#704: Q&A with Tim — New Religions, AI Companions, Longevity Levers, Resurrecting “Forgotten” Languages, Stress-Testing Cherished Beliefs, Tactics for Writer’s Block, Low-Back Pain, and Much More

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Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world class performers of all different types to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This time around, we have a slightly different format. In fact, it's the inverse. I am the guest and you guys asked the questions. I recently sat down with subscribers to my email newsletter for a fun and live Q A on YouTube. That was a private YouTube Q A to join these exclusive Q A sessions in the future. It is very simple. Just sign up for my newsletter at Tim Blog Slash Friday. And after you sign up every Friday, you will receive my free five bullet Friday newsletter, a very short email of five bullet points. It is one of the most popular newsletters in the world and I love doing it. It's basically like my diary of cool things. So each newsletter describes the five coolest things that I have found or explored or experimented with that week, often including books, gadgets, tech workarounds, tricks from experts, including a lot of podcast guests who send me amazing things, strange experiments. Of course, that's what I do as a human guinea pig and weird stuff from all over the world. My subscribers have seen a lot of things at the edges before they've gone mainstream. Dozens and dozens of things way out at the edges. So it's a lot of fun. But back to the intro for this episode. In this episode, I answer questions on resurrecting quote unquote forgotten languages. So languages you've studied a really long time ago, dog training, writer's block, reducing alcohol intake, AI companions training, the good enough muscle, low back pain, and different tools for that. The importance of weight training and muscle mass, travel recommendations for Japan, managing fear of death and the descent to death. Oh boy. Breaking negative self talk and much, much more. We really cover a lot of ground and I had a blast doing it and I hope you enjoy listening to it. Thanks for tuning in. We have questions that were pre submitted and then we have questions that are coming in in the live feed and I will do my best to answer a whole bunch of both. So why don't we dive in? The first question I'll answer is from the live feed. This is from Zaheer. Are you actively taking any actions to reduce your carbon footprint? Yes, I am. There are certainly a number of different steps you can take in terms of funding new technologies. A lot of my investing over the last, I would say three to four years has been in various types of tech, different products and services that I think will overall help people to reduce carbon footprint. I also donate money monthly to different causes and companies, including charm industrial, which puts oil back underground. People can check that out@charminustrial.com. And that I believe is now funded through, as it stands for me, terracet. I believe that is how I'm going about doing this terracet climate so people can look at that as a means, for instance, to hopefully offset some of the carbon footprint of my travel and other things. I am intensely aware of individual action, but also the necessity, in a sense, to, number one, not try to consume our way out of this problem, but also simultaneously to recognize that we do need better technology. So it's a combination of different things. This is a question from the live feed. What classical career are you in in a parallel reality? This is espanol three two seven. I would say neuroscientist or marine biologist. Those were the two professions that I most wanted to pursue after age, say, twelve or 13. Prior to that, it was comic book pencilr. So I would say those are my classical careers as such, that might exist in some parallel set of universes in the multiverse on other tracks that are running parallel to this one. Let me go to the questions that were presubmitted, and I will answer a number of those and we'll bounce back and forth. So the next question is going to be from Lucas. Hey, Tim, you mentioned in an interview that you allowed yourself to live your life unoptimized. Are you still living an unoptimized life? I would say that there's optimizing and de optimizing happening simultaneously in the sense that there are certain things that I am optimizing to define that. Simply tweaking variables to, say, improve certain outputs based on the inputs. Right. So looking for an elegant refinement insomuch as I might approach something like Occam's protocol in the four hour body, which I've ended up following again, roughly