How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future | Tim Ferriss

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Tim Ferris Tim Ferris is an author a podcaster an investor and is known for having a near Supernatural ability to predict the future which has allowed him to obtain success in a huge number of different Endeavors for instance he is a five-time number one New York Times bestselling author but perhaps equally or more important to that he's also exceptionally good at teaching people how to write the entire process of writing and marketing a book his books the 4-Hour chef and the 4-Hour Body and the 4-Hour Work Week not only explain his own exploration of how to optimize and prioritize his time and learn particular skills but he teaches you those skills as well this is really what sets Tim apart he is an exceptional learner and an exceptional teacher and today you learn why that is and in a characteristic Tim Ferris way he explains the process in a way that you can apply it he lists out for instance the specific questions that you should ask When approaching any Endeavor in order to get the information that you want and to make the process of learning and getting better at something and achieving great success in something that much more likely that ability that Tim has to identify the specific questions that one needs to ask and answer answer and the specific action steps to take in order to achieve success is really what I believe sets Tim apart from everyone else on the Internet or on the bookshelf that's giving advice as to how to become good at something Tim Ferris is also dedicated to various philanthropic efforts the most recent of which is the donation of several millions of his own dollars to research on psychedelics for the treatment of otherwise intractable psychiatric challenges such as major depression suicidal depression eating disorders and addiction and he's also brought together other philanthropists which has really galvanized the whole field of psychedelic research for the treatment of mental health transforming it from what was recently kind of a fringe area of science to a main stay that's actually funded not only by philanthropy but by the National Institutes of Health so he's really transformed this entire scientific field into one that now is transforming the laws around psychedelics and is providing mental health treatment for people that would otherwise suffer today's discussion was a particularly meaningful one because not only is Tim a Pioneer in the world of podcasting but it also marked the 9-year anniversary of his podcast the Tim ferah show now as I mentioned earlier Tim is known for being able to see around corners or predict the future he really does seem to be about five if not 10 years ahead of everybody else in thinking about tools for optimization in particular domains of life and so we were very fortunate that during today's discussion he shares with us his current creative Endeavors and how he's thinking about and approaching those and he also breaks down for us the process of how to think about and prioritize one's schedule not just on the order of the day not just on the order of the week but really thinking about one's life as a journey and how to organize and go about that Journey so today's discussion will provide with you tremendous insight into who Tim Ferris is and how that incredible mind of his Works in order to do all the amazing things that he's done and of course he teaches you how to do it he will tell you the exact questions that you should ask and that you should answer and how to step back and think about those questions and then prioritize so that you can decide how to best invest your time I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Tim ferah show however if you're not already subscribing to the Tim ferah show I highly recommend you do I still go back and listen to early episodes of the timf far show and I'm a weekly listener to the new episodes we provide a link to the Tim Fair show in the show note captions also in the show note captions you'll find links to Tim's many New York Times best-selling books and a link to his excellent weekly blog before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Maui Nei venison Maui Nei venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available I've talked before on this podcast about the key importance of striving to get 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight now when one strives to do that it's also important to maximize the quality protein to calorie ratio in other words you don't want to consume a lot of extra calories in order to get your quality protein Maui venison in having an extremely high quality protein and nutrient to calorie ratio allows you to do that very easily and in addition to that Maui Nei venison is delicious I particular like their bone broth which has an unmatched 25 gram of protein per 100 calories I also love their ground venison and their venison steaks all of them are absolutely delicious if you'd like to try Maui neui venison go to mauii Venison docomo and get 20% off your first order again that's Maui venison docomond to get 20% off today's episode is also brought To Us by element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need that is the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium but nothing you don't which means no sugar it's critical that we get electrolytes because every cell of our body but in particular our nerve cells our neurons rely on electrolytes in order to function properly with element it's very easy to ingest the correct ratios of electrolytes they come in these little packets they're really delicious you mix them up with anywhere from 8 to 16 to 32 ounces of fluid I like mine pretty concentrated so I'll drink a 16 o glass of water with element in it when I first wake up I'll also consume another one of those maybe 32 ounces with one packet when I exercise and maybe another one if I happen to sweat a lot during exercise or if I was in the sauna and sweating lot if it's a very hot day Etc if you'd like to try element go to drink element that's lnt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase again that's drink element lnt.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities impact your blood glucose levels or blood sugar levels as they sometimes referred to with levels you can see how the specific foods you eat when you eat and exercise as well as any other activities impact your blood glucose and how those affect things like your energy level or your quality of sleep or your level of clarity and focus for mental work or your physical output for physical Endeavors I first started using levels about a year ago as a way to understand how different foods and activities impact my blood glucose levels and it's really impacted my entire schedule in fact I've shuffled a number of things around such that now I have more stable energy throughout the day yes I eliminated one or two Foods fortunately they weren't my favorite foods I've also added some new foods to my nutrition program that have allowed my blood sugar levels to remain much more steady throughout the day and to achieve better sleep at night levels even provides a simple score after any meal you eat so you can see how different foods affect you and develop a personalized nutrition program that's exactly right for you and that's really what levels is about it's really about tailoring things to your specific needs so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a CGM yourself go to levels. lhuin right now they're offering an additional two free months of membership again that's levels. linkhub and now for my discussion with Tim Ferris Tim Ferris I am nothing short of thrilled to have you here I've been reading your books reading your blogs listening to your podcast for a very long time and in preparing for today I was thinking you know who does Tim remind me of because I knew you reminded me of somebody but I didn't know who and then I realized it you remind me of the neurobiologist Ramon kahal you don't look anything like him he doesn't look anything like you uh he was a brilliant scientist he won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for essentially describing the structure of the nervous system he was the first along with another guy to Define synapses like it's fundamental connection the nervous system but the reason that you remind me of kahal is that it's a well-known or not so secret secret in Neuroscience that if you want to pick a really excellent project to work on you simply go and look at what kahal talked about or hypothesized and then you work on that you know he had this almost um super natural ability to look at fixed stained tissue of the nervous system much of it is incredibly beautiful by the way and think about how it worked when it was alive and he's considered the greatest neurobiologist of all time without question and it's really this feature of being able to like see around corners or into the future that establishes that link for me it's it's absolute truth that if you look back to what you were doing 10 years ago 15 years ago the kinds of things you were doing the kinds of questions you were asking that translates to much of what people like myself and people in the fitness space Tech space investor space mindfulness space psychedelic space all these different Arenas what they're doing now so um it's not hyperbole to say that you are the remon Cal of all those different spaces and podcasting of course is one of those so I owe you a great debt of gratitude and many others do as well so my first question for you is what was your mindset around the time that you wrote 4our Body 4our Work week but in particular 4-Hour Body because the protocols in that book are so very useful they were at the time it was published they still are now and so many of the things like ice baths the discussion around Brown fat thermogenesis um resistance training in its uh you know kind of basic form of just providing enough Progressive overload to get an adaptation not excessively long workouts weight loss slow carb diet um and on and on and on what were you thinking at that time like what if you can think back to then like what what were you foraging for what were you thinking about when you woke up in the morning think oh I'm going to go find all this stuff that at the time was really esoteric because it is all played out very well um what I'm basically saying is if you want to know what's going to be happening hot and useful in 5 years 10 years and onwards just look at what Tim's doing at any moment so there it is well thank you for