Timothy Ferriss's Blog, page 10

May 29, 2024

Jim Collins and Ed Zschau (#741)

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #361 “Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath” and #380 “Ed Zschau — The Polymath Professor Who Changed My Life.”

Please enjoy!

Bios of guests may be found at tim.blog/combo.

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 .

Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement, and LMNT electrolyte supplement.

Transcript of the full Jim Collins episode | Transcript of the full Ed Zschau episode | Transcripts of all episodes

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau

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 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.

LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim.

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep! Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I’ve suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But a few years ago, I started using the Pod Cover, and it has transformed my sleep. Eight Sleep has launched their newest generation of the Pod: Pod 4 Ultra. I’m excited to test it out. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates, automatically. With the best temperature performance to date, Pod 4 Ultra ensures you and your partner stay cool, even in a heatwave. Plus, it automatically tracks your sleep time, snoring, sleep stages, and HRV, all with high precision. For example, their heart rate tracking is at an incredible 99% accuracy.

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

SHOW NOTES[05:00] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:03] Enter Jim Collins.[06:28] How Jim’s students influenced his entrepreneurial path.[10:45] Why Jim carries a three-timer stopwatch.[12:21] Using a spreadsheet to optimize discipline in service of creativity.[13:42] Ideal minimum creative hours per year.[15:19] Avoiding a life-distorting “funk.”[17:41] Calculating an optimal end point.[19:27] Patterns discovered using Jim’s time-tracking method.[20:23] Three crucial components for living the life Jim wants to lead.[22:18] The bug book and the hedgehog concept.[30:31] Peter Drucker mic-drop lessons.[34:39] Enter Ed Zschau.[34:59] How I convinced Dr. Zschau to let me into his Princeton engineering course.[37:38] Ed’s background in competitive figure skating and the lessons it taught him.[41:45] The origin of Ed’s meticulous attention to detail.[45:31] The benefits of learning by doing through the case method.[49:21] Ed’s definition of entrepreneurship.[50:50] The role of optimism in entrepreneurship and life.[53:30] Ed’s aspirations as a teenager and young adult.[55:32] What drew Ed to Princeton as an aspiring physics philosopher.[58:21] How Ed got into teaching and his belief that career planning is overrated.[1:03:37] How Ed learned to become a good teacher and the influence of extemporaneous speaking.[1:06:53] Lessons from extemporaneous speaking competitions about preparation and adaptation.[1:11:04] Ed’s thoughts on focusing for extended periods versus opening himself to opportunities.[1:13:06] Ed’s decision to run for Congress.[1:17:57] Advantages of committing to a maximum of three terms in the House of Representatives.[1:21:29] Ed’s experience and self-reflection after losing his Senate race.[1:23:40] Ed’s decision process when transitioning from investor to CEO.[1:26:05] Differentiating between high-impact commitments and peer pressure.[1:29:41] Comparing Ed’s parenting style to his teaching style.[1:31:17] Ed’s belief in encouragement over direction and his own upbringing.[1:34:45] The origin of Ed’s goal to live a life that matters.[1:37:05] Influential books and recommendations for aspiring entrepreneurs.[1:42:05] Ed’s current excitement and efforts to make higher education affordable through technology.[1:48:37] The mantra by which Ed lives his life and his childhood nickname.[1:50:57] How Ed brings the sound of music to his endeavors.[1:57:34] Ed’s influence on others to continue his work of changing the world.[1:59:40] Parting thoughts.SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Jim Collins:

Website | Twitter | Facebook

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins | Amazon How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins | Amazon Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen | Amazon Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras | Amazon Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company by James Collins and William C. Lazier | Amazon Thelma and Louise | Prime Video Stanford University Manage Your Time Like Jim Collins | HBR Concepts: The 20-Mile March | Jim Collins A Thousand Hours of Creativity by Jonathan Eastwood | LinkedIn Jim Collins’ Happiness Spreadsheet | Accidentally Retired Operations Research/The Simplex Method | Wikibooks The Hedgehog Concept | Jim Collins Straight from the Hedgehog’s Mouth: Management Guru Jim Collins | The Irish Times Ten Lessons I Learned from Peter Drucker | Jim Collins Drucker Day Keynote with Jim Collins | The Drucker Institute Sierra Nevada College System Industries IBM ELE 491: High-Tech Entrepreneurship | Princeton University Harvard University Caltech University of Nevada, Reno Reader’s Digest StarTek US House of Representatives Brentwood Associates The TECH Interactive University of San Francisco California Council on Science and Technology Omaha Knights | Ice Hockey Wiki 10 Versions of Murphy’s Law for Universal “Truths” | ThoughtCo.“If You Fail to Prepare, You Are Preparing to Fail” | Quote Investigator Case Method Teaching | Stanford University Harvard Business School Stanford Graduate School of Business The McPhee Syllabus | The Millions Kant’s Views on Space and Time | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity: A Simplified Explanation | Space Newton’s Views on Space, Time, and Motion | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Devastating Impact of the 1961 Plane Crash That Wiped Out the Entire U.S. Figure Skating Team | Smithsonian Officer Candidate School (OCS) | US Navy Extemporaneous Speaking: Things to Know | ForCom 113 Extemporaneous Speech Topics | My Speech Class Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s Duel | American Experience, PBS American Electronics Association | NNDB How Silicon Valley Hacked the Economy | The Nation House Committee on Ways and Means | GovTrack 1986 United States Senate Election in California | Wikipedia Zschau Named CEO of Censtor, a Disk Maker | Los Angeles Times Boy Scouts of America The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss | Amazon The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss | Amazon Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson | Amazon Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson | Amazon Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson | Amazon The Wright Brothers by David McCullough | Amazon Building on Bedrock: What Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and Other Great Self-Made Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Building Valuable Companies by Derek Lidow | Amazon The Walmart Museum Income Share Agreements: What Students Should Know Before Signing | Nerdwallet Lambda School Mission Impossible | Prime Video The Steps of the Simplex Algorithm | HEC Montreal My Way by Frank Sinatra | Amazon MusicPEOPLE MENTIONEDBill Lazier Joanne Ernst Jerry Porras George Dantzig Rochelle Myers Peter Drucker Benjamin Franklin John McPhee Immanuel Kant Albert Einstein Isaac Newton Richard Feynman Aaron Burr Alexander Hamilton Jonathan Sachs William A. Steiger Alan Cranston James Wei Thomas Edison Abraham Lincoln The Wright Brothers Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs David McCullough Derek Lidow Sam Walton Doug McMillon Batman Robin

The post Jim Collins and Ed Zschau (#741) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

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Published on May 29, 2024 07:12

May 24, 2024

Greg McKeown and Diana Chapman (#740)

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #355 “Greg McKeown — How to Master Essentialism” and episode #536 “Diana Chapman — How to Get Unstuck, Do “The Work,” Take Radical Responsibility, and Reduce Drama in Your Life.”

Please enjoy!

Bios of guests may be found at tim.blog/combo.

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 .

Brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements; Wealthfront high-yield savings account; and Helix Sleep premium mattresses.

Transcript of the full Greg McKeown episode | Transcript of the full Diana Chapman episode | Transcripts of all episodes

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#740: Greg McKeown and Diana Chapman

This episode is brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate, apigenin, and L-theanine daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.).

Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered.

This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep! Helix was selected as the best overall mattress of 2022 by GQ magazine, Wired, and Apartment Therapy. With Helix, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering 20% off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim.

