Timothy Ferriss's Blog, page 11

May 9, 2024

Magic Pill — Johann Hari and the New “Miracle” Weight-Loss Drugs

Ozempic and other GLP-1 receptor agonists have skyrocketed in popularity as a treatment for obesity, promising rapid weight-loss at a hefty price.

“Miracle drug” is one of the descriptors use by celebrities, influencers, and many journalists. I have so far held off on first-hand experience (Related read: No Biological Free Lunches), and I suggest reading Dr. Peter Attia’s warnings regarding possible side-effects.

But just like the rest of the world, I am fascinated by the promises and perils of these drugs, and I am actively tracking how things unfold.

This is why I’m excited to share exclusive excerpts from Johann Hari (@johannhari101), who reports on his research and direct experience in his newest book: Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs.

Johann is the New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, named a Book of the Year by the Financial Times and the New York Post; Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, described as “one of the most important texts of recent years” by the British Journal of General Practice; and Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, which was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film The United States vs. Billie Holiday, for which Johann also served as an executive producer.

Johann has written for some of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian. His TED talks, Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong and This Could Be Why You Are Depressed or Anxious, have been viewed more than 93 million times.

If you’re pressed for time, skip to the second excerpt to read about Johann’s first-hand account of taking Ozempic, but I suggest reading all of the below.

These drugs and their close cousins will get more and more attention in the coming year, and the more you know, the fewer mistakes you will make.

Please enjoy!

Enter Johann . . .

In the winter of 2022, the global pandemic seemed to be finally receding, so for the first time in two years, I went to a party. I felt schlubby and slightly self-conscious because I had gained a stone a half [21 lbs] since the world shut down. Some people say the main reason they survived the pandemic was the vaccine; for me, it was Uber Eats. The party was being thrown by an Oscar-winning actor, and while I didn’t expect Hollywood stars to have pudged out as much as the rest of us, I thought there would be a little swelling at the edges.

As I milled around, I felt disconcerted. It wasn’t just that nobody had gained weight. They were gaunt. Their cheekbones were higher, their stomachs tighter. This hadn’t only happened to the actors. The middle-aged TV executives, the actors’ spouses and kids, the agents—everyone I hadn’t seen for a few years suddenly looked like their own Snapchat filter, clearer and leaner and sharper.

I bumped into an old friend and said to her, in a kind of shamed mumble, that I guessed everyone really did take up Pilates in lockdown. She laughed. Then, when I didn’t laugh back, she stared at me. “You know it wasn’t Pilates, don’t you?” I looked back, puzzled, and she said: “Do you really not know?”

So, standing at the side of the dance floor, she pulled up an image on her phone.

I squinted at it in the darkness, as the shrunken partiers all around us shook their bony behinds and discreetly declined the canapés.

On the screen, I could see a light blue plastic tube with a tiny needle sticking out of it.

Later, I would wonder if I had been waiting for that moment all my life.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve in 2009, I went to my local branch of KFC in east London. I gave my standard order—a bucket of grease and gristle so huge that I’m too embarrassed to list its contents here. The man behind the counter said: “Johann! We have something for you.” He walked off behind where they fry the chicken, and he returned with all the other staff who were working that day. Together, they handed me a massive Christmas card. I opened it. They had addressed it “To our best customer,” and all had written personal messages.

My heart sank, because I thought: This isn’t even the fried chicken shop I come to the most.

Later still, I would wonder if our culture had been waiting for that moment for more than two thousand years.

I learned from the eating disorders expert Hilde Bruch that in ancient Greece, people believed that there had once been a drug that made it possible for people to stay slim, but somewhere along the way the secret formula was lost, never to be found again. Ever since, humans have tried to make this dream a reality—to find a way to hack our biology and reverse weight gain. The headline “NEW MIRACLE WEIGHT-LOSS DRUG” is as old as headlines themselves.

But when I spoke to experts on obesity across the world, they told me that this time, with this drug, something really was different. Rigorous scientific studies have shown that there is a new generation of drugs—working in a completely new way—that cause the people who use them to lose between 5 and 24 percent of their body weight. I was told by Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, that for people with severe obesity: “It is the Holy Grail that people have been seeking.” Dr. Clemence Blouet, an obesity researcher at Cambridge University, said: “It’s the first time we have a safe anti-obesity drug,” and now that the code has been cracked, the discoveries about how to make them better and more effective “are super-fast” and “every day there is something new.” Emily Field, a sober-minded analyst at Barclays Bank who studied the likely value of these drugs for investors, wrote a report explaining that she believed the impact these drugs would have on society was comparable to the invention of the smartphone.

This scientific excitement has caused a stampede. In one survey, 47 percent of Americans said they were willing to pay to take these drugs. Graham MacGregor, who is a professor of cardiovascular medicine at Queen Mary University in London, told me that in Britain, “within ten years, 20 or 30 percent of the population will be on obesity drugs. . . . There’s no argument about it.” Some financial analysts believe that the market for them could be worth as much as $200 billion globally in a decade. As a result, Novo Nordisk—the Danish corporation that manufactures one of these drugs, Ozempic—has in one fell swoop become the most valuable company in Europe.

Ozempic and its successors look set to become one of the iconic and defining drugs of our time, on a par with the contraceptive pill and Prozac.

Standing on that dance floor, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so immediately and intensely conflicted about a topic.

Skimming the basic facts about these drugs on my phone, I realized at once that I could make a passionate case for taking them. The calculations for the exact number of people killed by obesity and poor diet vary. The lowest credible calculation for the US is that it ends 112,000 lives a year—which is more than double the number of people killed in all murders, suicides and accidents involving guns combined. At the upper end, Jerold Mande—an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard best known for designing the nutritional label displayed on all food in the United States—warns that “food-caused illnesses” are estimated to kill 678,000 people every year. He told me this is “far and away the leading cause of death.”

Here, then, was a chance to finally interrupt our relationship with bad food and transform it. Nothing else we have tried has worked. We have been serially starving ourselves on diets for decades, and even the most optimistic studies find that only approximately 20 percent of us succeed at keeping off the weight we lose after a year. Doctors warn us that obesity contributes to two hundred known diseases and complications and explain that we are eating ourselves to death—and we nod gravely and open the KFC app. Many of us argue for taking on the power of the food companies to stop them from producing ever more addictive junk, but even a figure as popular and charismatic as Michelle Obama couldn’t get any traction for that cause.

The proponents of the new weight-loss drugs say this fog of despair is finally parting. Obesity is a biological problem, and now, at last, we have a biological solution. Here is a moment of liberation from a crushing condition, obesity, which according to some studies doubles your risk of dying. Here is an opportunity to massively slash the resulting rates of diabetes, dementia, and cancer that every major public health body in the world warns about. Here is a drug that could give millions of people back a shot at life.

I could see the power of these arguments. I felt their force. So why was I so uneasy?

I had several huge doubts right away.

In 1960, when my parents were teenagers, they knew almost no obese people. There had been no obese kids at their schools, and hardly any obese adults lived near them. Today, in the two countries where I spend most of my time, obesity levels for adults have hit 26 percent in Britain and 42.5 percent in the United States. This transformation—unprecedented in human history—didn’t happen because we all contracted a disease. It didn’t happen because something went wrong in our biology. It happened because something went disastrously wrong with our society. The food-supply system transformed beyond all recognition. We began to eat foods that didn’t exist before—designed by the food industry to be maximally addictive, pumped full of just the right proportions of sugar and salt and starch to keep us chomping. We built cities that it’s often impossible to walk or bike around. We became much more stressed, making us seek out more comfort food.

From this perspective, Ozempic and the drugs that have followed represent a moment of madness. We built a food system that poisons us—and then, to keep us away from the avalanche of bad food, we decided to inject ourselves with a different potential poison, one that puts us off all food.

We have started to take these drugs knowing surprisingly little about them. We have no idea about their long-term effects when they are used to treat obesity. We have no idea if they will even carry on working for obese people beyond a few years. And chillingly, the scientists who helped create them—as I was going to learn—are not yet sure why they work, or precisely what they are doing to us.

I had another anxiety. We seemed to be finally reaching a moment in our culture where we were learning to stop punishing our bodies and start accepting them, even if they were outside the narrow Western beauty norm. Was this going to slam all that into reverse? Was body positivity going to drown in a tide of Ozempic and its competitor Mounjaro?

Worse than that, what would happen when people with eating disorders get hold of these drugs? What would transpire when we give people determined to starve themselves an unprecedentedly powerful tool to amputate their appetite?

Surrounded by people whose veins were coursing with this drug, I was full of uncertainty, seesawing between support and skepticism. If we really are about to begin taking drugs that cause sustained massive weight loss, what will that mean—for our personal lives, our health and our societies? Can these drugs really be what they claim? Do they mean we are giving up on challenging the food industry and how it has screwed us over? Do they mean we are giving up on accepting ourselves as we are?

I realized there was one person who I most wanted to discuss all this with. It was because of her that I decided to write this book. To understand everything that happened next, I need to tell you about Hannah.

When I was nineteen years old, I went to the National Student Drama Festival in the faded English seaside town of Scarborough. Every year, students in Britain who’ve staged plays apply to take part, and theatre professionals come and assess your work, and if it’s good enough, you are invited to perform your play by the sea and compete against other students from all over the country, get seen by agents, and potentially win awards. That year, some of my friends got through to the finals, and I went along for the ride. It meant that I watched about twenty plays in a few days. Some were brilliant, and some were lousy, but it was seeing the worst of them all that, in a strange way, changed my life.

One afternoon, I sat down to watch a play called Atlantica. It was written and performed as a realistic drama about a group of scientists who were confronting a peculiar and disturbing problem. All over the world, whales were hurling themselves onto beaches and slowly dying. Nobody knew why. It was almost as though these giant blubbery creatures were killing themselves.

Were they trying to escape pollution? Did they have a brain disease? What was happening? The play followed these scientists as they took boats out onto the ocean and observed the whales in the wild to try to figure out this mystery. But when they did, something disturbing happened. Suddenly, the whales charged their boats, trying to break them in half. As the scientists tried to speed away, one cried: “Oh my God! We’ve got a sperm whale riding shotgun!”

One of the scientists turned to another and said: “David—do you think the whales are” (dramatic pause) “evil?” Everyone sitting in the audience near us seemed to be leaning into the seriousness of the drama, caught up in its spell. Everyone, that is, except for me—and one other person. In the seat next to mine, in the darkness, there was a young woman who I could see was physically shaking with laughter. I tried really hard not to look at her, because I was afraid I would let out a howl. The more intently the rest of the audience followed the play, the more we began to shake. “These whales are going to—kill us all!” one of the scientists cried.

Then came the twist. The scientists figured out why the whales were beaching themselves en masse. It turned out they had been watching humanity for some time, and they had concluded that human beings had forgotten how to play. They were tossing themselves onto the world’s beaches to urge us to join them in the ocean, to learn how to frolic once again. After explaining this, the lead scientist said: “There’s only one solution.”

The other scientists gasped. “No,” they said, “you can’t.”

“I have to. I have to—become a whale.” And then, with orchestral music swelling in the background, he leaped into the water and transformed into a whale. Curtain. Applause.

The woman who’d been rocking with suppressed laughter in the darkness hurried out of the auditorium and ran round a corner. I followed her and, without saying a word, we both began to cry laughing. She yelled “Do you think the whales are . . . evil?” and I shouted back: “I have to become—a whale.” I literally fell to the floor.

That night, Hannah and I began to tour the fast-food outlets of Scarborough. We started with a fish and chip shop, then headed to a kebab shop, and then a fried chicken shop. It was only there that I looked at her properly for the first time. She had mousy brown hair and a huge stomach, and she spoke with a musical lilt, as if she was always trying to caress more humor out of the world. At the time, I was overweight, and she liked to describe herself as “deliciously enormous.”

Right away, we developed our first running joke. We would go into the skeeziest greasy spoon and immediately begin to review it like it was a Michelin-starred restaurant. She took a tiny nibble of a grease-laden kebab and said: “It’s a delightful amuse-bouche with . . . yes—” she chewed some more—“a deliciously bold aftertaste.” We became connoisseurs of grease, sommeliers of Big Mac sauce. We drew up a plan to create our own Michelin stars, except these would be given out by the Michelin Man himself, and the award would be for giving you bigger and bigger tires around your stomach. As we ate our third kebab, she began to improvise stories about famous suicides who turned out—in a stunning twist—to have been whales. Socrates whale, slugging hemlock rather than face a blubbery tribunal. Sylvia Plath whale, ramming its head into an oven. Virginia Woolf whale, filling its spout with stones and hopping onto land.

