this book project?

Tim Urban

Because so I write blog posts about anything and it's a great format now

Tim Ferriss

just so people understand what we're talking about. Because I have more context than some people listening. How long are some of your blog posts?

Tim Urban

So the short ones are like 3,000 words, which is like, I don't know, I don't know, 10 minute read. Yeah, something like that. And then early on I was like, I can't go over, you know, 2,000 words. And I was like, okay, I can't go over 3,000, 4,000. And then it just kept going up and then I did one that was like 8,000. But like we got some traffic and I was like, people liked it. Okay. And then the next one and then so I just had a problem where it was like one of these, you know, it's like someone who keeps taking like, you know, more drugs to get the same high. Like so I would just start like then getting more thorough and more thorough. And by the end I was writing 40,000 word.

Chris Williamson

That's word count influence.

Tim Ferriss

That's a book for me. It's like 50,000 words is a, it's

Tim Urban

like 120, 150 page book, something like that. And, but, but, but. So I have this format where I can write any length blog post. So I'm like, why would I do a book? I'm. I write, I have a. And then I was like, okay, if I'm doing a book, it has to be a topic that I could never do as a blog post. Like what's the ultimate topic that like is so big it has to be history of everything. So the answer was everything as a topic.

Tim Ferriss

Now I, I'm just going to pat your back a little bit because I know you're not going to do it yourself. One of your longer posts, is it fair to say? I hesitate to even call it a post, but man of the hour, right? SpaceX is on a lot of minds. I checked Today, it's like 2.5 trillion market cap right now. So Elon liked your stuff so much that he gave you exclusive access to what?

Tim Urban

Yeah, so he read my AI post and was like, hey, I like how this was circa when this is 2015, beginning of 2015.

George Zaidan

2015.

Tim Urban

So this is really early days with AI and with Elon really. I mean he was very, he was a huge deal. But a lot of people I told in my life, they didn't know who he was at that time.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

Tim Urban

And Space X was Some people knew about it, some people didn't. And, and basically he said, you know how he is, he's very like, he likes to trust people and not. And be hands off in a lot of those cases. So he would say, he said, would you like to write about Tesla or SpaceX ever? Normally if someone's like, you want to write about my company? I would say no. But like Tesla and Space X are as fascinating as any blog post could be because they're about such bigger things than a company. Right.

Tim Ferriss

Also with the access that you could get.

Tim Urban

So then he basically said, you can talk to me as much as you want and also any engineer you want and they don't have to be media ready. But. And I said, Because I, I said to him like. And then on my side I was like, I'll, I'm not like a journalist who's like that. You can't change anything. I'm like, I'll send you the post at the end. And if there's something like some proprietary thing someone said that's not supposed to be in there, you can take it out. And they really almost took nothing out. It was like, it was like the, the, the cost of like a Starlink set. Starlink was an idea at that time. It was like, you know, little things like that, the bandwidth of a Starlink satellite, things like random numbers. There were like two or three of those. You can't put that in. Elon had like criticized someone that later they were like, yeah, we don't want that in there. I was like, okay, I'll take that out. Other than that, like they left, let it go. And it was obviously, I'm like the space network to be in SpaceX, you know, factory in, in Hawthorne. And just looking at the rocket up close, I got to like sit in a Dragon and like talk to.

Tim Ferriss

This is 2015, 2015.

Tim Urban

So they had never landed a rocket yet. That was the big thing at the time. No one has ever landed a rocket. SpaceX is trying to. People think they're crazy. And I actually, I did one of these because they started broadcasting their launches and I did the very, you know, it was like one of the very first ones. They were like, you want to do one when we're trying to land a rock? And I was like, sure. So I was like a guest broadcaster on the time when they landed for the first time.

Tim Ferriss

That's so cool.

Tim Urban

So like the 7 year old in me was like, I can't believe this is real. It was like, it was very exciting for me. And then later I wrote a big, big post about Neuralink, which they launched the company alongside that post. So it was like. And then. And then the scariest thing ever was the whole company now is kind of waiting on me and I am a procrastinator.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, with Neuralink.

Tim Urban

Yeah. And like, we're talking about how my posts always go longer. They thought it was gonna be like a 6,000 word post. This one was a 40. And Elon Musk, I think this chill, he was like, it's so long, bro. And I was like, this is how I am, dude. This is how. I don't know what to tell you. I can't not do it. There's so many. I can't talk about Neuralink without talking about other brain computer interface. I can't talk about those.

Tim Ferriss

Then I talk about evolution and then

Tim Urban

I talk about the brain. Brain, the nervous system. How did it evolve in the first place? We end up back in like the most ancient part of like origin of life. But that's how I do it. And. And it was such a complicated story to tell because it was the concept of a brain computer interface. But then the reason for it, which was like merging with AI and what the hell? So it was long, but he sends out a tweet that was like, like, we'll be launching in a week. You know, Wait, but why? Post will be ready like in a week. And I was like, no, it won't. So scary. So I ended up. I ended up like furiously trying to finish and finish in three weeks. And I was like, talk about like good external pressure. That's helpful to have like Elon Musk publicly putting pressure on you. So that was that. But yeah, and it's just great because you get to like, by writing that post, you end up just fully understanding like a whole industry you didn't understand before. Right. So it was, it was fun.

Tim Ferriss

So amazing.

George Zaidan

Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss

They're blog posts and then they're blog posts.

Tim Urban

Right? But yeah, so that's why a book had to be something even bigger than something like that.

Chris Williamson

You've got the most watched TED Talk of all time as well.

Tim Urban

Second most.

Chris Williamson

Oh, who beat you?

Tim Urban

Ken Robinson. Well, he was the first one post it like back in 2006. Mine was 2016, so he's got a decade on me. But I'm like, I think he has like 80 million and I have like 78. And I'm like, come on, man, like, just get to first put some paid behind it.

Chris Williamson

Just put some paid advertising behind it to just.

Tim Urban

I Don't think that'll. I don't think that'll be all YouTube.

George Zaidan

You could make it RIP in Bangladesh.

Tim Urban

You could get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson

Got one of those. Watching people learning how to fascinate.

Tim Ferriss

Maybe for your Kindle version of your book or all your books you just have. It's almost like signing up for WI fi at the airport. Like, you have to watch an ad, but in this case, they have to watch your TED talk.

Chris Williamson

30 seconds. Just enough. Just enough to trigger a play.

George Zaidan

That's all I need with the new book. Let's say history is kind of like a stock market and everything's priced. I feel like World War II is very much. It's like Apple right now, right? Like, people talk about World War II. What parts of history from your research do you think is, like, way more fascinating than people give it credit?

Tim Urban

Oh, my God, some. I mean, almost everything. I mean, everything, once you dig in. I mean, I was just writing about the black hole era. Do you know what that is? Like, it's. I'm going to get like. I might, like, have an existential crisis if I talk about this, but. So basically, there's. The star era goes on for like, 100 trillion years or something like that. So that the last stars will be born around 100 trillion years from now. And then like 20 trillion years later, the last stars are gone, and we're in the Degenerate era, and there's just nothing except for little white drawers. And then that ends, and all that's left is black holes. And so how long is the black hole era? Because the black holes decay really, really slowly. Really slowly. But then some of them are going to be huge. But there'll be a point, at some point when the last black hole.

Chris Williamson

It's Hawking radiation, right?

Tim Urban

Hawking radiation, exactly. It's like the tiniest little right around the edge. The antimatter, you know, whatever. So I was like, how do I explain how long this is? It's 10 to the 106 years. Okay, so what. How do you. What does that mean? How do you put that into context? And the way I thought about it is, okay, imagine if we make a timeline where every centimeter is a billion years. So so far, this is how long we've gone. Big bang today, right? And 13 centimeters. And now I was like, so how long would this timeline have to be to get all the way to the end of the black hole era? And I said, okay, well, let's just actually get. I want to always want to, like, actually do the calculation. So I was like, let's imagine this is a ribbon with a half a millimeter thickness and it's 1cm wide. And then every centimeter of it is of length is a billion years. So how long would it have to be? Turns out you'd have to. If you could pack, like, okay, if you imagine if you packed this room tightly with ribbon, so it's just like this block hard rock of ribbon, just packed as much as you possibly could in, you know, and every centimeter is a billion years. Okay. Would that be enough time? No, you'd have to pack the entire observable universe to the brim with ribbon. And that would get you nowhere close. You'd have to have packs. And the final number I came to is 1.4 billion observable universes with this, this ribbon to have by the end of the last universe, you get to the end of the ribbon, that's the end of the Black hole era. So there's shit like that that I just.

Chris Williamson

I'm going to put a wrinkle into it because after that you still have quantum fluctuations.

Tim Urban

Oh, yeah. Oh, no.

Chris Williamson

The Dark Era. And that goes on. That goes on for even longer. So the five. The five stages of the five ages of the universe. Sorry, book from 1996 goes through this. They had to come up with their own numbering convention to be able to name it. They didn't use ribbon. Yours is much more inventive. That's just way more nerdy.

Tim Urban

The Dark Era, which just comes after the observable universe. Sorry, after the Black Hole era is way more upsetting because now imagine you have an entire. You wrote a book that contains the history of the universe, right? And every page is an equal amount of time you could pack. And it's like something like 16 of these. So a trillion times a trillion times a trillion times a trillion observable universes, but 16 trillions to the brim with pages. And from the Big Bang to the end of the black hole era. That whole thing with the ribbon I just talked about is not even the first proton in the first atom of the first letter of the first word of the first page of the first book. So I get upset about this. This is the kind of thing that when I think about then I'm like, in bed and I literally can't sleep and I'm tossing and turning. And the next day my wife is like, why are you so tired? And I'm like, it's too embarrassing to explain. But, like, I. I'm having an existential

Chris Williamson

crisis about how long the universe we

Tim Urban

won't be here, but that amount of time will pass. And that is weird. Like no one should want eternal life.

Chris Williamson

There's an interesting theory about super advanced alien civilizations shutting down because toward the end of that era, you end up with an unbelievably cold universe, one that's significantly colder than ours now. Now it's not much, but on the margins this makes a big difference because almost all energy usage blows off heat. And if you were doing simulations, ancestor simulations, future simulations, if you had, if you'd gone into the metaverse and decided to make this your new place, it's way more efficient to do this the later that we go. So I'm going to guess that you came across this too.

Tim Urban

It's one of the explanations for the Fermi paradox, which is the paradox that asks why have we not seen aliens when there should be lots of them out there? We should see something. There should be some that are far more advanced than us, so that they should really be noticeable out there building Dyson spheres and stuff. And there's many explanations. One of them is they're all hibernating because they've all figured this out and they're going on this thing that will feel like a second to them, but they're just going to go past a few, I don't know, whatever it is, 100, few hundred billion years. And we're just in this era where it doesn't make sense for an advanced species to be conscious. So they just are all hibernating.

Chris Williamson

It's like waiting for the ventilation guy to come and fit the AC before installing a new computer talent. That's what it's like. It's going to wait. It's too hot, it's going to make the apartment too hot. We just go chill, let's go play pickleball for a while. He'll come in in a bit. And then once we, once he's hibernated,

Tim Urban

it'll just be like a blink. Okay, we're here now. Let's keep going. But to us, we're just like, it's empty. No one's here.

Chris Williamson

Yeah. Fucking wild. It's really cool, dude. I got obsessed with that and supervoid, the Beweto supervoid. Now that if you want an existence.

Tim Urban

Another. Yes, another crisis.

Chris Williamson

Yeah, it's like a. So you should have a relatively uniform universe, right? A cosmic microwave background, but you don't. You have little fluctuations. This, even within little fluctuations, it should still broadly be pretty Uniform, but it's not. There's these huge things called supervoids that are like millions of light years.

Tim Urban

Some of them are. The biggest ones are a billion light years across.

Chris Williamson

Boeta is one might be a billion light years, a few billion light years across. And it's almost entirely bereft of material for billions and billions of light years. It's insane. It's so fucking.

Tim Urban

There are some theories that even we are in somewhat of a void potentially like that. We're in a very uncrowded part of the observable universe. Perhaps, it's unclear, but. And of course, by the way, everything we're talking about, the voids we see, everything, that's all within the observable universe, which might be like a grain of sand compared to the earth size full universe. Like this is just what we can see. And like that also freaks me out.

Chris Williamson

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George Zaidan

Do you ever watch Power of 10?

Tim Urban

Of course.

George Zaidan

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you watched Power of 10? Maybe. Jared, you can get it on the screen on YouTube. But it's because as you give me that kind of conversation there, I start zooming out of myself and I realize, oh, I am essentially nothing. And the power of 10. It starts with people in a park. And it just zooms out by the power of 10, I think every three seconds. So it goes from them in the park, like zoomed in on their face to above to above to above. And you realize how quickly it goes all the way out to the earth, just essentially being nothing. But then what's the most fascinating part of this video is they then zoom in. So then zooms in all the way. Yeah, it's that top one there. This is the nearest I found to doing any psychedelic drugs without having to ingest anything.

Tim Urban

This is a staple of American schools. We watched this.

Chris Williamson

This was insane.

Tim Ferriss

Are you serious? I never saw this.

George Zaidan

This is how you ended up, like, how you ended up.

Tim Urban

This made a huge impression on me.

Tim Ferriss

10 times as wide. Our picture will center on the picnickers

Chris Williamson

even after they've been lost to sight. Right.

Tim Urban

100 meters.

Chris Williamson

Nice. That basically, this is making those picnic is the center of the universe. Yeah, that's pretty fun. Power boats lie at their docks. This must have been difficult to do without much computer technology.

Tim Urban

I know. I'm impressed.

Tim Ferriss

The distance a racing car can travel.

Chris Williamson

Dude, fire up the autism engine. This is great.

George Zaidan

It's actually a beautiful, like, meditation technique to sit there and do this and then start realizing how many other people out there have their own form.

Tim Ferriss

We see first the rounded end of Lake Michigan. This is something that I don't know if you guys recognize this name. So Ed Cook, who was a memory competitive, memory champion. He's. He's from your motherland. He's a Brit. Then he trained. I think it was Jonah Lair in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. So he took a layperson in this guest journalist and trained him up to be memory champion in the US where they have to memorize a shuffled deck of cards for time and things like this. There are various events, kind of like a mental decathlon, but as a meditative tool, he does this zooming out.

Chris Williamson

Right.

Tim Ferriss

And there's also a really. This is like the Brit roll call here. But I think Oliver Berkman is also one of your countrymen. Wrote a great book called 4000 Weeks, which is tremendous. And one of the chapters is called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. And it's some version of this. But that is partially why I wanted to ask you to what extent do you find it helpful to think about this stuff where perhaps it puts problems in perspective versus overwhelming in its magnification of your insignificance?

George Zaidan

There's a great cartoon. I think it's by Asher Perlman. And it's a guy saying, not only are your problems insignificant, you're insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. It's like this guy who's dealing with nihilism. And then it's like the reframers. You also don't matter in the whole universe as well.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

George Zaidan

So you can't have that effect. That happens to people.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. So I'm curious for you personally, I,

Tim Urban

I, I think it does make me feel kind of cozy in a way. Like, I, I, I, I think it makes me feel better because it makes me feel just like, lucky to be conscious here for a second as opposed to thinking like, this is the baseline and oh my God, I'm going to like, die. And that's going to. I'm like, it's so cool that I, that for a moment in this universe, like, my consciousness formed so improbable.

Tim Ferriss

Right?

Tim Urban

Yeah. And like this tiny little also, so again, we just talked about. Time is really scary. Space is really.

Chris Williamson

Right.

Tim Urban

Crazy. And like you said, then goes down to the small. Like it gets even smaller than it does big. And that's cool. I'm like a, you know, Feynman has this great quote, like, you know, I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe. And it's like both of those. Right. And it's like, it does just make me feel like, very lucky to be here. And then that, then it feels like I'm playing with house money a little bit and then like, suddenly debt doesn't. I'm like, whatever, man. It's like, this is so cool. And just like, I don't know one, you know, I'm tickled by these thoughts. I find it like endlessly I get the dopamine hits I get from them. So to me, it just, it's usually a positive. I don't like reading about, like, the rise and fall of empires. You know, there's other parts of the book that I'm like, that's not a nice thought. Because a lot of these empires, close to home, at their peak, they were really sure. Or even on their up or even on the early way down, they were just, they were, this is it. We finally are here in the modern times and we figured it out. And like those empires of the past, like, they, they made mistakes that we won't make. And every single one, they had a catastrophic fall. I don't like that.

