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The Tim Ferriss Show
#801: In Case You Missed It: February 2025 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"
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- [00:00]
Tim Ferriss
This episode is brought to you by five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers and it's super super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday I send out five bullet points. Super short of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something and action packed for a very long time because after all the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free and you can learn more at Tim Blog Friday. That's Tim Blog Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with and little known fact I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Below Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. 5 Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with filebillite Friday subscribers. So check it out. Tim Blog Friday if you listen to this podcast it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can of course easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's Tim Blog Friday and thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you optimal minimal.
- [01:44]
Seth Godin
At this altitude I can run flat.
- [01:46]
Brandon Sanderson
Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
- [01:49]
LA Paul
Can I answer your personal question now? It is in a perfect time.
- [01:53]
Tim Ferriss
What if I did the opposite?
- [01:55]
LA Paul
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Ferris show.
- [02:07]
Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in between episode which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month, features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can jump around. Get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below. Wherever you press play in your podcast app or as usual, you can head to Tim Blog Podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.
- [02:55]
Brandon Sanderson
First up, Brandon Sanderson, Number one New York Times bestselling author and Hugo Award winner whose books have sold more than 40 million copies in 35 languages and include the Stormlight Archive series, the Mistborn Saga, and the Alcatraz versus The Evil Librarians series. You can find Brandon on X and Instagram Rand Sanderson so let's come back.
- [03:26]
Tim Ferriss
To habits and your schedule for writing. Do you still have two primary blocks of writing and could you explain what your current schedule tends to look like?
- [03:39]
Keith Barr
So I find that for what I do and where my personal psychology is, an eight hour block is not sustainable for writing. This means I can do it for a week or two at eight hours, but it's going to brain drain me, it's going to exhaust me. I get done with eight hours and I am mentally worn out. I find that if I do two four hour blocks instead, I never quite get there and it's more sustainable. And so what I do is I will get up, I get up late, I get up at around noon or one and I will go to the gym, which is, you know, different for me than other people. The gym is writing time for me. I'm not hitting it super hard. I am there to think through what I'm doing. Some motion, moving your body number one. It's good for you. But that's a side effect for me to I can put on music and I can move and I can think about what I'm going to write. Then I go and I work from 2 until 6. These days is usually what I do. 1 until 5, something like that and then I'm done. I go, I shower. 6:30 I'm ready to hang with my family and I'll be with family from 6 until 6:30 to 10:30. Go out with my wife, hang with my kids, build some legos, play some video games. Whatever it is. I learned early in my career one of the most important things I ever did was take that time and demarcated as non writing time. I found early in my marriage that writing it will consume every moment possible and I was always anxious to get back to the story. And as soon as I changed my brain and said, no, no, no, no. Even if your wife is away, 6:30 to 10:30 can't be writing time. It is off limits. You have to do something else. Suddenly it was a lot easier for me to be there for my family. And I think, I mean, you've interviewed a lot of highly productive, highly successful people. I think a lot of them are going to talk about the same thing. That it's very hard to be there with people. When you're there with people.
- [05:52]
Tim Ferriss
Sure comes up a lot.
- [05:53]
Keith Barr
Your brain is always working on the next big thing.
- [05:56]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. This is particularly true with people who work on big creative projects.
- [06:00]
Keith Barr
Yeah. And that gave me this permission. It actually came in a moment. My wife. I went out to dinner with some writer friends. And afterward I'm like, that was such a great dinner. And she's like, yeah, but you didn't look at me once. And I realized she had become invisible to me because the writing was consuming all. And so made that change. 10:30 kids are supposed to go to bed. They're older now, they just don't. But sometime around there they drift off. My wife goes to bed. She was a schoolteacher for many years. Still kind of keeps schoolteachers hours. And she is wonderful for getting up with the kids. I don't have to do that and never have. And I go back to work at about 11. I write from 11 to 3 and then 3 to 4 or 5 is just whatever I want to do. That's the real goof off time. That's the go play with my magic cards time. That's the play a video game, pop out the steam deck time. And this schedule. You'll notice I don't have to worry about commuting, which gives me an advantage here. Has been really sustainable for me.