the very generous comparison and intro I'm thrilled to be here so thanks for having me and the 4 our body represented an opportunity for me to do a few things the first was to diversify my identity from outside of the realm of the say business category so it was a deliberate move since the success of the first book book bought me permission to do something else that Publishers would still want to gamble on I wanted to see if I could maybe like a Michael Lewis take my audience with me to other topics so that was a lateral move that was very deliberate from a a career optionality standpoint and then I was doing I think what I've done for a very long time and what I enjoy doing which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field could be anything if anyone says always never should I pay attention and take note of that they may very well be right but if anything is said in absolutes I like to stress test and in the case of say physical performance or physical manipulation tracking 2008 2009 was a very interesting time because a number of different Technologies were coming online meaning being adopted by small groups you had the very early stages of say accelerometers as variables you had a number of different Innovations and means of tracking that had never been available before you had for instance and this took a bit of fiing on my side it wasn't immediately on the road map for the 4our body but continuous glucose monitors at the time that was I want to say exclusively limited to type 1 diabetics or maybe type two diabetics but largely type 1 diabetics and what captured my interest and I can't recall how I came across it but it was probably through the very earliest iterations of what later became the Quantified Self movement and I remember attending the very first gathering at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica California this is this was around 2009 12 people 13 people to discuss quantifying Health but the the example of a professional race car driver I can't remember the the form factor whether it was F1 or Nascar or other who who was using this continual glucose monitor for paying attention to glucose levels while driving and I thought to myself would that not be useful for healthy normals would that not have other applications if this if this is being used by high performer in this type of context might it have other types of applications which then led me to use the very early versions of Dexcom which were really painful to implant no longer the case of course that's changed a lot and I wanted to see how I might be able to find a handful of different categories of things there's the new like the genuinely new like CGM at that point was genuinely new the very old that might have some room for scientific investigation and I would say when I say scientific I don't necessarily mean randomized control trials at a university I do think as an N of one if you think about study design and you can even blind you could even Placebo control and I knew people in the small subculture of Quantified Self who did this you can I think approach things in a methodical way where you can make a lot of progress in trying to determine causality or lack thereof looking at very old things looking at orphaned things so for instance there are many examples in the world of doping where you have say Bal back in the day where famously Barry Bonds and others purportedly use things like the cream and the clear and these were based on anabolics that were sourced from Soviet literature or older literature from the 50s and 60s that might not be on the radar of say the anti-doping uh groups that would administer the testing so all of these different buckets were of interest to me and I begin where I usually do which is interviewing folks so I would interview one or two people in a given field and I might ask them any number of questions so one is what are the Nerds doing on the weekends or at night this is also really good for investing it's like all right what are the really technical nerds doing at night or on the weekends after they've put in a really long work day or work week let's take a really close look at that another one is and I'll I'll create a flow for this but what are rich people doing now that everyone or tens or hundreds of millions of people might be doing 10 years from now and an example of that would be let's just say full-time assistant virtual assistant AI right so we've seen the needs and wants being addressed by different technology but it's an iteration of the same thing on some level in the case of say using chat GPT tied into zapier for various functions and then where are people cobbling together awkward Solutions so where are people piecing together awkward Solutions and is there room for some type of innovation there these are a few of the questions that I would not only ask myself but ask experts in different areas so if I end up spending time say this was a few years prior to writing the 4-Hour Body I spent time at Nasa as and was interacting with a number of scientists some people who were working on all sorts of biological tests and at genomics and had a very Frank discussion about where they thought if they had to push right so I'll ask questions like push a little bit into the realm of Science Fiction and speculation because I'm sure you can't support any type of projection like that with the literature with scientific literature but what do you think some of the risks are of say publishing your genome because at the time a number of high-profile folks had just made their full genomes available they're like well I think in the near future it' be possible to reconstruct someone's face based on their genetic data and they like high degree of confidence like zero 100% how confident yeah 80 90% I'm like okay I should pay attention to that because if you're making your data available let's just say and it's anonymized per se you still might be identifiable it's like okay that raises some interesting questions like okay well then how might you get around that how might you put in safeguards so that you are the one and only keeper of your data so to speak uh brought up all sorts of targeted Weaponry uh bi sort of bioweapons possibilities that I was interested in and then I would ask that person who's clearly like willing to step outside of the box of whatever he's working on dayto day who are two of your close friends or two thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to are kind of at the bleeding edge of something and unorthodox and then I would just continue to have these conversations over and over again and the the the the the dream of development that I paid a lot of attention to is something along the lines of the following so the the the very Beginnings are usually in some type of extreme case and I think the extremes and this goes for product design as well but the extremes inform the mean but not vice versa so you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases so race horses for instance uh you'll often see things start with say race horses uh or people with wasting diseases for instance or any type of chronic or terminal illness who are willing to try some more experimental interventions then let's just take one step further bodybuilding see a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding and high level athletes then billionaires then rich people then the rest of us right so my assumption is and was for the for our body that along the lines of William Gibson's quote you know the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed so I'm never predicting the future I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating that I think are going to bloom and end up spreading really really widely uh so that's that's that's generally where I start and I assume the practitioners are going to be ahead of the papers so studying say the coaches whose jobs are on the line who are getting paid based on Athlete Performance and assuming that a lot of that will eventually if it holds up make its way into say the peer-reviewed exercise science papers but it's going to have a lag time of three to five years at least at least at least takes a long time yeah science is often very slow to catch up yeah um you mentioned many things I have questions about um you mentioned paying attention to the new the very old or the orphaned um so interesting and I just thought I'd uh tell you that when you sit down with a graduate student or a postdoc and they're trying to come up with a project rarely do you say you know like what do you want to work on and they fire back like really interesting question sometimes they do but that's the rare person more often than not you'll send them to the literature and they'll come back with like okay there's this new technique that we can use to answer a set of questions better than ever before or there's a very old Theory I want to revisit or there's this theory that no one pays attention to in fact we had one guest on here ODed Ravi who is studying it essentially um inheritance of traits transgenerational inheritance of traits it's a little bit although different from Lamar uh uh Evolution but it's a lot like that um in some ways and you know these orphan theories that everyone assumed were wrong and there is a basis for them so I think there's Real Genius in that U analysis um it also struck me as you were um listing off some of your process Circa the the writing of the 4-Hour Body that I and many other people are are probably curious about what the operations around all that looked like so are you or were you at the time like waking up in the morning going okay I'm going to take a walk and think about the new the old and the orphaned or um I'm GNA take a walk or sit in a chair and think about like what are the Nerds doing right now what are rich people doing right now cobbling together awkward Solutions was was that exploration a structured practice for you or is this just something that um was the consequence of being Tim Ferris waking up in the morning and just like leaning into that because i' I've experienced both right you know but I think a lot of us are uh Curious I mean that there's a lot of Mystique around you um my best to dispell it whether whether you like it or not um it it it's there and um and we're not trying to to pry but pry away is the is the establishment of structure for you something that's the consequence of structure in the first place it's like okay now it's time to think or do you just allow things to geyser up to the surface I do both and I would say that in the case of the 4-Hour Body it's it's a bit of an anomaly compared to my later