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 Vagus nerve stimulation and one of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years has seen a wild collection of benefits. So, let's talk about that.

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.

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 500, 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.

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.

I think of myself as a self-experimenter, 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.

We're going to talk about a lot of different things today. So it 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 metalarning, I've never heard this term before. 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 and I sometimes worry that some of that information is being wasted.

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, DSS, 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 the learn to swim as an example and breaking it down into constituent parts. 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 two 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 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 to 12 weeks without question if you approach it methodically. But you need the right material first.

And then the next S is sequencing. Putting it in the right order. And 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. Like you need to figure out like 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.

So, so there's the deconstruction, selection, sequencing, and then the last S stands for stakes, which means incentives. So, how do you ensure that you will do actually what it is you say you're committing to doing? If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six pack abs. So, information is clearly not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient. Incentives drive behavior change. So, you need good intentions are not enough. Even a system is not enough. You need strong incentives. So, right, you could give uh 500 bucks to a friend or 100 bucks, whatever. Does the amount doesn't really matter. And if you don't do what you say you're going to do, they donate it to like your most hated political candidate in your name, right? That's another one that I've seen work really well.

That's it. That DSS, deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes. And if you just check those boxes moving that order, uh, your ability to learn will hockey stick in a really meaningful way. And what's also important to realize when you're trying to tackle any new skill, doesn't matter what it is. There will, it will not be just a linear climb from, you know, bottom, left, upper, right. But if you know in advance that those are coming, then you can have a plan for it and weather the storm. So that's also very important. If people expect some kind of like linear incremental progress, it just ain't going to happen. And so most people quit before they hit any real inflection points.

I do think about this a lot and I've used this for a very very long time and I don't see it changing anytime soon. I refined it here and there. Almost everything I do is a 6 to 12 month project. with lots of 2 to four week experiments within that 6 to 12 months. I do not have and I've never had a long-term career plan 5 years, 10 years. If you have a reliable 5 to 10 year plan, you're going to be playing so safely within the bounds of your capabilities that I feel like you're selling yourself short.

So for me, it's projects and just going 100% into those projects. But how do you pick the project? I pick the projects based on relationships and skills. So new relationships or deepening important relationships and my learning curve skills I'm going to learn and there's a condition though those relationships and those skills have to be able to transcend that project.

I'll give you an example. If I have a project which is working on a startup as an adviser that startup was stumble upon. Okay so I'm working on Stumble Upon. Way back in the day Stumble Upon was a huge deal. It delivered a lot of web traffic to various websites. It's kind of like a Pandora for websites. A year or two into that didn't go anywhere. But who was it? I spent all my time with it. Stumbled upon. It was the founder named Garrett Camp and I became really close friends. I learned a ton about web traffic. I was also able to use my own website and blog as a experimental destination. Right? So there was upside even if it went to zero for me. And few years later I get a text from Garrett. we meet up to talk about this new idea which is solving the taxi problem in San Francisco. And then shortly thereafter it was called Uber Cab LLC and I became advised to that.

And I could give you 12 more examples like that where like the first project failed but I became friends with with person A or B learned C and D and those were applied two projects later to something that was a home run.

Lady Fortune has a lot to say about what happens. There are so many things outside of your control that whatever game you choose to play requires a system that allows you to survive a string of very bad luck. Everything snowballs over time and compounds and it's really hard to lose long term as long as you're not overindexing and betting too much on any one project say financially. It's like you need to be able to withstand as a team or as an individual a period of very bad luck in order for the law of big numbers and statistics to work in your favor with a system that gives you a slight edge.

So that's just my lens on the world in general at least professional choices and I would say you mentioned a couple of other things right like reputation and so on. I feel like a lot of those are second order effects. They happen automatically if you are optimizing for the relationships and skills. So, this comes back to the sequencing, right? So, it's like which which is the lead domino. So, if you have 12 dominoes, you kind of have to decide in which order you're going to stack them so that you knock over the small domino, knock over the bigger domino, then the bigger, then the bigger, then the bigger. And over time, if you're thinking about doing two projects a year, let's just say if they're 6 months each, that's going to add up. It's going to add up. So, you can afford to be long-term greedy instead of short-term greedy.