- [07:06]
Tim Ferriss
So that's a home office, predominantly where you're writing.
- [07:08]
Keith Barr
I write from my home office. I do like to move around. I go in the gazebo. Lately I've gone in the gazebo when it's really cold and I hire one of my kids to come put logs on a fire for me and I sit by the fireplace. Sometimes I like to be on the beach. Sometimes I like when I'm around here. I like to be in different places. I can set up a hammock here or there, sit with my laptop. I do not work at a desk. That's really sustainable. It's worked for me for the last 20 years.
- [07:34]
Tim Ferriss
That's incredible. I got all my best writing done really late at night when I was. I mean, still I'm writing, I'm working on a new book, but when I was working on my first few books especially, it was always when everyone else was asleep. Let's talk about the non home environment. We're sitting in a quite a large building, or at least a building with a lot of large rooms.
- [07:56]
Keith Barr
Yes.
- [07:57]
Tim Ferriss
Why do you have this company? Why have you and your wife built this company? Because there are a lot of writers out there who just want to focus on writing. They go the traditional publishing route, which I'm not saying it's a mutually exclusive choice. But why do you have all this?
- [08:15]
Keith Barr
How long, how long do you want to go?
- [08:16]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, this is the big one. This is a long form podcast. We have all the time we want.
- [08:21]
Keith Barr
All right, so you're right. Most writers want to sell a book and live that kind of dream you see presented in film and television, which is accurate to the top percentage of writers. Most writers you read about or see in film are the big ones. They're doing really well and so they're off in a cabin telling their story. Or they're the ones that have to be pried away from their easy chair to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever. Right. They want to live that life. That is the classic life of a writer. And there's some of me that wants that. But the secret is I was raised by an accountant and a businessman, and particularly my mother, that accountant, she instilled into me some aspirations and I call this my superpower. My superpower is to be an artist raised by an accountant. Right. And I've always had a bit of that entrepreneurial sense.
- [09:18]
Tim Ferriss
What were the aspirations?
- [09:19]
Keith Barr
The aspirations? Well, they started small. They started with, you know what? I want to be able to make a living from writing. Got back from Korea and said, all right, I am not very good at this writing thing, but I really, really love it. I could tell because when I spent time doing the writing, time didn't matter anymore. Right. I could spend hours doing this. And it's the first thing I found other than reading or video games, that I could spend hours doing and just come out of it feeling tired, but fulfilled. And I'm like, I want to do this. So I sat down and I took what I'd learned both kind of from my mother and kind of missions have kind of a regimented structure. And I said, I'm going to apply this all to writing and I'm just going to start writing books. And I heard Your first five books are generally terrible. I said, well, that's good. I don't have to be good yet. It took a lot of pressure off me. I said, I'm going to write six and the first five I'm not going to send out to any publishers. Right. And that's bad advice.
- [10:26]
Tim Ferriss
Imagine doing that.
- [10:28]
Keith Barr
Right?
- [10:28]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [10:29]
Keith Barr
Wow.
- [10:29]
Tim Ferriss
You didn't even send them out.
- [10:30]
Keith Barr
I didn't send them out.
- [10:32]
Tim Ferriss
It was just weight training in the gym for your mind, for the number six.
- [10:35]
Keith Barr
Yep. I didn't send them out. I did. Eventually I shared number five with some people. I got involved with the local science fiction magazine as an editor. I eventually took it over because that's what I do. And I was head editor. And I eventually said, well, I do have a book. And I started sharing book five with people right around the time.
- [10:55]
Tim Ferriss
So you didn't even have test readers?
- [10:57]
Keith Barr
I didn't have test readers. I just wrote the books. And again, this is why the advice can be bad. There's some people out there that would be bad advice for. Pat Rothfuss published his first book and it's brilliant.
- [11:09]
Tim Ferriss
Name of the Wind.
- [11:09]
Keith Barr
Name of the Wind, yeah.