books because I had recorded effectively every work ad I had done since age 16 as a competitive athlete I just I had a lot of records and I kept copious notes on supplement use and everything imaginable so I have what you might call hypergraphia I just capture almost everything in writing and that was very useful because various points in time let's just say I looked at a photograph of myself from making this up but 2004 and I think I would like to look and feel like that again okay let me revisit my workout logs let me just replicate the preceding three to six months of workouts and look at my intake and my diet at the time and lo and behold more or less I could replicate the same type of look and feel and performance so I had a lot already logged that I thought was worth examining and putting up under scrutiny trying to replicate with other people I do think replication is really important and then when it came time to commit to writing the book I thought about what types of mini books would be of great interest to me personally and that book like many of my other books was written in such a fashion that it could be a Choose Your Own Adventure book did not need to be read in fact in many ways it shouldn't be read linearly from page one to the end you get to pick and choose which chapter chapters are of Interest based on breath hold vertical jump endurance hypertrophy cold exposure for fat loss whatever it might be and then I began talking to people and at the at the very outer bounds of self-experimentation at least in the Bay Area it's a pretty small community so you're one or two lily pads from just about everyone and it's not accidental that I put myself in that environment in San Francisco specifically and more generally in the Bay Area Silicon Valley because there's just a high surface area for luck to stick to because you have so many serendipitous encounters you have so many people focusing on different disciplines that I think was the fertilizer and the fertile ground for everything else was actually the choosing the wear of writing physically being located in San Francisco and then when I'm structuring things maybe I'll get into some of the nitty-gritty but I was using at the time and I still like to use a program called scrivener which is actually designed predominantly for screenwriting it's used for many things now novels and so on it's expanded its reached quite a bit but it allows you to gather research and all of your documents and drafts so that you can move them around in very novel ways so you can view say a split pane of your research and what you're working on simultaneously with without having to toggle between a lot of different windows and I was very promiscuous in my gathering of data so I would gather from say the web using a Web Clipper from Evernote which I was involved with as a company and basically without bias capture as much as possible put three asterisks next to anything that I thought I really might want to revisit after I had read something a second time which I would always do then I could controll F to find just three asterisks because they don't occur much in normal writing just like people authors writers will you use TK meaning find such and such a date data needs to be inserted later but I don't want to interrupt the flow of writing let me put in TK because it doesn't really appear in natural English much uh in terms of structured thinking the way I approached it was during that period of time in my life it was interviews tracking people down conversations emails reading so ingestion let's just say for the workday then a break for training and and actually using myself as the human guinea pig for various things that had surfaced that might be on the docket where were you training at that time San Francisco is not uh famous for amazing gyms it's not famous for amazing gyms at the time I was training mostly at a Climbing Gym called Mission Cliffs they didn't have much but they had barbells and they had and they had kettle bells I also had in the in the walkway leading from the front door of the apartment I was renting it was more of a house the front door all the way to the first set of stairs there were 30 K kettle bells so various types and I was training for certification because I wanted to put myself on some type of deadline with accountability for that type of training to get a better understanding of it so trained for a few hours I also had developed a friendship with Kelly starett so San Francisco CrossFit who I have tremendous amount of respect for likewise on multiple levels and his new book yeah built to move his great book he's so good yeah he he really not only talks the talk but walks the walk and exemplifies many of the capabilities that he teaches which I take seriously I like practitioners not just the people with pretty theories although the theories are important I prefer to see someone who can actually put them into practice so Kelly served that function uh certainly and we're still very close friends and then after that all right shake off the cobwebs get the body moving get the brain moving also eat and then I would actually focus on synthesis so I would write generally from let's call it 900 p.m. or 10 p.m. through to 4 or 5 a.m. and I would ride the wave if I happened to be in the zone if I weren't in the zone I wouldn't force it and I would try to get more sleep but I have always performed best with my writing in those witching hours of let's call it 10: p.m. to 4:00 a.m. and my experience is that the writers I've interviewed the the writer friends I've become close with if you look at when they made themselves not necessarily what they do now right but what they did that eventually got them to escape velocity they're almost always doing most of their writing very late at night or very early in the morning when the rest of the world or their social group is inactive wow yeah and I say wow because uh of course all of this was prior to the publication of Matt Walker's seminal book right why we sleep which I really see as the book that shifted a lot of people fortunately from the I'll sleep when I'm dead mindset uh to I'll you know to really paying attention to it and um you know I don't think that gets enough credit I mean there uh there's been a revision of a few points within that book but the majority of it is just spot on and Hyper legitimate so good and um and yet what you're describing is a schedule that you know starting to write at 900 p.m. and finishing up around 4:00 a.m. but you talked about research earlier that day and training and eating so were there naps in there I would sleep from say 4: to maybe 11 or 12 so I would be getting up later and I've had conversations with Matt about this and there are night owls and morning Larks and there are certainly differences in the code meaning the genetics but that worked very very well for me for a very long time it is however a very challenging social schedule so once you have a significant other and every girlfriend I've ever had is a morning person if you want to spend time together that schedule just does not work so I made compromises later for the social side of things but if if you put a gun to my head and said you need to write the best book humanly possible that is your only priority outside of some exercise and fuel I would follow the same schedule I know several um very successful podcasters Lex fredman in particular who I think he's trying to follow a more normal schedule now but he's pseudo nocturnal at least by my ex my read yeah um and there are couple other uh online content creators um Derek from more plates more dates who's hyperproductive in his domain and is mostly nocturnal um and then as you're describing your writing routine and your overall routine I was thinking that you know the the great skateboarder everyone knows Tony Hawk who is obviously a great skateboarder no doubt about that but Rodney Mullen who invented the all on Street the kickflip the all like Rodney is basically nocturnal and has been for a long time and would you know skateboard up and down the bordwalk in Santa Monica in the middle of the night because lack of distraction is really was and he's been doing that since his teens I don't know what he's doing these days but I think a lot of creators just need space and and I always wonder if that's because when they at least the ones that are not uh socially dysfunctional like yourself who when they are around people there's this almost hopefully a desire to interact so you almost have to remove the stimulus completely yeah it it it removes the plausible deniability which might not be the perfect use of that phrase but in the sense that you it's harder to fool yourself into thinking you're doing something important when you're checking your messages or social media at 2: in the morning who are we kidding folks you should be writing in this case right and writers will do anything to avoid writing I remember IR Rand wrote a book about writing which is actually fantastic I can't remember the exact title it might just be on non-fiction writing something like that and she talked about polishing the sneakers or the shoes before writing like I really just need to do this one thing which is to just clean up that shoe because somebody should really clean it up and at some point I should clean it up and therefore why don't I just do there's no time like the present I'll just do that it's all to avoid writing which is the harder thing and in my conversations with Matt also I should say that as someone who has self-described as a person who struggles with onset insomnia Matt made the point and sometimes we need to relearn things maybe you should just go to bed later sure and that might address some of this onset insomnia and I don't know the causes for that but I do get a Second Wind very late could be related to some cortisol release abnormality or just different scripting in my system who knows I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors athletic greens athletic greens now called ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic green since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once usually twice a day is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health our gut is very important it's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health and those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health in addition athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road in the car on the plane Etc and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's athletic greens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2 I'll mention one other