As I got to know Hannah, I discovered some hint of why she had developed her stabbingly dark sense of humor. Her grandmother was Jewish and had escaped Germany just in time in the 1930s, and Hannah volunteered at a center for Holocaust survivors in north London. For years, her social group consisted largely of people who had been in concentration camps. I became friends with one of the survivors she introduced me to, a woman named Trude Levi who had collapsed on her twenty-first birthday on one of the death marches. Hannah liked to say that it’s not a coincidence that the Jews and the Irish had both the most horrific histories in Europe and the best sense of humor. You laugh in order to survive. You joke to endure. One of her heroes was Joan Rivers, the outrageous comedian who, after her husband’s suicide, went onstage and said as an opening line: “My husband killed himself and it’s my fault. I knew I shouldn’t have taken that paper bag off my head while he was fucking me.”

For years, Hannah and I would go to the Edinburgh Festival, a cultural volcano where tens of thousands of performers descend on the medieval streets of the city and perform for over a million annual visitors. You walk up the Royal Mile—the city’s central artery—and all around you, people are performing parts of their plays: they’re juggling, they’re dancing, they’re handing you flyers. Inspired by Atlantica, we would deliberately seek out the worst-sounding plays and see them all. Graham—The World’s Fastest Blind Man, a musical about a blind sprinter? We dashed there as fast as our bulk would let us. Every afternoon, we drank milkshakes at the Filling Station, a restaurant on the Royal Mile. Hannah had an incredibly beguiling way of befriending people; she drew them to her with a mixture of extreme vulnerability and extreme vulgarity. Most of her running jokes are so extreme I can’t write them down, even here. But I can tell you that one day, one of the waitresses in the Filling Station laughed so hard at one of her obscene jokes that she spilled a banana milkshake all over me.

One evening, an American actor told us about a place I had never heard of. In Las Vegas, he said, there is a restaurant named the Heart Attack Grill. At the entrance, there is a huge set of cattle scales, and if you are over 350 pounds (twenty-five stone), you eat for free. As soon as you walk through the door, you have to sign a waiver saying that if the food gives you a heart attack, the responsibility lies entirely with you. You then put on a hospital gown, and you are served by waitresses dressed as nurses. If you don’t finish all of the massive portions of food, they spank you with a paddle. We immediately promised ourselves that one day we would go there and toast our friendship in banana milkshake.

Hannah liked to talk to men in public places in startlingly frank sexual ways. She enjoyed seeing the shock on people’s faces, as if she was refusing to be ashamed of her weight and her body and defying the world to take her as she was. Her voice had a soothing, mellifluous quality that often jarred with the things she said—she once told me she wanted people hearing her to feel like they were listening to a children’s TV host gently reading out the words of Charles Manson.

And yet, existing alongside this spirit of joy and play, she would show sudden bursts of being terribly afraid. She would have panic attacks, seemingly out of nowhere. She hated getting on public transport. She took a very high dose of antidepressants. She was convinced that politics could turn very dark, very fast, that the stability we lived through would turn out to be an illusion, and the world would turn out to be a charnel house, so our job was to amuse ourselves as best we could before it consumed us. (On 7th July 2005, after a terrorist attack on the London Underground, she immediately texted me: “Now you see why I am a taxi person.”) She had a level of fear appropriate to the Holocaust survivors she volunteered with, not to a person who had grown up in 1980s and ’90s Britain. She always had the vigilance of somebody who was ready to run.

We never talked about why she ate so much, except through our obsessive surreal joshing. I never heard her express any concern about her weight. We once watched a documentary about a person so obese that they had to dismantle his house to get him out for medical treatment. She said: “I have a new life goal.”

Our friendship became a rat-a-tat-tat of shared jokes and shared obsessions. We loved Stephen Sondheim musicals, and we prided ourselves that our favorite was, at that time, the most obscure: Merrily We Roll Along. It’s the story of three friends, told backward: it starts with the central characters as jaded, bitter, drunk forty-somethings, and then rolls back the years, scene after scene, until they are young and naive and optimistic, just starting out. There’s a song in it—“Old Friends’—about how, even if you argue with your old friends, they’re always there, lodestars for how you live. I thought of it as my and Hannah’s song.

But then something happened. Every time I met her, it struck me anew that Hannah was one of the cleverest people I’ve ever known, constantly coming up with brilliant ideas out of thin air. For example, the day the United States invaded Afghanistan, she started improvising, over dinner, a novel about an undercover US agent in Kabul, written in the style of Raymond Chandler. I can still remember the first line: “She wore her burkas tight, and her morals loose.” I urged her to write it all down, and to translate her brilliance onto the page. I was starting to become successful as a journalist, but she was just staying at home a lot of the time, feeling anxious, not working. It seemed to me that Hannah had chosen to stay hidden. I kept pressing her to do more, and as I pushed her, she retreated. We began to argue. I was pushing her to be everything I felt she could be. Thinking about it now, perhaps she thought I was judging and condemning her.

As we argued, I became increasingly frustrated. Every flash of genius I saw in her seemed even more like a waste. Why was this being confined only to me and her small group of friends? Why scatter it to the wind?

Somewhere along the way, this dynamic meant we pushed each other away. The last night I remember seeing her was in 2008, when we watched Barack Obama’s victory at a big party in my apartment. But even as the gap since we’d last seen each other yawned wider, I was always sure we would meet up again somewhere down the road. We had too many shared jokes, I believed, for our bond to break. Often, I would hear something funny and think—I must phone Hannah and tell her that. In my mind, she was somewhere hailing a taxi, milkshake in hand, laughing, always laughing.

Then, one morning, in early 2021, I received a phone call. Hannah’s family had posted on Facebook that she had died. In the days that followed, I called our mutual friends who were still in touch with her. They told me what they knew. Several years before, she had developed severe back pain, and started taking opioid-based painkillers. She became addicted, and found it really hard to stop, but she managed to do it. Then she developed type 2 diabetes. Then she developed cancer, and felt that taking opioids would constitute a relapse, so she went through the grueling treatment in agony. She was weakened by the cancer but survived. Then she got Covid, and was weakened some more, but survived again. Then one night, she began to choke while eating and went into cardiac arrest.

I was incredulous that somebody who took such joy in living could have died in her mid-forties. I kept running over her old jokes in my mind, writing down as many as I could, as if they were slipping away from me. I felt desperately sad that she didn’t reach out to me when she was ill. She must have thought that I would judge her, or that I wouldn’t show up at all.

The heart of our shared sense of humor was our love of bad food, and our commitment to consuming it in epic quantities. I felt queasy as I thought about that now. It’s possible for anyone, no matter what their weight, to choke and for their heart to suddenly fail. But it seemed very likely that her obesity had caused her death. She was weakened by a series of illnesses, and obesity makes it more likely you will get cancer, more likely you will become seriously sick with Covid, and more likely your heart will fail when faced with a stressful event. I also strongly suspect that the way she compulsively ate and crammed huge amounts of food into her mouth may have contributed to her choking.

I looked at the remembered jokes I had written down, and wanted to laugh at them one more time, but now they turned to dust in my mouth.

Not long afterward, I was in Las Vegas, researching a different book. I decided to keep my promise to her and go to the Heart Attack Grill, to toast our friendship in banana milkshake. I stood by the entrance and watched people standing on the cattle scales, hoping to clock in at higher than 350 pounds so they could eat for free. I saw the waitresses dressed as nurses, spanking people who didn’t finish their giant servings of fries. I gazed over the people wolfing down massive burgers, and buckets of milkshake, and onion rings the size of a whole plate.

I couldn’t bring myself to go in. It felt like the joke was, in the end, on us.

Joseph Stalin reputedly said that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is just a statistic. I guess I had known since I was a teenager that the major scientific bodies in the world warn that obesity kills large numbers of people every year—but in my twenties and thirties, it had seemed like an abstraction. Now Hannah had left a hole in the world. I am certain that nobody in my life will ever again be able to reduce me to the helpless, hysterical laughter of childhood as much as she did.

Hannah’s death should have been a warning sign to me. As a child, I ate almost nothing but junk and processed food, but my weight only started to blow up in my late teens, when I began taking chemical antidepressants. Since then my weight had yo-yoed between being slightly underweight to quite seriously obese, with a waistline that ranged from 30 inches to 40 inches.

By the time the pandemic was dissipating, I was creeping back into the danger zone. I am five foot eight and I weighed fourteen and a half stone [203 lbs]—a BMI just over 30, which was bad, but my other indicators were worse. When my trainer at the gym tested to see what percentage of my body was fat, he winced at the score: 32 percent. “If I was a sandwich, you wouldn’t want to eat me,” I said with a weak smile. Later I googled and learned that the most blubbery mammal in the animal kingdom, the whale, has 35 percent body fat.

I knew that for me in particular, this condition wasn’t safe. My grandfather died of a heart attack when he was the age I am now, forty-four. My uncle died in his sixties of a heart attack. My father developed diabetes and had to have a quadruple heart bypass in his early seventies. Worse still, my fat was in the worst possible place for my health. Dr. Shauna Levy, an obesity specialist at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, told me that if your fat is distributed evenly across your body, that’s less harmful to your health than for “people with central adiposity— skinny arms, skinny legs, big belly. They are more likely to have diabetes and high blood pressure.” But I love life. I want as much of it as possible. I want to be around for a long time. (I can hear in my mind how Hannah would respond to all this. “Do you really think you love life more than you love Big Mac sauce?”)

Many times before, I had received wake-up calls about weight that didn’t wake me up. Sometimes a jolt would spur me to cut back on the junk food and exercise more, and the effects could be quite dramatic when I did. I even had a few years when I was at the lower end of the BMI chart, and my cheekbones emerged, like the lost continent of Atlantis from beneath the ocean. But I always slid back sooner or later, feeling slumped and ashamed. It’s true I was nowhere near as obese as Hannah, but I suspect I had a larger genetic risk for cardiovascular problems than her.

For all my obvious doubts about Ozempic, I also wondered: Could this possibly be the way to break some of the danger that my own health was in? I learned that several people I knew were already taking the drug. The men would admit it quite freely, while the women would offer long stories about intermittent fasting or a fantastic new spa, and then quietly concede that, yes, they were on it too. I could see weight was falling off them, and their doctors were telling them that all their key indicators of health were dramatically improving.

I was full of doubt—about my weight, and these drugs, and about the future. But I kept thinking of Hannah. I would lie awake at night and punch her number into my phone. We became friends just before mobile phones became widespread, so she had the last phone number I ever committed to memory. I would think of all the things I wanted to say to her—the jokes I’d heard, the regrets I wanted to offer. But I never hit the call button. She was gone.

Then, quite abruptly, I decided that I should start to take these drugs. It was a snap decision, and later I realized I was driven by impulses I didn’t fully understand at the time. I went to see a private doctor, and after some brief questions and some cursory measuring, he agreed to give me Ozempic. A few days later, a courier arrived at my home bearing a white parcel. I was too nervous to open it on my own, so I waited for a friend’s party the next night, and we tore it open as a group. Inside, there was a fat blue pen and some tiny white needles. I hate syringes—I’m the kind of wuss who has to look away and sing to myself during blood tests. But this needle was tiny. The instructions said that once a week, all I had to do was twist the teeny needle onto the end of the pen, poke it into my stomach, and push down on the base of the pen to let it flow into my bloodstream.

When I stabbed my flab with it, I felt very little—a sting no worse than an insect bite. I heard only the click-click-click coming from the pen as the drug was released. The Ozempic began to flow through my body for the first time.

I know a few people who have had near-death experiences, and they say that their lives really did flash before their eyes. In that moment, it happened with my culinary life. I pictured all the foods I have gorged on since I was a kid. I saw in my mind the mushrooms and bright yellow bananas made out of sugar that I would stuff into my mouth at the age of five. I thought of salt and vinegar chipsticks, a kind of sticky potato chip popular in the 1980s. I pictured more KFC than Colonel Sanders could conjure in his wildest, wettest dream.

I pictured the hundreds of branches of McDonald’s I had sought out all over the world, like a plastic womb I could always retreat to wherever I found myself. I saw the lowest McDonald’s in the world, by the Dead Sea in Israel. I saw the first ever McDonald’s in Russia, a symbol of Western freedom that shut down shortly after I visited because of the invasion of Ukraine. I saw the branch of McDonald’s I most love, at the end of the Strip in Las Vegas, just beyond the Luxor, where the customers are all either tourists who got lost or homeless people who live in the tunnels beneath the city. I saw the scariest McDonald’s I ever visited, in El Salvador, where there was a guard on the door holding a huge machete. I asked him why he had a machete and he said it was because the authorities had taken away their machine guns. There are 38,000 branches of McDonald’s in the world, and I felt like I could see them all before me, slowly fading away.