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

SHOW NOTES[05:26] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:28] Enter Greg McKeown.[06:49] What is non-essential?[07:46] Overcoming the planning fallacy.[13:30] The problem with taking ownership of someone else’s problems.[15:44] How to avoid committing to the unsustainable.[21:26] Three rules.[25:28] The personal quarterly offsite.[33:05] Enter Diana Chapman.[33:22] A transformative gift.[36:56] The Drama Triangle.[43:36] The whole-body yes (or no) and how it can serve us.[46:06] Diana guides an experience to help pay better attention to our whole-body yes (or no).[54:36] Observations made during the exercise and how Diana recommends using this inventory.[1:01:39] Fostering playfulness for those who mute their desire to celebrate.[1:08:28] Diana’s “black belt in practicing candor.”[1:09:37] Diana’s thoughts on loving pressure and how to bring it into a relationship.[1:13:24] Applying loving pressure to people you don’t know well.[1:15:08] Diana’s guidance on introspection leading to perspective shifts; using Byron Katie’s “turnarounds.”[1:17:48] Diana guides me through a turnaround.[1:23:58] A turnaround’s purpose is to identify and embrace alternatives, not invalidate the inspected belief.[1:29:06] The importance of introducing the somatic into the process; suggestions for difficulty with this step.[1:31:47] The role of the witness in this process.[1:33:54] Walking the line.[1:35:40] Welcoming the opportunity to learn from the experience, even if it’s not preferred.[1:37:35] Alternative tools for dysregulation in the moment.[1:39:31] Risks Diana and her husband Matt took to keep their relationship vital; who initiated the first difficult conversation.[1:45:11] How Diana figured out who she needed to be during this time.[1:47:11] Navigating decision points together as a couple.[1:49:42] Examples of commitments from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.[1:53:22] The Mind Jogger app and how Diana uses it with the commitments.[1:55:55] Assessing self-awareness in hiring interviews applied to non-job situations.[1:57:53] Books most gifted.[1:59:35] Parting thoughts.SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Greg McKeown:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown | Amazon Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most by Greg McKeown | Amazon The Greg McKeown Podcast Finding the One Decision That Removes 100 Decisions (or, Why I’m Reading No New Books in 2020) | Tim Ferriss The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss | Amazon The Planning Fallacy Can Derail a Project’s Best Intentions | The Washington Post Why You Start Things You’ll Never Finish | The New York Times Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John Townsend | Amazon The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker | Amazon Quarterly Personal Offsite Meetings | Dennis Kennedy

Connect with Diana Chapman and the Conscious Leadership Group:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp | Amazon Q&A with Diana Chapman on Conscious Leadership | Criteo Hendricks Institute Karpman Drama Triangle | Wikipedia Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss | Amazon Jim Dethmer — How to Shift from Victim Consciousness, Reduce Drama, Practice Candor, Be Fully Alive, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #434 Mind Those Q’s | Think Shift Whole Body Yes | The Conscious Leadership Group Miracle (2004) | Prime Video The Work of Byron Katie Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide | Tim Ferriss Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month | Tim Ferriss Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict by Tsultrim Allione | Amazon Mind Jogger for iOS | LeStro’s Apps How to Assess Self-Awareness in a Hiring Interview | Conscious Leadership Group Blog The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks | Amazon Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks | Amazon The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity by Gay Hendricks | AmazonPEOPLE MENTIONEDHenry Cloud Oprah Winfrey Peter Drucker Dustin Moskovitz Gay Hendricks Katie Hendricks Stephen Karpman Jim Dethmer Byron Katie Matt Chapman

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Published on May 24, 2024 07:56

May 21, 2024

Brené Brown and Edward O. Thorp (#739)

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #409 “Brené Brown — Striving versus Self-Acceptance, Saving Marriages, and More” and episode #596 “Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets — Beating Blackjack and Roulette, Beating the Stock Market, Spotting Bernie Madoff Early, and Knowing When Enough Is Enough.”

Please enjoy!

Bios of guests may be found at tim.blog/combo.

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 .

Brought to you by AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement, LinkedIn Ads marketing platform with 1B+ users, and LMNT electrolyte supplement.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#739: Brené Brown and Edward O. Thorp

This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact.