one other maybe shuris that I use for trying to peek around Corners which is if I find an example of an outlier trying to find two or three right because one is an exception two is interesting three is worth investigating that's sort of how I think about it and I recognize the plural of anecdote does not equal data however a lot of interesting discoveries begin as case studies or case histories and so there are some things we could talk about that that I've paid attention to over the last few years that are not in the for our body that I think are quite interesting and raise very very exciting questions uh but I'd love to hear about those yeah and and along the lines of what I call anic data I mean most of what we know about human memory stems from one patient hm who had his hippocampi removed for epilepsy and of course there have been Millions probably close to millions of studies in animals and humans focusing on the hippocampi but most of what we know about human memory is from one guy yeah yeah exactly so there's there's there's a lot to be examined not all of it will get funding for rcts let's be realistic this is especially true if you're hoping for any type of directive data and notice I'm not saying conclusive but if if you are a human who's going to be making decisions about diet Health exercise if you want any consensus you're doomed you'll be you're not going to get any answers before you die can you say that twice so that the internet can hear it extra loud and clear for those of you that are arguing about nutrition on Twitter like it it might actually be life wasted yeah I mean I'm not being judgmental I mean I think that there's validity in lots of those Pockets there's stuff that's wrong in lots of those Pockets yeah um their diets that work extremely well like you know 4-Hour diet or slow carb I always call the 4our diet but the Slow Carb Diet it works extremely well anytime I've followed it you I get much leaner and stronger and all that stuff um uh that it's uh purported to do it it works um but yeah maybe you could just uh explain what you mean by that because I think there are some argument slf friction spaces that that are truly an energy sync yeah I would just say focus on what works for you and your family or your team and if you're arguing on the internet recognize that you're just doing it because you like arguing on the internet you're not going to convince anyone of anything and uh you're just going to make yourself uh more frustrated if you plan on changing any opinions so for me it's Live and Let Live and uh the more people who engage in that type of behavior the more competitive Advantage do you have if you don't so for me I'm like okay if you want to spend this vital non-renewable resource of yours called time on that if I ever compete against you I'm going to win so great I'll just uh I'll I'll also not even try to convin you to stop doing that unless you see the logic in it which I have which is why I also don't have at least for two years have mostly had no social apps installed on my phone uh and we could talk about that because I think recognizing that these things have been engineered to overcome any type of self-discipline with billions of dollars at stake uh should lead you to believe that you're bringing a a knife to a gunfight so I just don't have the apps on my phone to begin with and I find it much more gratifying to see disproportionate change from small inputs so that's what I'm looking for and I'm also looking for changes that are easy to make that can have high adherence that have very limited downside which is very different from proving something for instance in the 4our body took a look at the potential effect of cell phones or the proximity of cell phones to say gadal function and reproductive health and the literature that was available at the time was very limited had some animal studies mice rats Etc I recognize humans are not just large mice so they don't always translate but I looked at I said okay looking at this simplistically is it plausible that there could be similar effects on humans seems to be the case also based on conversations with people people who are Specialists but would never go on record therefore if your phone is in your pocket just have it on airplane mode I mean it it does not have a high cost and and then pending any revision we can see but while the jury is still out I'm going to risk mitigate by taking this step yeah well and I just want to say thank you there too I read that recommendation I followed the recommendation of not keeping the phone on in my front pocket or back pocket um and that's anic data um my sperm analysis isn't relevant to this conversation but worked out but you know you could say well that's not necessarily because you had the phone off but um I did a very long detailed episode on male and female fertility there is now a what I view as a really quality metaanalysis and it's pretty clear that there are effects of the smartphone on proximity of the smartphone when it's turned on uh that are not good for sperm isn't necessarily going to render somebody sterile but um on sperm that can be separated out from the heat effects and so essentially this is another instance in which uh you were you were right um and I think more data will come out and am I a EMF conspiracy theorist uh no um do I wear tinfoil underwear no um but uh I think it's interesting I think it's important and uh thanks to you um queued my attention to it in fact I I teach about that in a a course on on neural circuits and biology and health and disease amazing and I don't expect to get everything right at all that would be crazy i' like to think I'm not totally crazy and it's very important if you are going to do self- experimentation or experimentation in small groups which the Quantified Self community did quite well and I think still does quite well you should really make every effort to not fool yourself which is hard it's it's challenging at times but read books like bad science read books like How to lie with Statistics ensure that you are able to read studies well you don't have to be the best in the world but that you can on some level identify the strengths and weaknesses of studies this doesn't take a long time certainly our friend petera Dr petera has studying studies which is a multiple part blog series dedicated to this there are other ways to approach it I took one of his podcasts republished it on the Tim Farah show because it talked about how to examine studies what powering refers to things like this in the span of one or two weeks you could really become literate with the building blocks of scientific literacy with respect to reading studies and that gives you such an enormous life Advantage it's hard hard to overstate yeah I agree and I also think that there are a lot of things that just simply will not ever be explored in a randomized control trial um one of the things that Peter and I have talked about before is he texts me you know what are your thoughts on bpc157 this is a gastric peptide that's now been synthesized so people will inject it into a tissue that they're trying to heal or improve lots and lots of anic data on bpc157 making injuries heal faster Etc again anic data I've used it I took an injection of it yesterday in fact um Peter basically is not a Believer because there a lack of published data on this which is perfectly fine or I should say he's um skeptical um and so there's always that possibility of a placebo effect but I don't think there will ever be a really nice controlled trial on bpc 1570 because the financial incentives aren't there and no smart graduate student is going to go do a thesis on this that so that's a reality I mean maybe one will do it now that we're having this conversation but it just doesn't that the payout isn't there yeah and that last one you mentioned is one that people miss a lot people doing these studies are people with careers who are planning their careers and so they choose what they're going to invest time in very carefully so that's another limiter on what will end up in an RCT or not right so uh I think that's good for people to hear and as you get more involved with science and in my case through a foundation you know Cay Foundation funding a lot of early stage science you realize how expensive it is and how long it takes it is a long-term investment and if you are looking to make behavioral changes or modify aspects of yourself cognitive physical psycho emotional or otherwise identifying interventions right options that seem to have some plausible upside like there is a a mechanism that might make sense in humans if you feel fairly certain there's very limited downside which should include talking to people who are presenting their results as anic data then maybe you consider using X if you can cap your downside right and I recall for instance looking at trans Resveratrol specifically not for longevity but in potentially increasing endurance for for our body and I ended up testing it and there's a funny story associated with that didn't quite work out as planned and I don't use it any longer but what I experienced prior to actually finding this on forums was joint pain elbow pain the one most consistent side effect was what felt like tendonosis in the elbows and then I went online and I'd already done this but I hadn't come across I think it was the 500 group people have been using 500 milligrams of trans res trol daily for long periods of time and one of the most common reported side effects is joint pain and I was like okay I'm not willing to make that trade-off yeah and makes sense to me yeah I think um it would be fun if ever you were willing that we could do uh a hybrid podcast on supplement fails I have some spectacular failures as do I and I'm thinking I'm thinking about a few of them I mean some that were really um like took me off course like there's one supplement uh called bulbine natalensis this is another another one of these shrubs sounds like an infection I mean this thing will really spike your testosterone and free testosterone I'm talking back acne like huge strength gains aggression it's really wild and then after about seven to 10 days it all crashes and you go below Baseline oh sounds Terri yeah even testicular pain so it was unclear so you if you're a smart person you use right so I can understand why people are skeptical of certain things and then of course there are supplements that I'm a big fan of and that you're a big fan of we talked about those things elsewhere but um it might be fun to do supplement fails podcast if ever you were willing that would I could do just experimental fails