I stood up and rubbed the spot where the needle had been. I felt nothing.

It seemed like a bizarre moment in history—when nearly half of us would be keen to inject ourselves with a drug to stop us from wanting to eat. I wondered: How did I get here? More importantly, how did we get here?

To understand what these drugs will mean for us all, I went on a journey around the world, where I interviewed over a hundred experts and other people who have been affected by these questions. I got to know some of the key scientists who developed these drugs, and also their biggest critics. I followed the trail of this science to some strange and unexpected places, from a stadium filled with trampolining teens in Iceland, to a diet expert who watched me eat a cinnamon bun in Minneapolis, to a restaurant serving poisonous fish in Tokyo.

What I learned is complex. If you want a book uncritically championing these drugs, or alternatively a book damning them, I am afraid I can’t give it to you. The more you look at this topic, and the wider debate about obesity, the more complicated it gets. When it comes to food and diet, we crave simple solutions, but this is a topic fraught with complexity, with question marks at every turn. I started this journey full of doubt, and I finished it knowing much more, but still riven with uncertainty. I hope, in the end, this is a strength. One of my favorite writers, Graham Greene, said, “When we are not sure, we are alive.” I felt strangely alive while working on this book. The truth is that there are huge potential benefits to these drugs and huge potential risks, and everyone reading this book will weigh those differently. My hope is that we can find our way through the complexity together.

If we do, we can see that these drugs reframe—and to some degree may even resolve—some of the oldest and hoariest debates about obesity. Why have we gained so much weight in the last forty years? What really causes weight gain? Is losing weight a matter of willpower? How should we think about our bodies?

At every stage of working on this book, my mind kept coming back to the musical Hannah and I loved, Merrily We Roll Along. I thought again of its plot—of how at the start, we meet three friends when they are middle-aged and jaded, and with each scene, the clock runs backward, and we see them become younger and healthier. In the most optimistic scenario, that is what these drugs seem to offer us. We get to roll back the clock—to a world where people like Hannah get to have a chance at health.

But as I learned, we’ve had several moments in the past when a new diet drug was hailed as a “magic pill,” and then had to be yanked from the shelves because it was more deadly than obesity itself.

There are three different senses in which these drugs could be a magic pill. The first is in the sense that they could be a solution to this problem—one so swift and so simple that it seems almost miraculous. The second is that they could turn out to be an unintended illusion that, when you look closer, is not what it seems. They might not always work exactly as claimed, or they could come with downsides that are not visible at first glance. Or they could be magic in a third sense. Perhaps one of the most famous stories about magic is the Disney cartoon Fantasia. It’s a parable about how when you start to unleash an unknown force like magic, it can easily spiral out of your control, and have effects you could never have imagined at the start.

That is why, as I felt the Ozempic course through my veins for the first time, I needed to know: what kind of magic, exactly, is this?

Part 2

I opened my eyes and immediately felt that something was off. Thwacking my alarm clock into silence, I lay there for five minutes, trying to figure out what it was. It was two days since I had started taking Ozempic. I felt very mildly nauseous, but it was not severe—if it had happened on a normal day, it wouldn’t have stopped me from doing anything. So that wasn’t it. It took me a while to realize what it was. I always wake up ravenously hungry, but on that morning, I had no appetite at all. It was gone.

I got out of bed and, on autopilot, went through my normal morning routine. I left my flat and went to a local cafe run by a Brazilian woman named Tatiana, where my order is always the same: a large, toasted bread roll, filled with chicken and mayonnaise. As I sat there reading the newspapers, the food was placed in front of me, and I looked at it. I felt like I was looking at a block of wood. I took a bite. It tasted fine. Normal. I took three or four more bites, and I felt full. I left almost all of it on the plate. As I hurried out, Tatiana called after me, “Are you sick?”

I went to my office and wrote for three hours. Normally, by noon, I would have a snack, something small and sugary, and then at about 1 p.m. would go down the street to a local Turkish cafe for lunch. It got to 2 p.m. and I wasn’t hungry. Again, my sense of routine kicked in, and again, I went to the cafe and asked for my standard order, a large Mediterranean lamb with rice and bread. I managed to eat a third of it. It seemed to me for the first time to be incredibly salty, like I was drinking seawater.

I wrote some more, and at 7 p.m. I left my office to go and meet a friend in Camden Market, one of my favorite parts of London. We walked between the stalls, staring at food from every part of the world. Normally, I could stuff my face from three different stalls, but that night, I had no hunger. I couldn’t even manage a few mouthfuls. I went home, feeling exhausted, and went to sleep at the unprecedentedly early time of 9 p.m.

As that first week passed, it felt like the shutters had come down on my appetite, and now only tiny peeks of light could get through. I was about 80 percent less hungry than I normally am. The sense of mild nausea kept stirring and passing. When I got on the bus or in a car, I felt a kind of exaggerated travel sickness. Whenever I ate, I became full startlingly fast. The best way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine that you have just eaten a full Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and then somebody popped up and offered you a whole new meal to get started on. Some people say Ozempic makes them find food disgusting. To me, it made food, beyond small quantities, feel unfeasible.

On the fifth night, a friend came by to watch a movie, and we flicked through Uber Eats. The app suggested all my usual haunts. I realized I couldn’t eat any of this food now. Instead, she got a kebab, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup. On the sixth day, I took my godsons out, and they wanted to go into McDonald’s. When they got Happy Meals and I got nothing at all, one of them said suspiciously: “Who are you and what have you done with Johann Hari?”

I wanted to understand what was happening to my body. I figured that the best people to educate me were the scientists who made the key discoveries that led to the development of Ozempic and the other new weight-loss drugs. So for my book Magic Pill, I began to track many of them down and interview them, along with many other key scientists working in the field.

They taught me that these extraordinary effects were coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and my brain, and in yours.

If you ate something now, your pancreas would—after a while—produce a hormone named GLP-1. It’s part of your body’s natural brakes on your eating, saying stop; you’ve had enough. But natural GLP-1 only stays in your system for a few hours. These drugs inject into you an artificial copy of GLP-1—but instead of lasting a few hours, it stays in your system a whole week.

At first, the scientists thought that these drugs work primarily in your gut and on your gut, boosting fullness and slowing digestion. That’s their secret.

But then there was an unexpected breakthrough. A team at Hammersmith Hospital in London stumbled on an unexpected fact. Studying rats, they found that there are receptors for GLP-1—areas of the body particularly sensitive to it—far from the gut. It turned out that they actually have receptors for GLP-1 in their brains. It seemed peculiar and led to the obvious question: Is this also true of humans? It turned out it was. Then it was discovered that all humans actually make GLP-1 in our brains. It was a bombshell. We don’t just process and make this hormone in our guts. We process and make it in our brains.

This led to more questions. When you inject people with a GLP-1 agonist like semaglutide—which is marketed as Ozempic and Wegovy—where does the effect play out? Robert Kushner, who had played a key role in developing Wegovy, told me: “If you do animal studies and you tag the compound” and then “you look at where it goes in a rodent’s brain, it’s everywhere. It’s deep in the brain—in the appetite center, in the reward centers, and the homeostatic centers.” Dr. Clemence Blouet, who is researching this question at Cambridge University, agreed, saying the receptors for these drugs are “in lots of different areas. . . . It’s everywhere.”

So scientists began to ask, when you take these drugs, is it possible that the reduction in appetite isn’t driven primarily by changing the chemicals in your gut but by changing your brain?

At first glance, this might sound like a technical question. You could say: Who cares, so long as it works? But in fact, this reframing of how GLP-1 agonists work made scientists wonder if there was a possible set of uses for these drugs that nobody had asked yet. If it works on your brain, might the drug also be able to shape more than just the way you eat? As they dug further, they started to ask an extraordinary question. Had they, in fact, discovered a drug that boosts self-control across the board? If they had, might it be used to treat addiction?

At the same time, some of them worried the fact that the drug works on the brain also opened up a new set of risks. If it’s changing your brain for the better, could it also potentially change it for the worse? What kind of harm could the drugs be doing?

Seeking the answers to these questions sent me on a strange journey—from Tokyo to Minneapolis to Iceland—and led me to feel deeply conflicted about these drugs. They have extraordinary benefits and significant risks. They are going to change the world—for better and for worse.

Excerpted from MAGIC PILL: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs by Johann Hari. Copyright © 2024 by Johann Hari. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

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Published on May 09, 2024 05:25

May 8, 2024

A Strategic Deep Dive on TikTok, The Boiling Moat of Taiwan, and China’s Next-Gen Statecraft — Matt Pottinger, Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor (#736)

Illustration via 99designs

“As a former Marine, Deputy National Security Advisor, I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think TikTok is near the top. Near the top, okay? Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we are in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government. The main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news.”
— Matt Pottinger

Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Matt served as U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, Matt coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy. Before that, he served as the NSC’s senior director for Asia, where he led the administration’s work on the Indo-Pacific region, and in particular its shift on China policy.

Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, Matt ran Asia research at Davidson Kempner Capital Management, a multi-strategy investment fund in New York.

Matt’s new book, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, is coming out July 1st.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear another episode that examines the intricacies of US-China relations? Listen to my conversation with Niall Ferguson here, in which we discussed keeping the Cold War II from heating up into World War III, life under fatwa, understanding history to change the world for the better, an appetite for tweed, and much more.

#634: Niall Ferguson, Historian — The Coming Cold War II, Visible and Invisible Geopolitics, Why Even Atheists Should Study Religion, Masters of Paradox, Fatherhood, Fear, and MoreSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan by Matt Pottinger | Amazon Congressional Testimony House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party | Congress.gov Remarks by Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger to London-Based Policy Exchange | The White House 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests | Amnesty International UK Bao Tong, 90, Dies; Top Chinese Official Imprisoned After Tiananmen | The New York Times Imperial Examination | Wikipedia Asian Languages & Civilizations | Amherst College Beowulf | Amazon Gwoyeu Romatzyh — Better Than Pinyin? | East Asia Student Romanization of Japanese | Wikipedia One Piece Wiki | Fandom TikTok: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Popular | Investopedia What to Know About the TikTok Security Concerns | Time TikTok Admits Using Its App to Spy on Reporters in Effort to Track Leaks | The Guardian China Has a Sweeping Vision to Reshape the World – And Countries Are Listening | CNN TikTok Isn’t Silly. It’s Serious | The Economist TikTok Faces Calls for Ban amid Claims of Anti-Israel ‘Indoctrination’ | Al Jazeera Xi and Biden’s Diplomatic Dance: APEC Summit and the Future of U.S.-China Relations | FDD Biden Reiterated US Concerns over TikTok in Call with XI, White House Says | Reuters Xi Jinping | Wikiquote People’s Daily | Wikipedia Wars Are Fought on ‘Smokeless Battlefields’ | Taipei Times 5 Things to Know About ByteDance, TikTok’s Parent Company | FDD Australian Security Adviser Told Writer Not to Fly to China | AP News Is Tiktok’s Parent Company an Agent of the Chinese State? In China Inc., It’s a Little More Complicated | The Conversation Chinese Social Media Platforms Are Now Awash with Antisemitism | The Diplomat Blinken Accuses China of Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang | FP Teen’s TikTok Video about China’s Muslim Camps Goes Viral | BBC News Vandenberg rRsolution | Wikipedia Senate Passes Bill Banning TikTok If Parent Company Does Not Sell It | The Guardian TikTok Dominates Media Outlets as News Source for Gen Z | Axios TikTok Is Turning Its Users into Lobbyists, Just like Uber Did. | Slate Why Is Taiwan Important to the United States? | Council on Foreign Relations Why Taiwan Matters to the World | Financial Times Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere | Wikipedia Even as Taiwan Perfects Its Democracy, China Is Sabotaging It | The Economist Democracy Index 2023 | Economist Intelligence Unit Taiwan’s Dominance of the Chip Industry Makes It More Important | The Economist Deterrence and Dissuasion in the Taiwan Strait | Foreign Policy Research Institute Saving Private Ryan | Prime Video Taiwan’s Dominance of the Chip Industry Makes It More Important | Financial Times The Ambitious Dragon: Beijing’s Calculus for Invading Taiwan by 2030 | Department of Defense Taiwan Foreign Minister Warns of Conflict with China in 2027 | The Guardian Forward Alliance | Wikipedia Russia and China Are Winning the Propaganda War | The Atlantic China Says Ally Venezuela, Guyana Must Resolve Border Dispute | Barron’s Xi and Putin Flaunt Deepening Ties, Flout the US-led Order | United States Institute of Peace Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Amazon The People Onscreen Are Fake. The Disinformation Is Real. | The New York Times ‘Chinese Spy’ Targeted Thousands over LinkedIn | BBC News Select Committee Unveils CCP Influence Memo, “United Front 101” | Select Committee on the CCP What to Make of China’s Massive Cyber-Espionage Campaign | The Economist Limiting Chinese Influence Operations – U.S.-China Technological “Decoupling”: A Strategy and Policy Framework | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Gold Bars and Tokyo Apartments: How Money Is Flowing Out of China. | The New York Times AlphaGo | Google DeepMind Reagan, “Evil Empire,” Speech Text | Voices of Democracy How bin Laden Catapulted One Man Into War | WSJSHOW NOTES[05:55] Bao Tong’s calligraphy.[08:20] Matt’s decision to study East Asian languages.[10:13] Studying with Perry Link and the challenges of learning Chinese.[12:19] Tips for learning Chinese and other languages.[17:17] How TikTok has been weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party.[20:58] The origins of TikTok and its obfuscatory ownership structure.[26:30] How sowing chaos in the West serves the CCP’s aims.[31:37] “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”[33:11] How should the US rein in TikTok’s influence over its population?[40:23] The significance of Taiwan geographically, ideologically, and economically.[49:59] The semiconductor industry in Taiwan and its global importance.[52:07] Deterring China from attacking or coercing Taiwan.[58:51] Cultivating social depth in Taiwan.[1:01:09] Guessing at Xi Jinping’s timeline.[1:05:33] Demonstrating the will to match the capacity of following through.[1:07:47] Matt’s top priorities for stemming Chinese ambitions.[1:10:15] Architects of chaos.[1:14:21] Staying alert against informational warfare and united front activity.[1:21:00] Countering China’s influence on its Western-based citizens.[1:25:05] Checkers vs. Go.[1:26:56] How can the US reassert its position as a beacon of democracy?[1:33:05] What prompted Matt to join the Marine Corps at age 32?[1:38:50] Getting in shape for the occasion.[1:40:45] Leadership lessons learned.[1:46:59] The Boiling Moat, the importance of public service, and parting thoughts.MORE MATT POTTINGER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“As a former Marine, Deputy National Security Advisor, I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think TikTok is near the top. Near the top, okay? Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we are in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government. The main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news.”