I like energy over passion for a couple of reasons. Because you could have passion between the bed sheets. You could have the passion of the Christ. You had a different type of passion. I don't like imprecise terms. Energy for me, very simple. It's like, are you more awake or are you sleepy? Right? Do you feel like you can do this for another 5 hours? Do you feel like you want to stop in 15 minutes? These are almost biological questions, like biological state questions. So, it's it's pretty intuitive for people to get to a yes or no.

Well, I think that humans need certainty. They need something to believe. And if your belief is that non-belief is the way, well, guess what? I mean, that's a belief. My experience is if you want to experience self transcendence which I think is critical for mental health you don't need religion per se. What you you can have I think a very wonderful life without religion. I don't think it's possible to have a wonderful life without awe and wonder. And those are things you can architect. Those are things you can very much architect and engineer and schedule in your life.

Why have veganism and CrossFit done so well? They're religions. I mean, effectively, they may not have a god, per se. But certainly they have thought leaders, they, you know, Glassman before his fall from grace and so on. Uh various athletes and so on. But it's like clear rules, community, self-inforcing and describing life sports. Yeah. I mean, it's like this is religion just goes by another name. It's a lot of the behaviors, collective behaviors and tenants of religion just lacking the r-word.

I think the risk for me is that I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people which can turn into a bit of a savior complex because of a lot of the pain that I've suffered in the past. Uh I feel like I am not necessarily uniquely suited, but I have the the experience and the perspective that allows me to be credible when talking to people who are experiencing certain types of pain. And that can become a huge unhelpful self-imposed burden where I feel a moral obligation to do things at the expense of my own mental health or physical health. So I would say that's something that I have very clearly on my radar as of a few years ago.

I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son from 2 to four on a weekly basis, I would say. Very clear memories of all of it. And that will shape you. I mean, that will definitely shape you. And it can have a lot of effects. It can rob you of agency. it can certainly make you or contribute to me being hypervigilant. I'm very slow to trust and so on and so forth, right? like that is a formative experience at a formative time.

And then later had I think number one a genetic predisposition if you just look at my family to major depressive disorder and that showed up as let's call it on average starting in early adolescence like three to four multi-week or multimonth depressive episodes per year. That is half of your lived time. And for people who may have experienced something like this, I will say that there are tools at work. So now, never thought it would be possible, but I would say now I have one depressive episode of a few weeks at most every 2 to 3 years. Now the juxtaposition between those two people is hard to overstate, right? Those are those are two fundamentally different experiences of being a human.

And um a lot of it ties back to some of the levers I was talking about, right? Metabolic psychiatry, psychedelic assisted therapy, bioelectric medicine, including accelerated TMS. Like these things for certain people really work and can be durable. They're not one and done. Very few things are, but uh these are things that you can slowly chip away at and become familiar with and instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can mold the experience into something that is at least not disabling.

Sometimes you can make it enabling. I remember a very good psychotherapist said to me maybe five years ago, six years ago, "take the pain and make it part of your medicine." And it was basically like all that stuff is horrible. Nothing can excuse it. Take that pain and made it make it part of what you offer the world.

I had always planned on writing a book about it or like my healing journey after my parents passed away cuz I didn't want them to blame themselves. And my girlfriend at the time over a meal said something that had a huge impact, which was, "Have you ever thought about how many people are going to pass away from natural causes or from COVID or anything else before you ever have a chance to write this book?" Cuz you're probably not going to write that book for 10, 15 years. Think of all the people you could have helped that you didn't help.