George Zaidan

Yeah, well, I was, was joking with Chris when we did an episode recently that as every, I think we spoke about this as well that as every empire falls, nobody announces that the empire has fallen. So it's obviously up for debate. But that Rome, most mainstream historians will say that Rome fell in about 4, 7, 6 AD and it's almost because it's quite poetic because you have Romulus saw the rise of the Roman Empire, he was the first Roman Emperor and then young Romulus was disposed and that was the end of the Roman Empire. But the next day there was no big announcement that the Roman Empire had fallen. So much so you obviously have the split of the Roman Empire. I think in the 70000s A.D. charlemagne is announced as the official Roman emperor. So 300 years later it was still going on. Voltaire said the empire that calls itself Holy Roland, an empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. He said that in 1700 AD. So the actual when it came to everybody deciding the Roman Empire had fallen, when it was officially announced, I think by Francis II, it was the mid-1700s. So I joke that the most powerful empire today, when it falls, there'll be people that still think it's going to be.

Tim Urban

People in 3000 will be like, well of course the US empire collapsed in 1994 AD and we'll be like, huh, what?

Chris Williamson

It's like a punch drunk boxer that can't admit that he's failing. But dude, your career's over, it's time to go.

George Zaidan

Me and Chris can confirm that there was no moment that it certainly happened in our lifetimes that the BBC announced the British Empire had fallen. It's like, when did it happen? It happened, but when did it happen?

Chris Williamson

Yeah, speaking of stuff that you learned in school, have you seen the Retro Codex? Have you seen this really, really cool website? So it's a website that teaches you things that you learned in school that are now disproven. So you can go in and look at what year you graduated high school and it'll tell you what you learned in school and have now been disproven. Jared, can you pull this up for me? So I put this in as 2000s, which would be for me and George. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Lightning has struck several places multiple times. Empire State Building is struck approximately 25 times a year. Wearing red near a bull will cause it to charge. Bulls may not be able to distinguish the color red from other colors. What triggers the bull is movement and physical provocation, not color. The red cape is to conceal blood stains. Goldfish have a 3 second memory. Goldfish retain memories for weeks, months and possibly years. George Washington had wooden teeth. He did wear Dentures, but they were made of other materials such as tin, gold and lead. Human teeth from enslaved individuals. It's a bit gnarly. You need to wait 20 to 30 minutes after you eat to swim or you'll get stomach cramps and drown. There's no clinical evidence for that. There's another one. Go a bit further down. Oh, I see.

Tim Urban

Oh.

Chris Williamson

If you roll your eyes.

Tim Ferriss

Targets pool and folk wisdom checked on the top left. I was like, I don't recall getting more.

Chris Williamson

If you pee in the pool, everyone will know because it'll turn water green.

Tim Urban

Hot water. Washing hands is not. Go back up in cold water. Yeah, right there.

George Zaidan

Interesting.

Tim Urban

I'm learning a few things.

Chris Williamson

Water temperature has not been found to impact the antibacterial efficacy of hand washing. I didn't even know that after a person dies, their hair or fingernails can keep growing.

Tim Urban

Who thinks Earth is the only planet with water? I don't know. I don't know about that.

Chris Williamson

But in the 2000s, might you have thought that. Because Pluto being a planet would have been true when we went to high school.

Tim Urban

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

George Zaidan

True.

Chris Williamson

Brown sugar is healthier than white sugar. Yeah. I just, like. It's nice to find. And then obviously all of this stuff with the food pyramid that's got turned literally upside down, so some of these

Tim Urban

will end up being overturned too. But yeah.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, for sure.

Tim Urban

I think when I was thinking about, you know, the way kids are educated, I think that schools do something that I think in some cases, like state. At least they traditionally. That is. That is maybe the right thing to do, which is you teach the wrong story, the simple wrong story, first just to, like, let the concepts. And then later you start to build the nuance and you realize that the. But that's in kind of like. Like Thanksgiving. I think it's. I think it's. I learned early on that Thanksgiving was this, like, wonderful thing. And the Pilgrims came and the Indians. At the time, the Indians were like. And everyone was happy and they had this nice feast or, you know, just like, Columbus discovered the New World. But I'm like, no, he didn't. But, like. And just, like, keep it. Let the basic story seep in. And then later you can be like, actually, like, this is like an allegory kind of. That represents like, a much larger, more complicated, much nastier story often. And I think sometimes right now what they're doing is they're, you know, of kind of, I don't know, you know, kind of political reasons or whatever. They're. They're. They're teaching kind of very, very like, you know, kind of a hardcore first story to really young kids right away

Chris Williamson

that they're front loading the gnarly version.

Tim Urban

Yeah, exactly. And maybe going too far even in that direction when like, I think I, I mean, this is a whole other can of worms. But I think that maybe I want

Chris Williamson

to put, put the disguise on.

Tim Urban

But like, I know, I think that, I do think American children should be taught first all these great things about America. They should learn that they're in this great country that has complicated. It's not been perfect, but they've done a lot of great things. And it's this wonderful thing and patriotism and be really proud. And then later, later, then you can learn a lot more nuance or it's the same reason that I think you shouldn't be teaching your kid. You know, that like, you think your dad's a good person, but actually, you know, he cheated when in his 20s, you know that he like did that. You know, he like, you don't do that. You start with a dad's grade, of course, and then later in life and the kid's an adult, you start. I don't. This is partisan, controversial anymore. You start to then say, you know, dad, you know, dad can say to you, you know, yeah, I'm not perfect. I did this and this.

Tim Ferriss

But like, yeah, you don't need to front load.

Tim Urban

Kids are kids. And like, it's a very different kind of person to teach.

Tim Ferriss

Well, also because, I mean, I remember talking to a very close friend of mine who's got a bunch of kids. Wonderful guy, very successful in what he does. And I asked him what his parenting advice would be. And his first rule was, you need to teach your kids to be optimists because action flows from optimism and agency flows from optimism. Right. And so what you're describing sort of creates a picture that you don't want to aspire to engage with and seems antithetical to that.

Tim Urban

They're like, you know, second, third, fourth graders, just hammer climate change. Climate change. Your future is destroyed. Like, why? Who thinks this is a good idea, right?

George Zaidan

Little, little kids.

Tim Ferriss

Well, and then the older generations are like, oh my God, these younger generations, so apathetic. I'm like, yeah, you're getting waterboard into with existential threat all day. Yeah, you would be too.

George Zaidan

I guess it makes sense that the younger you are, the more neuroplastic you are.

Chris Williamson

Right?

George Zaidan

And even like statements like that are quite reflexive. So if I go on the news tomorrow and say it's going to be a sunny day. I have no impact on whether it's going to be a sunny day. But a reflexive system is. If I go on the news tomorrow and say there's going to be a bank run, I have an impact on whether there's going to be a bank run. And if you go in thinking America's a terrible country, that's gonna be quite a reflexive thing for your entire youth. I mean, it's quite funny listening to an. Not that you were complaining to him, but an American talk about the lack of patriotism in their country.

Chris Williamson

Suck with two Brits next to the table.

George Zaidan

Yeah, it's kind of like Chris talking to me about how he's frustrated with the size of his forearms right now. You know what I mean? I'm like, okay, okay, I understand. But yeah, I think it's interesting for America to be going through that when you're still by far the tallest midget in the room.

Tim Urban

Right, Totally. And by the way, there's so much British history to be proud of. Oh, don't get me started. This negative lens.

George Zaidan

Don't get me started, Tim. I declare I said this to Chris previously. We are the most insecure in terms of internal reputation versus external. So if you travel anywhere else in the world, apart from a few places, they often love the uk, but internally they often criticize themselves the most. I'll never forget a friend of mine came, his sister came home one day and she said, you know what? She goes, Britain is the racist country on earth. And he paused for a second and he just said, compared to where she couldn't answer

Chris Williamson

is that line about capitalism. It's the worst system, apart from all of the other ones.

Tim Urban

No, it's just a crazy distortion lens and it's so self defeating and it's like this crazy.

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Chris Williamson

Jack Butcher's got this great line. He says unlearning is a hundred times harder than learning. And if you're laying down those myelin sheets and some kid who's five years old, six, seven, I don't know when you start to understand what climate is and what power structures look like. But yeah, you're probably best starting off with generalized optimism and getting into specific pessimism or specific scrutiny as opposed to generalized.

Tim Urban

High school maybe, you know, like, maybe a little minuscule. Elementary school is just, it's just.

Chris Williamson

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George Zaidan

So to steal my other side before you even get onto the 16 year old is also a. You have to use identification now to use social media for anybody over the age as well.

Chris Williamson

Is that a bad idea?

George Zaidan

It's an interesting discussion.

Chris Williamson

Everybody's got okay with it. Everyone's got a concern about digital safety. I understand that, but why have you

Tim Ferriss

abstained for the last few days from X?

Chris Williamson

Busy.

Tim Ferriss

Okay, okay. I was like what was the catalyzing event?

Chris Williamson

It wasn't a choice. It was literally just busy.

Tim Urban

Yeah.

George Zaidan

Touching grass.

Chris Williamson

Yeah, Trying to.

George Zaidan

Pathetic mate.

Chris Williamson

Get over trying to. I was looking at photos of grass on X.

George Zaidan

Actually it was better he was too busy. Doom scrolling on TikTok was the actual fewer bugs.

Chris Williamson

But the Australia thing. You're right. What? You're such a fucking technicalist.

George Zaidan

Carry on.

Chris Williamson

What?

George Zaidan

No, don't interrupt. Don't interrupt. As Winston Churchill said, stop interrupting my interruptions. Winston Churchill once said to Randolph Churchill's son at dinner, the best thing ever. Which is like can you stop interrupting my interruption? Go on you go. You go for it.

Chris Williamson

I just don't understand what the counterargument is. I don't understand what it's such anchoring bias. Because we developed the technology before we put the guardrails around it. And I think if you were to invent it today, having known the impact of social media, if it had been worked inside of a Faraday cage lab for a long time to look at what the impacts are, it would be like releasing cigarettes into the world, knowing the impact of them. Something's gonna, I imagine that kids were able to smoke 70 years ago or something. I don't know whether there was ever an age restriction on smoking. I imagine the same would be for alcohol. And you start to tick this up over time. The UK's introduced that, that lagging law for vapes now. So I think anybody born after 2010 will never be able to smoke. And the age just keeps tracking up. So it's. If you were born what, 2006 or earlier, you're allowed to. And it's never going to change, you're never going to be able to smoke. That's just their attempt at. You didn't learn to do it in the first instance, therefore you're never going to need to do it in the future. But yeah, I mean, I'm in support of this. I'm interested to hear what criticisms pushback against it are, but I don't see any reason why it's a bad idea to put under 16s, put a ban on. The smart ones that want to start a business and really need to learn the Internet are going to be able to get around it. They can still be entrepreneurial and the ones that don't, I don't think they're going to miss out on much.

George Zaidan

What do you guys think in terms

Tim Ferriss

of age verification and identification?

Chris Williamson

Is there an issue stopping kids under 16 from going on social media? Would you be in support of it?

Tim Ferriss

It, I would be in support of curtailing or forbidding it for sure. 100%. 100%, yeah. I mean spending time with Jonathan Height and so on, I, I just think the evidence is so compelling. Yeah, I would, I would for sure.

Chris Williamson

I wonder how much of an impact he's had.

Tim Ferriss

He has just.

Chris Williamson

Jonathan Height as a guy, he's had

Tim Ferriss

an impact with his small team on a, with state by state legislation changes. They've been very effective for, for a small crack team of researchers and people were also before.

Tim Urban

I mean my last book was about political polarization and wokeness and all of this. And he was, you know, the chapters ranged from kind of like evolutionary psychology to political history to kind of modern current stuff. And I had different kind of gurus for each chapter that were different thinkers that I would like, you know, be sourcing from. And he's the only one who was one of those people in every chapter. Yeah, he's kind of a, you know, I don't agree with everything he says. He's a, he's a giant. And this is before any of the

Chris Williamson

antics you ever met him in person. Yeah, yeah, he's an actual giant. No, no, he's very tall.

Tim Urban

Oh, he is, yeah. Oh, I don't remember.

Tim Ferriss

He's tall compared to us.

Chris Williamson

That's tall. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss

But he, yeah. For people you mentioned. Anxious generation.

Chris Williamson

Yeah. Happiness, righteous mind.

Tim Ferriss

Last name. Yeah. H A I D T. And Happiness

Chris Williamson

Hypothesis is one of my favorite books of all time.

Tim Ferriss

He's also just such coddling of the American, such a sweet guy.

Chris Williamson

Also I think if you're going to talk about stuff like that, you, the potential for you to be right coded. If you want to be effective, you need to signal a lot of placids, peaceful, empathetic understanding both sidesy energy. Because if you even begin to lean right and center it immediately looks like.

Tim Urban

My friend and I argue about this because I have a friend who's very conservative and he's very smart. He changes my mind about things sometimes, sometimes he's over the top. But he, the people he can't stand the most are kind of Jonathan Haidt, Coleman Hughes, these people who agree with who are, you know, I argue to him, these people are fighting the causes you care about but they're doing it way more effectively than you would because they're actually reaching center left people. And if you start immediately being like, you know, super tribal and super right coded, you'll never reach any of them. And he just sees them as such, he calls them media kiss ups. You know, these people just, they still want to be, you know, they always need to make sure that the polite society approves of them. And I totally disagree with him because I think that John Haidt has done unbelievable impact against those kind of over the top left causes that he really doesn't like.

Chris Williamson

Way more effective.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, yeah. And I don't even view it. It's not a partisan issue. Right. I mean I would just because Jonathan's so terrible at asking for money. I would say as someone who plays with scientific funding and stuff like that, if people are looking for ways to kind of bend the arc of history and undo some of the wrongs and ills of social media and so on, I think funding some of what Jonathan is up to with very small sums of money has a hugely disproportionate impact. Just coming back to your. What has he done with his small team? I just wanted to throw that out there.

Tim Urban

The ripple effects of being able to genuinely, you know, push the needle with changing policy with kids in social media is. Is one of the biggest impacts you could make, I think on the planet right now for you won't even know the effects of it, but 30 years from now, I mean.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

Chris Williamson

Sam, what have you brought from home? You've got a bag that's lurking.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, I brought, just to dumb this conversation down a little bit, I brought a bunch of show and tell items.

Chris Williamson

Adult show and tell. I like it. Fire up the autism engine.

Tim Ferriss

So let's see, I'll start with.

Tim Urban

You have a little engine that's you.

Tim Ferriss

I'll start with this. So this is called bite and the subtitle is pretty simple. It's 124 bits, but it's bits as in little pieces of what look like candy mouthwash bits. And this was recommended to Me by Dr. Tommy Wood. He's a neuroscientist, also a beast of an athlete, but a very credible scientist, very well published. And he and I were having a conversation about different approaches for neuroprotection. Hopefully mitigating the risk of neurodegenerative disease. And oral health is a really big one. And yes, you can brush your teeth, yes, you can use like a water pick or something like that. But xylitol is really, really compelling as an intervention. So you could choose xylitol gum, you could do this, that and the other thing. But I found ultimately everything I read so compelling that I started using these, which he recommended. And these are really simple. Well, you're going to need water if you chew on it. So you basically, for travel, but also at home, rather than having mouthwash, you take one of these, I'll show you what they look like. I mean, it literally just looks like a little piece of candy or like an aspirin.

Tim Urban

And we have water here.

Tim Ferriss

Well, I'm gonna spit it out. You can't swallow it, so. Or you probably shouldn't swallow it. So you just, you chew on it. Take like a couple tablespoons of water in your mouth, swish it around for 30, 60 seconds, then spit it out and that's it. And you just do that.

Chris Williamson

Why is that better than normal mouthwash?

Tim Ferriss

Because of the xylitol content along with a couple of other things. So for sort of antibacterial effects. And I know people, I'm not gonna mention this person by name, but MD, PhD who had cavities, started using xylitol twice a day and went back to the doctor or the dentist, rather. No cavities. It's like. It's pretty interesting. That's n of 1. Of course, I don't know what's out there in the literature with respect to that, but found it interesting enough. And it's so lightweight as an intervention that I was like, okay, I will. I will start doing that.

Tim Urban

And anything that you can kind of just like, have on your desk and just like, pop one in. And, you know, while you're. It's. You'll do a lot more.

Tim Ferriss

I mean, my compliance with this also with the amount of travel that I do, is.

Chris Williamson

Tastes good.

Tim Ferriss

Is really hot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tastes like. Kind of like candy.

Tim Urban

A friend of mine wanted me to get into organ meat, and I'm like, I'm not. I'm not going to grind organ meat into my smoothie. I'm sorry. He does this.