oh yeah yeah n of one experimental fails which include things that people might not think about for instance for our body had quite a bit of real estate dedicated to looking at things like PRP so PL rich plasma I think there's a rooll for it it's not useful for everything but for certain types of injury or repair I think it's very interesting um but uh every time you get injected this is where you have to be careful because there are very few free lunches out there there's there's usually some type of feedback loop your system is very smart at Auto regulating things this is this is outside of that a consideration that I hadn't made which is every time you have an injection there's a chance of an infection particularly if the sight in my case was the elbow and the injection was made for the PRP not quite where it should have been slightly to the rear of the elbow where the the skin is very thick and so it pushed uh staff bacteria from a mid layer of the skin into the joint capsule not good and that really could have ended very poorly I ended up having to go to the ER and get it get it all removed and so on but that could have ended up uh in a in a much much more severe situation so you do have to be careful with this stuff I've become a little more conservative with some what I do including injections I'm like all right like let me think twice about the injections if I'm going to swallow something let me make sure I'm really looking at the implications for the liver yeah smart very smart I'm curious about some of the things that you talked about in the 4-Hour Body and the that you've mentioned today things like accelerometers continuous glucose monitors deliberate cold exposure how many of those things are you still doing on a regular basis and how many do you um you know use a couple times a week or a couple times a month or go through phases of using and not using cold exposure I use as consistently as is practical so if I'm traveling it's a little harder but we're in LA right now one of the first things I did was find a few options for contrast therapy MH one of the first things I did and by contrast I do not mean infrared sauna and cold plunge I'd much rather have hot and cold water just in terms of sort of speed of heating the Japanese approach right for just speed of vasod dilation particularly for injury recovery I think it's incredibly helpful for mood regulation certainly that's the case and cold water for mood regulation or the treatment of say depression or as a pre Ive intervention to avoid or mitigate depression is old used to be prescribed for melancholy and people like the Vos of the world would be prescribed cold baths so that was something I was like well let's take a look at some of the old history read about that and then look into PubMed and so on to see what might be supported so the cold I'm still using I become increasingly interested this was not in the 4-Hour Body but whole body hyperthermia often excluding the head for depression which I know there's some some research UCSF ex right now yeah really interesting studies too early to report I'm not involved in these but I think these are really important studies because for all the people saying oh well you know it's ice bath stuff you know metabolism this metabolism that one thing that's very clear is long lasting very significant increase in the catacol means dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine um not a replacement perhaps for anti-depressant medication but as you said to to move the needle toward anti-depressant States um that's the cocktail and um heat as well yeah yeah and the hypothermia especially the way is formatted right now with some of the research is is very early stages there's going to be less adherence it's not as readily available say cold shower cold bath so I do think about the Practical implications of that but right now it's it's very interesting slow carb diet still use it all the time it is not my default 247 as it us used to be so maybe I'm just getting older and more self-indulgent but if I find myself going off the rails a bit and I'm like okay I'm getting closer to Muffin Top here let's stage an intervention then I will go immediately back to slow carb diet and within within a matter of weeks it's it's pretty easily corrected and just a cue for people I know it's um you know slow carb diet um achieved great prominence in fact wasn't it featured on uh or mentioned in an episode of Orange Is the New Black I it might have been it's made it's made appearances on a handful of shows great I realized that I've been referring to the Slow Carb Diet several times throughout this discussion so for those that aren't familiar with the Slow Carb Diet I know they can go look up what that is but so that we can keep them here uh for the rest of this discussion and not have to send them out and back uh just yet um could you give us just a brief top Contour of what the slow carb diet is sure so slow carb diet is intended to be a simple easy to adhere to diet for people who have perhaps failed other diets that allows you to recompose your body so improve muscle mass decrease body fat percentage and the rules are really simple and that's part of what makes it work it's not ideal for every sport in every circumstance but broadly speaking it works for a lot of people who've had trouble with dieting in the past so rule number one don't drink calories that's it very simple so black coffee unsweetened tea great juice out anything with calories out you could add a little bit of heavy cream to your coffee let's say uh but that's that's also bending the rules in a way that I don't like so in the beginning it's like follow the rules so you can break them later so in the beginning let's just say you can't drink calories number two don't eat anything white sounds pretty basic right just don't eat anything that is the color of white or that could be white basically that means you're going to be avoiding starches and uh things that are are similar to starches that includes things like oatmeal that includes things like oatmeal so roughly speaking just avoiding things that are white or that could be white will get you pretty far and yes there are exceptions like cauliflower fine you can have cauliflower but again don't get fancy right it's it's very easy to outsmart yourself when it comes to behavioral change keep it simple so for at least two weeks forget about the exceptions right don't drink calories don't eat anything white and then eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up okay got that and then there are a few buckets you can choose from right so you have vegetables beans and lentils uh and then some type of protein so you're going to come up with meals that you can follow without deviating for a period of one or two weeks just come up with the same meals and that's going to sound boring yes but guess what you do it already you just might not realize it and the the lentils and the beans specifically as a prere we can get into some of the reasons but add a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite right so that's actually a very important component of these meals and there may be a handful of other rules but those are the basics and then the Redemption is take one day off per week and just go crazy that that's cheat day there are some epic cheat days out there some I've captured for myself and anything goes when I say anything I do mean anything so if you want to consume multiple pizzas pints of ice cream whatever indulge I left one out no fruit during the week so avoid fruit avoid fructose so agave nectar anything that is sort of hidden sugar avoid all that uh it's a no added sweeteners obviously but avoid avoid fruit and fructose and again it's not going to kill you guess what if you're from European ancestry your ancestry did not have like blueberries in the middle of winter generally speaking right so you'll you'll be fine for a few weeks um and then there's that cheat day and cheat day anything goes the amount of damage you can do on cheat day is pretty limited and there are ways you can mitigate that there's a whole chapter called damage control in the 4our body but focusing just on that diet and having one one day off where you know you can do anything means when you are controlling yourself for those six days of the week you're not giving up your favorite foods forever you can even keep a list of all things you want to eat on cheap day and then you have free license to eat on cheap day and that provides you with a release valve so that you can build in the cheating as opposed to having it occur as a failure point there are a handful of other things there if you have Domino Foods in the house for instance if you eat a lot of almonds or mixed nuts and you're just going to sit there compulsively eating them while you're sitting at your laptop don't have what I call dominoe Foods in the house which are going to really create some portion control issues but broadly speaking don't drink calories don't e things that are white take from three categories and build your meals out and those are the meals that you follow do not eat fruit or fructose and then cheat one day a week and Saturday is a nice day or cheat day for most folks FKS and uh just to answer some questions people are going to have no that doesn't mean 24 hours that you can spread out over two days that will actually say you back but the amount of fat that you can store in a handful of sittings over 24 hours which legitimately is more like 12 to 18 hours pretty limited um so that's slow grab diet great thank you for that I also want to ask is it okay to take the day after cheat day and fast or do one meal that day when I followed the Slow Carb Diet I benefited from it tremendously lost fat gained muscle tons of energy sleeping great uh required less caffeine all sorts of wonderful things stable blood sugar I felt so so good um really enjoyed the cheat days I really really enjoyed the cheat days so much fun um at some point there's some gastric distress that comes from you know not regulating intake um which led me to not want to eat the the next day MH um so I tended to do the cheat days on Sunday in my case um and then I would fast most of Monday just water black coffee tea and then I might have a small meal in the evening and then by Tuesday I was back on the Slow Carb died does that seem like a um an uh sort of a detrimental deviation from the from the plan I think that if that is what works for you then that is what works for you so this is this this the Slow Carb Diet template for me is a starting point and generally I'll say I think this is from Picasso right it's