And I was like, "Okay, maybe I should workshop it on a podcast." But keep in mind, none of my family knew. And so I was very fortunate to have a very close friend who's based here in New York City, Debbie Milman, Design Matters Podcast, one of the longest running podcasts in the world, wonderful human. And she disclosed to me a number of years back for the first time in full fidelity extended childhood sexual abuse. and we talked about it and I came clean with her after that conversation with my girlfriend and I asked her if she would be open to having a conversation with me that we could record but as a conversation because I knew I couldn't do it as a monologue. I just knew I couldn't do it and I told her in advance I said I have no idea if I'm ever going to share this but I feel I feel compelled to at least record it.

And so we did and ended up publishing that I want to say in September 2020, something like that. And uh holy shit. I would say the most shocking thing about that to me. I probably had a quarter to a third of my close close friends reach out to me for the first time to talk to anyone and confess that they had had some type of similar experience. I I mean the percentages were staggering. Um that was really hard. Um I was willing to absorb it. I have a lot of capacity for absorbing that type of thing, but it was hard because I would get these tearful voice memos from guys who had never told anyone, giving me graphic details of everything that happened. It's just gut-wrenching.

For a long time I had let's just call it to pick a number out of thin air it's like okay I have seven mental health psycho emotional challenges I need to address and I was viewing them as independent problems to address. But when I was willing to reopen the door and look at the childhood abuse, everything was tied to that. And sometimes you just have to, you know, put on your gas mask and go into the cellar and contend with that. And there's no one right way to do it. Psychiatry is still in the dark ages. It's where surgery was 300 years ago. But still there are certain things that work often without knowing the mechanism seem to help a lot of people.

So there there are tools I think internal family systems created by Dick Schwarz is very interesting. The MDMA assisted psychotherapy certainly for PTSD very interesting and generally well tolerated not right for everybody. And then a number of the other things that I mentioned uh family constellation therapy also quite helpful for a lot of people but uh it's not insurmountable.

What I would not say is that some people and I think that I would love to be able to do this but I just can't get there or who would say like I don't regret it. I'm glad it happened because here's the silver lining. No. Like if I could control Z and remove that stuff 100% I would I mean it did a lot of damage but it gives me a credible voice when I am talking to people who have had these experiences and that is valuable.

I don't think anyone can really answer that particularly well with high conviction. But what what I'll say is that uh I am blessed and cursed with a near photographic memory for some things. So you have the original injury, you have the original insult, but if you have, as I do, which is weird, but like I can draw the floor plan of almost any building, any restaurant I've ever been in, even once, I don't know why that is, but I can do that.

Now, there are upsides to that. There are a lot of downsides, too, in the case of abuse. And as you have greater and greater ability to navigate the world and realize what has happened, what is happening, what might happen, and you can recontextualize high-fidelity memories. Well, then you realize that that thing that was very weird at the time was a lot more than just weird, right? It was just straight exploitation and abuse. So that's the best answer I think I can give to that question.

I think people who have been abused are those who survive and do well afterwards in some way are become very good by force, by necessity at compartmentalizing. And uh if you look at some of the very very top tier military special forces units and so on, the percentages of those guys who have been abused very high. Now, why why would that be an asset? Well, if you're in battle, if you're in a chaotic environment where people are dying or at risk of dying and you need to act effectively and calmly in the most disruptive, unpredictable environment imaginable. Compartmentalizing is a superpower, right? where you can basically detach and take this observer status almost as if you're watching yourself doing, you know, kill and capture raids or whatever it might be.

Uh but when some of those folks come back to civilian life, the compartmentalization is a severe handicap and disruptor in family life, right? So that superpower becomes a super weakness. And I think that that is true outside of the military for people who survive abuse. They may bury it completely, put it under lock and key subconsciously. So they don't even have explicit recall of the event until perhaps there's some triggering catalyst that brings it back up.

Uh so I would say that in in my case that compartmentalization was uh on some levels very enabling, right? Like I could outlast out endure a lot of people in sports, in work. My pain tolerance was incredibly high. Uh but there's a there is a price to be paid when you cauterize certain aspects of yourself and disallow certain types of emotions. Like there are prices to be paid.