Tim Ferriss

That sounds gross.

Tim Urban

And then he got me these. These pills. Oh, man.

Tim Ferriss

Desiccated liver.

George Zaidan

I need to.

Chris Williamson

It's ancestral supplement.

Tim Urban

Yes, something like that. And it's. It's like I take five or six and whatever a day, and I just. Because it's on my desk and I just see it there, I pop it in and I do it every day now. Now I have organ.

Chris Williamson

This is so I understand when people are designing their workspace that you're supposed to keep it relatively undistracted. Like, if you're gonna be in creative flow mode, maybe you do want some newspaper cuttings and, like, some cool art on the wall. But for the most part, we're trying to lock in and not get distracted. You're so right. Having an environment that pushes you toward behaviors that you want to do. Sean Puri has a basketball on his desk, and he thinks better when he's tossing. I played ball sports as a kid. It's the same. My best ideas almost always come when I've got a tennis ball in my hands or some sort of. And I'm just able to throw. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it just distracts the front of my brain a little bit. The other one is that ohm lamp that me and you have got. So this is a lamp around about this big, and there's a little stone on the top of it. And the stone is an FDA quality HRV sensor. You just pick it up, hold it in your hand, and the light goes up and down, and there's sounds and it's using an algorithm to maximize your heart rate variability. So it's resonance breathing that you can do in three minute chunks. But the best thing is you can turn off all of the settings on it and it vibrates. It's like haptic vibrates in your hand. Pick it up and hold it and you can watch a movie. I went and checked cause I talked about it on my newsletter this week. I've done 160 hours of resonance breathing in six months. Just this year I've done 160 hours. Cause I just grab it next to my. I've got one in my office, one here, one there, grab it and I just breathe in time with this vibrating thing. So if you're watching something with it's just like subconscious and you're just tracking it up and down and it's adjusting based on what your heart rate is doing, it's linked in with the wifi, so it's link it once, never think about it again. The algorithm is cutting edge. And all you do is you just grab this stone and hold it and breathe with it and it vibrates. And there's one on my desk. So if I'm about to sit on a call where I need to be quiet for ages, I'll just grab it and have it. I mean I don't hold it too close, but you know what mean? I, I mean yeah, I have hundreds

Tim Urban

of fidget toys, like of all different kinds. And I get like, I put, I have a certain like dish on my desk that's that these are the ones that are in the rotation right now. And I have all the whole archive back.

Chris Williamson

Where'd you get your fidget toys?

Tim Urban

Oh my God. Well, for Instagram ads is deadly. For me it figured me out. Specs this, there's a S p a k s.com I think is just that they have amazing like, like soft silicone covered magnets and like stretchy things and I have Silly Putty and I've got mechanical toys. You know, it's, it's an important thing for me. If I don't have those, I'll bite my nails.

Chris Williamson

That's why these toothpick things or an equivalent. But the new tonic nootropics are just a bit of an oral fixation. If you're working away writing something. Your business partner Josh, because he's a real caffeine fiend, like ex Muay Thai fighter, now Brazilian jiu jitsu dude, like kind of hardcore guy, just started stacking them on a morning and Got onto a call, I think it was with you, and he had six in his mouth because he'd never taken any of the old ones out. He just kept adding them in so he looked like a camel that was chewing on a bit of straw. And he had all of these things poking out the front of his mouth.

Tim Urban

Yeah, I found that if you ever, you know, I don't know if you're like me, but if I'm on a. If I'm sitting at my desk and a friend calls me and we're talking and then I get really, like, animated, I say something, I'm like, yes. And I want to make this point 100%. I'm up and I'm walking, pacing. Right. And I'll. Even if I'm driving and I get home and I'm in a good phone call, I'll just keep looping around because it's something about the movement. And then so I think, well, why am I sitting at my desk when I'm writing? Like, it's probably something about my mind really lights up, like it wants to physically move. It's all tied together. So, like, you know, I'll just do a standing desk with one of those rockers or a treadmill. You know, they have these, like, little rockers, and it's just kind of like. I don't know, it just keeps you moving. But I don't know, I just feel like, yeah, if I'm physically engaged.

Tim Ferriss

Have you ever played with dictation, any AI dictation or anything as a way of brainstorming while walking? I've been doing that recently.

Tim Urban

I. I've done it for brainstorming, like outlines of posts, talking through it. Yeah. But even better for me if there's someone on the other end, especially someone I like, respect. So this is my assistant, Alicia, who's been working with me for 10 years. She knows exactly what I'm working on. And she's like, you know, really tapped in, obviously. So I will just sometimes say I'm stuck, and we will do a call, and she will basically say nothing but her being there and me, she'll. She will give feedback at the end sometimes, but that's not. She knows the game is. Is he's gonna talk to me now and he's gonna crack his own thing by the end of this. Conversate this conversation.

Tim Ferriss

So you don't record them or you do.

Tim Urban

I. Usually what I'll do is, while I'm talking to her, I'll say a line and I'm like, yes. And I'll write it down. I'm like, where the hell was that? When I was thinking alone, I think I wasn't talking to someone.

George Zaidan

So what My weirdest new habit that I've done is I've tried to essentially give up all thought by the brain.

Tim Urban

So, like.

George Zaidan

So let me explain. Let me explain.

Tim Ferriss

So lots of nitrous.

George Zaidan

Yeah. So most people or my former self existed in the kind of simmering six. So the middle kind of ambient rumination, rumination, rumination. And the big trend at the minute is the whole retard maxing. Just stop thinking. Which I think's a bit ridiculous. I think what you actually want is a barbell. So you want. Sometimes you do the retard maxing mode, and then sometimes you're doing the Einstein maxing mode, but that bit in the middle disappears. So for me, I stopped thinking in my brain. What I mean by thinking, by the way, is if it's like, oh, Tim's got denim jeans on. That's a thought. That's okay. But if as soon as I get into a. I've got this thing tomorrow, you got to do the thing tomorrow, and it's replaying the thing tomorrow, it's doing the thing about tomorrow. It's doing thing. If I catch that going more than two or three loops, it's okay. I can either think with my hands. So write it down. And Ralph Aldo Emerson described it as. As when you would write rather than think in your head, you go from being drunk to sobering up. Because even the working memory that we have in our head is what, like seven plus or minus two? I'm probably at the five mark. So that's one of the reasons why you loop. You almost. I got advised once by a cognitive behavioral therapist who said you would never do like even a moderate equation in your head. Yet we will do the most complex life decisions to just there for years. Ruminating, ruminating, ruminating. And it's an example of where the 10,000 hour rule actually doesn't work. If anything, you get worse and worse and worse. So either think with my hands or as you mentioned, then think with your mouth or think with your feet so as you're walking. So as soon as I get in one of those loops, I'm like, it has to be no brain, hands, mouth, feet.

Tim Urban

I like that.

Tim Ferriss

The story you just told resonated because when I was totally stuck on my first book for months, could not figure out how to crack this really important section, and hired a woman who worked as a ghostwriter, but I Wasn't going to use her that way to interview me on a phone call and effectively just ended up talking and cracked it by the end of the conversation. And I was like, oh, I just need to get out of.

Tim Urban

And like what is that?

Tim Ferriss

So you're like self referential.

Tim Urban

There's a part of your brain that is capable of this thing and for some reason when you weren't talking, you're thinking it's just not, you're not accessing it. Like it's strange, but it's really wild. Yeah.

George Zaidan

Well I assume if I had to think about it from a neuroscience perspective, you're probably using more of your default mode network. As you're ruminating, as you're moving your lips, as you're moving your hands, you're activating a different part of the brain. And through the activity it's almost like you're just releasing the taps.

Chris Williamson

You must know from like Kelly Sarett's stuff and just the way that the human body and brain works. Why is it that we want to locomote as soon as we start thinking about something deeply or we have that conversation? Because it's the same for me if I get on a good call. Even if I. I now have a habit that if somebody just rings and I've got nothing to do, I'll get up and go for a walk because hooray, it's good to get steps in. But there's other times where you start to get really animated and you just find yourself walking. What is it about the act of walking that makes thinking easier?

Tim Ferriss

I'm not sure. I don't know. I mean Kelly Starrett people should look up Becoming the Supple Leopard. He's a very famous PT performance coach. Deathbound really knows what if you've ever used like a lacrosse ball to loosen up or like distraction with a band or something like that. He popularize a lot of that stuff. The Couch Stretch named by Kelly, et cetera. So he's worth looking up. I don't know. There are people who do really well sitting still. My fidget fix is like Japanese, East Asian, like pen spinning. That's a whole thing. People can find like a 20 year old YouTube video of me showing like the basics of this, but I'll just sit there doing different types of spinning with a pen. That's my move. Pacing also huge pacer for me. I think it could be I'm just speculating here but occupying a part of your mind that is for instance like the monkey mind. Right. I think this is Part of the reason why flow states often include some kinesthetic component, right? Whether it's music, playing violin or something like that, surfing, whatever it might be, I think that there is an occupying of certain cognitive faculties or looping mechanisms that is aided with physical movement. But that's just.

Tim Urban

It's like when my, my 15 month old is annoying me and I'm trying to do something, I'll just like hand her something to occupy her and then she's like, it's like a little like there's like a 15 month old in my head that's like, ah. And I'm like, shut up and give something. And then it's fiddle the fidget spinner.

Chris Williamson

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George Zaidan

As you was talking earlier about the treadmills and all the fidget spinning devices and the Instagram ads and you're buying some stuff. I had like a, I was thinking in my head of if you was born 10 years ago.

Tim Ferriss

Did you say if you was born if.

George Zaidan

Sorry, if you were born again. British English coming in. That's not really.

Tim Urban

I liked it. British people talk so much more cool than we do.

Chris Williamson

If you was born around about 10 years ago.

George Zaidan

Listen here, listen here mate. Would you have been like diagnosed with adhd?

Tim Urban

Yeah. This is like the age old question in my mind is do I have adhd? Am I a classic example of it or not? And like, like, I guess, I don't know. I wonder if I were born. Yes. In that age whether I would have been like medicated because I was a class clown and. But I did well in school and it was never hard for me to like, I always assume think of like real ADHD as like you're sitting during a test and you're just like, you can't focus on the test. You need extra time. That was once I had adrenaline. Like, oh shit. I was like, I could focus really well. So I don't know, I don't know. I don't know what happens.

Tim Ferriss

Do you get calmer with stimulants? Are there certain stimulants where you end up like actually calming down and focusing or do you get agitated with stimulants or something?

Tim Urban

For me what it is, is like there's like a perfectionism that is if once I. It's. I can't transition. I'm awful at transitioning. I will procrastinate from starting work for hours and once I get have to start, once I'm in it now I'll get going and then someone will interrupt. I'm like, and I'll miss dinner because I just want to keep working. So it's like, it's this weird, like I'm very. A lot of inertia for whatever I'm doing. And that to me is a huge thing is just like, like there's no adult around making me start work. And I grew up with that as a crutch always. I had to go to class, I had to finish this, I had to. And now there's no one. So I will just self defeat for hours and waste a good part of the day. And then finally. So that's why when again, another thing I do with my, with Alicia is.

Tim Ferriss

Alicia's your sister.

Tim Urban

Yes. I will share my screen with her at like 10am and she's gotta be very careful.

Chris Williamson

You gotta be very careful with that. Depending on how your day goes.

Tim Urban

Yeah, you have spaces, you go to a safe space and she is working on her own thing. I don't know when she's looking at my screen and when she's not. She's probably not usually, but she might be. And so I'm not going to procrastinate in front of someone. That's mortifying.

Chris Williamson

You've created a digital Panopticon.

Tim Urban

Yeah, it's great.

Tim Ferriss

There are services that allow you to do this. They'll pair you with someone else and you work co working, you work at the Same time, I can't recall.

Tim Urban

It has to be someone that really knows. Like, if I'm on a certain research page age, they might not know. Is he procrastinating now? She'll be like, that's not relevant. What are you doing? You know, like, you're going too far.

Tim Ferriss

Will she actually police you?

Tim Urban

She. She usually.

Tim Ferriss

She's very like, tim, no Pornhub until 2pm yeah, she.

Tim Urban

She will say something about that.

George Zaidan

It's just World War II. I tell you what, I've got two things. Number one, we've discussed this earlier. I'm always trying to create new vocabulary for myself. I feel it activates a certain part of the brain. Do you remember my favorite word that I invented five, six years ago that you love?

Chris Williamson

Fly dripping.

George Zaidan

Yeah, fly dripping. So I was once stood at a toilet and, you know, men do this where they piss around the seat. And I was like, what's the word for that?

Tim Ferriss

Wait, piss around the seat.

George Zaidan

What do you mean? You know, when somebody urinates on the

Tim Ferriss

toilet seat, I usually try to avoid this.

George Zaidan

Well, exactly, yeah.

Chris Williamson

Public toilets is a bit of a problem.

George Zaidan

Public toilets.

Chris Williamson

You may see it right times.

George Zaidan

So I kind of came up with the term fly dripping for that. And what's useful about beginning to create your own language is. I mean, I have to talk about the benefits of language as I'm using language.

Chris Williamson

Interesting. This is the first word that you developed.

George Zaidan

That's the first word that I developed, or terms as a whole. So one of the things that worked with the high agency piece that I did, or even just having that language meant that I had a name for essentially an idea that people already knew or that I already knew, but it compressed like 5,000 words into two words. And then. And I was like, hold on, I don't have a term for that. That's quite meta. I don't have a term for that. And then Scott Alexander had this term called an idea handle. So an idea handle. You can kind of pick up ideas by coining terms. So the two ones I've been trying to coin last week are the following. So number one, Keshe's Law.

Chris Williamson

Like the artist Kesha, Keshe's Law is,

George Zaidan

whenever you're creating art, try not to use any modern references. Cause it may come back to bite you in the arse. So the art is Kesha, I love by the.

Chris Williamson

Formerly known as.

George Zaidan

This may not be the best podcast in the world, but we have the highest range. We've gone from Black Wolf to Kesha. Say what you want about the quality, but you can't knock the range.

Tim Urban

Ke$.

George Zaidan

Her number one song was started with Wake up in the Morning Feeling like P. Diddy.

Tim Urban

So that's tough now.

George Zaidan

So what she did. So what do you do if you're holding.

Chris Williamson

She had to retcon her own song.

George Zaidan

Yeah. So what she did was Wake up in the Morning Feeling like Me flopped. So now when did she do that? So quite recently in terms of the rebrand around the whole P. Diddy escapades, now she's come out and done Wake up in the Morning, fuck P. Diddy, which is a little bit better, but

Chris Williamson

she still doesn't really fit the story.

George Zaidan

But ultimately, if you put a P.

Tim Urban

Diddy bottleneck in there, where is the

Chris Williamson

comma in that sentence? Wake up in the morning comma. Kesha's P. Diddy.

George Zaidan

Kesha's law. So whenever you're creating things, you've got to avoid modern things. Another lore I've tried to create recently. I was watching, I don't know if you guys have seen the new Michael Jackson documentary on Netflix, and there's a scene in there.

Tim Ferriss

It's only so much Neverland I can handle.

George Zaidan

Yes. Yeah, I forgot. Tim, sorry to bring it up. You can walk out if you need to. There's a scene in there that's explained some stuff that we've discussed of. Imagine you have an axes like here. So you have essentially being an awful person or crimes that you might be able to commit. And I'm not even gonna discuss Michael's ones just yet. And then you have talent. So as you go, the talent can essentially get out of that axis.

Tim Urban

And mj, mgk, people are like, he's too funny. It's fine.

George Zaidan

Well, mga. And there's something about music that like, for example, no offense to you, Chris, I think you're a lovely podcaster. Okay. But if you started non sing right, if you became like a. I'm not

Chris Williamson

talented enough to get away with not.

George Zaidan

Nobody's like. Nobody is like going, yeah, but that whole nosy pod, you know what I mean? Like people but music. So this is the crazy thing. So Michael is in the defense for this pedophilia charge. And there's the. The guy who did a documentary on him, and they're showing the documentary. So it's where Michael's kind of got his hand around a child. And they're like talking about. The child's talking about how he didn't want to go into Michael's bed, but Michael. Michael asked him to come into his bed. So they're playing the whole documentary as proof of potentially his crimes. But within the documentary, it plays some of his music. So what's interesting, you have both the defense, the judge, the jury, and even the defense said when they played Billie Jean.

Chris Williamson

Yeah.

George Zaidan

He saw himself doing that. He saw the judge nodding his head. I was like, wow, MJ's law. You could be. The defense could hear your music and still bob their head.

Tim Urban

You still get. You're giving them, like, actual, like, pleasurable dopamine hits. And that makes that disendearing.