— Matt Pottinger

“We should be issuing a smartphone to every student who arrives from an authoritarian country in the United States, make it a university program to say, ‘This is your freedom phone. You can put any apps on here that you want. Don’t put any Chinese apps on here. Don’t put TikTok on here. They’ll see everything. Don’t put WeChat, Weixin” — the Chinese app which is used also as a surveillance tool — ‘Don’t put that on here. Put all your free society things onto this phone and then know that your other one is being monitored by Beijing, by the party.’ So we should be doing much more for the Chinese diaspora that comes here to study. We should be giving them a shot at actually breaking free from this bubble of surveillance and censorship that follows them when they come to the United States. We should be breaking out of that.”

— Matt Pottinger

“Vandenberg had a famous line. He said, ‘Politics stops at the water’s edge.’ It means we can have bitter debates internally between left and right, Democrats, Republicans, independents, Trump, Biden, but when it comes to our national interest, there must be a general consensus that prevails that we are on the same team and that there needs to be some predictability and continuity in our policies.”

— Matt Pottinger

“The Marine Corps talks a lot about both physical courage but also moral courage. So moral courage is more important. It’s this idea that you will do the right thing when no one’s looking, the idea that you will sacrifice yourself and not your integrity or your honor, but your position, in order to make sure that the right thing gets done, even when it exposes you to ridicule.”

— Matt Pottinger

“Public service is one of the best mistakes I stumbled into in my life. I joined the Marine Corps at 32, and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.”

— Matt Pottinger

PEOPLE MENTIONEDBao Tong Zhao Ziyang Michael Murray Alvin P. Cohen Donald E. Gjertson Perry Link Xuedong Wang Xi Jinping Morris Chang Mike Gallagher Raja Krishnamoorthi Enoch Wu John Garnaut Matthew D. Johnson Malcolm Turnbull Zhang Yiming Kathleen Hicks Taylor Swift James P. Rubin Vladimir Putin Ronald Reagan Mike Pompeo Antony Blinken Nassim Nicholas Taleb Robert C. O’Brien Paul Steiger John Bussey Robert Gates Cedric N. Lee Robert H. Chase Jr.Deng Xiaoping Demis Hassabis B.H. Liddell Hart Jeff Yass Maria Cantwell Nicolás Maduro Arthur Vandenberg Harry S. Truman Joe Biden Zhao Leji Douglas MacArthur Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy John C. Aquilino Karl Marx Vladimir Lenin

The post A Strategic Deep Dive on TikTok, The Boiling Moat of Taiwan, and China’s Next-Gen Statecraft — Matt Pottinger, Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor (#736) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on May 08, 2024 01:56

May 2, 2024

Are You Hunting Antelope or Field Mice?

Am I hunting antelope or field mice?

I often ask myself this, and I lifted it from the most unlikely of sources: former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich.

Now, I don’t know Newt, and I strongly disagree with a lot of his politics and deliberate hyper-polarization, but he had periods of nearly unbelievable effectiveness. He is considered by some to be one the most influential conservative leaders in the history of the Republican Party. How did he do it? And how did he even cross my radar?

Around 2012, I wandered into a used bookstore and chanced upon Buck Up, Suck Up… and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room, written by James Carville and Paul Begala, the political strategists behind Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign war room. At the time, I was thinking a lot about strategy, and, first and foremost, this is a book about strategy.

It’s worth noting that Newt didn’t always have the nicest things to say about Clinton, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, James and Paul felt it important to include a story about him in their book.

Here’s the excerpt that most stuck with me:

Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history.

Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope.

A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?”

If you look at your calendar for the last month or your to-do list for next week, or the lack thereof, are you hunting field mice or antelope?

Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?

Separately: Which undone item, if done, would liberate the most energy for me personally?

Reread The 80/20 Principle for good measure.

And if all of that yields no fruit, you might find that the to-do item you’ve been avoiding the longest, punting from week to week or month to month, is precisely the antelope you should be tracking tomorrow morning.

Happy hunting.

This short post was adapted from “ Testing The ‘Impossible’: 17 Questions That Changed My Life ,” a chapter in my book “ Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers .” You can read or listen to the chapter for free here .

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Published on May 02, 2024 11:26

Craig Foster of My Octopus Teacher — How to Find the Wild in a Tame World (#735)

Illustration via 99designs

“I was born wild. I’m a wild animal. These creatures that I interact with taught me I’m a wild animal. It was almost like I was walking along the shore and then that ocean to the one side was my wild self and the land to the right was this tame self. And I was trying desperately to find a balance.”
— Craig Foster

Craig Foster (@seachangeproject) is an Oscar- and BAFTA-winning filmmaker, naturalist, author, and ocean explorer. His films have won more than 150 international awards. He is the co-founder of the Sea Change Project, an NGO dedicated to the long-term conservation and regeneration of the Great African Seaforest. His film My Octopus Teacher has led to making the Great African Seaforest a global icon.

His new book is Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World. Watch the video below to learn more.

Please enjoy!

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Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at VuoriClothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you’ll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear another episode focused on human connection to nature? Listen to this conversation with hunter and conservationist Steven Rinella in which we discuss how Steven got me to overcome my lifetime aversion to hunting, why the conservation-minded non-hunting crowd should care about the decline in hunting and fishing license sales in the United States, the politics of reintroducing predator species to popular hunting grounds, close encounters of the grizzly kind, and much more.

#470: Steven Rinella on Hunting (and Why You Should Care), Reconnecting with Nature, Favorite Trips, and MoreSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster | Amazon Remember You Are Wild | Sea Change Project My Octopus Teacher | Netflix Striving to Know from the Inside-Out | Mentora Great African Seaforest | Sea Change Project Explore South Africa’s Forest Beneath the Waves | Atlas Obscura Short-Tail Stingray Seen on a BRUV (Baited Remote Underwater Video) | Cape RADD Short-Tail Stingray | Wikipedia Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life | The Tim Ferriss Show #571 The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty | Amazon The Great Dance A Hunter’s Story | Internet Archive 10 Interesting Facts About the Kalahari Desert | African Travel Canvas San Bushmen | Siyabona Africa The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis | Amazon The Primal Metaphysics of Becoming-Animal during the Chasing Hunt in the Kalahari Desert | California Institute of Integral Studies Common Limpet | Oceana Restoring the Indigenous Knowledge of Wildlife Tracking | Tracker Academy Luxury Safari Experience in South Africa | Sabi Sands Nature Reserve My Octopus Teacher Became a Viral Sensation on Netflix. Its Human Star Craig Foster Wants the Film to Inspire Change | Time What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young | Amazon The Easy Guide To Nature Observation | Nature Mentoring Guided by Wonder: A Naturalist’s Observation Skills | David Lukas Craig Foster | The Wim Hof Podcast #10 Africa: Scent of Nature | Natucate Wild Underwater Photos Captured by Free Divers | Popular Photography Underwater Wild: My Octopus Teacher’s Extraordinary World by Craig Foster and Ross Frylinck Sevengill Sharks | MarineBio Conservation Society Craig Foster Interview | Scott Ramsay Cape Clawless Otter – The “Loch Ness Monster” of Africa | Scientist in Limbo An Otter, the Wild and Coming Change | Sea Change Project Watch a Coyote and Badger Hunt Their Prey Together | Smithsonian Monkeys’ Cosy Alliance with Wolves Looks Like Domestication | New Scientist A Dwarf Mongoose’s Perspective | Londolozi Blog From Sloths to Clownfish: 20 Examples of Teamwork Across the Animal Kingdom | Stacker Cooperation in Animals, and What It Tells Us about Scientists | Science for the People Clinus Superciliosus | Wikipedia Sea Change: Exploring the Octopus’ Garden | Getaway How Connecting with Nature Benefits Our Mental Health | Mental Health Foundation ACT Raises $35,000 for The Trio Indian Shaman’s Encyclopedia | Amazon Conservation Team Everything You Need to Know About Hunting Javelina | Mossy Oak The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss | Amazon First Humans: Homo Sapiens and Early Human Migration | Khan Academy Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned | Scientific American Past Is Prologue: Genetic ‘Memory’ of Ancestral Environments Helps Organisms Readapt | University of Michigan News Scientists Have Discovered How Memories are Inherited | World Economic Forum Characteristics of Heart Urchins, or Sea Potatoes | ThoughtCo.Sepia Tuberculata | Wikipedia Understanding the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon | Healthline Nature is Very Smart. Damn It. | BNIM Intelligent Beings without Brains Are Abundant in Nature – A Growing Scientific Consensus | Forbes Mirroring Nature | Earth Island Journal New Shrimp Species Has Unique Association with Octopus | UCT News Lophophora Williamsii (Peyote) | Wikipedia The Origins of the Naming of Lophophora Williamsii | Cactus Conservation Institute The Music of Bill Monroe | Jim’s Roots & Blues Calendar Jon Young: The Song of Nature | 8 Shields Institute Kelp Structure | Microbiological World Why Yo-Yo Ma Thinks Culture and Music Can Help Protect the Planet | Opus 3 Artists Song of the Silent Forest | Sea Change Project Home is Everywhere, Everywhere is Home | Sea Change Project Connecting with Sharks | Sea Change Project The Psychological Consequences of Fame | Psychology Today Can Your Hair Turn Gray Overnight? | The Cut Tiger King | Netflix Bodhidharma and Jim Morrison on Prayer and Worship | Mirror of Zen Blog Our Human Ancestors Very Nearly Went Extinct 900,000 Years Ago, Genetics Suggest | Smithsonian Magazine Finding the One Decision That Removes 100 Decisions (or, Why I’m Reading No New Books in 2020) | Tim Ferriss 1001 Seaforest Species | Save Our Seas Foundation Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz | Amazon Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919): The Conservation President | US Fish and Wildlife Service Time to Put Conservation Back in Conservatism | Earth Island Journal What’s the Oldest Tree in Austin? | KUT Radio Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez | Amazon Mike Phillips — How to Save a Species | The Tim Ferriss Show #383 The $20M Flip: The Story of the Largest Land Grab in the Brazilian Amazon | Mongabay Indigenous Youths Lured by the Illegal Mines Destroying Their Amazon Homeland | Mongabay Rick Perry Calls on Texas to Study ‘Magic Mushrooms’ to Treat PTSD | People Steven Rinella on Hunting (and Why You Should Care), Reconnecting with Nature, Favorite Trips, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #470 Jake Muise — The Relentless Pursuit of Innovation, Quality, and Meaning | The Tim Ferriss Show #678 ‘Austin Is Known for Being the Blueberry in the Tomato Soup of Texas’ | The Irish Times Conservatives and Climate Change | National Affairs Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots | Amazon I Am a Seaforest Species (Octopus Films Us) | Sea Change ProjectSHOW NOTES[08:39] A morning ray.[11:01] Connecting with the sea is a family tradition.[13:24] Making The Great Dance.[15:28] Unnatural powers granted by natural attunement.[22:40] Observing the secret lives of animals.[26:44] What makes Kalahari trackers so impressive?[29:37] Connecting with nature in the big city.[32:43] Breath holding and cold exposure.[37:25] Land lessons via underwater tracking.[42:55] Connecting with a Cape clawless otter.[46:20] Interspecies alliances.[49:39] What compelled Craig to write Amphibious Soul?[52:58] Why pristine nature comforts and inspires us.[1:00:03] Is ancestral memory real?[1:04:16] Nature as a mirror.[1:07:48] The pros and cons of discovering new species.[1:10:03] Song catching.[1:16:30] The meaning of “home.”[1:19:03] Parenting lessons.[1:23:41] The psychic cost of sudden fame.[1:31:18] For whom was Amphibious Soul written?[1:33:58] Sea Change Project.[1:35:53] The short-sightedness of current climate policy.[1:41:52] Changing entrenched minds.[1:52:37] A camera-stealing octopus.[1:55:25] Hope for a shift in human perspective.[1:58:21] Parting thoughts.MORE CRAIG FOSTER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Just start to look at a small area where there are few insects and maybe a few birds, maybe one or two amphibians, and take notes and observe every day, just, say, for half an hour. After a while, you’ll be absolutely shocked at what you couldn’t see before. It’ll be so obvious and it was totally invisible to you before. And it’s not just about the leaves changing color, but there are thousands of these things going on that, unless you take notice, you will miss. Nature then becomes this incredible teacher.”
— Craig Foster