And um I will say that I think the potential and promises of psychedelics by and large are overstated. But in terms of bringing emotions back online, that was almost entirely due to psychedelic experiences for me. I hadn't cried in like 20 years. Couldn't remember the last time I cried. And then I'd be like on a plane watching a really compelling kind of heart-wrenching documentary and just start crying on the plane. What the fuck is going on here? And uh certain emotions just came back online.

And I think that once those were online, that is in part what then pulled along with it, this revisiting of these high-fidelity memories. And then um I had a very rough period because of that and ultimately decided, you know what, like this is the lead domino that has already been tipped over that has affected so many things. I can continue to do patchwork like remediation with band-aid solutions for various things, but I'm just I'm plugging holes in the side of the boat, not asking why it's filling with water in the first place. And I just decided, you know what? I'm just going to take 6 months. And I know psychiatry is pretty messy, but priority number one is to try to find some resolution with this.

Looking at my audience over the last 10 years, every mental health complication or diagnosis that I can think of is up and to the right. Just hockey stick. So, chronic anxiety, treatment resistant depression, you name it, right? When I see a constellation of issues like that, I try to identify if I can, not just the symptoms because then you end up putting band-aids on things that are interrelated but treating them as silos, but looking underneath it to see if there are root causes that we can address.

To people who are suffering right now, the social interaction, analog human interaction, I would just say is the is the the one target when hit that solves a multitude of other problems that otherwise you'll be playing whack-a-mole with.

But if there are then remaining problems with say chronic anxiety, OCD when we get into some slightly trickier terrain, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, etc. There are a few things that I have found in the course of doing a lot of work with different scientists and also a lot of experimentation on myself having grown up with multiple long duration depressive episodes every year.

And those are a short list of different types of brain stimulation specifically something called accelerated TMS. The before and afters that I've seen with that are beyond incredible and equal or surpass in some cases the amplitude of effect and the durability of effect of psychedelic assisted therapies. Accelerated TMS, so transcranial magnetic stimulation. And Nolan Williams, Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford is is a good person to look up for more on that.

Accelerated TMS refers to a new protocol with better hardware and software of a technology TMS that has existed probably for 40 years if not more on some level and you will instead of doing two or three sessions a week for many months you do 10 sessions a day for 5 days straight. So you are getting stimulated on the hour every hour for about 8 minutes and you do that for 10 hours straight and then you compound that over 5 days.

And you see for instance uh to give one example a friend's child very terrifying story uh but uh he was a cutter this this 14-year-old self harming. And the parents were just waiting for the call that their child had committed suicide. And this went on for two or three years, I want to say. And then within 3 days of accelerated TMS treatment, it was like reversion back to old self. And then with boosters every say 3 to 6 months, that has been durable. It's the before and after is impossible to overstate. It's pretty wild. It's magnets. The what it feels like is is someone kind of like flicking the side of your head. It's sort of the sensation. It is from a safety profile perspective really compelling. Like the downside risk is very very minimal.

And me with the most recent sessions that I've done myself, I had probably four to five months of no anxiety. Like all of that stuff vanished as if by magic wand and I felt like I'd been meditating twice a day for a year. I mean it was it was incomprehensible. Uh it was it was really really really uh remarkable. And there's there's good clinical evidence for this. It's not just end of one anecdote.

Then you have metabolic psychiatry. Primarily that would be dietary intervention. Chris Palmer at Harvard is is someone who's popularized this in the last handful of years. metabolic psychiatry specifically putting people on a ketogenic diet. You have folks who have been treated with 15 different medications for schizophrenia for a decade who get off all of their medications within 3 to 6 months and stay off simply by stabilizing a handful of things in the brain including adding a very beautiful clean energy source which is ketones.

There are also a lot of possible applications of the ketogenic diet or modified ketogenic diets, exogenous ketones meaning supplemental ketones for neurodegenerative disease. So I have three relatives right now who have Alzheimer's and genetically I'm very predisposed. So I'm thinking a lot about this also from a preventative perspective.

