Tim Ferriss: 4 Science-Backed Tools That Rewired Decades of Childhood Trauma & Depression

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

Every mental health complication or diagnosis is increasing, and I've worked with different scientists and done a lot of experimentation on myself, having grown up with multiple depressive episodes every year to see if there are root causes that we can address. And so, I'll just throw out a few things that have been very, very helpful. First, there's brain stimulation. When I did this, I had months of no anxiety. Then, there's something called Vegas nerve stimulation, and one of the most heavily cited scientists over the last 30 years has seen a wild collection of benefits.

Steven Bartlett (0:29)

So, let's talk about that.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

Tim Ferriss has become a performance hacking expert after speaking with over 800 influential voices on his podcast. Now, he's taking the most valuable frameworks and techniques to help you optimize productivity, health and performance.

Steven Bartlett (0:44)

Tim, the variety of things that you write about, talk about is so wide, so what is the question that most people should ask you?

Tim Ferriss (0:52)

How do you break down complicated subjects and accelerate your ability to learn? Because time is one of our most valuable non-renewable resources, and so I have a framework that you can apply to any subject matter, which consists of the 80-20 principle, which is picking the 20% to focus on that will give you 80% of what you want. For instance, there's hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish, but with the most frequently used 1500, you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks. And if you figure that out, you're ahead of 99.9% of the world.

Steven Bartlett (1:24)

And what do you think is the question most people want to ask you?

Tim Ferriss (1:27)

So there's a lot of questions around mental health, and I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people because I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son on a weekly basis. I was this close to killing myself, and it can have a lot of effects, but these are things that you can slowly chip away at, and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can take the pain and make it part of your medicine. So...

Steven Bartlett (2:01)

Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can, now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you.

Tim, you're a remarkably interesting individual, in part because the variety of things that you write about, talk about, clearly have deep curiosity in, is so wide that you're hard to put into any particular box. So my first question to you is, how do you think about the work you do, and how do you self-define if you do it all, who you are and what your mission is?

Tim Ferriss (3:12)

I think of myself as a self-experimenter, slash student and teacher in that order. The purpose, though, ultimately, is to try to find simplicity through complexity or topics that can be complicated, and then provide some type of recipe or algorithm that people can test with low risk and hopefully a decent amount of upside.

Steven Bartlett (3:36)

We're going to talk about a lot of different things today, so probably a good place to start, which is learning how to learn. And especially in a world that's changing at such speed, there's a lot of people that are being forced into relearning of some sort, whether it's professionally or in other domains. So meta-learning, I've never heard this term before. What is meta-learning and how do I learn how to learn better? I would love to because I spend so long, as you do, speaking to really interesting people. I sometimes worry that some of that information is being wasted.

Tim Ferriss (4:03)

Yeah, the basic idea is this, that rather than treat different subjects or fields as these silos that need to be figured out independently, how can you develop just a broad framework that you can apply to any subject matter? And the acronym that I generally recommend, folks, DSSS, Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, Stakes. There's Deconstruction, which is taking a fairly ambiguous goal, like learn to swim or learn Japanese. None of those are actually very descriptive, right? So deconstructing any one of those is taking, let's just use learn to swim as an example and breaking it down into constituent parts, right? And you can do that very effectively with the help of an expert. You can try to do it yourself. But for instance, I mean, if you want to find a silver medalist from the Olympics to Olympics ago, you can probably get on a Zoom call with them for $100 an hour, maybe $50 an hour. Like you do have access to world-class talent. Then they would help you figure out, all right, there are all these different possible components. When you get to the next part, which is selection, you're picking the 20%—this is the 80-20 principle, right? Pareto's Law. So you're picking the 20% that will give you 80% of what you want. Let's just use language learning in that case. Well, you can very easily find word frequency lists. So for any given language, like Spanish, sure, or in English, hundreds of thousands of words you could learn. But with the most frequently used 1500, you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8-12 weeks without question if you approach it methodically. But you need the right material first. Then the next S is sequencing, putting it in the right order. I feel like this is the magic sauce that gets lost a lot, which is what is a logical sequence for learning any given skill? What do you practice first? So in the case of swimming, for instance, forget about breathing. You need to figure out fuselage right, fuselage left, and gliding, kicking off a wall in the shallow end of a pool before you ever think about breathing. And getting comfortable putting your head under water, etc., etc.