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

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODESHOW NOTES[06:06] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:09] Enter Brené Brown.[07:30] Changing in a lasting, meaningful way.[08:03] Is self-accepted complacency possible?[10:53] My woo confession about a crux skill.[13:06] Narcissism: the shame-based fear of being ordinary.[14:06] Efficacy isn’t always efficient.[15:48] Pathology as armor that can’t be discarded.[16:28] What are you unwilling to feel?[17:04] Discarding armor that no longer serves us.[21:26] Curiosity as midlife’s superpower.[22:53] There’s trauma for all of us.[23:33] An 80/20 marriage hack.[25:18] Decisions in a family-focused family.[27:04] Parenting from compliance to commitment.[29:31] Enter Edward O. Thorp.[29:54] Edward’s background, and what drew him to apply mathematics to gambling.[37:04] Edward’s first blackjack trip to Vegas, reference materials used, and his meeting with Claude Shannon at MIT.[40:13] Edward and Claude devised a method to beat roulette using the first wearable computer, according to MIT.[42:16] Despite being 89, Edward looks great for his age; he discusses his approach to staying in shape over the years.[50:22] Edward explains how he got into finance and investing, and the people he met along the way.[59:25] Edward shares what convinced him that Warren Buffett would one day be the richest man in the world after their first meeting.[1:03:58] Edward discusses the frameworks he would teach in an investing seminar for modern students, including those without a strong math aptitude.[1:08:52] Edward shares lessons learned from investing that are transferable to other areas of life.[1:11:02] Edward, a long-term thinker at 89, offers advice for those who struggle to think beyond the short-term.[1:15:40] Edward explains how he discovered something suspicious about the Madoff brothers’ business practices 17 years before others caught on.[1:24:17] Exploring mental models of externalities, the tragedy of the commons, and fundamental attribution errors.[1:33:32] Edward recommends reading and listening material for those who want to enact positive change in the world, politically or evolutionarily.[1:38:51] Edward shares which investors, besides Warren Buffett, impress him and why.[1:42:52] Edward discusses how he balanced growing a business with personal life and what led him to wind things down.[1:47:56] Edward defines independence and shares how he spent his time after winding down the investment side of his life.[1:49:30] Edward shares what he’s particularly curious about learning at the moment.[1:51:40] Reflecting on a conversation between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, and other parting thoughts.SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Brené Brown:

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brené Brown What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It) | HBR Narcissism and Other Defenses Against Shame | Psychology Today Rush Brené Brown on Vulnerability and Home Run TED Talks | The Tim Ferriss Show #100 Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach | Amazon Understanding the Significance of Pandora’s Box | ThoughtCo The Midlife Unraveling | Brené Brown Topo Chico Mineral Water | Amazon

Connect with Edward O. Thorp:

Website | Twitter

Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One by Edward O. Thorp | Amazon Beat the Market: A Scientific Stock Market System Edward O. Thorp and Sheen T. Kassouf (PDF) | ResearchGate A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Edward O. Thorp | Amazon University of California How to Play Blackjack | Vegas How To Blackjack Basic Strategy Chart by Edward O. Thorp | Chasing the Frog Kelly Criterion | Investopedia A Brief Journey Inside the IBM 704 | Archival History of Computing at MIT National Academy of Sciences A Favorable Strategy for Twenty-One by Edward O. Thorp | ResearchGate American Mathematical Society The Stockpicker’s Burden, and Other Lessons | Barron’s How a Math Professor Led a Revolution in Las Vegas | RTD How to Play Roulette | Vegas How To 10 of the Best Compound Exercises for Muscle and Strength | Openfit Aerobics Program for Total Well-Being: Exercise, Diet, and Emotional Balance by Kenneth H. Cooper | Amazon Yes, Race Walking Is an Olympic Sport. Here’s How It Works. | Vox New Mexico State University Stock Warrants vs. Stock Options | Investopedia Black-Scholes Model | Investopedia Cboe Global Markets How Warren Buffett Made Berkshire Hathaway a Winner | Investopedia Equity | Investopedia Market Efficiency | Investopedia Risk | Investopedia Preventing the Spread of the Coronavirus | Harvard Health The 4% Rule | Investopedia Cryogenics | Wikipedia Meet the People Who Want to Live — And Keep Their Wealth — Forever | Policy Genius Global Management Consulting | McKinsey & Company Collar | Investopedia The Card Sharp Who Cottoned onto Madoff’s Fraud in 1991 | Forbes Madoff Investment Scandal | Wikipedia Bear Stearns | Wikipedia National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) | Investopedia Why Can’t You Go Faster Than Light? | Fermilab Externality | Investopedia Svante Arrhenius, the Man Who Foresaw Climate Change | OpenMind Tragedy Of The Commons | Investopedia Elon Musk Thinks Every Child Should Learn About These 50 Cognitive Biases | Inc.Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger | Amazon Psychology of Human Misjudgement According to Charlie Munger | LinkedIn Fundamental Attribution Error | Ethics Unwrapped Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman | Amazon Carbon Tax | Wikipedia Moral Foundations of Politics by Ian Shapiro | Coursera The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It by Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro | Amazon Who Lost Biden’s Agenda? Democrats Offer Competing Theories for Failure of ‘Build Back Better’ | NBC News Poll Finds 96 Percent Support Social Security | AARP The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail by Ray Dalio | Amazon Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama | Amazon The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama | Amazon A Quantitative Investment Management Company | Renaissance Institutional The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman | Amazon Leading Global Market Maker | Citadel Securities Princeton Newport Partners | Wikipedia Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood by Marsha Sinetar | Amazon Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Amazon Catch-22 by Joseph Heller | Amazon Kurt Vonnegut on the Secret of Happiness: An Homage to Joseph Heller’s Wisdom | The MarginalianPEOPLE MENTIONEDTara Brach Esther Perel Steve Alley Herbert Hoover Claude Shannon John Selfridge Tom Wolfe Kenneth H. Cooper Sheen T. Kassouf Warren Buffett Fischer Black Myron S. Scholes Nassim Nicholas Taleb Robert C. Merton Jim Cramer Peter Madoff Bernie Madoff Albert Einstein Charlie Munger Svante Arrhenius Garrett Hardin Elon Musk Daniel Kahneman Ian Shapiro Joe Biden Ray Dalio Francis Fukuyama Jim Simons Kenneth C. Griffin Frank Meyer Marsha Sinetar Joseph Heller Kurt Vonnegut

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Published on May 21, 2024 09:32

May 17, 2024

Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. BJ Miller (#738)

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #298 “Dr. Gabor Maté — New Paradigms, Ayahuasca, and Redefining Addiction” and episode #153 “The Man Who Studied 1,000 Deaths to Learn How to Live.”

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 .

Brought to you by Vuori Clothing high-quality performance apparel; Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business; and LinkedIn Ads marketing platform with 1B+ users.

Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#738: Dr. Gabor Maté and BJ Miller, MD

This episode is brought to you by Vuori Clothing! Vuori is a new and fresh perspective on performance apparel, perfect if you are sick and tired of traditional, old workout gear. Everything is designed for maximum comfort and versatility so that you look and feel as good in everyday life as you do working out.

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.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify! Shopify is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required.

Go to shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim .

This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn ads, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact.

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

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

SHOW NOTES:

[05:37] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:57] Enter Gabor Maté.[07:22] Compassionate inquiry and trauma vs. traumatic.[11:06] Self-reconnection resources.[14:40] How Gabor benefits from yoga.[16:27] Gabor’s thoughts on the therapeutic value of psychedelics.[18:14] What’s been revealed by Gabor’s experiences with ayahuasca?[25:32] Essential intention.[26:30] We don’t respond to what happens, but to our perception of what happens.[32:48] Enter BJ Miller.[33:07] What does BJ do?[35:32] What does the first meeting look like for a new patient at the Zen Hospice Project?[37:18] Defining palliative care.[40:54] What happens when a patient dies in Zen Hospice compared to a regular hospital?[45:03] How many deaths has BJ experienced?[45:42] What has observing hundreds of deaths taught BJ about living?[50:39] On keeping a mindfulness or meditation practice.[55:05] About the Dinky (a terrifying story of electrocution).[1:04:29] The miracle of a snowball in the burn ward.[1:07:48] BJ’s experience as an undergraduate student at Princeton.[1:08:46] On the idea of art.[1:14:46] How BJ would support someone who suffered injuries similar to his own.[1:16:57] What helps people most in hospice care?[1:21:22] Why cookies matter.[1:23:12] Thoughts on the use of psychoactive compounds in end-of-life care and treating existential suffering.[1:33:46] BJ’s secret habit that might surprise most people.[1:38:32] Suggested material for an introverted hospice patient.[1:45:04] What comes to mind when BJ hears the word “successful?”[1:48:13] Daily practices for seeing good in people.[1:51:00] How to ride a motorcycle when missing three limbs.[1:55:01] What purchase of $100 or less has most positively affected BJ’s life?[1:56:53] BJ’s billboard.[1:58:24] BJ’s advice to his 30-year-old-self.[1:59:58] What has BJ changed his mind about in the last few years?[2:01:26] BJ’s requests/asks/suggestions of the audience.SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Dr. Gabor Maté:

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté | Amazon In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Maté | Amazon Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg | Amazon Compassionate Inquiry with Dr. Gabor Maté Are We Mislabeling Our Trauma? Why Dr. Gabor Maté Believes We Need to Change the Way We Think about Pain | CBC Trauma Is a ‘Stupid Friend’ That Our Minds & Bodies Don’t Forget: Dr. Gabor Maté | CBC The Wisdom Of Trauma with Dr. Gabor Maté Traumas of Omission | Complex Trauma Resources Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine and Ann Frederick | Amazon Peter Levine on Trauma Healing: A Somatic Approach | Psychotherapy.net Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)Emotional Freedom Techniques | The Tapping Solution Sensory Integration Therapy | Wikipedia Yoga | Wikipedia Sadhguru Opens Vancouver Physician Gabor Maté’s Inner Eye to Benefits of His Yoga Program | Georgia Straight Inner Engineering The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale (Ayahuasca) | The New Yorker The Profound Power of an Amazonian Plant – And the Respect It Demands | The Globe and Mail The Trauma Doctor: Gabor Maté on Happiness, Hope and How to Heal Our Deepest Wounds | The Guardian Take the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Quiz — and Learn What It Does and Doesn’t Mean | NPR You Can’t Always Control What Happens, But You Can Control How You React To It | Collective World

Connect with BJ Miller:

Website | LinkedIn | Twitter

BJ Miller ’93: Wounded Healer | Princeton Alumni Weekly BJ Miller: What Really Matters at the End of Life | TED Talk Design Thinking Sprints for Social Impact | OpenIDEO Challenges Adam Gazzaley: The Maverick of Brain Optimization | The Tim Ferriss Show #83 Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach | Amazon Princeton Dinky | NJ Transit 7 Tips for City Stargazing from Chicago’s Park Astronomer | The Trust for Public Land The Trip Treatment | The New Yorker A Bridge to the Relinquished Parts of Self and Society | The RiverStyx Foundation Heffter Research Institute | Wikipedia Our Vision Is a World of Mental Well-Being | COMPASS Pathways Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)Kurt Vonnegut Once Told a Story About Buying One Envelope at a Time | Snopes Waiting For Guffman | Prime Video Kentucky Fried Movie | Prime Video Grizzly Man | Prime Video Upgrade Your Resolutions | Scuderia West Roots in the Past, Stakes in the Future | Joseph Swan Winery Symptom Management Service | UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center Be an Advocate | Hospice Action NetworkPEOPLE MENTIONEDPeter Levine Sadhguru A.H. Almaas Gautama Buddha Adam Gazzaley Justin Burke Michael Rabow Mark Rothko Jackson Pollock Kurt Vonnegut Ludwig van Beethoven Oprah Winfrey Deepak Chopra Mert Lawwill

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Published on May 17, 2024 09:02

May 16, 2024

Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas (#737)

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #97 “Naval Ravikant — The Person I Call Most for Startup Advice” and episode #341 ” Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life. “

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 .