“If you are in an environment where there’s almost no biodiversity, your ancient creature that’s living inside you, your deep design, is terrified because it doesn’t know you can go to the supermarket. It’s just looking and feeling and hearing and smelling. There’s no life around. So the experience of going to these wilderness places tells that wild part of us that everything is okay. We just need to go and harvest a tiny bit each day and there’ll be plenty for everybody, for the family. And you feel, oh, everything’s all right, everything will be fine. This is good. This is the good life.”
— Craig Foster

“In this part of the world, you won’t believe how easy it is to find a new species. It’s the naming of it that’s an enormously difficult job.”
— Craig Foster

“When I’ve spoken to some of the scientists I work with, certainly some of the cinematographers, there’s this strange thing that the wild ecosystem is somehow mysteriously mirroring the human psyche and almost wanting to teach us and show us things way beyond where the edge of attention bias leads.”
— Craig Foster

“I walked down to the ocean and I went in that kelp forest and I looked back toward the house that was no longer there. And it struck so hard in my heart that this ocean, but also very much this planet, this original deep mother that birthed our species and it nurtured me from my whole life was actually my home, and I would be absolutely fine as long as that biodiversity and that biosphere was functioning well and was healthy.”
— Craig Foster

“If the phytoplankton communities in the ocean collapse, we stop breathing. Literally, that’s it. So every single investment that you might have in the bank or any property you might own or any future children that you might want to have, that’s game over for all that. That investment is worth zero if biodiversity collapses.”
— Craig Foster

“The planet’s fine without us. She’ll last easily without us. She’s as tough as nails and can handle anything. We are the fragile ones. So we almost need to look at our place and all the other animals that are sharing the space with us and just feel at least that gratefulness for this amazing planet that has looked after us so beautifully.”
— Craig Foster

PEOPLE MENTIONEDBoyd Varty Alex Van Den Heever Renias Mhlongo Wade Davis Nainoa Thompson Papa Mau Jon Young JJ Minye Swati Thiyagarajan Bill Monroe Yo-Yo Ma Pippa Ehrlich Ronan Skillen Zolani Mahola Tom Braden Foster Frank Luntz Theodore Roosevelt Barry Lopez Steven Rinella Matt Mullenweg The Dalai Lama Jannes Landschoff

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Published on May 02, 2024 01:00

April 23, 2024

Live 10th Anniversary Random Show with Kevin Rose — Exploring What’s Next, Testing Ozempic, Modern Dating, New Breakthrough Treatments for Anxiety, Bitcoin ETFs, Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul, and Engineering More Awe in Your Life (#733)

Illustration via 99designs

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own life.

This time, we have a very special episode I recorded with my close friend Kevin Rose at SXSW in Austin, Texas!

This week is officially the podcast’s 10-year anniversary, and there is no better way to commemorate such a wild milestone than with Kevin Rose and a little tequila. As many listeners know, Kevin was my very first guest for episode 1, way back in April 2014.

Who is Kevin Rose? Kevin (@kevinrose) is a partner at True Ventures, an early-stage venture-capital firm that has invested more than $3.8 billion in a portfolio of more than 350 companies. He also hosts The Kevin Rose Show, which offers glimpses of the future into investing, artificial intelligence, wellness, and culture, featuring conversations with experts at the vanguard of their fields.

In this episode, we discuss the dangers of audience capture, novel mental health treatments, modern dating, Ozempic, time dilation, Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul, and much, much more.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the conversation on YouTube here.

Brought to you by Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega fish oil, Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#733: Live 10th Anniversary Random Show with Kevin Rose — Exploring What’s Next, Testing Ozempic, Modern Dating, New Breakthrough Treatments for Anxiety, Bitcoin ETFs, Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul, and Engineering More Awe in Your Life

This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.

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This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the #1-selling fish-oil and algae-oil brand in the U.S.! Trusted by doctors and health-care professionals since 1995, Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega and Algae Omega provide foundational support for heart and brain health, immune-system function, and more. More than 80% of Americans don’t get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body can’t produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their Ultimate Omega fish-oil formula—made exclusively from 100% wild-caught fish—and their 100% vegan Algae Omega—made from microalgae, the original source of marine omega-3s.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear the last time Kevin and I put on a Random Show? Listen to our conversation here, in which we discussed tequila, resolutions of New Years past, early investor advantages, privacy and liability concerns in an AI-guided world, physical reboots, perilous cocktails, how NFTs drove Kevin to ketamine, tattoos, ayahuasca agony alleviation and alternatives, minimalist delegation, and much more.

#712: The Random Show — 2024 New Year’s Resolutions, Tim’s 30-Day No-Caffeine Experiment, Mental Health Breakthroughs, AI Upheaval, Dealmaking and Advising for Startups, The Next-Gen of Note-Taking, Digital Security Tips, and Much MoreSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Kevin Rose:

Website | Instagram | Twitter | Threads

The post Live 10th Anniversary Random Show with Kevin Rose — Exploring What’s Next, Testing Ozempic, Modern Dating, New Breakthrough Treatments for Anxiety, Bitcoin ETFs, Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul, and Engineering More Awe in Your Life (#733) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on April 23, 2024 00:54

April 17, 2024

Martha Beck — The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner “Integrity Cleanse,” Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety (#732)

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It’s never true to hate yourself or condemn yourself. — Martha Beck

Dr. Martha Beck (@themarthabeck) has been called “the best-known life coach in America” by NPR and USA Today. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science and has published nine non-fiction books, one novel, and more than 200 magazine articles. The Guardian and other media have described her as “Oprah’s life coach.”

Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her next book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, is expected in early 2025.

Please enjoy!

Brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements, Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#732: Martha Beck — The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner “Integrity Cleanse,” Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear an episode with our cherished mutual friend Boyd Varty? Listen to our conversation here in which we discussed the origins of the Londolozi Game Reserve, the ancient lineage of the Shangaan trackers, the hardest animals to track, living 40 days and 40 nights in a tree, beehive algorithms, trauma recovery, ceremony work, the meaning of Ubuntu, and much more.

#571: Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker’s Guide to LifeSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Martha Beck:

Website | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose by Martha Beck | Amazon Bewildered Podcast The Gathering Room Podcast The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self by Martha Beck | Amazon The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss | Amazon Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life | The Tim Ferriss Show #571 The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty | Amazon Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith by Martha Beck | Amazon Londolozi Game Reserve Full Circle by Dave Varty | Amazon The Lion Tracker’s Guide To Life Quotes by Boyd Varty | Goodreads How to Track Your Life’s Purpose | Martha Beck The Porcupine and the Tamboti Tree | Londolozi Blog Tracking Lion | Londolozi Blog “Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Magic.” | CCCB LAB Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month | Tim Ferriss Lamont Library | Harvard Library The Rhodora by Ralph Waldo Emerson | Academy of American Poets Croc Attacks Son of Conservationist | IOL What Makes Crocodiles Such Stealthy Hunters? | Londolozi Blog About Down Syndrome | National Down Syndrome Society (NDSS)Have You Ever Tracked a White Rhino? | Londolozi Blog A Mormon Daughter’s Book Stirs a Storm | The New York Times Woo-Woo Definition & Meaning | Merriam-Webster The Survival Specialist | The Guardian Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #585 The Integrity Cleanse DIY Workbook | Martha Beck I Think You’re Fat by A.J. Jacobs | Esquire The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso) by Dante Alighieri | Amazon Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare | Folger Shakespeare Library Stoicism vs. Hedonism: What’s the Difference? | Orion Philosophy The Addictive Puzzle Game That Started It All! | Tetris Nice Work If You Can Get It | Bewildered #49 Calm Down, We Can Do Both! | The Gathering Room Podcast #126 Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Path: Saying No, Trusting Your Intuition, Index Cards, Integrity Checks, Grief, Awe, and Much More | The Tim Ferriss Show #430 “Adulthood Is Emailing ‘Sorry for the Delayed Response!’ Back and Forth until One of You Dies.” | Marissa Miller, Twitter Sorry for the Delayed Response | The New Yorker ‘New Yorker’ Cartoon Editor Explores What Makes Us Get It | NPR It’s All Chinese To Me? | It’s All Greek To Me The Significance of Oranges Around Lunar New Year, Explained | Time What Is Zen Buddhism and How Do You Practice It? | Lion’s Roar Tao Te Ching: A New English Version by Lao Tzu and Stephen Mitchell | Amazon The Great British Baking Show | Netflix The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss | Amazon Sweet Vs. Savory | The Daily Nexus A Strange Place to Find Comfort | The Gathering Room Podcast #112 The Formula for Happiness | Martha Beck When You Want Not to Want What You Want | The Gathering Room Podcast #99 Compare Models | Tesla We Asked Leaf Blower Guys if They Know How Annoying They Are | Vice Andrés Segovia: The Father Of Classical Guitar (1975) | YouTube Cananga Odorata (Ylang-Ylang) | Wikipedia Why Do My Dog’s Feet Smell Like Fritos or Corn Chips? | AKC Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) | Psychology Today Efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Reducing Suicidal Ideation and Deliberate Self-Harm: Systematic Review | JMIR Mental Health Perissodactyla | Wikipedia Luxury Safari Experience in South Africa | Sabi Sands Nature Reserve Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie | Amazon The Work | Byron Katie A Stillness within Stephen Mitchell | Los Angeles Times Faust: A Tragedy in Two Parts and the Urfaust by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe | Amazon Language. Culture. Germany. | Goethe-Institut USA Goethe: The Smartest Man in History? | Mystery Scoop How to Live Like a Rock Star (or Tango Star) in Buenos Aires… | Tim Ferriss What the Stroop Effect Reveals About Our Minds | Lesley University What is Neurodiversity? | Harvard Health Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight | TED Talk Spaghetti Tower Marshmallow Challenge | TinkerLab Awakening Your Magician | The Gathering Room Podcast #144 All of Creation | Martha Beck Activity: Mirror Writing | Museum of Science Figure Study Tool | Line of Action Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012 | The University of the Arts What is Internal Family Systems? | IFS Institute Internal Family Systems Therapy, Second Edition by Richard C. Schwartz and Martha Sweezy | Amazon Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts | The Tim Ferriss Show #492 Self-Therapy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness Using IFS, A Cutting-Edge Psychotherapy by Jay Earley and Karen Donnely | Amazon Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach | Amazon A Mother Cheetah Reveals Her Tiny Cubs | Londolozi TV A Cat’s Best Friend | San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Stories The Merchant of Just Be Happy | The New York Times Koelle Simpson’s Equine Therapy | Oprah.com Capuchin Facts | Costa Rica Wildlife Guide The Magical Corner of Intention and Invention | The Gathering Room Podcast #155 A Tale of a Troop of Baboons | Londolozi Blog Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde | AmazonSHOW NOTES[06:06] My contribution to teen atrociousness.[06:40] Connecting with Boyd Varty.[12:27] The path of not here.[16:38] Finding joy in the body can save your life.[21:17] The pregnant pause that ended Martha’s obsession with intellect.[26:51] Sensitivity and suffering.[30:14] The year of living lie-lessly.[35:36] An illuminating change of perspective.[46:14] The path to taking a black belt integrity cleanse.[49:42] Owning your right to say “No.”[53:45] Alternatives to “No” that remain honest.[57:11] The language of candor.[59:30] Ending relationships that have run their course.[01:00:37] The Asian influence.[01:04:26] Sweet or savory?[01:05:36] Are you comfortable?[01:07:29] Want vs. yearning and jumping the track.[01:20:36] Rhino ruminations.[01:22:06] The Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, and Byron Katie.[01:33:19] America’s Goethe?[01:36:20] Weighing kryptonite against superpowers.[01:44:50] Exploring the opposite of anxiety.[01:56:38] Dick Schwartz and Internal Family Systems.[02:01:57] Compassion even for the self’s unwanted pieces.[02:04:20] Favorite animal.[02:08:58] Equine therapy.[02:15:06] Selling the ranch.[02:18:05] The monkey whisperer.[02:20:05] Parting thoughts.MORE MARTHA BECK QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“It’s never true to hate yourself or to condemn yourself.”

