#801: In Case You Missed It: February 2025 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

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 short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, 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 gonna 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 Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five 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 I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else.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 Five Bullet 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 any time. So, easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog/friday and thanks for checking it out, if the spirit moves you.

Brandon Sanderson (1:42)

Optimal minimum.

L.A. Paul (1:44)

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

SPEAKER_4 (1:49)

Can I ask you a personal question?

L.A. Paul (1:54)

I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

Tim Ferriss (2:07)

Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris 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. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app.

Or, as usual, you can head to tim.blog.com/podcast and find all the details there.

SPEAKER_6 (2:53)

Please enjoy.

SPEAKER_4 (2:55)

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 at brandsanderson.

Tim Ferriss (3:24)

So let's come back 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?

Brandon Sanderson (3:39)

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 different from 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 too. 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 two until six these days, is usually what I do. One until five, 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 six until 6.3 to 10.30.