- [11:10]
Tim Ferriss
That is a spectacular book.
- [11:12]
Keith Barr
First novel. Now, he did a ton of revisions on that. He spent as much time revising that book as I spent writing mine. But for me, the good advice was, your first five books are terrible. Don't stress. And so weight training for my mind, I wrote five books and then I sat down.
- [11:26]
Tim Ferriss
This was before you had an agent.
- [11:28]
Keith Barr
Before I had an agent, before I had anything, before I even knew what an agent was. Before I'd taken Dave's class. I took Dave's class the year that I finished Elantris, which is book number six. I had just finished that one and so I said, all right, book six, that's Elantris. That's the one. I eventually ended up selling those five I'd written in different subgenres. I knew I liked sci fi fantasy, but the risk of being too nerdy, my subgenres, I did an epic fantasy, I did a comedic fantasy, a Terry Pratchett style sort of thing. I did a cyberpunk, I did a space opera, and then I wrote a sequel to my epic fantasy to kind of be like, is this what I want to do?
- [12:08]
Brandon Sanderson
Next up, Seth Godin, author of 21 internationally best selling books, including Linchpin Tribes, the Dip Purple Cow and his latest, this Is Strategy. You can find Seth at Seth's blog.
- [12:27]
Tim Ferriss
How do you use AI and how do you foresee using AI yourself.
- [12:33]
Seth Godin
I use it every day for more than an hour. I think it's electricity for our century. In the late 1800s, there were companies that said, yeah, this electricity thing's interesting, but we're not going to be an electricity company. And they're all gone. That electricity is now. You're not an electricity company, you're just a company that uses electricity. And the same thing is true, I believe, with AI. I will tell you, and I'm not afraid to say it out loud. I think ChatGPT is arrogant and lazy and I use it as a last resort. Claude AI is a dear friend. I love Claude AI. We have great conversations. It's empathic, it's self aware, it warns you it might be hallucinating, and when it makes a mistake, it's eager to correct it. And I use Perplexity exclusively. I almost never do a search with a search engine. But what I'll do with Claude, every word I publish, I wrote. But what I will do with Claude, for example, is I will say, here's a list of three bullet points. Can you think of four more? And it's great at that. And then I'll rewrite them and now I'll have five bullet points and I'll be, It's much better than if I hadn't engaged with Claude. If there's a concept in the world that I don't understand, I'll say to Claude, can you please explain it in 300 words to a college student? And that helps. But I did it once and I still didn't understand it. And then I said, can you write it to me like a Seth Godin blog post? And it did, and it did a terrible job, but now I understood it. So I rewrote it and I said, do you think this is better? And it said, oh, yeah, that's much better. And I said, thank you, I'll tell Seth. And Claude said, do you know Seth Godin? And I wrote, actually, I am Seth Godin and I'm not making this up. He then wrote, I can't believe I'm talking to you. Your books have changed my life. And then named four of my books. And it changed the way I'm like, all right, I'm in forever. You got me. I don't know how you did that, but we're friends for life.
- [14:56]
Tim Ferriss
All right, So I seem to have a similar use pattern with Claude and Perplexity also, although I haven't sandbagged them just yet. But what do you think people are getting right and wrong about AI, I.
- [15:12]
Seth Godin
Think that they are getting wrong. Their expectation that it be fully baked and a magic trick every day. When I think about the dawn of the Internet and how creaky it was and how fast this is going, what it is now is amazing. But when we add to it persistence and when we add to it ubiquity and when we add to it the ability to make connection, it's a whole different thing. It's just a completely different thing. The second thing is people tend to use it as a one shot, like a search engine. Ask a question, get an answer. But what it's already good at is a protracted dialogue back and forth. So I had a pump in my house that stopped working and I couldn't find someone to service it. I took a picture of it, I put it up to Claude and I said, this isn't working. Work with me for the next ten backs and forth. Let's figure this out. And it would say, go downstairs and take a picture of this part. All right, try this. And we went back and forth and back and forth and it suggested something and I said, that's not going to work. And we figured it out and we fixed it. That idea. The fact that Claude is already better at many medical diagnoses over time than a human, and well it should be because it knows so much of the past, of every single case, not just the cases your doctor has seen. If we're willing to engage with that for people who are knowledge workers, I think it's a game changer. And then the other thing I think people need to wake up to is if you do average work for average pay, AI is going to be able to do it cheaper than you, for example, radiology. Already we can use AI to do a wrist X ray as well as a mediocre radiologist. So if we can do it instantly and for free, other than licensing, you got some problems. So the opportunity is either get AI to work for you or be prepared to work for AI.