— Martha Beck

“There’s a level beyond just telling the truth, and it is called compassion—and it’s truer.”

— Martha Beck

“When you’re saying ‘Get away, I don’t want you,’ the part of you that does insomnia and depression goes into a panic because it’s now being told it can’t belong. You don’t want it, you’ve rejected it. It ups the ante, and all it knows how to do is keep you awake and make you depressed.”

— Martha Beck

“I said being creative is the opposite of anxiety, but you can’t get to creativity if you don’t start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can’t stand.”

— Martha Beck

“When you realize that nature is available to you as a companion if you just tell the truth, it really is worth giving everything else up.”

— Martha Beck

“I remembered Emerson’s statement that ‘beauty is its own excuse for being,’ and I thought, ‘Joy is its own excuse for being.’ That is the one thing I can experience that makes it worth sticking around for the suffering this life entails. So I shifted my entire life toward a sort of very simple test: does it bring me joy or does it not? And joy became the track I was following.”

— Martha Beck

“The essential self yearns. The social self wants.”

— Martha Beck

PEOPLE MENTIONEDOprah Winfrey Boyd Varty Bronwyn Varty-Laburn Dave Varty Shan Varty Renias Mhlongo Sherlock Holmes Arthur C. Clarke Ralph Waldo Emerson Eddie Izzard Alex Van Den Heever Brigham Young Hugh Nibley A.J. Jacobs Julie Schoenberg Jacobs Dante Alighieri Julius Caesar William Shakespeare Elizabeth Gilbert Andrés Segovia Molly Ferriss Steven C. Hayes Stephen Mitchell Byron Katie Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Jill Bolte Taylor Leonardo da Vinci Neil Gaiman Iain McGilchrist Richard Schwartz Jay Earley Tara Brach Lewis Hyde

The post Martha Beck — The Amazing and Brutal Results of Zero Lies for 365 Days, How to Do a Beginner “Integrity Cleanse,” Lessons from Lion Trackers, and Novel Tactics for Reducing Anxiety (#732) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on April 17, 2024 01:13

April 10, 2024

Dr. David Spiegel, Stanford U. — Practical Hypnosis, Meditation vs. Hypnosis, Pain Management Without Drugs, The Neurobiology of Trance, and More (#731)

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“One of the things I love about working with hypnosis is people are surprised at what they can do because they’re trying out being different and seeing what it feels like.” — Dr. David Spiegel

Dr. David Spiegel is Willson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Director of the Center on Stress and Health, and Medical Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he has been a member of the academic faculty since 1975.

Dr. Spiegel has more than 40 years of clinical and research experience, has published thirteen books, 404 scientific journal articles, and his work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, and more.

He is the founder of Reveri, the world’s first interactive self-hypnosis app.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.

Brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements; Helix Sleep premium mattresses; and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#731: Dr. David Spiegel, Stanford U. — Practical Hypnosis, Meditation vs. Hypnosis, Pain Management Without Drugs, The Neurobiology of Trance, and More

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear another episode with someone who takes hypnosis seriously? Listen to my conversation with Loonshots author Safi Bahcall in which we discussed using hypnosis for insomnia relief, common relaxation trance induction techniques, the most effective applications of hypnosis, how hypnosis compares to meditation for self-control, understanding anger as a gift, effective and non-effective ways of helping someone cope with depression, and much more.

#382: Safi Bahcall — On Hypnosis, Conquering Insomnia, Incentives, and MoreSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Dr. David Spiegel:

LinkedIn | Stanford Medicine

Connect with Reveri:

Website | LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

Digital Hypnosis | Reveri Conversion Disorder | Cleveland Clinic The Truth About Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures | Epilepsy Foundation Forensic Psychiatry | Wikipedia Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small | Quote Investigator Dr. Andrew Huberman — A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance, Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Testosterone, and Using the Body to Control the Mind | The Tim Ferriss Show #521 How Does Hypnosis Work? Here’s What the Science Says | Time Shared Cognitive Mechanisms of Hypnotizability with Executive Functioning and Information Salience | Scientific Reports Uncovering the New Science of Clinical Hypnosis | APA Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on the Autotelic Experience | Goodreads Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi | Amazon Women’s Swimming & Diving | Stanford University Athletics Tiger’s Psychologist: The Use of Hypnosis to Create a Champion | Golf Viral Meditation, Mindset, and Mastery | The Tim Ferriss Show #201 How to Know If You Can Be Hypnotized with Andrew Huberman | JRE Clips Piaget’s Theory of Childhood Development | Child & Family Blog Test–Retest Reliability of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C, and the Elkins Hypnotizability Scale | International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis Point-of-Care Testing of Enzyme Polymorphisms for Predicting Hypnotizability and Postoperative Pain | The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics The Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP) in Clinical Practice and Research | International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis The Eye-Roll Hypnosis Test: How to Measure Your Susceptibility with Dr. David Spiegel (Clip) | The Align Podcast What Is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)? | EMDR Institute “One Foot in the Present, One Foot in the Past:” Understanding EMDR | The New York Times We’d Rather Feel Guilty Than Helpless | Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church LSD May Chip Away at the Brain’s “Sense of Self” Network | Scientific American MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy | MAPS The World’s Largest Psychedelic Research Center | The Tim Ferriss Show #385 Psychedelics Open Your Brain. You Might Not like What Falls In. | The Atlantic Psychedelics Aren’t For Everyone | Green Market Report Research Takes a Closer Look at the Experience of Ego Dissolution | Binghamton News Nolan Williams — A Glimpse of the Future: Electroceuticals for 70%–90% Remission of Depression, Brain Stimulation for Sports Performance, and De-risking Ibogaine for TBI/PTSD | The Tim Ferriss Show #714 Accelerated TMS: Moving Quickly into the Future of Depression Treatment | Neuropsychopharmacology Scientists Use High-Tech Brain Stimulation to Make People More Hypnotizable | Stanford Medicine Stanford Hypnosis Integrated with Functional Connectivity-Targeted Transcranial Stimulation (Shift): A Preregistered Randomized Controlled Trial | Nature Mental Health Dr. James Esdaile and Deep Hypnosis | Institute of Interpersonal Hypnotherapy A Randomized Controlled Trial of Clinical Hypnosis as an Opioid-Sparing Adjunct Treatment for Pain Relief in Adults Undergoing Major Oncologic Surgery | Journal of Pain Research Vasodilation: What Causes Blood Vessels to Widen | Cleveland Clinic What Is Dissociation? | Mind What Is Pain? | National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Dr. David Spiegel: Can You Control Pain with Your Mind? (Clip) | The Proof #297 Hypnotic Alteration of Somatosensory Perception | American Journal of Psychiatry How Hypnosis Can Alter the Brain’s Perception of Pain | Scope What Is Interoception, and How Does It Affect Mental Health? Five Questions for April Smith | APA Brain Activity and Functional Connectivity Associated with Hypnosis | Cerebral Cortex The Pink Elephant Problem | Psychology Today Hypnotherapy Compared to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Smoking Cessation in a Randomized Controlled Trial | Frontiers in Psychology Trance and Dance in Bali | Wikipedia From Magic Power to Everyday Trance | The History of Hypnosis Re-Imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter | Medical History Mesmeromania, or, the Tale of the Tub | Cabinet Recognizing and Treating Status Asthmaticus | Healthline US Involvement in the Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive, 1968 | Office of the Historian Floating in the Dead Sea | Dead Sea The Secret of How Hypnosis Really Works | Time The Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis | SCEH American Society of Clinical Hypnosis | ASCH The International Society for Hypnosis | ISH Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis by Herbert Spiegel and David Spiegel | Amazon Self-Hypnosis for Major Wellness Issues | Oneleaf Fix the Miscommunication between Your Gut and Brain | Nerva Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung by Richard Katz | AmazonSHOW NOTES[07:00] How Herbert Spiegel was exposed to hypnosis.[10:14] Using hypnosis to cure non-epileptic seizures.[11:53] What is a forensic psychiatrist?[14:43] How hypnosis works.[17:54] Hypnosis and the flow state.[21:03] How hypnosis differs from meditation.[22:38] Determining one’s susceptibility to hypnosis.[27:21] I take the eye-roll test.[29:33] Thoughts on EMDR.[36:29] Therapeutic psychedelics and ego dissolution.[41:05] Potential adverse effects of hypnosis?[42:34] Accelerated TMS improves response to hypnosis.[44:25] Hypnosis as a tool for stress and pain relief.[48:56] David treats my back pain with hypnosis.[57:09] Replicating this effect with self-hypnosis.[57:57] Understanding the science of pain relief.[1:03:18] Filtering the hurt from the pain.[1:06:37] For us, not against us.[1:09:12] Hypnosis vs. other addiction interventions.[1:11:41] A mesmerizing tale of hypnotic history.[1:16:10] Most surprising patient outcomes.[1:24:53] Finding connection to treat the agitated.[1:28:40] Who is Reveri designed for?[1:31:15] Hypnosis as a first rather than last resort.[1:35:02] Further resources and final thoughts.MORE DR. DAVID SPIEGEL QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“One of the coolest things about the [hypnotic] state is you tend to let go of your ordinary premises — not just about what’s going on at that moment, but who you are, what kind of a person you are. … People can try out being different and see what it feels like. They can let go of their usual premises, and that’s where hypnosis is something like flow state.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“Most eight-year-olds are in trances most of the time. As you know, if you call your eight-year-old in for dinner, he doesn’t hear you. He’s doing his thing — work and play are all the same thing for kids. I don’t know why we try to train them to be little adults, because they have so much fun.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“By the time you’re about 21, your hypnotizability becomes as stable a trait as IQ.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“[EMDR is] another therapeutic technique, but I have to say that my overall impression is what’s good about it isn’t new, and what’s new about it isn’t good.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“Depression with post-traumatic stress disorder is so harmful to people because it tarnishes their feelings about who they are as people. And if you can understand the experience, but disconnect it in some ways from this default mode conclusion about what sort of a person you are, that can be powerfully therapeutic.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“The good thing about hypnosis is you can turn it on real fast, you can turn it off real fast. So the worst thing that happens most of the time is, sometimes it doesn’t work, so what? So you do something else. … Hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing anyone. It’s just not dangerous.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“Hypnosis is like an underappreciated company that hasn’t been managed well and has a lot more positive resources, and that’s what it’s like. We just don’t take advantage of it.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“One of the things I love about working with hypnosis is people are surprised at what they can do because they’re trying out being different and seeing what it feels like.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

“I’d love to see [hypnosis] integrated better with people’s overall health and wellness care. I think it’s been sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of psychotherapies.”
— Dr. David Spiegel

PEOPLE MENTIONEDHerbert Spiegel Marcia Greenleaf Gustav Aschaffenburg Henry Kissinger Andrew Huberman Afik Faerman Mihály Csíkszentmihályi Tiger Woods Jay Brunza Jean Piaget Dana Cortade Francine Shapiro Robin Carhart-Harris Nolan Williams James Esdaile Thomas Paul Hackett, Jr.Franz Mesmer M. de Voltaire Anna Freud Sigmund Freud Louis XVI Benjamin Franklin Antoine Lavoisier Joseph-Ignace Guillotin Rodney Dangerfield

The post Dr. David Spiegel, Stanford U. — Practical Hypnosis, Meditation vs. Hypnosis, Pain Management Without Drugs, The Neurobiology of Trance, and More (#731) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on April 10, 2024 11:40

April 3, 2024

Reed Hastings, Co-Founder of Netflix — How to Cultivate High Performance, The Art of Farming for Dissent, Favorite Failures, and More (#730)

Illustration via 99designs

“Hope is everything.”
— Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings (@reedhastings) became executive chairman of Netflix in 2023, after 25 years as CEO. He co-founded Netflix in 1997. In 1991, Reed founded Pure Software, which made tools for software developers. After a 1995 IPO and several acquisitions, Pure was acquired by Rational Software in 1997. Reed is an active educational philanthropist and served on the California State Board of Education from 2000 to 2004. He is currently on the board of several educational organizations including KIPP and Pahara. Reed is also a board member of City Fund and Bloomberg.