Chris Williamson

Yes, there's some. We talk about this a lot of people that are in the pop culture. Thinkers, speakers, artists, whatever. Who is it that's got the largest bank account that they could withdraw from. From before they go into Bill Cosby.

Tim Urban

Social was probably number one. And. And he. He. If you'd asked me before all the. The Bill Cosby scandal came out, I would have been like, bill Cosby is the number one, like, like, least likely to be canceled person. And it turns out what he did was so bad that it. If you're gonna, you know, like, actually, like, roofy. Dozens and dozens of, like, young women that you're promising, like, career breaks, too, that is so bad that, like, even Bill Cosby that you can't even, you know.

Chris Williamson

Correct.

George Zaidan

You didn't have a Masayama. Masama Makusa. Yeah, I think that's it.

Chris Williamson

If Bill Cosby had released a banger,

George Zaidan

I think music, weirdly, it's almost comedy before music seems to destroy the human brain more than comedy. So, for example, if you really dislike a comedian or they've done something awful, you can almost not find them funny, which is why I use the example. Then if Chris was in court, again, I'm not planting these rumors, but if Chris was in court for doing something horrific and they pulled up his 4K set with Matthew McConaughey, doesn't do anything. But there's something about music, someone really funny.

Tim Urban

I think it does chapter the same

George Zaidan

effect, but not to the level.

Tim Urban

Not to the level. Now, another example would be. And this doesn't work for the whole population, but political tribalism is like this just powerful drug that just makes brains crazy. And so if your political tribe, you're really tribe. If you're a really politically tribal person and the person that you are that is, you know, part of your team team, you'll forgive, like, anything. And so you can see this with a lot of famous politicians today. You can like, and it's. I think that the. The people of the. That tribe. Or you can see with like, you know, other kinds of tribalism. Like there are many people who refute Jussie Smollett is innocent. He was. And there's every bit of evidence. But like, because it get taps into a really tribal thing, the people that see him as like on our side and the people criticizing him are the bad guys. And like there's nothing that could make them turn on it.

Tim Ferriss

Could I workshop a new word with you guys right now? Shoot.

George Zaidan

Shoot.

Tim Urban

All right.

Tim Ferriss

I've been struggling with this because I like doing the same thing. I like these. The invention of words.

George Zaidan

Right.

Tim Ferriss

And so like I'll. I'll give two examples of ones that, that I'm. I'm proud of. Rightly or wrongly. One is a word. Tell adultery. So tell adultery is when you and your partner have watched a show together and then someone separately watches more episodes without you.

Chris Williamson

Oh, that's good television.

Tim Urban

Exactly what it feels like.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. Tell adultery. You're like, how could you?

Chris Williamson

Right? Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

And then the other, the newer one, which is like, ah, it's not quite as good, but I like it. There's something. There is hallucinatives, like the first generations to assume that LLM responses are fact to do no cross checking hallucinatives. Right. It's like, ah, it's not bad. I mean it's not as good as teledultry.

Chris Williamson

Teledultery is going to stick in the lexicon.

Tim Ferriss

That one I put put up this like probably 10 years ago on Twitter. So back when it was Twitter. So. So we'll see.

Chris Williamson

I staked better than fly dripping.

Tim Ferriss

I. I stake fly dripping's not bad.

Chris Williamson

Such a niche issue.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, such a. The one I want.

George Zaidan

I'll tell you.

Chris Williamson

So McDonald's in the northwest, that's the Denny's. If you do the fight.

Tim Ferriss

Start niche. Start niche. The. The one that I've been trying to figure out is. And this maybe I'm the only one. I don't think I am. Where everyone is so overwhelmed with notifications and bullshit on their phones that, that at least most of my friends have do not disturb on. So they'll be like, sure, man, call me. And then you call them and it goes straight to voicemail and they're like, no problem. I'll call you straight back. They call you back and it goes straight to voicemail. So it's this like do not disturb death loop. But I have not been able to come up with like a pithy word for this.

George Zaidan

I. I always joked that If I could have a job, it would essentially be this. So if. If I could have any job in the world that I would do for free.

Tim Ferriss

Coming up with these words.

George Zaidan

Yeah, the. The one I. So this type of thing. Or it would be. Be like. You probably don't get it as much in America, but in the UK you have the proper British red tops. So it'll be the. And they did horrific things. Red top will be like the newspaper. Like proper, like scummy newspapers. But they'll have something like, Wayne Rooney's shagged a prostitute. That's a grandma. And they're running the story tomorrow and they need someone to write the headline.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, it's like New York Post.

George Zaidan

Yeah, New York Post. The ability just. I actually hate the articles, but the ability for just somebody to give me a story and then just say, we need. Need four words.

Tim Ferriss

We need some horrible pun.

George Zaidan

Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss

In this headline.

Chris Williamson

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about like, disturb loop. Like do not loop or disturb a peed. Which makes me think about like the Human Centipede.

Tim Urban

Human Centipede.

Chris Williamson

Like Ouroboros. Like playing something into that could be fun.

Tim Ferriss

Or something with a boomerang. We could throw that one out to the audience too.

Chris Williamson

Cool. Yeah. Best ones in the comments below for when you ring someone and it's do not disturb and they call you, I

Tim Urban

will say, like, as a blogger, do

Chris Williamson

not disturb all the way down.

Tim Urban

Like explaining things and coming up with like, terms. Terms and stuff like that. And it's like most of the terms don't stick. And the, The. The, like the posts are ideas of mine that have gone most viral or just stuck around the most are almost always like, where I nailed the term. And it really is like, it is such an important thing because if you can really. I mean, look, look at the cancel culture. It was this concept. People said, you know, where the people are. There's too much political correctness or like, you know, we're. It's a little bit. You know, it's like. It feels like there's witch hunter. It wasn't quite getting it. And then this one term alliteration labeled it and that exposes it. Now you're acting kind of like that.

George Zaidan

And it just.

Tim Urban

It did a number on it. It was really like. It was. It was a powerful. It changed the. The culture war. This term. I mean, so you can. Examples like that are just so. And people who can do that really well.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, can I throw out one more related to that bigoteer, like a racketeer. Someone who labels others for profit it or a gain of some type. A bigoter.

George Zaidan

That's great.

Chris Williamson

Very nice.

George Zaidan

That's great.

Tim Ferriss

So what are some of the blog posts that have really nailed the terminology?

Tim Urban

Like you, you mentioned the TED Talk that's gone really viral and I think part of what was successful there was procrastination is something that so many people experience and was just again, putting labels to things. Like I called that when you are procrastinating. I said, you know, I described your interview in the, the dark playground. And it's a specific thing where you're, you're, you're, you're dipping around social media, you're, you're texting with your friends, looking

Tim Ferriss

up one of your blog posts.

Tim Urban

You're, you're, you're texting with your friends and you're, you're doing whatever and, and it is, you're in the playground. You're having fun, right? It's leisure time, but it's not fun at all. This is just dread and guilt and stress and anxiety that you're here and you know, you should start working and you feel this. It's not fun. That's why it's the dark playground. But now I get messages from, you know, mother that are saying, my son, my nine year old son said, oh, mom, I'm in the dark playground, I need to get out. And it's like, okay, you know, that was a successful term. And it's like, you know, it's interesting,

George Zaidan

the leverage, the leverage that exists.

Tim Ferriss

What about the tail end? Yeah, Is that, am I uniquely affected

Tim Urban

by that or is that. No, that one. And that's this.

Tim Ferriss

Do you guys know this blog post?

George Zaidan

Yes, I think so. Yeah, I've read it a little bit.

Tim Ferriss

You should describe it because this was sent to me by a friend, Matt Mullenweg. And like it's, I still think about it constantly.

Chris Williamson

You remember the guy that sent it to, to you?

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

Oh yeah, yeah. You want to dive if. Yeah.

Tim Urban

So this was, this is why I like blogging. Because I want to take lots of swings at the bat. Swings, swings at the bat. Because then you might hit a home run once in a while and you

George Zaidan

don't know which ones.

Tim Urban

But if you're just doing. That's why books is like one giant swing over three years. I don't like that. And this is an example of one where I was procrastinating during the SpaceX post. I was writing the SpaceX post and I was like, you know, what I

Tim Ferriss

should really do is write Another blog post.

Tim Urban

Yeah, Classic, classic thing. I was like, I have an idea. Oh, I'm just going to do. Instead of doing this like big giant mountain, I'm just kind of like, oh, I'm just going to do this little idea that I've had for a long time. But then I like thought about it in bed in the morning and I was like, oh, okay, I know how I want to do it. And then I just got up and did it in a couple hours. And it made it one of those, that really made a big impact. And the idea is that. So one of the things I like to do is just like use visuals or whatever to look at how much time we have. I like to zoom out. And I don't want to just unconsciously go through life and then be like, oh, wow, like, look how much time passed that I never. I want to be like, how much? Let's just look at it. How many weeks are there left if I live to 90? Like, let's just, let's just see this for what it is. And so I'm not like caught, you know, I'm not blindsided by it later. And so I would think about, okay, you know, even just watching the World Cup, I'm like, Maybe I have 12 World Cups left, depending on like longevity research. And that's if I'm lucky, you know,

Tim Ferriss

and how many Christmases, how many exactly.

Tim Urban

So I do this kind of thing. But then I kind of had a disturbing thought which was, was not all of the important things in life are evenly distributed. World Cups are, Christmases are. I grew up spending 350 days a year with my parents or whatever. You know, when I got older, went to camp, maybe 3, 30 over 300 days a year with my parents and my sisters.

George Zaidan

And,

Tim Urban

and then you graduate and, you know, you, you, you, you either go to college or whatever you're doing, you know, if you, if you move out of the city especially, you might see your parents, I don't know, 10 days a year, 20 days a year. I don't know if they live in your city, maybe you see them 80 days a year, whatever, but either way the number is much smaller. And so then I was like, well, if you actually add up the total number, if I just say I'm seeing them 15 days a year right now, so I need 20 years now to capture one year of parent time. When I was a kid, I was like, wow, if you look at the whole number, I'm 95% of the way through with my in person relationship with My parents and I would. This was. I had this thought.

Tim Ferriss

When you graduated high school.

Tim Urban

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. When you graduate. So now I'm even older. Right. And so. And this is if you're lucky, if your parents live long lives. And it was super depressing. And also one of those things where I'm like, I need to. Some thoughts I have that are, you know, or ideas that are depressing and don't serve any positive purpose. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to just share my misery and spread it.

George Zaidan

This.

Tim Urban

I was like, no, this is important.

George Zaidan

We need to look at this.

Tim Urban

We need to look at this for, you know, two reasons. One, if you are living in California and your parents are in New York or whatever, and you are seeing them 10 days a year, and that's just a reality. Or again, with a friend. There's some friends I saw all the time in high school that I. I'll see once every five years now. Once every five years. Sometimes. These are close friends. I might see that friend 10 more times, period. I might see my parents only, I don't know, 200 more times. 150. 100 more times. And so if that's the reality, being, like, staring it in the face and being aware of it will at least make you treat those times you are together as what they are, which is precious. Or also you can maybe make a big change. I've had people tell me they moved back home to where their parents are because of this post. Because if you go from living in California to you move back home, home. And you see them now 60 days a year, you actually just brought that percentage down. Oh, instead of being 94% done, I'm only 81% done. Like, what? That's a. You can change the equation. So it's this actually really empowering thing. Or at least, you know, I'm not living in the same city as my parents, but I'm. I've become like, so adamant about, like, we need to all see each other every eight weeks. Like, somewhere it needs to be revisit, revisit. My sister's there. Then we visit home, then we have Thanksgiving. Then you should all come here for this. So it's like, it's helped motivate me to. I mean, and again, it's not pleasant. But having the delusion that we have endless time together is not helpful.

Chris Williamson

It encourages a bias for action.

Tim Urban

Yeah.

Chris Williamson

One of the worst things to do is to identify something uncomfortable that it feels like you can't change or Fix that is where people really, really don't like, you know, this is how bad social media is for you. And people push back against that a lot because I feel like it's out of my control. I. I kind of agree with the problem but you haven't yet given me or the solution feels a little bit more out of reach than that.

Tim Ferriss

I mean I just start. I personally started taking my whole family on a family trip every like year to two years and did that up until my parents were physically incapable of doing it. But like that post was a real catalyst conversations that I had with Matt and other people about it and I was like okay, like look, I'm not going to move back home. I don't have any desire to live in the middle of nowhere. But at least we can block out like two to three weeks of concentrated time where we're sharing these adventures together. We have the anticipation of the trip leading up to it which is a big piece of it. We have the memories and photos.

Chris Williamson

Is that from you? That from you is one of my favorite ideas. Look at this. Just mutually fellating each other. One of my favorite things for you

Tim Ferriss

is that most you promised it in the text to me so here we are.

Chris Williamson

That's true like Bonnie Blue range your insight range dude, it's the most the highest range pocket on the planet. Your idea that the holiday that you go on you should book them as far out in advance as possible because so much of the enjoyment is done in anticipation. So there was this great study done a while ago. I did my master's dissertation on the effectiveness of anti alcohol advertising on students at Newcastle University. I wanted to see what sort of interventions we could do to try and reduce this is when drinking was a problem not drinking which is now the new problem problem. But the thing that I realized is doing a little bit of reading and a bit of research around this was a study was done looking at when people enjoy nights out the most and this included people that were drinking. So you'd think how many drinks deep is it? Is it when you arrive at the nightclub, Is it when the music, the mainline DJ comes on the headline DJ and everyone's there and they're having a great time. No, it was in the flat in the apartment apartment as you were getting ready for the night out like the middle of the bullseye of dopamine. And human satisfaction is things are about to get a little bit better than

Tim Urban

Friday at 3pm at work is the happier moment than like midday Saturday.

George Zaidan

Correct.

Tim Urban

And by the way the inverse of that is if you, if something shitty is. If that I'm going to dread is on my plate, I want to know about it as late as possible. I had six months to think about that. I have a TED Talk hanging over that's going to this horrifying thing over the horizon. And I wish someone had just told me a month before. You have to. If you want me to speak at your wedding, tell me. Freaking 10 days before. Do not give me six months from like after that wedding. I have to come up with a really good speech.

Chris Williamson

Oh, that's so good. Yeah, you're front loading the pain.

Tim Urban

Exactly.

Chris Williamson

As well as front loading.

Tim Urban

So you want to know about good things way ahead. And you want to know about the

Chris Williamson

gang bang a year in advance. But tell me about the tax return one week before.

Tim Ferriss

Depends on the details.

Tim Urban

Which side of the gang bang you want to be.

George Zaidan

You know the most depressing version of your kind of tail end thing. It's this old proverb in China and it essentially goes along the lines of like the saddest feeling in the world is to grow the desire to take care of your parents only to realize they're no longer there. This proverb in Chinese culture. I'm like, Jesus Christ.

Chris Williamson

Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? Problem I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co last night. But they're non alcoholic and that's not a problem.

George Zaidan

Sorry man, I. I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in. Never happened.

Chris Williamson

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George Zaidan

Bottoms up.

Chris Williamson

There's a great line that I came across I wanted to read to you guys. It's from Salhigune and it says you'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids, and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows. Whatever you choose, you'll regret it. Because the problem isn't in your choices. It's in romanticizing your life.

Tim Urban

Grass is always green.

Chris Williamson

A person always finds an untravelled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. And that was that Douglas Murray line. In life, we must choose our regrets. And you go, okay. In advance of a big decision, you might want to think, which decision do I want to live with? But the better question is, which regret could I not bear living with?

Tim Urban

Yeah, that's the one. It's a little like if you're, you know, someone who. You can't be too perfectionist about finding your life partner. It's like, which. Which flawed person and flawed relationship are you going to choose? And each one is going to have a different set of flaws. And I think in both of these cases, internalizing that is very helpful because it can make you realize that if I have regrets, it doesn't mean something horribly wrong happened. If marriage is imperfect, it doesn't mean I did something wrong. And so it can help you accept, which is half the battle. I mean, it's like, regret is only really painful when you feel like, I wish I could. I made a huge mistake. As opposed to, like, this is part of.