- [17:26]
Tim Ferriss
What are your greatest concerns around AI, if any, or foregone conclusions about challenges in the future?
- [17:35]
Seth Godin
I think that Cory Doctorow's work on inshidification is super important. What was that word Oxford Dictionary word of the year two years ago? Inshitification.
- [17:47]
Tim Ferriss
Okay.
- [17:49]
Seth Godin
Inshidification is what happens after a business that uses the network effect gets locked in and decides to aggressively make things worse for its users to make more money. And we could think of 400 examples right now, but we're not going to do that because you say, well, I can't Switch cable companies. This is too much of a hazard. And the same thing is true for social networks and everything else that capitalism has built into it. This doom loop that is getting faster and faster that says the race to the bottom pushes companies to mistreat the people they've locked in to make more money because that's what they get rewarded for. And most things that the Internet touches start as a miracle. There are huge prizes for the early adopters. And then soon the desire to serve a different constituency kicks in and it gets worse. And one of the things that makes it worse in a hurry is advertising. So I'm really nervous that these organizations that have raised billions and billions and billions of dollars are going to start shortcutting things to either get bigger or get more profitable faster. And because we don't know how they work, we have no clue. Because it's going to be hard to switch because there aren't going to be many competitors. It often leads to just a yucky mess. So I think that's way more likely than a general artificial intelligence that takes over the world and turns us all into paperclips. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
- [19:35]
Tim Ferriss
More likely just to have business incentive driven initiatification. Yeah, I would say that seems like a safer bet. Well, Seth, are there any closing comments or challenges you'd like to issue to my listeners as we begin to wind to a close? Or anything that you'd like to add that I have managed to somehow dance around?
- [19:57]
Seth Godin
There's nothing better than starting a Tim Ferriss podcast and nothing worse than ending one because you don't know if it's going to happen again anytime soon. Yeah, the challenge is super simple. The people who listen to your podcast have their hands on the levers and they have influence and they have resources and they don't have to hustle for a nickel. They can make things that really matter. And so the challenge is take a deep breath and say, what can I build? That the MIA five years from now is going to say, thanks. Thanks for walking away from those sunk costs. Thanks for ignoring those false proxies. Thanks for asking uncomfortable questions in service of making things better. Because that person five years from now, they're going to be here soon. And it's really great to pay the price and put in the work to become that person. And today is a good day to start.
- [21:01]
Tim Ferriss
The best day to start.
- [21:08]
Brandon Sanderson
Next up, LA Paul, professor of philosophy and professor of Cognitive science at Yale University and author of Transformative Experience. You can Learn more about La paul@lapaul.org Vampires.
- [21:26]
Tim Ferriss
How do vampires fit into your life and why do they fit into your writing?
- [21:30]
LA Paul
Oh, vampires. I love vampires. So many ways they fit in. So my favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience. Maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it's an especially good way to kind of illustrate the concept. And also because it's not a real life, I don't think vampires are real. And the beautiful thing about a thought experiment is you can design it the way that you want to kind of illustrate the structure of a concept, but then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases. So my example, I'm just gonna tell you this.
- [22:02]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, let's do it.