like learn the rules as an amateur so you can break them as a professional but it's like I recommend most people kind of stick with the format for a handful of weeks and measure the results right there so there are guidelines for how to measure the the scale is a bit of a blunt instrument so there are other ways but if you're extremely overweight you can just use the scale and fasting I think is fine or just ratcheting back your chloric consumption significantly uh and what happens over time for most people also is for the first say four weeks on cheat day you're going to go completely insane and I remember I was doing something much stricter called the cyclical ketogenic diet which is a whole separate thing it's much more limiting in terms of what you can eat but I was training for ultimately the Nationals in Chinese kickboxing this was happening in 99 so I was training super hard I was following a cyclical ketogenic diet which meant I could eat very few things but I did have this one cheat day and I would do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand which is one of the things you can do to limit the damage on cheat day do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand and then I would just go crazy I mean I would drive to like crispy K cream by 12 donuts and they would be gone by the time I got home and it wasn't an hour away it was like a 10-minute Drive Donuts would be gone right I would go to Safeway and I would buy a bag of those funsize Snickers and that would be just a tiny portion of my calor stuff for you huh a lot of sweet stuff I also did the Savory stuff I mean I had my favorites nothing was safe Pizza nothing was safe nothing was safe my my Paws got into everything and then over time because the next day you're going to feel like you got hit by a diabetic dump truck you start ratcheting back and you're like okay maybe I don't need to do that maybe cheat day will just be two meals or maybe cheat day will just be like the pastries in the morning with the coffee and you start to regulate a bit generally you don't have to but over time you generally will and I think after you've followed it to the tea just follow the Commandments for say four to eight weeks then you can certainly deviate and I'm not saying if you're not hungry don't eat however in many cases people have they have acclimated to not eat eating in the morning and then they end up overeating later in the day if you have that habit right if you're consuming 50% of your calories or more at dinner and you want to lose body fat I would say get some cottage cheese or something that will give you 30 grams easily in the morning worst case scenario use a protein of some type just don't make it hypercaloric you mean powdered protein like could be powdered way powdered way protein whole food is going to do a lot more MH and no calorie counting correct no calorie counting tends to be self-limiting when you're eating this much fiber and this much protein it tends to be very self-limiting what you'll want to consume and what you can consume yeah once again I had great experiences with slow carb diet and um I'm going to go back on yeah and nobody and uh nobody needs to buy anything to figure it out if you just search on tim. blog slow carb diet there you'll get everything that you need to get started no purchase necessary well it works very very well I'll say that and it's very straightforward to follow and it does include the the notorious uh cheat day uh Infamous cheat day um uh and it can be done um on a on a very reasonable budget and so if people want to learn more about that they should go to Tim's blog on 4our uh um 4our body and um slow carb diet we'll provide a link but it's you know I think it's worth highlighting again just how effective that is you know as you pointed out thousands and thousands of people um using it to great success some of whom were um quite obese and um yeah any updates on those folks are they still keeping the weight off I would like to do a followup uh it's I think with diets in general there's a lot of reversion to the mean you know regression to the mean so I would expect that that some have kept it off and some have not that would be true of I think every possible diet especially for people who are overcoming beh avoral inertia of having gained hundreds of pounds but uh I'd like to do some followup what was fun about the post I put together called how to lose 100 pounds on the Slow Carb Diet we had we profiled say four or five people but there were dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and this was a very long time ago so I would say that a long-term followup would be super interesting and we did at one point track several thousand people through a platform of the time I think it was coach.me as they follow the Sol carb diet for the first four to 12 weeks and that was fascinating because I want the data and I'm happy to be proven incorrect with any of my assumptions I mean I I don't view that as a failure me I view that as as a huge net gain and uh it has a very high adherence rate so I I pay attention to not just is something effective does it get you the outcome you want not only is it efficient from a Time and resource perspective but how high is the adherence rate right so if you take a random sampling of a thousand people from the US across socioeconomic classes Etc how many people practically speaking will be able to or willing to follow this for say an eight-week period of time or four-week period of time and I try to optimize for the widest adherence because I know the the sil CB I people come on they're like what but what about intermittent fasting what about this and what about endurance athletes I'm like this is not for everybody in cases it just happens to be a good default diet with a high adherence rate and like you said it's very inexpensive it can be followed very very inexpensively could sorry to interrupt you one thing that I really like about it is that um many uh variants on caloric restriction which is because laws of thermodynamics definitely apply folks we're not we're not trying to say they don't um but one of the issues with a lot of things including intermittent fasting which I sort of do some variant of because I'm not really hungry to eat until about 11:00 I like to train in the morning if I can Etc is that they can sometimes prevent best performance in terms of especially resistance training high-intensity resistance training so very low carb diets I've tried them um even if you're paying attention to you know other ways to restock glycogen it performance drops off whereas a slow carb diet I feel like I can think I can work I can exercise I can sleep like everything just works well but there's one thing in it that I wanted to raise that I when I heard this I thought there's no way this is true which was uh making sure that you get 30 or so grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking yeah and I thought how can that be like how can adding protein early in the day actually make a difference and it really did work I was I still track my numbers so in terms of dropping body fat percentage increasing muscle it really does work now whether or not that's simply because it's offsetting food intake that I would have um food that I would have taken in later in the day I don't know I I don't I'm not going to make myself my own control experiment to the point that I drive myself crazy yeah but um it really does work quite well um to get past sticking points to just get that 30 g of protein early so violate the the uh um Tim restricted feeding component deliberately with some protein in the morning y then still train and do all the other things and you know carry on as usual and it's just so it seems so peculiar like eating more and and losing body fat but it works yeah it's counterintuitive and a lot of approaches can work for a lot of different people right to State the OB but this particular aspect of this low carb diet is helpful for let's just say the majority of the people in that thousand person sample I was talking about the hypothetical Pole from different parts of say the us or anywhere because it it it seems to help with a few things first there's just the thermic effect of food and for protein there's a greater thermic effect you also have and I think there's there's decent at the time there was decent literature to support this so I don't know if it's changed that the protein intake along those lines has an appetite suppressing effect so the The Net Daily calories consumed tends to be less when someone has a higher protein meal earlier in the day and last but not least I will say one of the risks and there are many people who execute well on this but you have to be very meticulous which is true of the ketogenic diet as well you can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you do it 60% right or 70% right you're really you can get yourself in there massive psoriasis I mean my scalp you know slopping off from like when I'm in ketosis and going like what the hell is going on you're going back on some complex carbohydrates and it going away yeah I exactly I don't need I don't need a randomized control trial to know I simply don't want to run that experiment your scalp yeah so in the case of say Tim restricted feeding some people who do intermittent fasting lose a lot of muscle mass and there are multiple reasons for this I I think people should make use of relatively widely available tools like dexa and so on to ensure that your composition is actually moving the way you think it's moving uh make sure you standardize your hydration for that as well as time of day just Pro tip that's true for blood tests as well but it seems to get net net better effects than trying to teach people how to fast effectively which you can do and we can talk about fasting that's something that was not included in the 4-Hour Body that were I to rewrite it today I would include a section and there was a bit in tools of Titans to address that on more extended fasts let's just call it three to 7 day fasts uh so that's an area that's of of great interest to me as is ketosis and metabolic Psychiatry I'll Chris Palmer yeah who we both know incredible I mean what he's what the Awakening that he's uh created through his book and going on your podcast my podcast and others and and you know letting people be aware that changes in diet can impact mental health so I think in two three years it's going to be a duh and we're not just talking about the difference between you know um slamming back horrible Foods horrible for US Foods versus eating really clean I mean really specific diet protocols to