Chris Williamson

This is a call that I made. Yeah. So thinking about pendulums swinging in one direction or the other going from. We were worried about binge drinking in 2010 when I wrote my dissertation. And now in 2026, we're worried about sobriety culture coming and taking away the way that people are able to communicate and spend time and socialize. An equivalent for this, I think. And I've messaged Scott Galloway about this too. Too. As a famously unmarried man in his 30s, the conversation of, you don't need to think that deeply about your life partner to now a lot of the biggest reels that Scott's done and Warren Buffett. The single most important decision that you're going to make in your life is your life partner. This is a piece of advice that distributes unevenly to people. It makes people who are already prone to overthinking feel even more pressure. Meanwhile, the people that were just blase making decisions on vibes are just coasting through it and it's applying even more pressure. I think this is, it's a noble insight which is, hey, this is an important decision and if you choose, if you choose wrong, it can make your life hell. But the don't choose wrong turns into I must perfect. I must become a perfectionist in choosing right. And it creates paralysis of analysis. This is David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box Fucking Money, by the way. Really, really good. Yeah, it's really good. But yeah, that.

Tim Ferriss

What's the basic premise? That I have an old one to recommend to.

Chris Williamson

Constraints breed creativity. Oh yeah, if, if. I mean he, he is really great at bringing stories together, but he has this. What was it called? The Magic Company. What was that? It was all of the engineers from Apple and it was the, the first ever Goldman Sachs idea ip. So they didn't even have a product, but they just had such an amazing team that they IPO'd just with ideas and they were able to do. They had unlimited budget, they'd IPO'd before they had a product. And he gives this example of a story where they were going to create basically the iPhone before the iPhone. And one of the engineers said, I'm gonna run it from 1904, let's say it was gonna be a hundred years, something like that, let's say. And another engineering team came in and said, well, why do it from then? Why not do it from further back? Because people might be using apps for historical recording and stuff. He said, okay, well I'll do it from year zero and we'll get up to 2004 whenever it is. And another team came in and said, well, that's stupid. Why don't you go all the way back to the beginning of time so that we've got a full calendar that people can. And it ended up what could have been four lines of code turned into this huge unwieldy project.

Tim Ferriss

This is general magic.

Chris Williamson

If you don't. General magic.

Tim Urban

That was it.

Tim Ferriss

There's a great documentary on this. And it's also like, if I can interject for a second, it's like Yoda Warski's Dune. I don't know if you guys have ever seen this documentary. It's about this ill fated attempt to make a Dune movie which was just like, I guess it was made by this crazy man named Yodaworski and it goes through all these disasters and it didn't work out. But the team ended up being Geiger, who designed the alien and so on. The talent density of that failed project was so high, it's hard to believe. This is true. With General Magic too.

Tim Urban

Right.

Tim Ferriss

You had like very, very young Tony Fadell who went on to create the ipod and the iPhone. You've got person who went on to create Android. It's, it's kind of nuts. And despite that, or in dis. I say in spite of, in spite of having this incredible talent density, it's like if you don't have constraints. Well, if you have a lot of brilliant people with a lot of ideas, that could actually be a fatal recipe.

Tim Urban

Right?

Chris Williamson

Correct. Yeah. Constraints.

Tim Urban

This is another, which I said coming up with the term is really important. Well, it's also just like, like, I don't know, just getting a certain like, anchor concept that can help anchor your rationality. So like one of the things I've always thought about with relationships for perfection, because I'm, I'm like this. And one of the times when I was able to kind of like, finally, you know, pull the pin. Yeah. Is because I think I grew up a little bit and was in enough relationships and I was like, again, the fact that like, every, they're all flawed. Every single, single one. So, but you also don't want to be like, well, they're all flawed, so this relationship is fine when it's actually really bad. Like. Right. So it's, it's more like what are up there? If there's 30 things you would love to have in a partner, you're 100% going to be missing a bunch of those in every partner. But what are your deal breakers? Like, actually think about two or three or four. Don't get too much with these that are like, this is critical to me. Like, I, I, I will not marry someone who does not, you know, whatever

Chris Williamson

I was going to say on both sides of the fence. Because they can be things that you must not have and things that you must have.

Tim Urban

Exactly. And, and I think it's a mistake. It's not being perfectionist enough to sacrifice on those deal breakers. And I think it's being way too much of a perfectionist to be like, you know, it's like, she's not, you know, she doesn't love to jam music with me and I did that with my previous girlfriend and that's a must. Like, you can't have a ton of those or you're never going to ever. No one's ever going to be enough.

Chris Williamson

One of the biggest, biggest issues in relationships that people don't talk about enough are bedtime lag issues. Like, if you don't go to bed and wake up within maybe an hour of your partner. I think that there's a lot that you're missing, like just literally you're missing out on a lot of time together. But I think it causes an awful lot of friction between you and your partner because like you're going to be woken up when they get into bed. They're going to be woken up when you get out of bed. Sleep's really important. There's health effects going to begin to resent them if they come in at a different time times. Maybe some people are laissez faire enough or a deep enough sleeper that it doesn't really matter. But I think aligning the sleep rhythm is probably one of the sort of unseen that should be in order to get into the conversation. That's probably across the board a piece of advice that most people should.

Tim Ferriss

I'll play devil's advocate just because I have historically had very strange sleep gap relationship.

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Tim Urban

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

I mean in some very good relationships, including my current relationship. But it's a few hours. Hours, I would say very often it's like one to two hour gap. She'll get up before I do. I think it can work if you are okay with going to bed at different times. Also, as soon as you have a puppy or a child, you're on the same schedule.

Tim Urban

Right. Or someone's doing the morning, the other person's gonna sleep.

Chris Williamson

So actually it's might actually be adaptive.

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Chris Williamson

If you've got someone that goes to bed at three in the morning typically, and you're like, okay, well you're obviously gonna do the night shift up until 3 and then if your missus is usually getting up at 5, it's like, all right, we'll just run that back a little bit earlier.

Tim Urban

And then, then I usually am up a little later and I'll usually close down the house and clean up the kitchen a little bit and turn off all the lights and take the dog out and then she'll be more likely to wake up and do morning stuff.

Chris Williamson

Before we move on from terms, we are still struggling to fucking name this podcast series. It's currently Rabbit Hole, which is the working title. But we're still struggling. Was it fuck me? Good dudes, good vibe. Rabbit Hole.

George Zaidan

Fuck Me is pretty good.

Chris Williamson

Fuck me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fire up the Autism engine was another one, obviously. But yeah, what's wrong with this?

Tim Urban

Rabbit hole described what we've done today, which has gone down 20, 20 rabbit holes and we underground burrow to a different rabbit Hole and then come back.

George Zaidan

It's funny, the power of a name though, right? You know, here's a little test for you.

Chris Williamson

Here we go.

George Zaidan

Have you ever heard of a book called Women Love and Relationships?

Tim Ferriss

No.

George Zaidan

No, because nobody fucking did, right? So this book released, I think it was in the 80s or the 90s, sold nothing. Nothing. So he came along, changed the title and just jazzed it up a little bit to Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. And it was the best selling book of the 90s. And just it was basically the same book, different title.

Tim Ferriss

Well, it's like, when's the last time you had Patagonian toothfish? Not recently. Right. Chilean sea bass. Now we're talking.

Chris Williamson

Question, given that we've got two, two authors and one fledgling author at the table, what is a book that you think is amazing but failed because of its name?

George Zaidan

Ooh, great question.

Chris Williamson

So mine my kind of go to for this is a little bit niche but it's Mate by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller. It's a become the man women want. It's an evolutionary psychology inspired dating book for men.

Tim Ferriss

Is that a bad title or is it just too generic?

Chris Williamson

I just think it should have done because Models by Mark Manson also I reckon had he have given it a little bit more magic, would have been because it's still great and sold relatively well, but could have been significantly better for what it was Made by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller is one of the best, if not the best book for guys to understand, understand how women think, understand what their fears are. It's very like sort of both sides of the spectrum in terms of being understanding about women being pro men without being too apologetic. And it fucking rips. And I think they even renamed it once. I'm not sure why, but that's just one that comes to mind. Fuck. That book was so good and it didn't take off and I feel like there was a big unlock in the name.

Tim Urban

I think with a book it helps, I think with certain things, like a company or even a blog. Maybe it's like xkcd. I think if I were advising my friend before that started, I would have been like, no one's four random letters.

Tim Ferriss

Like explain what that is.

Tim Urban

Yeah, someone will be like, you should, you should read that blog. It has the four letters and they're like, what? It's obviously a massive success.

Tim Ferriss

You want to explain what it is for people.

Tim Urban

XKCD is Randall Monroe's. He's this, you know, brilliant. Com. He's a, you know, he does a He does a three comic Monday, Wednesday, Friday. He also puts out books.

Tim Ferriss

It's like comic strip.

Tim Urban

Yeah, it's a comic strip but it's like nerdy and science and he is just. It's amazing. And has a giant been around forever. Yeah. Cult following. Yeah, he's been doing it forever and, and he probably gets more reads than like anything in like the, the, you know, the comics of the newspapers these days. I mean he's probably bigger than. But so I think, although maybe the fact that not everyone's heard of him, maybe maybe it would be even bigger. I mean that, that's, that's true. I don't know. I, I think I say, people say what's your blog's name? Wait, but why? And they go what? And I'm like I'm sorry. And it's. I just was looking on, I was looking on Godaddy and I was like I need a domain that has a dot com. And I had my hundredth idea and I was like okay, that's one. And I had like a small list of ones that actually had dot coms. And I was like, sure. I think like names in certain situations are overrated. I think with books probably not. I think books maybe is something that it's a. But I think, you know, I think company names, I think if a lot of really dumb company names.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the nature of the company. I'm literally having this conversation with one startup right now like whether to keep or change. And in their case I don't think it matters because they're B2B and selling. Selling in a very like long sales cycle to sophisticated buyers as opposed to a product that is B2C where it's like a consumer facing product where you want people to be able to easily say hey have you tried X? And if they can't remember X, you're kind of dead in the water. I do have a book example. There are a lot of books that didn't do particularly well, but I don't think it was solely due to the title. This one I think might be be title related. I've probably sold half the copies that this book has sold in total at this point because I've talked about it and I have a bookshelf in my guest bedroom with just this book for people to yank but awareness.

Chris Williamson

Anthony d'. Mello.

Tim Ferriss

Anthony d'. Mello. Yeah, and it's got, you know, the subtitle is the Perils and Opportunities of Reality. That's the better subtitle. They changed the subtitle to Conversations with the Masters, which makes no sense to me because it's a conversation with one guy, transcribed conversations. But that book, if I had to pick one book to read on an annual basis, that would probably be the one. I mean, I have some other close runner ups, but that one for sure. And it's so short.

George Zaidan

Why, what's the kind of reflections from the book?

Tim Ferriss

I would say this to the. I mean, it is honing your ability to observe your own thinking and your own state. And without that meta ability, I think your. You're striving to develop other faculties is severely, if not wholly handicapped. Right. You have to be able to sort of observe to the extent that you can without enhancement. There are certain drugs and so on that help with this. Or practices like different types of meditation, but without any augmentation. It's very hard to look at your operating system. What are the biases? What are the weights? Almost as if you were an AI model, right? Like what has been built, built into, like the confirmation bias and the narratives over time that you inherited from parents or whoever it might be that have not actually been stress tested, that you didn't arrive at through any type of firsthand experience. Or maybe there was one outlying experience that was tremendously painful and therefore you lived from that point forward for 15 years with this filter on reality, which actually isn't defensible, but it's sitting in the background governing how you make decisions. And it's incredibly colloquial. It's lectures that were transcribed and cleaned up. And it's unforgiving in its delivery. It's very harsh. So some people don't like it. It's very in your face in some ways. But I have had so many people, friends of mine, including people who are very, very accomplished, either get more dynamic

Tim Urban

done or

Tim Ferriss

feel like they have removed gauze from their eyes or pain from their life. Or all of the above after reading this book, which is like 150.

Tim Urban

It's called awareness.

Tim Ferriss

Awareness? Yeah, it's a red cover by Anthony DeMillo. He was a Jesuit priest, also a psychotherapist, and he's pulling from a lot of different traditions, but it's very pithy. I think all you guys would like it. But I was thinking of you, George, because of the naming. Right. His sort of idea handles that you then carry forward the stories that he tells. I mean, I've read it like 20 times, so of course I've had some reps. But even after one reading, the stories that stick with people are so compelling and funny. It's a funny book. It's a really sticky, effective book.

Chris Williamson

I think that WinZip file of I say that one word and it unlocks this entire. You know, I still have an obsession with language. I've always loved language since I was a kid. And one of the problems, if you do 1,100 podcast episodes where you're kind of obsessed with languages, you can sometimes get nerdy on it and you can start aphorism maxing, maxim maxing. But for me, it's really important if I've got a single sentence that explains a huge concept. One of the best ones I came up with last year was idea advice hyper responders. So advice doesn't land even suddenly. People who have a predisposition toward it tend to take it on board a lot, while the people that didn't already pay attention to it just coast past unchanged. I'm like, fuck, that explains so much of why certain people have their traits exaggerated, while the people that the advice is actually for. The prescription to work harder seems to be absorbed much more by people who are already working too hard than people who don't work hard enough. And fuck, that now explains. It opens up this entire world for me and it was a term that I needed for myself. And that if you're a super successful author who's got like ton of readers and distributes all of this stuff out, like you can move the entire sort of cognitive topography of everybody that comes into contact with it, and then people who don't even know the book or don't even know where it comes from

Tim Urban

spreads even bigger than readers.

Chris Williamson

Meme being one of them, catches on too and starts to change the world.

George Zaidan

For the advice hyper response, was there any examples of some maybe bad advice that you hyper responded to and then some good advice that you have ignored or still ignore to this day?

Chris Williamson

I think the one about working harder is a good example of that. As a person whose proclivity predisposition was always to lean into I'm not doing enough. I should be working more. I need to be more diligent. I already pay way too much attention to stuff and it sounded to me like type A advice for type B people. People. I just took that advice on for me as a type A person and it worsened my imbalances as opposed to correcting them. But the thing that's interesting about that, the type A advice for type B people or type A people have type B problems and type B people have type A problems. The reason that's particularly interesting is that on average, maybe more people do need David Goggins screaming in their face to go harder than Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that they're already enough. Perhaps that across the whole world it would be better for more people to pay more attention and work harder. But for a certain cohort of people, mostly people that listen to podcasts like this one, they actually need to hear the opposite message. They need to be rest day maxing, not work day maxing, which ties into

Tim Urban

that, ties into awareness. I mean that's where I think the most important possible skill you can develop is self awareness. And just being able to see. I go too far here. I'm not gonna listen to that advice. And if you see that about yourself, you're not gonna fall into that trap as much.

Chris Williamson

Much. One of the problems with that prescription though is that people who are already self aware will take more self awareness on. Yeah.

Tim Urban

And then too much self awareness is not great.

Chris Williamson

Is restricting.

Tim Urban

Yeah. You're too self conscious in everything you do.

Chris Williamson

Bingo. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

George Zaidan

It's true. Yeah. You also problem with self awareness is. Yeah. When you think too much about yourself. One of the exercises I was trying to write about the other day for the book. It's interesting little thought experiment for you two gentlemen, which is imagine we have.

Tim Ferriss

Gentlemen, hold on. Now.

George Zaidan

Imagine we have a room here. Okay. And there's 10 people inside the room. But one of them is secretly miserable. But they're keeping it together. Everybody else is moderately happy. Now think of everybody in your life that you know. Who do you think you could send in that room and have the best probability of figuring it out, figuring out which one and who would be the worst. Obviously don't answer the worst one publicly. But who. But if you think of those two people in your head, who would be the best, best person?

Tim Urban

Esther Perel.

Chris Williamson

Why?

George Zaidan

What is it about them?

Tim Urban

I don't know. I just feel like she is so unbelievably perceptive of. And I mean, I know this, I mean of her talks and stuff, but I. I know her personally and I just feel like she just like sees what I'm actually trying to say or what I'm actually feeling like really, really well. Which is part of why I think she's so magnetic in her.

Tim Ferriss

Also an amazing podcast with couples work.

George Zaidan

Oh yeah.

Tim Urban

Which is. I mean, and that's who's. Who's better at doing a podcast with couples. Couples therapy is usually this person who barely knows you to can within a few minutes start to see stuff that you don't see with each other, it's like, that's incredible power.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. They're also, I mean, I would think of for instance, my friend Kevin Rose. Super close friend, serial entrepreneur, amazing investor, great guy. EQ off the charts. Off the charts. So he would walk in and observe the room. And I think with millions of years of evolution tilting in his favor, I don't think it's necessarily something he could verbalize, but he would pick out it out.

George Zaidan

It's an interesting idea of is it a trainable skill? What's also interesting is that you could kind of replace secretly miserable person with psychopath con man having an affair and you'd probably pick loosely the same people to be able to go in to do that. And it appears that it's closely related to theory of mind, which seems to come online at 4 years old. So a 3 year old almost has no theory of mind. They can't understand that Tim has thoughts or thinks differently to me. And it happens at 4 years old.