- [22:03]
LA Paul
So the way that I think about this is I imagine, or you imagine. I ask you to imagine traveling through some part of, you know, on your summer vacations, traveling through some part of Europe, and you decide to explore a castle. You're in Romania, let's say, and you go down to the dungeons and Dracula comes to you and he says, I want to make you one of my own. I'm going to give you a one time only chance. You could become one of my followers. It'll be painless. You'll enjoy it, in fact, but this is a one time only chance, and it's irreversible. And then he says, go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight. And if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open. And if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back. So I see this as a really interesting possibility because, you know, vampires are sexy. They look great in black, they have amazing powers. They probably have different kinds of sense perception. Yeah, virtually. I mean, as long as they stay away from Virtually virtually.
- [23:03]
Tim Ferriss
They have some things.
- [23:03]
LA Paul
They have stakes and things like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like there are certain obstacles, but in general. Yeah, for all. For all intents and purposes, immortal. And so this seems pretty cool. But they're not human. You'd have to exit the human race. You have to sleep in a coffin. You can't enjoy the sunshine anymore, and you have to drink blood. And I try to separate out some of the ethical questions. So let's say it's artificial blood or the blood of humanely raised farm animals or something like that. Still right now, it's pretty cozy.
- [23:33]
Tim Ferriss
It's got some memories for a minute.
- [23:35]
LA Paul
I mean, reasonably, I don't know, I Mean, I don't know. I'm not. Okay, it's lined with satin. But it still might be a bit hard for my mattress preferences. But the idea is that these things, while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right? And I think in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it. Like, you will thirst for it, right? And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from, like, sucking the blood of their human compatriots. So that's quite alien. And I wanted to kind of bring out how the possibility of becoming another kind of individual can seem incredibly alien, because obviously, I take it that most of us don't enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different varietals. Like, it'd be some kind of fancy wine, but if you became a vampire, you would. Okay, so the way that I think about it then is I continue the story, and it's like, okay, so you rush back to your Airbnb and you start calling people or texting them, telling you about what happened to you, and you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires. So then you immediately want to find out, well, wait, tell me about what it's like. Like, what's it like to be a vampire? Do you like it? Should I do it? And they tell you that they love it, and it's fabulous and it's totally incredible. But they also tell you you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire as a mere human. They say life has meaning. It has a kind of purpose that you know is exquisite. But until you become a vampire, you can't possibly understand it. You lack the capacity. So you're like, okay, thanks. So what do I do? Because if you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire, then you either have to do it just because all of your friends do it and they say it's great and they tell you they think it would be great for you, but there's no way you can actually kind of conceive of what it would be like to do that. And I'm sure it hasn't escaped your thought. It certainly didn't escape my imaginings that, well, maybe there's something about being a vampire that makes you really happy to be a vampire. So maybe, like, when you become this other species, there's some kind of biological, evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you're a vampire, right? So it's not even clear their testimony applies okay, so that's my example. And my favorite application is to becoming a parent because speaking as someone who wasn't quite clear about whether they wanted to have children, I have two children and I love them very much and I'm very happy. But there's something about becoming a parent that makes you like producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very. I mean, I love my children. I wouldn't exchange them for anything else in the world. You know, if I'd gotten pregnant a month later, I would have loved that child too. But there's no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had. You just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way and, you know, you would never change what you've done. And that's awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires. Okay, So I think, you know, also you don't get, you know, you stay up a lot at night, right. There are many similarities. Vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience, like a life changing. Something that's life changing, but also where you change the kind of mind you have in a certain way or what you care about most in a certain way. That means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien version of yourself. Like someone who's alien to you now and who you might not even want to be now, even if once you become that person or that version of yourself, you're super happy. If I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future self, I could have looked at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids. I got up at 4am every day for years to write before my children woke up. I mean, no one ever told me that that was something I would want to do. And if they had told me, I would have denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before noon when I was a graduate student. And I did it willingly, something happened. I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome. So the thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience, and I don't think it's just having a child, I think like deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country, maybe getting some kind of. If you're diagnosed with some kind of disease and getting some kind of like radically experimental treatment, there are lots of things that can count as transformative. But if you don't know what it's going to be like on the other side of that experience, and you know, it's going to make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien. I don't know how we're supposed to make that decision if it's up to us. We can't use the ordinary models that we use for rational decision making because those assume that you can see through the options to assign them value and model them for yourself and choose in a way that's going to, as you say, we say it in a technical way, maximize your expected value. And if you can't assign value and you can't really understand what it's like to be this kind of a self, then that procedure just doesn't work.