He received a BA from Bowdoin College in 1983 and an MS CS in artificial intelligence from Stanford University in 1988. Between Bowdoin and Stanford, Reed served in the Peace Corps as a high-school math teacher.

You can learn more about Powder Mountain at PowderMountain.com.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform .

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear an episode with another Netflix founder? Listen to my conversation with Marc Randolph, in which we discussed changing communication style as a leader, split testing superpowers, what sets good entrepreneurs apart from mediocre ones, best and worst ideas, pushing back when countless people proclaimed Netflix’s business model would never work, and much more.

#496: Marc Randolph on Building Netflix, Battling Blockbuster, Negotiating with Amazon/Bezos, and Scraping the Barnacles Off the HullSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODEConnect with Reed Hastings:

Powder Mountain | Twitter | LinkedIn

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II by Jennet Conant | Amazon Radio History: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of LORAN | Mini-Circuits Blog Stock Market Crash of 1929 | Federal Reserve History Subprime Mortgage Crisis | Federal Reserve History The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by MIchael Lewis | Amazon Memento | Prime Video Risk Tolerance: It’s in Your DNA | University of California San Diego Jeff Bezos Explains One-Way Door Decisions and Two-Way Door Decisions (Clip) | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 Free Solo | Prime Video Why Culture Matters with Netflix’s Reed Hastings | Masters of Scale #8 Netflix Culture — Seeking Excellence | Netflix How Netflix Reinvented HR | Harvard Business Review Ozark | Netflix Pure Software | Wikipedia Beginner’s Guide to Java | Microsoft Azure Epic Pass | Vail Resorts Multi Resort Ski Passes | Ikon Pass Radical Candor: Fully Revised and Updated Edition: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean by Kim Scott | Amazon I Think You’re Fat by A.J. Jacobs | Esquire Reed Hastings and John Doerr: Building an Iconic Company | Kleiner Perkins Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh | Amazon Reed Hastings On Netflix’s Biggest Mistake | Forbes Farming for Dissent | The Condorsay Newsletter No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer | Amazon Netflix vs. Blockbuster — The Official Case Study | Drift Vintage Calgonite Commercial (1970s) | YouTube TED 2018: Netflix Sees Itself as the Anti-Apple | Wired Reed Hastings: Netflix Future, Hardest Keeper Test, Lessons From Book | Variety Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company by James Collins and William C. Lazier | Amazon Jim Collins on The Value of Small Gestures, Unseen Sources of Power, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #483 Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath | The Tim Ferriss Show #361 Why Is Rinsing Your Cottage Cheese Important? | Dan Greer The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni | Amazon The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni | Amazon Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari | Amazon The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers | Amazon I Am Woman | Prime Video Helen Reddy: I Am Woman (Video) | YouTube Netflix at 20: Let’s Revisit the Failure of Qwikster | Quartz Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Apologizes for Mishandling the Change to Qwikster | YouTube Netflix Apology | Saturday Night Live 24 Lessons from Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letters to Shareholders | CB Insights Research Where Does Netflix Go from Here? With CEO Reed Hastings | New York Times Events Goldilocks Principle | Wikipedia Wasatch Peaks Ranch Skiing | Yellowstone National Park Lodges What is Cat Skiing? (Quickly Explained) | The Ski Girl Salt Lake City International Airport to Powder Mountain | Google Maps Eden, Utah | Visit Ogden Warren Buffett Was ‘Terrified’ of Public Speaking and Took Three Steps to Conquer His Fear | Inc.com What Are Index Funds, and How Do They Work? | Investopedia 35. Amateurs Should Stick With Low-Cost Index Funds | 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Reed Hastings Creates $100 Million Education Fund | Philanthropy News Digest KIPP Public Charter Schools Support a Classroom. Build a Future. | DonorsChoose QuestBridge Waiting For Superman | Prime Video Understanding Charter Schools vs. Public Schools | US News Why Can’t Charter Schools and Teachers’ Unions Be Friends? | Pacific Standard Reed Hastings’ Philanthropic Efforts and Social Impact | Pressfarm Make the Most of Your World | Peace Corps Summary of Reed Hastings’ Interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business | r/Entrepreneur The Three Qualities of the Most Effective Team Players | TEDSHOW NOTES[06:34] Alfred Lee Loomis and Tuxedo Park.[07:53] Risk tolerance: nature or nurture?[10:56] Cultivating culture that “eats strategy for lunch.”[15:41] The logic behind generous severance.[17:02] Adapting to Pure chaos.[18:44] Reference checking potential hires.[20:29] Context vs. control.[22:35] Radical candor.[24:15] Guardrails for maintaining work/life balance.[27:04] Farming for dissent.[28:39] Believing in the green crystals.[30:54] High-performance team, not family.[31:59] The keeper test.[32:49] Fire and replace, or replace and fire?[33:59] Beyond Entrepreneurship and other recommended reading/viewing.[37:46] A favorite failure.[40:32] Outstanding leaders.[41:10] Reed’s two “religions.”[42:19] Powder Mountain.[44:44] How Powder Mountain differs from Reed’s other projects.[46:24] Powder Mountain’s biggest challenges ahead.[47:02] Could Reed ever really retire?[47:19] Best investments of time, energy, or money.[48:49] How can we improve education in the US?[52:48] What class would Reed teach?[53:59] Juggling projects without losing focus.[55:04] Philanthropy: Why Africa?[55:32] Being “big-hearted champions who pick up the trash.”[56:28] Reed’s billboard.[58:01] Parting thoughts.MORE REED HASTINGS QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I’m in the camp that culture eats strategy for lunch. … How do you get human beings to work well together and accomplish amazing things? One of the aspects of that is being around other incredible performers.”
— Reed Hastings

“Customers would love to have everything for free. The challenge is to have great customer satisfaction and to charge them enough to have growing operating income. And that constraint is what makes business challenging, fun, and exciting.”
— Reed Hastings

“The few times I’ve done investing, I’ve lost my shirt. And I realize I’m just so optimistic. Anybody who seems to have a good idea, I’m like, ‘Sure!'”
— Reed Hastings

“Hope is everything.”
— Reed Hastings

PEOPLE MENTIONEDAlfred Lee Loomis Bill Gates Michael Burry Steve Eisman Jeff Bezos Reid Hoffman Patricia Quillin John Doerr Elon Musk Jim Collins Larry Ellison Patrick Lencioni Yuval Noah Harari Helen Reddy Brian Armstrong Warren Buffett Dale Carnegie

The post Reed Hastings, Co-Founder of Netflix — How to Cultivate High Performance, The Art of Farming for Dissent, Favorite Failures, and More (#730) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on April 03, 2024 15:26

March 27, 2024

Legendary Actor Scott Glenn — How to Be Super Fit at 85, Lessons from Marlon Brando, How to Pursue Your Purpose, The Art of Serendipity, Stories of Gunslingers, and More (#729)

Tim Ferriss and Scott Glenn

“If you love it, make it your life. And right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up. And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, ‘I don’t care how many times I get knocked down, I’m getting back up every single time and going after what I want,’ that’s the answer.”
— Scott Glenn

Scott Glenn’s acting career spans nearly 60 years. His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, The Virgin Suicides, and The Bourne Ultimatum. More recently, Scott has appeared on the small screen as Kevin Garvey Sr. in The Leftovers, the blind sensei Stick in Marvel’s Daredevil and The Defenders, and as the retired sheriff Alan Pangborn in Castle Rock. This year, Scott will return to HBO to join season 3 of The White Lotus.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform .

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This episode is brought to you by LMNT! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear an episode with Scott’s TV son on Apple TV+’s upcoming Bad Monkey series? Listen to my conversation with Vince Vaughn here in which we discussed developing grit, high school trauma, sharpening acting chops through improv, rejection inoculation, finding tone in storytelling, expanding comfort zones, and much more.

#243: How to Fear Less: Vince VaughnSELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODERoom Service Poems for Carol | Carol Glenn Ceramics Friction Zone by Scott Glenn | Carol Glenn Ceramics Scott Glenn Prefers Living Away From the Hollywood Hubbub | Deseret News Bighorn Crags: Climbing, Hiking, and Mountaineering | SummitPost Challis, Idaho | Chamber of Commerce The Baby Maker | Prime Video Nashville | Prime Video Apocalypse Now | Prime Video Universal Studios Hollywood Scott Glenn Landed His ‘Apocalypse Now’ Role After Saving Francis Ford Coppola’s Life | The Hollywood Reporter Baretta | IMDb Cattle Annie & Little Britches | Prime Video Wild Bunch | Wikipedia The Studios At Paramount 13 and a 1/2 | Urban Dictionary Nuestra Familia | Wikipedia Urban Cowboy | Prime Video Scott Glenn as Wes Hightower | Frostbite A Look Back at How Gilley’s Gave Us ‘Urban Cowboy’ | Texas Highways Collision Course: An Omnibus of Plays at Cafe Au Go Go (1968) | AbeBooks Scott Glenn Talks The Defenders, Daredevil, and The Leftovers | Esquire Scarlet Fever: All You Need to Know | CDC Benzylpenicillin | Wikipedia The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) | Prime Video This Is How to See if You Would’ve Been Drafted for Vietnam | Military.com Snap-on Tools April 2, 1963 | Kenosha News Archive One of the Original Acting Studios in NYC | HB Studio Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad | Wikipedia The Salvation Army USA How to Convert to Judaism | My Jewish Learning Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu | Amazon Practical Shooting: Beyond Fundamentals by Brian Enos | Amazon Mysticism | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Why Do Creationists Keep Saying Carbon Dating Is Debunked? | r/Atheism What Kind Of Fish Swallowed Jonah? How Did He Survive? | I Love Docs Scott Glenn And Killer Joe: A Perfect Fit | Playbill The Leftovers | Prime Video ‘The Leftovers’: Scott Glenn on His “Unpredictable, Subversive” Character | The Hollywood Reporter Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor | Amazon Vince Vaughn to Star in ‘Bad Monkey’ from ‘Ted Lasso’ Co-Creator | The Hollywood Reporter Eugene the Marine | IMDb Stories From the UN Archive: Marlon Brando, the UN’s First Frontman for Water | UN News Bizarre Things That Happened on the Apocalypse Now Set | Looper Royal Academy of Dramatic Art | RADA What Is Method Acting? | We Are Actors Where Was Apocalypse Now Filmed? | The Cinemaholic Rolling Stones: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction | The Ed Sullivan Show Simple 10-Minute Daily Ear Massage & Acupressure | Qigong of Tulsa How to Breathe Properly | Breathwrk How Humming Stimulates Your Vagus Nerve for Stress Relief | Bustle Pressing Reset: Original Strength Reloaded by Tim Anderson and Geoff Neupert | Amazon The Quick and the Dead: Total Training for the Advanced Minimalist by Pavel Tsatsouline | Amazon Kettlebells | Amazon The Most Brutal Push-Up Exercise (Prison Push-Ups) | Victor Gaspar Resistance Bands Vs Weights: Which Gives The Better Workout? | Marathon Handbook Resistance Bands | Amazon FeetUp | Amazon Scott Glenn is a 75-Year-Old Knife-Fighting, Spear-Fishing Madman | GQ Where to See Manatees in Florida | Visit Florida Master Your Inner Experience | Breath Hold Work Freediving Apnea Trainer The Actors Studio Decompression Sickness | Harvard Health Learn to Dive Today | NAUI Worldwide Static Line Skydiving: Is It Really Safe? | DZONE Skydiving Golden Knights | GoArmy.com Everything We Know About ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 | Robb Report Krabi-Krabong: Thailand’s Traditional Martial Art | Fighters Vault Where to Watch Muay Thai Fights in Bangkok | HeavyBJJ Off Limits (1988) | IMDb Lesser Vehicle | Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia Savate | Wikipedia Asia’s Infamous Golden Triangle and the Soldiers Tracking down the Drug Smugglers Who Rule Its Narcotics Trade | ABC News Three Pagodas Pass Much More Than A Border Gate | The Lost Passport How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area | Codus Operandi The Right Stuff | Prime Video Tosca Cafe, San Francisco: An Oral History | Bon Appétit Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov in “Giselle” (1977) | American Ballet Theater Easy Writer | Sun Valley Magazine Slow Riding Tips: How to Ride a Motorcycle at Slow Speeds | Harley-Davidson Insurance The SVD Dragunov: The World’s Most Prolific Sniper Rifle And Its Olympic Roots | Gun DigestSHOW NOTES[07:10] Idaho vs. Los Angeles.[13:26] Apocalypse Now, self-confidence soon after.[17:26] Burt Lancaster’s movie star lessons.[23:06] The birth and death of Wes Hightower.[32:22] Catching the attention of James Bridges.[35:42] Scarlet fever.[37:29] From Marine to police reporter.[42:12] Berghof Studios and parental advice.[50:44] Converting to Judaism.[53:36] Lao Tzu: the ultimate mystic?[58:16] Letting go with Killer Joe.[1:02:53] “Crazy Whitefella Thinking.”[1:08:31] Getting out of the way and Erwan Le Corre.[1:11:51] Lessons from the “morally phenomenal” Marlon Brando.[1:16:26] How Scott’s childhood bout with scarlet fever informed his life’s course.[1:19:05] Daily routines and exercises of an in-shape 85-year-old.[1:35:12] Securing a serendipitous skill set.[1:42:13] Thailand talk.[1:46:18] Increasing surface luck.[1:47:04] How Scott met and fell in love with his wife.[1:53:04] “Just dance.”[1:53:46] Mistakenly calling Rudolf Nureyev Russian.[1:55:57] Poetry.[2:00:01] What Laurence Olivier knew about the value of tenacity.[2:01:41] Parting thoughts.MORE SCOTT GLENN QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I understood, because of the way I’ve learned everything in my life that’s important to me, is you learn by apprenticeship, not from a book or going to school. At least I can’t.”

