If you want to love other people fully, you actually have to figure out how to love yourself on some level.

Like, there is no mental Cirque du Soleil trick that you can pull off to really get around that.

Tim Ferris has been a man on a mission driven to deconstruct mastery and excellence and then share what he's learned for his entire adult life.

It began with his own relentless experimentation and documentation, which yielded number one New York Times bestsellers like the four hour work week, the four hour body, the four hour chef, and a series of other books in more recent years.

This yearning has led him to sit down with hundreds of elite performers from a vast array of domains on a quest to reveal what made them them.

And these conversations are shared weekly on Tim's award-winning podcast, The Tim Ferris Show. In today's best of conversation, we cover it very different ground and get really personal.

While I first sat down with Tim in 2017 to record this conversation, the things we talk about, the topics, the ideas, the experiences, the insights, they're more relevant now than ever before.

Tim actually lost a number of people in the year before we sat down in the studio where he also had just turned 40 and found himself in this deeply contemplative and emotional space.

Thinking about who he is, how he wants to create the next 40 years of his life and what really matters.

And when I sat down with him, he had recently returned from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat and while gone, he had actually lost yet another close friend.

He was in his own words in an incredibly porous place, leading more from the heart than the head, which was a bit of a major turnaround for him.

And we spent time deconstructing Tim's 10-day silent meditation experience, his struggles and awakenings, how it compared to psychedelic experiences,

and how barring one major saving grace, this retreat may have sent him spiraling into a very dark place.

We also talk about his experience with death, his decision to append audio of his departed friend, Terry Lothlin,

which was recorded by Terry's daughters in the hospital during his final days of life, to the end of a podcast interview with Terry.

Tim also shared his decision to take the TED stage, switching last minute, to talk about something deeply painful and personal,

and what that meant to him, to his lens on legacy work, and how it landed with his family who also didn't know what he would be talking about.

And we explored Tim's awakening with a softer set of metrics in mind to measure a life well-lived and his evolving definition of what it truly means to live a good life.

So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

Good to be hanging out. I was kind of thinking, it's been a hell of a year in your life.

Yeah, it really has been. I mean, it's been a great year in many respects.

I turned 40, spoke at TED on the 10th anniversary to the day of the publication of The For Our Work Week, which was trippy,

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