treat mental health incredible yeah super exciting so that's that's one of the things that I'm paying a lot of attention to right now they're a handful in that r within the just say the the interplay of Mind and Body since The cartisian Duality and separation of this too makes no sense from a biological standpoint so um that's that's something that certainly captured my attention and I paid a lot of attention to even as far back as early 2000s uh for mental health and just cognitive performance I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be assessed with a quality blood test the problem with a lot of blood in DNA tests out there however is that they'll give you information about certain lipid markers or hormone markers but no information about what to do with all of that data inside tracker makes it very easy to look at your levels of hormones metabolic factors lipids ET ET and then to assess what sorts of Behavioral nutritional supplementation or perhaps other interventions you might want to use in order to bring those numbers into the ranges that are optimal for your health for this week only the week of June 19th 2023 insid tracker is offering a buy one get one free on their ultimate plan this is their best discount of the year you can get this offer by going to insidetracker docomo again that's insidetracker docomo thanks for uh revisiting some of the 4-Hour Body and slow carb diet and elaborating on um some of the process that went into that and I think uh creators of all kinds thinkers of all kinds and people who are interested in the contents of the 4our body are going to be uh very grateful for that information I certainly am fascinated by your process um one of the things that you mentioned along the lines of process was you know the power of places and where one happens to live I think there's a essay by Paul Graham that talks about this it's a little outdated um you know and it talks about the messages that you um the tacit messages of being in certain cities I think it was you know like Boston you're not smart enough um uh what was it it was New York uh you're not powerful enough uh and not you I just thinking and um or you should be more powerful is the message like the tcid message um Los Angeles um what you're what you're doing people aren't paying attention paying enough attention to it like that messages these are stereotypes about cities certainly cities change um the role of places is an interesting one like you know you mentioned you know small gathering Kevin Kelly's house Quantified Self and I think for people who don't know people like that right um maybe we could get your thoughts on you know how would one think about where to live and and maybe even curating their own Gatherings useful Gatherings because it's not that uh I have to imagine it's not that you guys sat back and like I'm Tim Ferris he's like I'm Kevin Kelly let's have a gathering so we can talk about it in a few years on a podcast this stuff happens MH that word you know it's dangerous word organically um when people who have common interest decide to get together and talk and listen and brainstorm and I'm yet to do that in a you know with good people and not have something really incredible come out of it not necessarily that day yeah but looking five years looking back five years later and just God that was really worthwhile totally yeah few thoughts in no particular order I would say the first is it depends my recommendations depend a lot on where you are in the Arc of your career in life if you are in full growth hyperdrive mode and you are trying to build both yourself and your capabilities in a very concentrated way where you're not necessarily focused on family maybe have fewer obligations then if you're serious I think many people should consider moving to an area of high density for a period of time it could be three months it could be six months could be longer but putting yourself in a New York or an LA or San Francisco or Chicago or as new places develop I'll I'll give you one you might not expect say in Ottawa Canada where Shopify is based and the presence and growth of Shopify has spawned an entire ecosystem of startups so there may be options outside of the usual cast of characters Pittsburgh and dualingo similar effect so there are more options than people might recognize but taking a journey and placing yourself in a place where you can be in a very active pinball machine where you may interact act serendipitously with many different people from many different worlds I think is is is hard to overstate the value of and my drive and my filtering function let's just say because when I first got to the Bay Area nobody cared about me I was nobody I was driving my mom's used minivan hand me down that had the seats stolen out of the back it Terri were you in the South Bay I was I was working in San Jose yeah I mean no disrespect to San Jose I'm from the South Bay yeah but there's a there's a bleakness to the South there is there is a little bit of bleakness and then I lived across the street in this tiny apartment lived across street from the Jack in the Box in Mountain View so it's not like I was strolling onto the big stage and just blowing people away oh I I I I grew up right near Mountain View I'm very familiar probably skated the curbs at that Jack did you train at the Golds Gym in off rang store did actually amazing that was a great gym that was a great gym that was a great gym I don't think it's still there I'll go there super late before my writing sessions okay and it had the benefit of being open really really late and wow rang St haven't thought about that in a long time so the point is I also started where a lot of people are starting and what did I do I put myself in a high density environment next what did I do knowing no one I started to volunteer at events where they had interesting speakers and interesting people coming to hear those speakers so I put myself in Silicon Valley and then then I began volunteering for groups like svas I don't know if it exists anymore the Silicon Valley Association of startup entrepreneurs I think it was Tai the indust entrepreneur which is a very sort of Indian or indian-american focused organization that does a lot in the realm of startups and I would carry water I would take out garbage I would check name badges I would check people in nothing was too low for me and I'll give you guys a tip that will be obvious to some but nonobvious to many when you're are volunteering a lot of folks who volunteer do the absolute bare minimum because they are not getting paid this is not going to get you noticed but it sets a very low bar so that if you volunteer at these events and someone's dropping the ball or there's something happening that needs fixing and you just proactively do it the producers of these events will notice you and this is what happened over time over a few months and then I got invited to join in on meetings that were planning future events and I eventually got to the point where I was recruiting speakers and able to set the agenda for an entire main event and then that's how I got to know say Jack Canfield who is the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul and many others who introduced me to my book agent many many many many years later Jack Campfield but I was a nobody then you have to play the long game but you can be methodical on how you play that and that is one approach just as an example for how to build your network which snowballs over time don't hump every vip's leg within 10 minutes of meeting them play it cool you know and and Gatherings where that person is uh has a lot of Demands on them is the last place you want to do that the way you're going to make yourself saleny to that yeah the way you're going to make yourself memorable with people like that is to be very professional always on time predict what they are going to need or problems they'll run into beforehand and address them before they even think of them and be easy to deal with and people like that high performers notice these things they will make note of it yeah the being easy to work with is something that um I used to tell my graduate students posts I mean it because the opposite of that nobody wants yeah right nobody wants that yeah especially in the beginning like later okay great you're Steve Jobs you want to be difficult here and there or a lot no problem right but in the beginning that can be a real liability you can make up for that if you're the best in the world but in the very beginning you probably won't be uh so try to stack the deck in your favor volunteering is a shortcut and that would be one way of doing it another now especially given the virtual communities that exist so you have subreddits you have online communities you have Twitter groups you have Clubhouse you've got a million different options which can be over overwhelming is Clubhouse still going maybe not I have no idea oh no I don't know I'm not saying it's gone I just I remember during the pandemic there were some Clubhouse Gatherings that hopped on there and but I've sort of forgotten to to get on maybe the the platform Affinity is really fickle which is why I think to the extent possible if you want to build a worldclass and I use that term very deliberately Network in record time just to give you a nice headline I would say focus on the uncrowded channel which is in person it's out of fashion it's out of Vogue going to a conference and actually interacting with humans in the hallway approaching panelists this is another thing that I did I'll give it I'll give another tip so very early on I would go to conferences nobody cared who I was nobody knew who I was fine and I would study the panels let's say I'm going to a big event like South by Southwest and I would this is what I did in 2007 which was just prior to the first book coming out and and I would go to these various in-person events I was focused mostly on events that had uh the Thematic focus of blogs we could come back to that but blogs were what podcasts were a few years ago right they drove incredible traffic but they were undervalued by mainstream media undervalued by mainstream Publishers Etc which meant there was an Arbitrage opportunity in a way and I would pick say a handful of panels with topics I thought were super interesting and then the panel would end and what would happen the panelists would get rushed by various folks because many of them were wellknown who was not getting rushed the moderator I would go straight to the moderator and I would talk to the moderator I'd thank them for the panel i' would be very genuine none of it was made up and