Chris Williamson

I think that's when lying starts as well.

George Zaidan

Yes. So this ability to be able to think. Oh, think how Tim thinks and then sometimes think how Tim speaks you do

Chris Williamson

not want to do.

George Zaidan

I'm thinking. Yeah, I know.

Tim Urban

It's funny watching up close, like there's stages before that. First is like, I am the only person and everyone else is like a. Is like here for my. Everyone's a figment of my imagination. And then there starts like, oh, other people are here and they're real. Like they actually have their own consciousness. But they're all here for me. They're all here. And then there starts to be like a kid and everyone smiles at you in the grocery store and it's, oh, everyone's doing their own thing. They're not here for me, but everyone likes me. Everyone's good. Everyone loves me. And then you start to realize like, oh, I'm just a random person and I'm not a kid anymore and people aren't smiling at me.

Chris Williamson

The first existential crisis.

Tim Urban

And actually there's a lot of theories, I forget who originated, but it's this oceanic feeling that you have when you think, think everyone is there for you and that everyone loves you and everyone knows you is. Some people cannot let that go. And the desire, the deep desire some people have for fame is forever chasing.

Chris Williamson

Oceanic.

Tim Urban

Yeah, the oceanic feeling is this feeling that you're in this ocean of love. And then later you feel this very cold loneliness. And fame is like, if I could be famous and Everyone knows me again and everyone loves me and I'm admired and, and it's this. And I think a lot of people have a real like 13 to 15 year olds have like this. A lot of them people go through, I think I went through this at that age. Like this, you want fame more than anything in the world because it's the ultimate, like being popular in school, but like, it's like them, you know, and then most people grow out of that. But I think some people don't.

Tim Ferriss

To your question about trainability, I think, I think it is trainable, but different people have better raw materials or some people. Right. It's like vertical jump muscle mass. Like, sure, you can improve on those metrics a lot with really thoughtful training. And I think that's true. But some people just get it. And I think it goes beyond human to human interactions too. Right. Like, I'm very, very, very interested in dog training and mammal training writ large. Actually, it goes beyond mammal training. That's like a whole.

Chris Williamson

Why?

Tim Ferriss

Because I think that, that it's interspecies communication, however primitive it might be, is fascinating in and of itself. I think that, I mean, dogs in particular, like the relationship between dogs and humans is kind of crazy. Like if you start to look past the familiarity of seeing dogs everywhere, like, yeah, dogs. And you're like, wait a second, like, think about how unusual it is that we have effectively co evolved over time.

Tim Urban

Yeah, there's an animal that lives in my house.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, it's an animal lives in your house. Your house. Actually this is like, this is like a companion slash guardian. I grew up with four cats. I love. Look, cats are great, but like, cats are animals that live in your house. Dogs are sort of in a separate category if they're trained. And I think a certain different type of awareness and consciousness comes online for dogs vis a vis training as you develop kind of labels for different things. So for, for all of those reasons, but it extends to equine training and how that could be applied, like animal interactions to people with aut, autism or ptsd. You see some wild stuff. And this doesn't end up being limited to horses. For instance, in the case of the therapy. I've seen instances. I volunteered at a wolf sanctuary in Colorado for a period of time, which is a long story. But wolves that had either been injured, trapped by ranchers or raised in captivity, which is a terrible idea. Please, people don't get wolf dogs or anything like, like that. It's really, it's really, really awful on a lot of levels. But there are these Ambassador wolves that they have. I think it's just called Mission Wolf in Colorado if people want to look at it and possibly support it. But these civilians can come in and visit and like donate money if they want. And the Ambassador Wolves will go straight up to people who are seemingly having the most pain in the room. It's weird.

Chris Williamson

No one.

Tim Ferriss

It's weird. Yeah. Or the people who are most withdrawn, like autistic and autistic kids and things like that. And it just raises a lot of really fascinating questions.

Chris Williamson

I've seen some videos of dogs that are there to stop seizures. If people are about to fall and have seizures, maybe people have got epilepsy. And these dogs, they're giving us some pheromones.

Tim Ferriss

They can use them for autoimmune disorders.

Chris Williamson

They jump up before someone has the collapse. It's able to. And it jumps up and because when they're shaking, the dog sort of lies on them like a weighted blanket or make sure that they're not going to fall apart over. And there was a woman that was taking some food. There's a. I don't know why there's a video. Maybe it was a ring doorbell camera, like internal doorbell camera or something. And she's taking food out of the oven and the dog jumps up and pulls her back. So, you know, when you sort of crouching down, she's already halfway down. Grabs her in the back of the collar and pulls her to the ground and lies on her and she's fine. And she's thinking, what is this dog doing? Is it okay? Is this something that's going to go on and then seizure. She has a seizure after the dog speaks. Been there. So insane.

Tim Ferriss

So this raises. Yeah. I mean, if we want to get into like Crazy Town territory, let's go, Tim. Well, I'll do. Let me do non crazy Town and then we'll segue to crazy town. So the non crazy town is the reason I bring up the dogs is that you will. I. I've noticed that the same people who have the highest EQ around humans often have the highest EQ around animals.

Chris Williamson

Right.

Tim Ferriss

So they like intuitively know how to interact with animals or be. Be guarded around the right type of animals. Say a dog that's really quiet may actually be really afraid and could be aggressive or they can read that type of body language even though it's a different species. Whereas some people have no awareness.

Chris Williamson

Right.

Tim Ferriss

They'll walk up to a dog that is clearly uncomfortable and they'll come top down to like Put their hand on the dog's head. It's just like, oh my God, you're just asking for trouble. Or they're not paying any attention to their kids. Like, why do so many little girls have dog bites on the face? Because little boys are kind of assholes. They like to like poke dogs and stuff. But little girls like to hug dogs around the face and neck. Dogs don't like that.

Tim Urban

Right.

Tim Ferriss

And parents aren't paying attention. So it's not actually necessarily the dog's fault, it's the parents fault. So I think that EQ is not limited to human to human. And that just relates to the theory of mind stuff. Maybe the theory of mind can be expanded to dogs.

Tim Urban

Dogs are like a pattern recognition machines on four legs. I once heard. And that's part of why I, I think, like, I noticed with my dog, like she can. If I'm about to leave, but I haven't even started getting ready yet, she can tell something's different. The way he's, you know. Yeah, but, but you know, I, I'm interested in dog training. I'm not a good dog trainer. My dog is not very well trained, but I. Training a mammal will make you realize an important skill which is you are a mammal and your brain, if you treat your brain like a dog and great things can happen.

Chris Williamson

You just become a behaviorist.

Tim Urban

Yeah, well, because you're, you know this idea that, well, I'm a person. It's like, no, no, you have a, you might be a person with like, you know, this higher consciousness in your head is a mammal brain. And it's not that different.

Tim Ferriss

It teaches you about how to train yourself.

George Zaidan

Yes.

Tim Ferriss

Seinfeld talks about this in training his mind. Like a dumb little puppy. Yeah, I shouldn't say dumb little puppy. It's just like a blank slate puppy. Doesn't know what to do and whatnot.

Tim Urban

It's a primate brain. We're all like, this consciousness is stuck inside of a, of an ancient primate. I mean, that's what it is. And so it's like if you realize that and you're like, like you said, you want to have positive. You want to have things on your desk that encourage. I mean, that's. What is that. That's because you're a dumb primate. That is going to be the person sitting at the desk.

Chris Williamson

How else have you applied this behaviorist dog training lens to yourself?

Tim Urban

I mean, ju. Just, Just reward.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. I mean really, it, it's so I, I should say like, if we're talking about like B.F. skinner and Skinner boxes, like we're getting. You can get into territory where you, you don't. You basically assume, and I'm simplifying here, that something does not exist if you can't observe it externally.

Chris Williamson

Right?

Tim Ferriss

But this is how you get into like, oh, animals don't feel pain. Oh, blah, blah. Which by the way, we assumed about infants for a very long time. It's not that crazy. It's not that long ago that people were operating on infants without anesthesia. Anesthesia, Right. Crazy. So I, I mean, there are, they're. I'm careful with the Skinner stuff. But when you get into like classical conditioning, operant conditioning, there's an amazing book called Don't Shoot the Dog, which has a terrible title. Maybe this is a good example of a book that failed don't shoot the Dog. But it's written by this woman, Karen Pryor, who worked in training marine mammals. Right. Dolphins and so on and a lot. I think she and her, her colleague also worked with the military, like training cats. Like the military's trained cockroaches to like turn light switches on and off. I mean, this is, this is not science fiction. This is real stuff.

George Zaidan

Like a crazy town now.

Tim Ferriss

So it's like, how do you do that?

Chris Williamson

Right?

Tim Ferriss

Oh, I'm not even. I'm just getting warmed up. Oh, yeah. But this is well documented. Like that's, that's not fiction. Sidebar. The mosquito sized or the fly sized drones out of China. Right. I don't know if you guys have seen these videos. Holy terrifying. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Where's Neil Stevenson when you need him to make some predictions? But took myself completely off the rails.

Chris Williamson

Don't shoot the dog.

Tim Ferriss

Don't shoot the dog. Karen Pryor, when you're training, say, a marine mammal, right? Okay. Dolphin doesn't do what you want to do. You can't hit it with a rolled up newspaper. You can't chastise. The dolphin just swims away from you. Right. So you end up focusing on positive reinforcement, Right. Providing rewards for the behavior that you're trying to shoot. Shape and behavioral shaping is also just an interesting concept I could explain in a second. And she started using different auditory cues and that converted into clicker training for dogs. So to teach a dog what to do or not do.

Chris Williamson

Hang on, sorry. The training of dolphins is where the clicker for dogs comes from.

Tim Ferriss

Yes. From aquatic mammals.

Chris Williamson

No fucking way.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, because they would use a whistle.

Chris Williamson

Dogs, because we clicked at dolphins, they

Tim Ferriss

used, I think they used whistles. But it's the same idea because you're trying to indicate to this dog, and this applies to humans, too, like, what is the right behavior, what is the wrong behavior? But for instance, like, the dog shits in the house, you come home two hours later, and then you punish the dog. It's so temporally dislocated, the dog has no idea, right? It's. It's not effective. It's just going to make the dog less likely to offer behaviors because it doesn't know when it's going to get punished. Punished, right. And I. Look, I understand approaches to E collars, and I think they have their place and so on, but this is just to say that when you start digging into this and you start thinking about behavioral shaping. So I'll give an example of behavioral shaping, a simple example. And look, I'm not a professional dog trainer, but I do find it really interesting. So, for instance, if you're trying to get a dog to sit is really easy. But if you have a treat, right? So you're using a lure, and you start with a motion that's. Let's say the dog's right here, it's standing, and you do this, you push it back behind its head, it sits down to get its mouth closer to the tree, right? And then over time, you lose the treat because now it has figured out how this dance works. And then you get to a point where you're using like the international sign language for sit. And then you're. Then you start to pair that with sit and then this. And then you can actually remove the manual signal altogether and just use the verbal cue, right? But if you're trying to get like a dog to turn around and do a spin, which is more of like a vanity trick than a safety thing or a functional thing, but as soon as it turns slightly, it might. It's not going to get it. On the first go round, you click, you give it a treat, and so you're basically encouraging it to continue that behavior. And you can shape really complex behaviors over time as long as you're not trying to boil the ocean at once. So how does that pertain to humans? All of it pertains to humans, whether you're trying to train yourself, whether, you know, as you're building a family, you're thinking about like, you're not going to crate train your kid, although you kind of do, I guess, with the crib, in a sense. But I think a lot of this applies. And people get upset and they're like, oh, my God, I can't believe you're Comparing a baby to a dog. And I'm like, guys, evolutionarily speaking, we're not that different. I mean there are some important differences. And it's like, yeah, we've got more, more, you know, white matter and so on, but don't breastfeed a dog. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I've been fostering a dog for the last six months who was going to get euthanized. She was on the, she was on the street. And so it's been. So I've been very much in the thick of it with a dog that was effectively a wild animal off the streets. A really adorable dog. Looks to be. Haven't done the genetic testing, but like an Anatolian shepherd mix. So very tawny colored with a black muzzle.

Chris Williamson

Isn't the one that I met. No, that's your different dog.

Tim Ferriss

Different dog, yeah. The rear feet are slightly externally rotated. So could be some Great Pyrenees in there, but much smaller. The Anatolian shepherds can get huge. They're found in Turkey. They're found in the, the caucus region. They can get up to like 150 pounds, 200 pounds at least. 150. They're huge. She's a lot smaller. She's about 60 pounds. So I would guess that she's a mix with something else, possibly German shepherd or Belgian shepherd, something like that. But man, when you're starting with something that is really feral, it's different.

Tim Urban

And what's the original dog trip trainer like? The actual dog trainer is the dog's brain offering dopamine treats. So when you give food, it's not the food, it's the dopamine hit that the brain gives that makes the dog want it. So this is what before humans were there to train dogs. Animals across the animal kingdom for millions of years have been trained by their genes to act a certain way using dopamine treats.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

Tim Urban

And then, and so it's just, and then. So all we're doing is leveraging this system that's already in place in the dog's brain and we're saying, oh, we can, we can get the brain to do a dopamine hit when. For that and tie that, that and then the dog can tie that hit to this behavior instead of the thing it's programmed to be tied to, which is get food.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. So a big part of it is figuring out. Right. Because humans have been selectively breeding dogs into all these weird shapes for millennia. Yeah. Is what does this dog respond to?

Tim Urban

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

Because some dogs are really food driven.

Tim Urban

But then, then your brain is Also giving you dopamine treats.

Tim Ferriss

Sure.

Tim Urban

And this is what social media platforms do, is they are geared towards flooding your brain with dopamine treats when you give it attention and therefore add dollars.

Tim Ferriss

Well, we also think of ourselves as like, the masters of the universe, but it's like, to what extent did we domesticate certain plants and to what extent did they domesticate us for propagation? Right. I mean, it's like, it's, it's. It'. Fun question.

Chris Williamson

Oh, yeah, More on the tumble down the rabbit hole here.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just like, if you look at, like, wheat, corn, soy, etc. I mean, they've been very effective at propagating themselves as a species. And I don't want to attribute, like, anthropomorphizing the wheat, the. The wheat necessarily, but just from an evolutionary imp. Just from a evolutionary and sort of propagation imperative. It's like, how did they end up being so ubiquitous? Uh, I just think it's a fun question to poke around.

Tim Urban

Well, when I was studying, like, history and you're looking at, oh, we domesticated, not just plants. Who domesticated the horse, who domesticated the dog? Um, and now the cat, the modern cow, the modern, you know, house dog. They couldn't survive in the wild because they've been domesticated. So now they rely on this artificial structure. And then I, you know, you read more about humans and oh, shit, what a civilization. We domesticated ourselves.

George Zaidan

Yeah.

Tim Urban

We cannot survive. As if you bring us back to 50,000 BC pluck any. I mean, maybe you're like one of these people that might. Most of people I know, we would die. We don't. We're not our natural habitat. We cannot live in it. Just like the Maltese cannot live out in the natural wolf habitat. We can't live there because we domesticated ourselves. And this is one of these weird things where we now live within this structure that we only can live in. Just like a house. It's like a dog can only live in a human house. A dog. We can only live in this civilizational house. None of us know how to. Again, very few of us know how to hunt and truly gather and do the things.

Chris Williamson

Would that not be different slightly that we have, like, genetically, anatomically, in terms of our features and our functions? Humans are not too dissimilar to what would have been around 50,000 years ago, but dogs would be very different to what was around previously. If we had been born back then, culture would have been.

Tim Urban

We haven't gone to the full extent. Extent that, yes, that, that is, that. I mean, I'm sure there are some little changes, but yes, like maybe we're less aggressive than we would need to be back then or something like that. But you're right, we haven't domesticated our biology, but when we are now raised in this world, we have totally domesticated ourselves psychologically and intellectually and just in the skills we have. And it just, it kind of, you know, it just accepts. It explains a lot. And you then you see interesting clashes back in, you know, when first civilizations were developing where you have these wild people essentially clashing with domesticated people. And that doesn't always go, you know, sometimes that the weapons got good enough eventually that the domesticated people couldn't be with. But for a long time, these, you know, step hordes, Mongols and others, you know, whatever they, the Huns and many, many others would come down with no technology at all. But they were essentially wild people. Again, they, they had horses, except for a horseback archery. They had horses.

George Zaidan

They were pretty good.