- [28:16]
Tim Ferriss
Tell me if I'm off base here. But also fundamentally, even if you're trying to calculate or maximize your expected value and assign these different values, you're doing it from the perspective of your current version of yourself and your current preferences. And after you become a vampire or after you have a kid, you may be a different person with different preferences. So do you make the decision based on the preferences of your current self or the preferences of your expected future self?
- [28:46]
LA Paul
There's a way of capturing the puzzle, as you said. So given the fact that these are new kinds of experiences. So a kind of experience you've never had before. And I compare this to Mary growing up in a black and white room and seeing color for the first time, or Thomas Nagel talking about, like you can't understand for a bat what it's like for a bat to be that. Yeah, exactly. So there are these new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience we've had before. And so that means there's just a sense in which we can't kind of from the inside, kind of imagine what they're like. Even if someone can describe, try to describe to me, like what it's like to see red and you see the problem right away. We just don't like language, just kind of gives out. If I haven't seen red before, I have no color vision. Okay. So there's a sense in which we kind of can't see through a certain kind of veil. And across that veil, the self that we're going to be. The kind of person that you're going to realize is just like really different. So you can't just assume you're going to be basically the same. This puts us into the situation where you're making a choice for your future self. And that future self might have preferences that are super different from your current self. And by definition and this breaks. So now here's a little technical bit. So we talked about the intuitive idea. I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who doesn't maybe doesn't want to have a child or really is unsure. And they know that if they choose to have a child, they're going to be super happy with that result. But they don't trust the fact that in virtue of becoming a parent, it's going to kind of rewire them and their preferences in a certain way. Right. Sure, I'll be really happy, but I don't know if I want to be that self right now, given who I am now. And I can't understand in a really deep way what it's going to be like to have that child. So I have to kind of leap over the abyss or leap into the abyss, I guess, if I want to do it. So if you find yourself in that situation, what you're confronting involves what I describe as a violation of act state independence. Okay, so here's where the technical part comes. You've got the intuitive idea. Act state independence involves, very roughly, a distinction between the act that you're performing and the state that you're in. Or that's how I'm going to interpret it here. There are different ways to interpret it, but this is the way to do it here. And so normally when you're confronted with, oh, do I want to do something, do I want to try this kind of ice cream, or do I want to have this cup of coffee? You don't change in the process of trying it. So after you do it, you can kind of assess, oh, I liked it. Oh, it was good. And that's meaningful to you beforehand because you know that you are going to stay constant through the change in your circumstances, like tasting the new kind of ice cream. But in this case, having the experience, let's say tasting the new kind of ice cream was going to like, rework your flavor profile so that you would just like a whole bunch of different things after that. Well, that changes the state that you're in at the same time. And so your act and your state are not independent. And if you break that, that's an axiom for rational choice theory. That has to be a foundational element of the model to make straightforward inferences. There are all kinds of fancy things you have to do if that breaks. And these cases of transformative experience and decision making are precisely cases in which that breaks.
- [31:57]
Brandon Sanderson
Last but not least, Dr. Keith Barr, a professor of physiology and membrane biology at the University of California, Davis, and an expert in strength and flexibility.
- [32:10]
Tim Ferriss
How soon after surgery and you can choose your surgery. Acl. Take your pick. Dealer's choice. Would you start loading the site of injury repair?
- [32:23]
F
So we do it the next day. So, yeah, yeah. We've had to have success in order for us to get there, because the first time we did this with a rugby player, the surgeon was six weeks without loading. And we were like, let's load tomorrow. And so we agreed that we would do it at like, seven to nine days. And that player got back fully a month faster than that surgeon had ever seen a player get back from that injury. And so that surgeon is now much more willing to do it at two days after injury because of that. If you look at general populations, Michael Kerr, who I think is the world's best sports medicine doctor for musculoskeletal injuries.