— Scott Glenn

“I did one audition and they said, ‘You know, you’re not really very good. We want to give you things to work on.’ And I said, ‘What the fuck do you know? Who have you worked with? Because I was just doing improvs and work with Marlon Brando, Vittorio Storaro, Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper. And they accepted me as an equal. What have you done? You’ve done this and this. You can’t even fucking direct traffic.’ So they kicked me out of Universal.”

— Scott Glenn

“I stopped off in Wyoming at one point. People must have thought I was nuts. I got out of the Jimmy and I walked down to the side of the road and I took this invisible Wes Hightower and threw him in the ground and broke his fucking neck and called Carol at a pay phone. I said, ‘Wes Hightower is dead. I’m coming home.'”

— Scott Glenn

“The most important single event in my life was scarlet fever when I was nine years old that I wasn’t supposed to have survived. … But that experience turned me into an athlete, turned me into someone who had learned to not only live with, but fall in love with, my fantasies and my imagination.”

— Scott Glenn

“What gives performances on film their juice or electricity is their degree of spontaneity. … And complete spontaneity is not watching yourself at all. Complete spontaneity is being in the now so completely that you really don’t have a past, and more importantly, way more importantly I think with acting, you don’t have a future, which means plans on what you’re going to do in the scene dissolve and then finally disappear.”

— Scott Glenn

“When I need to learn something, the best teacher in the world materializes right in front of me.”

— Scott Glenn

“I’m willing to fall on my ass in front of people. The embarrassment of screwing up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people is not great enough to keep me from doing it. And that’s the trick to being a good student.”

— Scott Glenn

“The thing about the pandemic that I realized is a lot of people who were in love with each other had to discover whether they liked each other or not.”

— Scott Glenn

“If you love it, make it your life. And right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up. And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, ‘I don’t care how many times I get knocked down, I’m getting back up every single time and going after what I want,’ that’s the answer.”

— Scott Glenn

Carol Glenn Eric Ryback Robert Altman Francis Ford Coppola Richard M. Colby Martin Sheen Marlon Brando Dennis Hopper Vittorio Storaro William Shakespeare Rupert Hitzig Rod Steiger Burt Lancaster Amanda Plummer Diane Lane Pablo Picasso James Bridges Jack Larson Ryan O’Neal Sam Shepard Irving Azoff Freddy Fender Debra Winger John Travolta Wes Hightower Edward Parone Aaron Latham Lord Byron Walter Mitty William Hickey Lao Tzu Brian Enos Mike Johnson Tracy Letts Damon Lindelof Mimi Leder Molly Ferriss David Gulpilil Vince Vaughn Konstantin Stanislavski Isaac Boleslavsky Laurence Fishburne Gray Frederickson Erwan Le Corre Scott Reitz Lee Strasberg John Shaw Kurt Johnstad James Stewart Jimmy Stewart Jacques Cousteau Forrest Gump Gregory Hines Fred Ward Freddie Fields Rudolf Nureyev Matt Mattox Vladimir Putin Natalia Makarova Laurence Olivier

The post Legendary Actor Scott Glenn — How to Be Super Fit at 85, Lessons from Marlon Brando, How to Pursue Your Purpose, The Art of Serendipity, Stories of Gunslingers, and More (#729) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on March 27, 2024 09:00

March 22, 2024

How to Start a War

“How to Start a War” is a short story by yours truly.

I’ve never shared fiction on this blog before, and it makes me quake in my boots, but this year will be a year of firsts. The story was originally published in NFT form to learn more about the technology and play footsie with my friend Kevin Rose.

It’s a little tale about mercenaries, modern life, and the games we all play. The prose, handwriting, and concept is by me. The graphic design, which you can see at this link, is by Lisa Quine.

And how much of this is actually fiction?

Well, that’s a damn good question…

“If you want to start a war, call me.”

He handed me his card. It was nondescript: Name, number, AOL email address, stock art of an eagle. He could have passed for a plumber, handyman, or tree remover.

We were parting ways after a long weekend together, and the pieces of the puzzle had only started to coalesce in the last hour. I’d known he was former military from the outset, and I had guessed he was in his early 60’s from the gray hair, weather-beaten face, and close-cropped beard. His language also dated him. But beyond that, I knew little, as he was quiet and sullen.

The gathering was roughly 15 male guests, all self-made in some industry, and all pretending to be Jason Bourne. Perhaps Jason Bourne with a drinking problem. I, on the other hand, was a jack of all trades, master of some, but it had never added up to dynastic wealth. Nonetheless, here I was, invited by a back-slapping half-acquaintance who got my email years before. Once I’d signed the NDA like everyone else, folks seemed happy to forget I was there.

The stated purpose of the weekend was to learn evasive driving, hence we had some ex-Marines signed up to teach. I spent my days listening to the attendees peacock about finance, old sports injuries, and third homes. I spent my nights sipping whisky around a campfire with the instructors. Perhaps it was because I shaved my head, perhaps it was the shared silence, but one by one, they began to ask me questions. That’s how “Stan,” as we’ll call him, eventually opened up. We bonded over hunting and Hunter S. Thompson.

And now, at the very tail end of our time together, Stan was filling me in on his next gig. It turned out that he was a tree remover of sorts, or at least an obstacle remover. This all came to light because I asked him where he was headed after our make-believe excursion in nowhere Arizona. I’d been wondering how he paid the bills the rest of the year.

“I’m headed to Burma. I’m a God-fearing Christian, and there are some Christians who need protecting.”

He went on to explain that a large and pension-friendly non-profit had reached out to him through friends of friends. The non-profit was decidedly Christian but no longer advertised itself as such. It had pivoted to a broader donor base in the 1980s. Still, their roots remained intact, and they’d asked Stan if he’d be willing to “support” several small enclaves of Christians in northern Myanmar, whose rural villages were being attacked and, in some cases, burned by one particular paramilitary group. While most of the West thinks of Buddhism as a doctrine of peace, it turns out that no faith is immune to extremism.The violence was being inflicted by self-avowed Buddhists, who were also ruthlessly effective at cutting off supply lines of food and water to these encampments. They viewed any belief system outside of Buddhism as a betrayal of the truth, and that was justification enough for forced removal of both Muslims and Christians, often to Internal Displacement Camps (IDC). The attacks routinely included murders, and the murders were rarely investigated. The entire situation was mostly ignored by the Myanmar national army and local law enforcement, if not condoned. The whole thing was a spectacular mess.

I asked Stan what he could possibly do to protect these groups.

After all, he’d mentioned that it was just him and two other silver-haired vets who’d been hired, all well past their primes.

“Well, that’s pretty easy. These Christian villages can only be reached by helicopter. We have intel on the six or so primary pilots. They all live in one hub, a small city. So, the plan is to kill two or three of the pilots in their homes in a single night, in front of their families, and leave letters as written warnings. That should slow things down. If they don’t stop, then we kill the rest at longer range. It’s important to realize that these pilots aren’t trained to deal with this type of thing.”

The conversation went on for some time, each new revelation dwarfing the one preceding it.

Flying home that evening, the encounter prompted dozens of questions I didn’t have answers for, like:

How many times per year did Stan do something like this? And who hired him?

How many mass conflicts have been started, or prevented, by similar low-tech strikes?

And… how on earth did the U.S. 501(c)(3) in question categorize this expense?

To Stan’s credit, he never mentioned their name, but I could easily imagine an annual fundraising gala in a fancy Manhattan ballroom, replete with high-price auction items (a weekend at a board member’s Lake Como estate?), celebrity guests (wouldn’t the red carpet photos look great on Page Six?), and Fortune 500 execs sitting at $50,000 tables (their comms teams picked the perfect non-profit for great coverage!). In my mind’s eye, there is a well-dressed society woman on stage — white teeth, white dress, white pearl necklace — announcing the auction item: “Support for local partners helping at-risk minority groups in Southeast Asia.” Starting bid: $25,000 USD.

How did Stan and his team get paid? Did the non-profit donate to a recognized NGO on the ground, who then paid Stan in cash? Who knows.

All I knew was that he was being paid for two weeks of services. Put another way, in fewer than 14 days, a number of helicopter pilots — currently having ice cream with their daughters, maybe watching TV with their wives — would meet Stan but never see his face. Those men, no doubt believing themselves on the right side of history, would find themselves unexpectedly at the end of their own timelines and the flash of a muzzle. Perhaps that very same evening, a CEO on the Upper East Side would be bragging to dinner guests about his latest philanthropic work in Southeast Asia.

So, is Stan a valiant hero, a psychopath murderer, or simply (simply!) a guy with ends to meet and skills that don’t translate to civilian life? Is he good, bad, or neutral? Or are these all bullshit questions? After all, he can be these three things at the same time. It depends on your perspective, the stories you believe, and whether or not he’s on your side.

I have to imagine that we’ve all backed killers. Whether through paying taxes or chasing tax havens, whether by buying shoes of unknown origin or snorting a line of coke at a bachelor party, we’ve all been complicit in immense suffering. A Stan five steps removed is still a Stan, isn’t it?

Sitting in my aisle seat, these and other thoughts floated through my mind. The orange juice I’d been drinking tasted metallic. I pulled out Stan’s card to replay the day’s events, and as I turned it over in my hands, I noticed a quote on the back:

Vanitas vanitatum dixit Ecclesiastes omnia vanitas.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity.

How incredibly freeing it would be to believe it. I tried to commit the Latin to memory and failed completely, which only seemed to reinforce the point. I wondered why Stan put this on his card. As a warning to others? As a reminder to himself? A nihilistic justification?

There was a tap on my shoulder, snapping me out of my reverie, and an attractive middle-aged woman seated behind me held up my wallet. “I think you dropped this, sir.”

“Thank you very much. That’s really kind of you.”

My own voice echoed back like someone else’s, and I wondered: was it kind to return my wallet? I’d paid for the fantasy weekend, after all, which in turn partially supported Stan. Maybe it paid for part of his plane ticket to Myanmar. But how much of me was legitimately disgusted, and how much of me was glad to be involved or even proud? I couldn’t tell.

The absurdity was dizzying, and a smile involuntarily spread across my face. It wasn’t a smile of amusement. It made me think of chimpanzees, who sometimes break into maniacal laughter in the canopy if a troupe member is torn apart by a leopard on the jungle floor. I mean, what the fuck else are you going to do?

By this time, I needed a stiffer drink. I hailed the flight attendant and ordered two gin tonics, both doubles. She paused, considered objecting, then folded and walked away.

Three minutes later, I had my drinks on my tray, and I turned back to the woman behind me:

“Thanks again for the wallet. Do you mind if I ask you one quick question?”

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Published on March 22, 2024 07:37