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

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODESHOW NOTES[04:34] Notes about this supercombo format.[05:53] Enter Naval Ravikant.[06:05] On uncompromising honesty.[08:05] What Naval looks for when deciding to invest in a founder.[11:03] Recommended reading from outside the startup world.[18:38] Who Naval considers successful.[21:02] Cultivating non-judgmental awareness.[26:08] How to replace bad habits with good habits.[29:31] Naval’s advice for his younger self.[32:01] Naval’s billboard.[35:46] Enter Nick Kokonas.[36:05] Is pressure Nick’s default setting, or are perceived risks an illusion?[36:55] How do behavioral economics and Richard Thaler influence Nick’s approach?[41:38] Nick’s transition from philosophy to finance; was philosophy an asset?[42:43] Why Nick’s professor gave him shorter assignments than classmates.[44:57] Nick’s introduction to trading; dumbing down academics for clerk job.[46:42] Why philosophy majors often become traders.[47:19] Why Nick is glad he didn’t pursue an MBA in 1992.[48:41] Why Nick thinks his professor singled him out from his peers.[52:52] Recommended books for aspiring entrepreneurs without philosophy background.[57:31] Did being a Merc clerk meet Nick’s expectations?[1:00:02] How Nick followed his father’s entrepreneurial model in trading.[1:04:38] Why Nick left his mentor after a year to start his own company.[1:05:41] How Nick and employees trained to quicken mental agility for trading.[1:08:17] The moment Nick realized he could thrive in trading.[1:09:02] Recommended resources for becoming a better investor.[1:11:22] Nick seeks out “high, small hoops” for investment risks.[1:14:00] Do businesses fail due to difficult model or lack of due diligence?[1:16:55] When and why Nick decided to enter the restaurant business.[1:18:26] The dinner leading to Nick and Grant Achatz’s partnership.[1:27:52] Why Nick chose to open a restaurant out of many risky options.[1:30:33] How Nick spots talent early that others notice late.[1:34:07] Questioning restaurant conventions like candles and white tablecloths.[1:37:09] A now-famous chef was Alinea’s first customer.[1:38:03] Nick and Grant wouldn’t let designers override their ideas.[1:38:47] How Nick contributed effectively as a restaurant industry newcomer.[1:14:19] Why Nick was “horrified” when Alinea won Best Restaurant in 2006.[1:43:50] Grant’s cancer diagnosis; writing a book and revolutionizing reservations.[1:45:28] Traditional restaurant reservation systems and Nick’s improvements.[1:57:17] Bickering at press dinner; avoiding Next becoming “Disneyland of cuisine.”[2:02:14] Reservation software problems; variable pricing based on day of week.[2:05:48] The moment Nick realized “This is the best thing I’ve ever built.”[2:07:41] Why the reservation system’s rewards were worth the asymmetric risks.[2:10:16] Using Marimekko charts to visualize restaurant and sponsorship data.[2:16:57] The next industry Nick wants to disrupt: truffles.[2:18:55] Illuminating black boxes.[2:26:24] Self-selection of job roles; how Nick’s hiring process has changed.[2:32:01] Systems Nick uses to cope with a lot of email.[2:37:43] Importance of engaging on social media, even if unable to respond to all.[2:39:35] What “puzzle” filters and mini-hurdles in correspondence accomplish.[2:40:36] Comparing similarities between the music and publishing industries.[2:49:55] The agency problem as another black box.[2:54:58] The Hembergers, The Alinea Project, and the upcoming independent Aviary Book.[3:01:42] A brief discussion about cocktails.[3:05:42] Books Nick has gifted most and how he personalizes gifts.[3:08:10] Nick’s billboard.[3:09:49] Parting thoughts.SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Naval Ravikant:

Naval Podcast | AngelList | Website | Twitter

Lying by Sam Harris | Amazon Meditations by Marcus Aurelius | Amazon The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti by Jiddu Krishnamurti | Amazon Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee | Amazon The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin | Amazon What Is Non-Judgmental Awareness, Anyway? | HuffPost Life Crumb | Prime Video Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse | Amazon The Lion of Olympic Weightlifting, 62-Year-Old Jerzy Gregorek (Also Featuring: Naval Ravikant) | The Tim Ferriss Show #228 The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg | Amazon Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charlie Munger | Amazon

Connect with Nick Kokonas:

The Alinea Group | Tock | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

The Aviary Cocktail Book by Nick Kokonas, Allen Hemberger, and Grant Achatz | Amazon Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas | Amazon The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss | Amazon The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis | Amazon Wall Street | Prime Video How to Turn Failure into Success | The Tim Ferriss Show #256 Colgate University A River Runs Through It | Prime Video Chicago Mercantile Exchange | Wikipedia Chicago Research and Trading Group | Amazon The Socratic Method | The University of Chicago Law School The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell | Amazon Bertrand Russell on Ludwig Wittgenstein | YouTube The Nature of Things by Lucretius | Amazon The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt | Amazon MIT OpenCourseWare | Free Online Course Materials Lord of the Flies by William Golding |Amazon Hand Signal Galleries | Trading Pit History First Options Option Theory | Investopedia The Wolf Of Wall Street | Prime Video Chicago Board of Trade | Wikipedia 20 Years Already? Alan Greenspan and the ‘Irrational Exuberance’ Flop | MarketWatch Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) | Wikipedia Asymmetrical Risk/Reward | Asymmetry Observations Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Amazon The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Amazon “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance?” (Clip) | Dumb and Dumber Long Lost Lamented Restaurants Power Hour: Trio | Eater Chicago Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure by Joseph Wechsberg | Amazon The Great History of Fernand Point and La Pyramide | Vienne Condrieu Tourisme eGullet Forums Alinea Crucial Detail Bocuse d’Or Chef’s Table with Grant (Volume 2, Episode 1) | Netflix The Aviary Husk Sean Brock’s Opening Day Review of Alinea | eGullet Chartres Cathedral Alinea — The Business Plan | eGullet The French Laundry Alinea is the Best Restaurant in Chicago | Chicago Magazine A Man of Taste: A Chef with Cancer Fights to Save His Tongue | The New Yorker Next Dinner: The Toughest Ticket in Town | GQ Next: Paris 1906 | A Life Worth Eating When Paris Flooded, 1910 | Rare Historical Photos OpenTable Rackspace Marimekko Chart — A Complete Guide | FusionCharts How to Make a Marimekko Chart (Video) | MekkoGraphics Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger | Amazon The Boring Company US Commodity Futures Trading Commission War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy | Amazon About the Best Sellers | The New York Times Weta Workshop Pixar Industrial Light and Magic The Alinea Project Peychaud’s BittersPEOPLE MENTIONEDSam Harris Marcus Aurelius Jiddu Krishnamurti Bruce Lee Charles Darwin Elon Musk Steve Jobs Marc Andreessen Satoshi Nakamoto Buddha R. Crumb Hermann Hesse Jerzy Gregorek Charlie Munger Warren Buffett Grant Achatz Richard Thaler Jerome Balmuth Bertrand Russell Ludwig Wittgenstein Friedrich Nietzsche Rene Descartes Lucretius Dagmara Kokonas Jim Hanson Nassim Taleb Howard Marks Jim Carrey Captain America Gordon Ramsay Martin Kastner Thomas Keller Daniel Boulud Sean Brock Ruth Reichl Auguste Escoffier Stephen Bernacki Jason Fried Brian Fitzpatrick Aaron Wehner Allen Hemberger Sarah Hemberger Eric Jeffus

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Published on May 16, 2024 06:56

May 9, 2024

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

Photo by Diana Polekhina

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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Listen onApple Podcasts [image error]Listen onSpotify [image error]Listen onOvercast#736: 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)

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)

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“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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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.

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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

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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