The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Tim Ferriss is the author of the 4-Hour Workweek, as well as the new book, Tools of Titans. He’s also the host of The Tim Ferriss Show, which is one of my favorite podcasts, and an inspiration for this show. Tim is a relentless optimizer, and on his program, he interviews fascinating people to discover how they work, think, and get things done. It’s a show about the secrets of high performers. Here, I ask Tim about basically the reverse of that. How does he think about the parts of his life that, though crucial, are harder to optimize and systematize? We discuss friendship, love, psychedelics, spirituality, death, health, and whether it’s possible to get too addicted to productivity hacks. Amidst all that, we dig into:-Why Tim’s house is filled with reminders of his eventual death-Why he tries to build new friendships atop a foundation of shared suffering-Why he hasn't written a book on romantic relationships and probably won't-How productivity goes bad-How a serious bout of Lyme disease changed how he lives his life-Why some strange experiences on psychedelics convinced him there’s much more to this world than we understand-The difficulty of describing a sneeze-How his interviews have evolved since doing his podcast-What he feels constitutes good adviceOn his own show, Tim is always trying to offer takeaways and lessons about how to live, and he does that here, too. This episode is packed with ideas you can apply to your own life. Books:-David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man-Frank Luntz’s Words That Work-Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others-Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive-Sebastian Junger’s Tribe-Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude-Less is More, an anthology on minimalist thinking-Ann Lamont’s Bird by Bird-Frank Herbert’s Dune-The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz-Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek-Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning

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