The psychedelic assisted therapies for various conditions. I do think that psychedelics and this is to quote a very famous psychotherapist named Stanislav Grof. Stan Grof what the telescope did for astronomy what the microscope did for biology psychedelics will do for the mind. I don't think that's an overstatement because a lot of the the clinical outcomes that we're seeing with treatment resistant PTSD, people who've had an average diagnosis duration of like 14 to 17 years, nothing succeeded. They do two to three sessions and then you see like a 50 plus% complete remission of PTSD. I mean, what is going on there?

I think in a very productive way leading us to question some of the very fundamental assumptions that are made in the world of psychiatry particularly with pharmaceutical interactions or pharmaceutical prescriptions and that's really exciting to me because I think there is an argument to be made that you can address certain root causes.

There's one other that I'm digging into that I think could end up being very very interesting overall. This is one that is sort of TBD. Personally I am experimenting with it but Vegas nerve stimulation. There is a sea of shit floating around related to Vegas nerve stimulation. The vast majority of what you'll bump into is pseudoscientific nonsense.

The Vegas nerve is a bit of a misnomer because they're actually two bundles of nerves that travel down from around your brain stem down either side of the neck, kind of where you would feel your pulse. It's right alongside the carotid artery. And you can think of them as almost transatlantic cables. So you don't have you have two primary vagus nerves, but there are about a 100,000 fibers in each of them. And we only know what a tiny fraction of those do. They then travel down and they innervate and touch pretty much everything you can imagine, including your gut. And there's some very interesting communication between the gut microbiome and the brain. visa v the Vegas nerve. It's wild.

And the most credible voice that I found in the world of Vegas nerve stimulation or VNS for short science is a guy named Dr. Brian Tracy, T R A C Y. He wrote a book called The Great Nerve, which is a very good introductory read on all of this. One of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years. He's incredibly credible. and he co-founded a company I want to say at least 10 years ago or 11 years ago was involved at least as a as a primary scientific adviser for an implant. The implant is about the size of a omega-3 fish oil capsule gets implanted right in the neck. So surgical procedure but pretty minor and that has just been approved. It was the cover of the New York Times a few weeks ago for rheumatoid arthritis.

And the before and after that you see in some of these conditions again is something straight out of science fiction. You see someone who's been mostly bedridden, chronic fatigue, can't hold a job, struggling to interact with their kids, has this procedure, and then like two weeks later they're running up a flight of stairs to catch a train on a trip to Europe and have the problem of too much energy. It seems to have broad potential application to autoimmune conditions. So you might think of say a Crohn's disease or IBS. It seems to have applications to significantly enhancing HRV heart rate variability. So I have a friend who for the longest time he's former tier one operator military. He's got a lot of sympathetic overdrive. So he had trouble sleeping and he tried all sorts of sophisticated breathing programs which can help. He tried cold exposure which can help but those were all incremental gains on his HRV maybe improved 10 to 15% lots of meditation twice a day 10 to 15%. Used vagus nerve stimulation for somewhere between two and four weeks tripled his HRV.

The device he used is it is a device. It's called Gamma Core. It's by prescription. It is applied to the neck. It provides electrical stimulation for 2 minutes at a time. I believe it's very very minimal. It's 2 minutes twice a day. I want to say maybe it's 5 minutes twice a day. And that seems to have just a a downstream collection of benefits or potential benefits. I would say Vegas nerve stimulation has top of mind access right now for me in terms of interest.

Bioelectric medicine is a big category. So whether it's accelerated TMS or focused ultrasound uh where you might take something that looks like a hockey puck and put it over your your liver for instance or spleen uh to affect various things. uh using microchips over pills I think is is is a is going to be a huge growth area and that we'll realize more and more how much is dependent on the immune reflex and different types of communication mediated by electricity uh that can be affected by external or internal devices like an implant.

