#772: In Case You Missed It: September 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by 5-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 5-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 short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. That's why I created 5-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 percent of them because they first subscribed to 5-Bullet 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 I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else.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 5-Bullet Friday subscribers. 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 any time. Easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog/friday.

Thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.

SPEAKER_2 (1:42)

Optimal minimum.

Tim Ferriss (2:07)

Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. 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. It 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. 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.com/podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

SPEAKER_4 (2:54)

First up, Elizabeth Gilbert, number one New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic and City of Girls, and the creative voice behind the Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert newsletter. You can find Elizabeth on Instagram at Elizabeth underscore Gilbert underscore writer, and you can find her sub stack at elizabethgilbert.substack.com.

SPEAKER_2 (3:26)

And when I was in my, going through my first divorce, I was 30 and the well laid out, planned life that I had created very obediently, like I had done just what my culture had told me to do. I got married at 24 and worked hard and bought a house and made it plan to have a family. And then instead of having a family, I had a nervous breakdown, like quite literally, everybody was moving in this one direction and my entire intellectual, spiritual and physical system collapsed, which I now know, I now see that as an act of God. I now see that there was sort of the Tao, you know, that there was a force that was trying to communicate to me, this is not your path. I will kill you before I let you do this. I will kill you before I let you be a suburban housewife. I'm not allowing it. Like, I will make you, put you in so much physical pain that you're gonna have to notice that this is not the life for you. But I was also in so much shame of failure and letting people down and like, we just bought this house. Like, I just felt like the biggest asshole in the world. Like, I don't know why I can't just get in line and do this thing that everybody's saying to do. Anyway, that marriage ended and then I threw myself into another relationship and that ended. And I was like, I don't know how to orchestrate my life at all. And nothing, here I am 30 years old and nothing is what I had planned it to be five years ago. And I was in the deepest depression of my life and I didn't have much of a spiritual life at that point. But I remember waking up one night and just shame and getting an instruction. I mean, that's the only way I can explain it. And I'm comfortable with that language because I often have that happen in my creative life where I'm told what to do. This is what you're going to focus on. Here's what you need to do now. And I was given this instruction and it came in as clearly as I'm talking to you and it said, get up, get a notebook and write to yourself the words that you most wish that somebody would say to you. Because there was a great loneliness that I was feeling too as well as the shame. And that letter began, you know, what that letter said was, I've got you, I'm with you, I'm not going anywhere. I love you exactly the way you are. You can't fail at this. Like you can't do this wrong. I don't need anything from you. This is a huge thing to hear. I don't need anything. Talk about no cherished outcome. I don't need anything from you. You don't have to improve. You don't have to do life better. You don't have to win. You don't have to get out of this depression. You don't have to ever uplift your spirits. You could end up living in a box under a bridge in a garbage bag, spitting at people.