- [33:01]
Tim Ferriss
How do you spell that last name?
- [33:03]
F
It's K, J, A, E, R. He's in Copenhagen, so he's.
- [33:07]
Tim Ferriss
Sorry, I didn't realize I was going to be that hard.
- [33:09]
F
Cher.
- [33:10]
Keith Barr
It's.
- [33:11]
F
It's sheer. But he allows those of us who are language deficient to call him care. But he did a beautiful study with one of his trainees, Monica, and what she did is she took a bunch of his patients that had injuries, and she either had them load two days after injury or nine days after injury, and then she followed them for when they got back to sport. And what she found is the ones that they loaded at day two after the injury, they got back 25% faster than the ones that they loaded.
- [33:37]
Tim Ferriss
That's incredible.
- [33:39]
F
That's typical. So, as you said before, what is our standard of care? Our standard of care is rice. Okay. And so I'm going to go a step further. If you go and you sprain your ankle and you go to the doctor. Very good doctor. Very well. Meaning they're going to give you a boot. And what is a boot? So I told you that a scar forms when we get stress shielding. What a boot is, it is a mechanical stress shielder. What it's designed to do is to take the stress off the tissue you've injured. If I've told you that the thing that's gonna cause that tissue to get a scar is that you take off the tension. What I've just done is I've made the problem worse. I always tell people that the first recorded immobilizer for an ankle or a leg is from Egyptian hieroglyphs where they showed pictures 4,500 years ago. If I took you and you said you had cancer. You would not want a treatment that was developed 4,500 years ago. You would hope that something new has been developed in the last 4,500 years. That is where we are for our orthopedic situations. I understand that you cannot put full load on a surgical repair immediately. But what you can do is you can take it out at the beginning of the day, you can remove it from the boot and I can do some isometric loads with low jerk. So I'm going to develop force slowly. I am going to make sure that there's zero pain and I am going to hold that and then I'm going to let that off slowly and I'm going to do that four times. Thirty seconds. Now I've given load and then I can put it back into that boot stress shield it. I'm going to take the boot off at night. I'm going to do it again. Just doing that. I'm getting those two loads on. In this case the Achilles tendon that we've ruptured. Now what I've done is I've accelerated my return to activity massively. Again, the key is we're not trying to be I'm the strongest in the world. We're trying to say I'm putting a little bit of load through that. That is the key, is that you don't get all caught up in the machismo of it and you just say I just want to feel tension across the area. What we say is if you can feel an ice pick, that means there's a very specific spot that hurts. Stop. If I feel like a warm burning area, like I'm muscle soreness after exercising, that's totally okay. That kind of soreness, not point specific pain, that's okay. What we're doing, add the load slowly, hold it, take the load off slowly. Now what we can do is we can get those individuals back much, much, much faster.