So for instance, I'll give you a wild factoid which is people may have heard the story which is based on real science where you transplant the microbiome from say obese mice into lean mice and those lean mice then become obese just by transplanting m the gut microbiome. If you sever the vagus nerve before you do the transplant that doesn't happen. They don't become obese. So what's happening there? It would seem that the microbiome is communicating with the brain viv the vagus nerve.

And I think many of the assumptions that we have currently which form the bedrock of our quote unquote understanding of mental illness and so on are just going to be completely false. They're going to be completely untenable within 10 years. A lot of that I think is going to be driven by a better understanding of the body electric. It will be driven by better understanding of how fuel utilization in the brain drives many different psychiatric conditions that can be mitigated or completely addressed by say providing an alternate fuel source instead of glucose ketones, right?

That would be just kind of a simple example. But there's a huge huge compliance issue with the ketogenic diet, right? People don't want to do it for a lot of good reasons. So, how do you get people to stick with it? Well, maybe there are other options for achieving ketogenic like effects such as systemic anti-inflammation with the use of electricity instead of diet. Right? I think that's possible and I've invested in a few companies that are aiming to do that. uh which is very exciting because it means that you might have options for affecting brain function that do not require you to take molecules that get into your brain directly. That's really exciting. So bioelectric medicine I think is going to be a very exciting space to watch.

It's relationships. It's uh looking forward to the next big chapter for me which would almost certainly it not almost certainly be partner, family, all of that. I mean another startup's not going to make any difference to my life. You know, another podcast. I love all those things. I love startups. I love the podcast. I love the books. But we're at the squeezing out of marginal gains at this point.

I'm not married. Don't have any kids that I'm aware of. But uh dating a lovely woman right now. Very excited about it.

I will say, you know, if you're a good-looking guy and you're putting videos on YouTube, your DM inbound and your plethora of temptation that you need to resist is going to make remaining single very attractive. And that's true for a lot of these guys. So, I don't think there's a mystery to be solved. In other words, it's like if they go on the dating apps, it's just like shooting fish in a barrel. And I I don't think ultimately that the dating apps, despite what they might say, are designed to be deleted. I do not believe that. They are casinos intended to keep you in the casino.

Paradox of choice is a real problem. People think it's a quality problem of abundance. I'm not convinced that that's true. No way. It's not poss- I have so many clo- My friends that struggle with dating the most, date the most.

With my closest friends and family? No doubt. It wouldn't be pizza. It wouldn't be I mean maybe it involves pizza, but it would be telling the people I love that I love them and spending time with them. Doesn't need to be anything fancy. Could be sitting on a porch on a rocking chair.

And that might seem like a trite answer, but I am putting that into practice every year with periods of time that are blocked out for this. So, I'm not waiting until my last day. Before investing in new relationships. I look at my top say five to 10 relationships and ask myself did I spend the amount of time I would want to spend with these people last year? And if the answer is no, I always reinvest in those people and only the overflow gets allocated to new relationships. I really focus on the tried and true proven relationships with deep levels of trust over long periods of time.

In terms of productivity, and we're talking about weekly architecture, I think everyone should put as a challenge for themselves, particularly if they're an entrepreneur, a 4-week mini retirement once a year where you are unavailable. you are off the grid. No laptop, no phone outside of maybe Uber and Google Maps and Open Table where you are literally completely unavailable. And the reason I recommend that there are a few. Number one, it's going to allow you to play the long game at high intensity having that deloading phase. The second is it will force you to improve all of your policies, rules, guidelines for autonomous decision-making by employees, etc., etc. It'll force you to clarify all of that on a regular basis. So, when you come back, all of those systems improvements will endure beyond the mini retirement, but it's a forcing function. Uh it also forces you to take a very close look at the non-business interests that you have either maintained or cultivated or let atrophy in complete disuse. And if you end up having a slight panic attack because you don't know what to do with your time, that's a great wakeup call.