Tim Urban

They had horses. But like on the wild to domesticated scale, they weren't very far. And when they would clash, it wasn't just that they were really great with their weapons. They had this level of kind of wild brutality and, and you know, which, you know, and kind of a lack of a civilization of notion of empathy for human lives or whatever are worth something. I mean, the Mongols thought of humans as cattle, as, as another, you know, whatever. Killing them was not a moral wrong. And that was this huge advantage. So it's just interesting to like when you, you know, and that this is what's scary. It's very scary. When you think about civilizational collapse, talk about AI apocalypse, things like this. I mean, what's scary is just the power goes out. That means the Internet goes out. I mean, you'd see a lot of very domesticated people in a total chaotic situation and it would be, yeah, people

Tim Ferriss

lose their shit really quickly. I was in San Francisco and I was volunteering for something called nert, which is the Northern California Emergency Response Team. And it's a volunteer coalition of people who are distributed throughout, in this case, San Francisco. And it's done in collaboration with the police and fire department to train volunteers to respond in the case of, of a highly destructive earthquake or natural disaster of some type. And I remember in the very beginning they effectively said, okay, the broader San Francisco area has population of X, whatever it was, 1.2 million people. Guess how many fire engines we have. And they defined like what a fire engine was and so on they're like 10. Okay, so what happens if we have a conflagration which I believe think is a square block on fire of X magnitude and they're like, you should expect to be without water and electricity in these following areas for this period of time, like seven to 10 days. And I remember I was living in Glen park in San Francisco and PG&E had a rolling blackout and I was like, okay, power's out. And for like the first few hours people were like wandering out outside. It was a Saturday. And they're like, hey, your power out? Yeah. Wow, nice to see you, Bob. Everybody was very civil. And then it's like five or six hours and then people start to realize, oh, all of my food in my freezer is going to thaw at some point. And I think the water may have also been off and around like 10 hours post. There's one guy in the neighborhood who had a little Honda generator because he was a burner. He went to Burning man and he was like keeping his stuff frozen and one or two people wandered over and they're like, hey Joe, could I borrow that after you're done with.

Tim Urban

With it?

Tim Ferriss

Clearly he's not going to be done with it because he's using it. And I think it was at like hour 15 or 18, there was an entire throng of people who are these like hyper liberal, peace, you know, live long and prosper, live and let live types who are getting openly hostile about who would get to use his generator next. This is less than 24 hours. So the, the basic courtesy of modern life fall away very quickly.

Tim Urban

There's a whole wild person in every human that is completely contained in a normal situation. I sometimes I'm in a coffee shop and I see all these people, one standing in line so and I just like suddenly have a split screen to like those people like stabbing each other for food. And then I was like, they come back here and I'm like, you know, it's a little like it's the, you know, we're, it's all fine when it's fine and you know, I don't know.

Tim Ferriss

So let me say a couple things real quick. So this is going to sound strange not, not to like defend, you know, Genghis Khan and, and the step hordes,

George Zaidan

but Steelman pillaging for second ten.

Tim Ferriss

Not, not pillaging. There's a book I won't recommend it to be by one of the, I mean a name everybody would know. There's a book called Genghis Khan and the Making of the modern world. It is remark from like modern postal systems to infrastructure to reli. Religious freedom. They did kill and rape a lot of people. But that book is worth reading, especially the first half of it, just to get a full grasp of the historic implications. The second, just to give an OG podcast shout out. Wrath of the Khans by Dan Carlin. Oh my God.

Tim Urban

Listen to every Dan Carlin episode.

Tim Ferriss

I mean, honestly, still maybe the best. No offense, no offense, no offense. Best podcast of all time. Dan Carlin Hardcore history. Wrath of the Cons. It's like a five part series. Each one is four to five hours long.

Chris Williamson

Oh, so.

Tim Ferriss

And you will not be bored. You will rip through it.

Tim Urban

They are. I mean, this is a whole other topic. But like the history podcasts are one of my favorites and he is the goat.

Chris Williamson

I heard that he used to do them in a single take and if he messed up, he'd just restart again.

Tim Ferriss

Oh God. It wouldn't surprise me. He's a perfectionist. I mean, that's why they took so long.

Chris Williamson

Still doing. I haven't seen.

Tim Ferriss

I'm not sure. But part of the reason I also love Dan as an example is that wherever you are, whenever you are, are you run into whatever industry. These things that are taken to be true because they get repeated a lot, right? You have to post X times per week. You have to do this, you have to do that. No one's going to listen to a podcast that's longer than 60 minutes. And Dan was like, I'm going to do one six hour podcast or five hour podcast once every six months. And he was top of the charts forever. For years upon years.

Tim Urban

Not many people are doing A plus work. And when you are. Are none of those rules apply?

George Zaidan

Yes.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, the rules just didn't apply.

Chris Williamson

Tagline that we found for this is there will always be room for better. Yeah, there will always be room for better.

Tim Urban

It doesn't matter what the industry is, you know? You know, it just. It's something really great. There's just not very much of it. Doesn't matter how many podcasters there are. Very few people are doing a.

George Zaidan

Feels like that's accelerating now that you. Because you have LLMs churning more shit out and you're going to have more video models churning more shit out.

Tim Ferriss

Out.

George Zaidan

It feels that whether there's less quality today or is there. It just feels maybe there's less quality relative to the amount of quantity.

Chris Williamson

So it's also encouraging everyone to average back to the mean. Right. It regresses the aggregate of content that's being.

Tim Urban

And then people get discouraged and think, oh, there's so much content. Like, what's the point of it? It's like, no, no, no. If you can do something great, it will just rise above this and the world will see it.

Chris Williamson

Speaking of novel content, the Japan and USA Algo crossover because of the Translate mode that happened, has resulted in some pretty spectacular outcomes. None more so than Kenki Kid's account. Have you seen this guy? Okay, so he describes in his bio on X as a company employee living in Yokohama's Kanai area. Originally from Yokohama, born in 1985. Currently 41 years old, single 41 years with no girlfriend history. Non appealing to the opposite sex, unattractive amateur. Virginia like sex services. Hobbies are watching soccer, overseas travel, planning to retire early from the company at age 50, has given up on marriage and is currently seeking a comfortable single life. So it's interesting about this guy he's been tweeting about.

Tim Ferriss

That is one hell of a bio. How did he end up picking so many characters?

Chris Williamson

I think you were able to compress things down in Japanese.

George Zaidan

Impressive for a dog as well.

Chris Williamson

He's been tweeting about visiting different hand job parlors in Japan and is using the revenue paid out from X to fund his future trips. He's essentially unlocked an infinite hand job glitch in reality Chelsea supporter.

Tim Urban

It's also just no one in the in the Western world talks like this. It's just a very specific like Japanese.

Chris Williamson

So there's a quote tweet. Go to the quote tweet, Jared. It's where he says, today both my regular handjob spot and the married woman place are running discount events and I'm torn about which one to go to. That's quote tweeted by an American saying, Americans be like, I can't even get some chopped foid from a dating app to go on a $250 date with me. While the Japan bros are like, damn. The handjob parlor and the MILF joint are both on sale tonight. I don't know which one to pick. And he is using the X revenue in order to fund his hand job.

Tim Urban

He's like the most honest man in the world.

Chris Williamson

It's unbelievable.

George Zaidan

Can you set a calendar reminder for Black Friday

Tim Ferriss

Hanky Kids, dude?

Chris Williamson

Unbelievable. Yeah, the crossover from American people finally being able to see Japanese content on X has resulted in.

Tim Ferriss

I mean, I did love the I don't know if you've seen these split videos of like Japanese cleaning the stadium after a game and Knicks fans You brought this up.

George Zaidan

Yes. Even what's interesting, when the Japanese team played at Wembley against England, they cleaned the changing rooms afterwards. The players even did it. Completely different cultural difference. What's interesting though is you have these languages merge online. I'm assuming you're gonna have podcast language merge. Do you actually lose less the cultural differences as much? One of the reasons why Japan is so unique is because they did that sukuku. Right. Where they. Whilst the rest of the world was all mixing ideas. If you left Japan killed. If you tried to enter Japan killed. So it's so unique.

Tim Ferriss

It's so aliens like the Galapagos of culture.

George Zaidan

Yes. And I wonder with.

Chris Williamson

It's a great way to put it

George Zaidan

with the Internet now, do you actually have. Because I. I can feel it already already that English culture's becoming a bit more American or even like this Internet culture. It's not even American now. It feels like it's post American. It's becoming more.

Chris Williamson

It's just global. It's just the online culture.

Tim Urban

The Internet is like the anti Japanese isolationist culture effect.

Tim Ferriss

Yes.

George Zaidan

Especially on the dark web.

Tim Urban

And then what you. What's unfortunate is then what's nice is when you have all these independent cultures and each one does something really well. I mean, you can kind of. When it all starts to blend, you really lose the variety. The variety is where, like variety is the. In both evolution and cultural evolution is the engine of creativity and growth. And, you know, and it's. It's like instead of having, you know, a bunch of different brains in a room brainstorming, you just have kind of like one. One thinker. And it's. It's a shame.

Chris Williamson

Someone wrote a blog post a few years ago about where did emos and goths go? And the question was that subcultures need time to ossify. And if you've got this sort of global permaculture thing that's always moving and any bit that moves in one side of the membrane affects another bit over here. It's like everybody on a bouncy castle at the same time and somebody that jumps up and down over there impacts everybody else. So you don't have time to silo off to create this sort of weird niche trends, music tastes, language. Now you see subcultures on the Internet with language, but very quickly look at looksmaxing. All of that immediately now has become common vernacular because one part of the bouncy castle is now affected.

Tim Ferriss

I'm just pulling from words you're throwing out. You want a podcast name Idea.

Chris Williamson

Yes.

Tim Ferriss

Bouncy castle, gang bang.

Chris Williamson

Bouncy castle, gang bang. I'm actually not far. That's not.

Tim Ferriss

It's evocative. It's very visual.

Chris Williamson

It's either that or fire up the autism engine. It's one of those two.

George Zaidan

It is visual.

Chris Williamson

Yeah.

George Zaidan

Why have you mentioned goths and emos, then?

Chris Williamson

When was the last time you thought about goths and emos?

George Zaidan

And I always ask Chris this question, ask you two guys this, which is when the fascinating thing about something fading away is that you don't notice it fading away because by definition, it's fading away. Is there anything that's currently fading away or has faded away that you think we would have forgotten about until you mentioned it? A good example is the voicemail. The voicemail. If you watch I was watching Breaking Bad and there's about five minutes every episode of a voicemail scene where the voicemail will be playing across the house and it's just disappeared. It doesn't exist. But nobody really discussed it because by definition, if something's fading away. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

There's stuff that's fitting in too. Like mullets. Mullets are back.

Chris Williamson

Very, very bad.

Tim Urban

That's why mustaches came back.

Chris Williamson

Yeah. You. You're actually only able to grow.

Tim Ferriss

I don't know if I could make a. Well, I can't do, like the flat top mullet, which would be my sort of like, aspiration, because that's just not going to work. So I could do like a Power Donut rat.

Chris Williamson

Power Donut.

Tim Ferriss

Power Donut. Power Donut Rat tail. Also not a bad podcast name.

Chris Williamson

That's true.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

George Zaidan

Not a bad Grinder name as well. Power Donut.

Chris Williamson

Power Donut Racktor.

Tim Ferriss

You know what I'm talking about, right? Like Professor X.

Chris Williamson

That sounds like a wonderful couple that could be born out of Grindr. Powerdoner and Rattail would get together very well. Tim, what else have you brought from home? You got this bag.

Tim Ferriss

I brought lots of stuff. I'm throw out some fun stuff you're talking about, like humans. Modern humans in the wild. Dead.

George Zaidan

Right.

Tim Ferriss

Domesticated dogs in the wild, dead. One exception. If you take domesticated pigs and release them into the wild, they rapidly undergo physical and behav behavioral transformations. Within just a few months, they develop thicker, bristly hair, longer snouts and tusks. Like, they literally revert back into savage animals within months.

Chris Williamson

Does anyone study what's happening to them?

George Zaidan

Cool.

Tim Ferriss

They call it phenotypic reversion.

George Zaidan

Wow.

Chris Williamson

And have you brought one? There's a small feral pig I did

Tim Ferriss

not bring a wild boar. I brought a whole stack of things.

Chris Williamson

This is exciting. Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss

And then, so we can talk about these.

Chris Williamson

Oh, drugs. You brought drugs.

Tim Ferriss

I brought drugs. So this. This one is. I'm still like, jury's out. But the data are. Are pretty interesting. This is. So this is avmac.

Chris Williamson

I know exactly what this is.

Tim Ferriss

You know what this is? So some people have heard of something called sulforaphane. And I'm going to pull this up so I don't misquote here. Let's see if I can find it. Bear with me here.

Chris Williamson

I love when my autistic news feed and Tim's autistic news feedback feed come together. They merge together.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. So.

Chris Williamson

All right, just say it. Just get him to get you on.

Tim Ferriss

What's that?

George Zaidan

Carry on.

Chris Williamson

He needs. He needs more frosty beverages.

Tim Urban

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

Okay, so this. This stuff. So sulforaphane people might have heard about, like broccoli sprouts were kind of making the rounds a couple of years ago. And I think Rhonda Patrick should be giving credit for bringing this to light for a lot of folks. And this does not contain sulforaphane itself, but a precursor and an enzyme. So your body then produces sulforaphane. And I'll explain why I'm bringing this up because I've been taking this for probably nine months and predominantly because there is some possibility that it could help with mitigating the risk of neurodegeneration generation. So that's again, whether it's the xylitol or this stuff having multiple family members with Alzheimer's. I'm paying a lot of attention to prevention.

Chris Williamson

You'll have done your genetic testing as well, right?

Tim Ferriss

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson

Cool.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. What's interesting is quite a few people in my family, and I know this isn't the only risk factor, but they're APOE 33, which should be the lowest risk of Alzheimer's, could be protected. And yet. So there's other dysfunction. And in this case, sulforaphane reliably activates NRF2 related pathways in humans. All right, so the. It's promising but not proven. Slowing aging, preventing cancer, preventing dementia, extending lifespan, treating chronic disease. It's basically detoxification. But the re. The reason I brought it is that my supplement regimen has been very consistent for at least two or three years. And I do constant blood tests and so on. Just did a blood draw this morning, actually. And in the last maybe six months I've been getting. Could be coincidence, but more compliments and questions about my skin than ever before. And I was like, what is going on? Is this just coincidence or is something going on? And so I looked at the two things that I've added just out of curiosity. Nothing new. Otherwise I was like, okay, diet's the same. There is the asthmacal and then there's urolith methane.

Chris Williamson

Using timeline.

Tim Ferriss

Timeline.

Chris Williamson

And.

Tim Ferriss

And it turns out that it is plausible that this stuff helps with skin tone.

Chris Williamson

Rhonda's thing was that was for microplastics, right?

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean there's, there's a bunch that does, but yes.

Chris Williamson

Like did you see. So I brought this up last time, but I didn't get a chance to actually say it. I had it ready for last time. So the microplastics numbers were wrong. The gloves were the same source. So University of Michigan researchers just amended a core assumption about microplastic signs. Latex and nitrile gloves worn by the scientists doing the measuring shed sterile particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene.

Tim Ferriss

Polyethylene.

Tim Urban

Oops.

Chris Williamson

Standard infrared and Raman instruments couldn't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic. So you know that every American consumes a, a credit card sized amount of microplastics every year. Like when you pick up the little petri dish because it's human blood and feces and tissue samples and stuff, they're picking it up. But the way that it bends, the reason that gloves are able to bend is that tiny, teeny, teeny, teeny tiny bits break off. That's why it's malleable. They switched from that to some other type of glove and it just went through the floor.

Tim Urban

I like that. I was happy to see that all

Chris Williamson

the microplastic research looks like it could be wrong.

George Zaidan

Wow.

Chris Williamson

That's not to say that we're not consuming it, we probably are. But the numbers I think are 100x.

Tim Urban

Credit card doesn't sound that bad. I'll eat a credit card once a year. How bad could it be?

Chris Williamson

I'd frontload it. I'd get it all done January 1st. Just get the Amex in.

Tim Ferriss

Get up. So just to be clear, not a Doctor, don't play one on the Internet. This stuff, the AV McAll, biologically plausible, reasonably safe, interesting human data, but not yet a slam dunk clinical intervention, but still interesting because it activates your own detoxification pathways as opposed to being an external antioxidant that you consume. So the sort of hormetic stress response could be really interesting and have broader benefits. So that's why I'm.

Tim Urban

You do have cred with these kind of things because you're like annoyingly healthy looking. You're like the healthiest looking person.