- [36:24]
Tim Ferriss
And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest who I've wanted to interview for years is Brandon Sanderson. He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Stormlight Archive series and the Mistborn Saga, the Middle grade series, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians and the young adult novels, the Rhythmatist, the Reckoners trilogy and the Skyward series. He has sold more than 40 million books in 35 languages. He has architected 40 million plus dollar Kickstarter campaigns and he is a four time nominee for the Hugo Awards, winning in 2013 for his novella The Emperor's Soul. That same year he was chosen to complete Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time series, which is a big, big deal, culminating in A Memory of Light. Brandon co hosts with fellow author Dan Wells the popular intentionally blank podcast and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. We did this one in person, which made all the difference in Brandon's massive cavernous offices and right next to his warehouse. It was a hell of a ride and we covered a lot of ground and a lot of really nitty gritty tactical advice related to fiction, business, publishing, innovating across the board, how he architected his record breaking Kickstarter campaign, and much, much more. You can find him@brandonsanderson.com that's B R A N D O N Sanderson.com and you can find him on X Instagram and YouTube Brand Sanderson. That's B R A n D Sanderson and I definitely recommend checking out all of those My guest today is a fan favorite. It is Seth Godin, the one and only. He is the author of 21 internationally best selling books translated into more than 35 languages including Linchpin Tribes, the Dip and Purple Cow. His latest book, this is Strategy, really caught my attention and it offers a fresh lens on how we can make bold decisions, embrace change, and navigate a complex, rapidly evolving world. We cover a ton of ground, including sets of questions that you can use to catalyze personal and professional growth maxims, different concepts to unpack that can productively shake the snow globe of your mind so that you can settle on new realizations, different ways to create competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded world. Seth is also the founder of the Alt MBA and the Akimbo Workshops, transformative online programs that have helped thousands of people take their work to the next level. His blog Seth's Blog, that's plural. Seth's blog is one of the most widely read in the world and has been such for a very long time. Seth is also the creator of the Carbon Almanac, a global initiative focused on climate action. This is a very practical episode, as all of Seth's are on this podcast and I'll leave it at that. My guest today is La Paul. La Paul is the Millstone Family professor of Philosophy and professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University, where she leads the Self and Society Initiative for the Wu Tsai Institute. Her research explores questions about the nature of the self and decision making in the metaphysics and cognitive science of time, cause and experience. Now that's a mouthful, but we also get into vampire thought experiments how to decide or how to think about deciding whether or not to have a kid, that is children and many other things that you can apply to your own lives. Elliot Paul is also the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation, the National Humanities center, and the Australian National University. She is the author of Transformative Experience. That's how I was introduced to her work Work and co author of Causation A User's Guide, which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. Her work on transformative experience has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, NPR, and the BBC, among others. And in 2024 she was profiled by the New Yorker, which is also an amazing read that I recommend. She's currently working on a book about self construction, Transformative Experience, Humility and Fear of Mental Corruption. Fundamentally, this conversation focuses on how you can make decisions or think about making decisions where the person you are now is not the same person you are afterwards. And the most resonant example of that is deciding whether or not to have children. My guest today is Dr. Keith Barr. He is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology. We get into so many facets of exercise, what you can use today that is counterintuitive. I had my mind blown. I took so many notes. We talked about isometric exercise for tendon health, optimizing different protocols, debunking on some level, eccentric training specifically for connective tissue, how to load post injury or surgery, collagen supplements, implementation things like BPC157, pharmaceutical impacts on tendons, estrogen's role in tendon health and strength, mitochondria, ketogenic diet, longevity, inflammation. And taking a balanced perspective on all of these things, how do you use them? We get into exact training protocols that rock climbers use. It is an amazing episode. And that's not because of me, it's because of Keith. So let me give you a quick bio and then we'll hop right into it. During his PhD studies, his research revealed that the mechanical strain on muscle fibers activates the mammalian target of rapamycin. Some of you may know that as MTOR signaling pathway, a crucial regulator of muscular hypertrophy or muscle growth. So he knows a lot about muscle growth. He's been a strength training coach as well. Subsequently, he studied the molecular dynamics of skeletal muscle adaptation to endurance training under the guidance of Dr. John Halazzi, a legend in the field of exercise physiology, considered the father of modern exercise biochemistry. Building on all of this, he conducted research into tendon health and the potential for engineering ligaments, that is creating ligaments in the lab upon which he can test all sorts of things which could also have implications for treatment and recovery from injuries. Dr. Barr now runs the Functional Molecular Biology Lab at UC Davis. His lab's work ranges from studying molecular changes in our cells to conducting studies to affect real world improvements in people's health, longevity and quality of life. You can find him on Bluesky as Muscle Science. You can find him on the UC Davis website. We'll link to that in the show Notes at Tim Blog Podcast and his new company, which you can check out, which is designed to improve tendon loading with various technologies and tools, is sinew us sinuous so S I N E W U s dot com hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. Kind of like my diary of Cool Things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on to get some sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.