Tim Ferriss

Thank you.

Tim Urban

You seem very, like robust and unsickly all the time.

Tim Ferriss

Thank you. Yeah, I'll be 50.

Tim Urban

I'll take your advice.

Tim Ferriss

I'll be 50 before you know it, which is crazy. The key is to go bald early. So your photos look remarkably similar.

Tim Urban

I think as you get older, bald is an asset. You end up like. It's hard to age you.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, no, exactly.

Tim Urban

People.

Tim Ferriss

Oh, hair is the giveaway. Yeah. If you're trying to do like the dead squirrel come over or whatever. White knuckling dead giveaway. Should I talk about these things real quick?

Chris Williamson

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

So I have. When I was a kid, I collected, I mean, comic books. That was kind of my first business was buying and selling comic books. Wanted to be a comic book penciler forever. Was an illustrator throughout school. Paid a lot of my bills in college as an illustrator. So I love graphic novels and what I found as I'm being domesticated. Not domesticated, but trained through LLMs and everything else to have shorter and shorter attention span effectively. Right. I'm trying to offset that. But another insight that I've had for me personally, I am. And we talked about the Aphantasia, I guess it was, and hypervisualization. I'm so visual that often as I read or even if I meditate, we could talk about how meditation factors into this. But I'm conjuring these images constantly, which can be very distracting.

George Zaidan

Conjuring what? Images?

Tim Ferriss

Images. Just visualization in my head or scenes or whatever. Like there's constantly. As I'm here, there's like another movie playing in my mind. It's like watching like two screens with different movies.

George Zaidan

Studious tend to be like a past event or a future event. Or is it completely random? Could be.

Tim Ferriss

That could be just random bits and bobs. So I've taken to going back to graphic novels because once you are reading a story with visual accompaniment, it occupies that part of my brain. And I just love graphic novels. So I thought I would share after reading like dozens and dozens over the last couple years. Some of my favorites. This is something is killing the children. Real upload lifting. This is going to be made into a very expensive series by Netflix. But basic premise, the artwork is amazing. Story is really fun. And basic premise is monsters are real, only children can see them. And there are these cabals of. Of monster hunters. It's like A. It's a beautifully simple premise and looks very light. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's great. If you're into the sci fi stuff, this is Lazarus, which is kind of a post apocalyptic. These cartel like families run giant swaths of the United States and the world and it's about their kind of geopolitical battles and how technology factors into it if you want something more fantasy. And this, this gets into some deep psychological terrain and, and inner turmoil, but it also throws in lots of fantasy tropes. So it's kind of like fantasy plus a bit of steampunk monstrous, which just based on the COVID I was like, I'm not going to like this at all. In full disclosure, I liked the first maybe like 200 pages the most of what I read. But the testimonials and stuff are insane. So this is another one that is beautiful. I tend to be very biased towards the stuff with really gorgeous penciling. Day Tripper. This is from Brazil and does not have any sci fi, any fantasy. It's sort of a reflection on mortality. It's about this young man who has a star author as a father whose shadow he's constantly living in, who as his job writes obituaries at a local newspaper. But it gets much more interesting.

Tim Urban

So how long like does that take you to read compared to like a book? How many pages? How many page book is that?

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, this. You'll rip through this. Which is part of the reason why I'd say like, if you're gonna get in like, this is 250 pages. I read this in three hours.

Tim Urban

Yeah, I like that.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, you get through it very quickly. It's also an expensive habit if you're using hard copy. Right. I mean this is gonna be 20, 25 bucks.

Tim Urban

As someone who takes forever to do the simplest stick drawing and granted these people are far more talented artists. Artists. Like, I mean, I mean today maybe they're using AI but like when I looked at this, I'm like, no, these are all. It's so just this one picture?

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, yeah. The artwork in all of these is tremendous.

Tim Urban

Amazing how.

Chris Williamson

Have you ever read a comic book?

George Zaidan

Not in a while.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, this.

Chris Williamson

I was a child.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

Tim Urban

Never. Basically never.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Urban

I mean there's, I think I could get into it.

Tim Ferriss

There are some iconic Calvin and Hobbs.

George Zaidan

I used to.

Tim Ferriss

Calvin Hobbes is amazing. Calvin Hobbs is amazing. Look, I mean Sandman, there's some really like genre busting graphic novels. This one is from France, ama, which I'm currently Reading. Really deeply philosophical, very psychedelic. This one also gets pretty trippy, as you would guess by the name. What I'd suggest. So this is impossible to get as a hard copy. It's very, very challenging. Just get the Kindle versions. And Kindle, or I should say Amazon, acquired a company that allows you to read these graphic novels panel by panel. And it has this zooming in, zooming out function that is beautifully designed.

Chris Williamson

That's why they put the new focal Kindle together, I think, to try and encourage people to get.

Tim Ferriss

That's beautiful. And I'll actually.

Tim Urban

I'll actually just bode well for all of my.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, the. The graphics. The graphic novels are not easy to read on mobile, but on, say, laptop or iPad or something, it's what I want is.

Tim Urban

And I don't know if it would apply to this, but for my books and for a lot of others that have a lot of visuals is I want audio, I want Audible or some to be like, you're listening. And then it's like, ding. You look and the screen just has the current drawing, the current image, and so easy to. And then you put. You see, you put it back in your pocket and it's like, ding. Oh, there's a graph.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, right.

Tim Urban

And it's just why.

Chris Williamson

Supplementary materials available.

Tim Ferriss

Here's your attached PDF.

Tim Urban

That's such a game changer for me. Yeah, that's what I do. It's attached from PDF. It sucks.

Chris Williamson

I've got into Dungeon Crawler Carl. Have you read this book?

Tim Ferriss

That's a fun one.

Chris Williamson

Fuck me.

Tim Ferriss

It's a fun one.

Chris Williamson

It's. I mean, so Red Rising is the most addictive fiction series that I've followed, found pretty much ever. And they're about to release. Pierce is about to release book eight, I think, soon. And I got told, you know, when you get a book suggestion from two or three different people who don't know each other. Yeah, all right. I just obviously need to do that. I've triangulated. They've triangulated me as a.

Tim Urban

Even the second recommendation, I'm like, okay,

Chris Williamson

yeah, Dungeon Crawler Carl. So it's a LITRPG literary rpg. So you're basically reading, reading. Imagine somebody played a video game and you read a description of what happened. That's kind of what it's like. And it is fucking unbelievable. And this guy is on book eight or nine now, and he released the first one in 2020.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah. When are the what. And I remember the number of reviews was insane.

Chris Williamson

It was fucking wild. This. The Dungeon Crawler Carl for me is up there with Red. Rye's very different. It's very edgy. It's really light hearted and fun. There's a lot of inner monologue, there's interplay. You can tell that the story's gonna get huge and unwieldy. There's progress. What's interesting is because he's leveling up. He's playing the game or he is the game. And as he goes along he levels up skills and he's got to make a choice between which class he wants to be or this one. Do I want to make this particular sacrifice in terms of my strength and my dexterity and my intelligence or what should we upgrade this pet that we've got as and what armor should I put on? And you'd think, oh, that sounds so dry and boring. But it is. It's got me. It's got me.

Tim Urban

We will tap into the same thing that makes those games addictive to play.

Chris Williamson

Probably right.

Tim Urban

Without feeling watching someone upgrade.

Chris Williamson

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss

Whilst getting to 82,000 reviews on Amazon. 4.7 stars. I bet it's good reads is 427,000. It's insane. It's really since 2020, it's, it's pretty fun. I only got through book one and I enjoyed it. So I didn't make it.

Chris Williamson

I don't know how you stopped at book one. Yeah, he was about to choose his class. How did you stop at book one?

Tim Urban

I know.

Chris Williamson

What have you been reading recently? Anything good?

Tim Urban

So for a long time I've been alternating between because for my writing I'm constantly reading nonfiction, history or science, whatever, things like that. For right now I'm just reading a book called,

Tim Ferriss

what's it called?

Tim Urban

Something with Time by Carlo Rovelli.

Tim Ferriss

The Order of Things.

Tim Urban

The Order of Time.

Chris Williamson

Yeah. Benedict Cumberbatch.

Tim Urban

Oh my God, dude, the audio. I would listen to him read anything. So Benedict Cumberbatch is so good and he's reading it. And that's a book where talk about like people who listen to books on like 2x or whatever. I want to do that in like 0.4x because I have to constantly pause and just like think about what he just said, try to absorb. And then I go back. I, I, I'm going through this short four hour book over like so slow. But that's for work. That's for my book. I usually alternate between history podcasts and sci fi. Those are my right now. So I read the first book in the Expanse series which I liked. I didn't love. I liked, so I didn't keep going. And then I read my wife an Instagram post of her favorite of the books she read in the year with the favorite to the least favorite stack. And I usually don't cross over that much, but I was like that top one. It's their top book. So I read it and it was so good. It was called A Fraction of the Hole by Steve Toltz. He's this Australian author, takes place in Australia. And it is so funny and it's such an adventure and it's this just fantastic fiction book and it's not that well known and it was just such a joy and I would never have just picked that up on my own, but I love, loved that. And then, and then I. More recently, obviously, I read the whole Three Body Problem trilogy, which is, by the way, an example of one of

Tim Ferriss

those times when I couldn't do that either.

George Zaidan

You know, we.

Tim Urban

Oh, really?

George Zaidan

Oh, no. Here.

Tim Urban

Okay. So here's the book.

Tim Ferriss

I love the.

Chris Williamson

Bailed out four times.

Tim Urban

Let me tell you. Let me just. This is very important. So there's three. There's three books. The first book is only a sixth of the length of the whole thing because the second and third book are much longer. The first book is a bbp plus it's the appetizer to the whole thing. The second book, the first third of it is slow. So it's really. If you don't lose people there, you're going to lose people there. When you get 200 pages into the second book, the rest. No, I know that sounds bad. This is 1400 pages. You get to 75 and it all works out. This is 1,400 pages, the series, and you're only 500 total pages in. Now. The next 900 pages is the greatest thing I've ever read. It's the biggest adventure. And it's not like the first part's bad. It's just a little slow. And it's. Then it just takes you on this ride. You've never been. So if you haven't gotten. It's so worth.

Chris Williamson

I'm halfway through the first book and I'm not kidding, it's taken me 10 attempts. Just I need to grind it out.

Tim Urban

You have to.

George Zaidan

My thought process with things like this and particularly as I'm writing now.

Tim Ferriss

Good news. This takes an hour.

Chris Williamson

Great.

George Zaidan

I like high octane. And maybe it's just like my standard as a writer that I try and apply to somebody else, but I'm like, why did you have to wait? There's Two and a half pages. If you watch Breaking Bad, the first scene of Breaking Bad, some trousers land in an air. There's an RV driving. Walter White's got a mask on with three people passed out, looking dead in the back. And he's got a gun in his pocket. That comes out in the first five minutes. That's what I want.

Tim Urban

I don't listen. That's how.

George Zaidan

Ideal.

Tim Urban

That's ideal in this case. First of all, it's like once you get to the end, you also. Like, the beginning has more meaning to you. I totally agree. And.

George Zaidan

But it's.

Tim Urban

This has managed to be so popular despite things I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is, by the way, an example of an author who actually, I think, didn't do a great job with the title, which was not Three Body Problem. The title is remembrance of Earth's Past. That's the title. The title of the full series. And no one knows that because basically readers were like, we're gonna pretend you didn't say that.

Tim Ferriss

We're gonna come up with their own.

Tim Urban

It's a little bit like Game of Thrones. They didn't name Game of Thrones a Song of Fire and Ice, which is the actual title. They're like Game of Thrones, the first book. That's going to be the title of the whole thing. Because it's. It's just. I like when a certain, you know, the fans kind of decide for you that we're not gonna.

George Zaidan

It's interesting when something succeeds and then the real, like, nuanced conversation is how much of it it succeeded, despite variables. Because often you could look at Steve Jobs and go, the answer is turtlenecks and carrot juice. But I mean, those are either completely irrelevant or in despite of. And it tends to be like one power law.

Tim Urban

Correlation, not causation.

Chris Williamson

Yeah.

George Zaidan

And that's a real constant IQ test.

Tim Urban

Yes.

Chris Williamson

So you're saying Three Body problem could be your vote for book that succeeded in spite of a bad real title

Tim Urban

and a slow first 500 pages of the 1400. I mean, I've heard that.

Chris Williamson

I've never read Dune, but I've heard that Dune goes real up.

Tim Urban

So my problem is I just stuck

Tim Ferriss

with the first one.

Tim Urban

Yeah, I read the first Dune. It was good after Three Body Problem. To me, it's just like I read six Ian Banks books from the Culture series and they were really good. It's just. I. It'll never.

Tim Ferriss

What makes it so good?

Tim Urban

The. The Three Body problem?

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, it.

George Zaidan

The.

Tim Ferriss

I mean, I think Dune is I think masterpiece, right? I think Herbert was genius.

Tim Urban

The writing is not great. It's very like kind of just like literal. No, it's not funny.

Chris Williamson

It had to be translated. Fun as well too I guess.

Tim Urban

Had to be translated. The characters are super like boring people. Like plain, you know, there's no character development.

Tim Ferriss

This is a three by realm.

Tim Urban

Yes.

Tim Ferriss

You're selling me.

Tim Urban

Well, the plot, the plot is the best plot I've ever read in my life for anything the. It is the most gripping, rich plot and the concepts in the plot are so mind bending and delicious and everything that I've ever thought was cool. You know how like interstellar, which I don't think was actually that great a movie, but they had some killer concepts. Like you go to this planet and. And time is different and you come back and your seven year old daughter or whatever is. Is 25 and it's like whoa, right? It has so much of things like that. Like the coolest thing I've ever heard. Like he now weaves it into the plot and, and, and again it, it's really one big game theory. I don't want to blow it for anyone but like in the first 20% of the very first book the plot is launched and it's not a bunch of things, it's one thing happens in the early part of the first book and then the rest of the book is basically playing out game theory. What would happen? How could this play out? And it's 1400 pages of. This is one story that's happening. This one thing that happens and then what goes on from there. So I just think anyone who likes sci fi or like space or like just it is. You gotta get through.

Tim Ferriss

So the first book, the first book in the series is Three Body Problem

Tim Urban

called Three Body Problem. Then there's the Dark Forest and then Death's End and again once. The Dark Forest is one of my favorite books of all time and the Death End is also one of my. These are like two of my favorite absolute books. And again people also it's like, oh, the first book is slow. But that's only a six of the whole series. So that's what I would say.

Chris Williamson

Well, I mean. Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson. The moon explodes in the first line. The first line of the book, the moon explodes. I love that it was something like it was just after midday on a Sunday when the moon exploded. That's the first line of the book.

George Zaidan

Wow.

Chris Williamson

It's pretty good. Boys. I appreciate you all. You're all fucking awesome. Tim, you're going traveling for a bit. So I'm not going to see you for a while.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah.

Chris Williamson

What have you got going on? Where should people go to keep up to date with the shit that you've got happening?

Tim Ferriss

Just go to Tim Blog. Just put up a blog post talking about how nonfiction is imploding. Thanks to Ell. If you want to see real sales numbers on disruption, that's there. Yeah. Tim Blog. Sign up for the newsletter Tim Blog Friday. It's got 2 million subscribers. It's fun, it's free.

Tim Urban

So right until my book is out that can't. No one can buy that. So that's fall of 27. So for. Well, I'll be. Who knows. We put wide.com is my homeland on the Internet and all my posts are up and they're usually pretty evergreen. So that's still fun, I think. But likewise, I would say newsletter is the thing to do because. Because I don't post that often and I only send an email out when I post something, so it's not annoying. And I always encourage people to get on board there.

George Zaidan

Highagency.com books find out about Oblomov who I spoke last time. My 400 page Russian novel where a man spends the first 50 pages worrying about how he's going to get out of bed. Now that's a.

Chris Williamson

Having just criticized a man who's been 500 pages. Read it.

George Zaidan

Read it and see. Watch Oblomov sit there.

Chris Williamson

The most extreme lightning time in bed. All right, my beauties. I appreciate you all. I'll see you again soon.

Tim Urban

Thank you.

Chris Williamson

Let's go, boys. Yes.

Tim Urban

There we go.

Chris Williamson

Fun aside.

George Zaidan

Yeah. Boom.

Tim Urban

Good job, everyone.

George Zaidan

This.

Tim Urban

The amount of treats was such a. I had so much fun. These are incredible.

Chris Williamson

Thank you. Take some away.

Tim Ferriss

Yeah, they're fine.

Chris Williamson

Take some away with me.

George Zaidan

That was so much fun.