talk to them for a bit they would generally ask why I was there what I was interested in I would mention whatever that happened to be in this case it was I'm finishing my first book or I had my first book coming out soon I'm here to hopefully meet people uh who are involved with a or C and then if we hit it off which was not true every time but if it seemed to be going well I would say is I don't know anyone here I'm really sort of orphaned here making my way through uh this entire event is there anyone else here you think I would get along with who maybe I could buy a drink or coffee and vast majority of the time they like oh yeah you should meet so and so and then I get the introduction and then I would meet that person I would have a genuine interaction with that person and if it made sense if things were going well I'd do the same thing is there anybody else here you think I should just say hi to and I get along with not who I can ask for something and that wasn't deception I was being honest like someone I could actually Vibe with and if so would you mind making the intro yeah sure no problem many of those people are still my friends uh and by being surgical in that way not trying to gather business cards to use a really Antiquated metaphor people still hand them out yeah people still hand them out I guess depends on where you are especially like Boston but uh if if rather than trying to collect people as Pokemon cards developing say five three to five deeper relationships through longer conversations at an event that is what directly LED ultimately to the hockey stick for the 4our work week within Tech within specifically San Francisco um so those be a few approaches for for building your network when you don't have the ability to just walk up to say Kevin Kelly and have a conversation that came over time yeah whether or not it's um Health practices or uh nutritional practices or at meetings seems you're oriented toward the crowded but very interesting people in spaces MH but the key word there I think is uncrowded and of course the other key word is interesting right I mean it's not like you're standing in the parking lot talking to whoever happens to be there although that can be interesting right there's a Serendipity there and you know there's always um things to learn from people but in terms of uh career advancement and and building new ideas and forging for information I'm just struck how you've done that over and over um and again thank you for uh giving giving us some insight into the process please all right here's another one so I think there's a tendency among people who want to develop their networks or their relationships to be star not to get too technical but that's a technical term yeah yeah and they want to tell other people they are friends with someone more than they want to develop skills or learn from someone this puts you in a very disadvantaged position because then that means all right you want become friends with Elon Musk good luck or you want to become friends with this a-lister celebrity who everyone else wants to meet good luck it's going to be a crowded bloody path to get there and by the way they've also certainly developed really attuned defenses against people like you so it's G to be hard on the they have staff to prevent they have a fance of protectors to prevent you from ever getting to that person on on the other hand if you're approaching it from the standpoint of developing skills learning and actually becoming potential friends with someone give you an example you could go after you want to become better at boxing let's just make that up all right maybe not the greatest example skiing would be another one but let's let's stick with boxing just because of the way I'll explain it if you wanted to say get personalized lessons from Floyd Mayweather it can happen okay let's go then maybe a step down out of the pro ranks to gold medalist okay if it's a brand new gold medalist let's just say like Oscar De La Hoya when he was really The Golden Boy and it just thrashed everyone still going to be hard what about the silver medalist who just had a bad day when he had that last bout against Oscar De La Hoya potentially right from a technical perspective from a personal connection perspective you may have more in common with that person or bronze medalist and they can get you 70 809 0% of the way there and by the way you probably don't have the physical attributes to make it to 100% anyway if you're coming to it this late and you could get in many cases one-on-one lessons whether in person or virtually with someone who is of that caliber they're in the same front of the pack as the names I just mentioned maybe not as famous 100 bucks 200 bucks per hour for a lot of people that is Within Reach yeah I'm not sure what the value of saying one knows somebody very famous is it's just never been something that I've oriented to it's a common orientation though yeah and uh I think that's true for a lot of things like many people use say psychedelics because they want to tell other people the story that they have of doing psychedelics right they're not doing it intrinsically for what they hope to get out of that experience maybe there's part of them but it's more more the social signaling and validation they get when they project that out at a group dinner into a story that they can tell and that's true for many things so one of the questions I ask myself with all sorts of things if I could never talk about this would I do it what a what a great great right thing to think about right like if I could if I could have let's just say we didn't know each other and I was like okay I'm earlier in my career let's apply some constraints so I'm not where I am I still want to do abnc in the public eye maybe I want to build a podcast whoever if I could meet with you but I could never tell a soul would I do it I don't know would you I would I would I would too but but for a lot of folks if they meaning I'd meet with you I'm not saying I'd meet with me by the way I'd mean with me you know the believe me I meet with me all the time and sometimes it's pretty unpleasant yeah and and that can be applied to all sorts of things right it's like and it's it's a useful question because I as myself this for examining your motivations and I'm not saying one motivation is always better than another but it's it's you should at least be aware of your driving motivations because you can end up playing games you're not even aware you're playing and that's how you end up I think getting into a lot of trouble in life one of the ways so that would be a question I might apply I apply other questions like there's a great question uh that Seth Goden applies who really I admire tremendously and has built an incredibly unorthodox unique life for himself and his family he's he he's zigged when everyone would expect him to zag and I I and he always has a defensible logic behind it and much like Derek cers but most people have probably heard the hypothetical question like what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail right or what would you do if you couldn't fail and Seth turns that around I think that's a good question but he turns around he said what would you do if you knew you were going to fail in terms of identifying what you would do for the process right what would you do if you knew it was going to fail okay you're considering these five different projects let's say they're all going to fail but you still have to choose one of the five which would you choose yeah that's a great question um much harder to answer yeah and you know at the same time I'm called back to uh when I was a graduate student and still now with the podcast uh I have this um litmus test um which is you know is the experiment that I'm working on the one that I want to be working on most is the podcast that I'm working on the one that I want to be working on most I mean there's truly no other podcast I'd rather be having today than this one right and the moment I'm starting to think oh I wish I was doing that thing over there I realize I'm off Target I'm off Target and um uh I think that asking really good questions is something clearly that you're very good at and uh getting a little bit deeper into your process around that do you write those things down like is there a Notebook someplace in the Kingdom of uh of Tim Ferris in Austin or elsewhere um that says you know those questions that that essentially those questions are written are they yeah I collect I I literally have a document with questions that I've gathered from Seth printed out and at the Airbnb where I'm staying here so you brought it with you I printed it out here and then I went through and I read it last night and I was highlighting questions from past interviews I've had with him on my podcast to revisit his questions so I I was literally doing that last last night over dinner and I collect questions I collect questions if I am reading a magazine and I come across a good question I take take a photo or I capture it somehow in notes or in Evernote which I know is kind of oldfashioned these days but I've used it for everything so the critical mass is beyond enormous and I do collect and revisit these things I capture them in journals as well but I I absolutely capture good questions when I find them questions are so powerful for the brain I don't want to go into this in too much detail because I have a lot more questions for you but uh we just wrapped a series on Mental Health um that will come out later this year with Paul kti and he um is brilliant as we both know and uh does truly important work and um and he pointed to the value of asking really good questions about oneself and the because of the way that questions that are really directed at self-inquiry ceue up the subconscious so you asked the question question and unlike a statement or a meme um the brain works with that in in the days and hours after asking the question in ways that um simple declarative statements probably don't ping the system the same way which is probably why we can see so many points of wisdom and Truth everywhere and it doesn't necessarily transform us but asking really good questions really does seem to transform us yeah there there's uh I think judging people by their questions is it's also a shortcut to assessing and learning a lot about how someone functions and what makes them tick I think it was volter who said you know judge a man by his questions not by his answers something along those lines but when in doubt attribute to volter it sounds good does sound good and I I think about this a lot I do think about the questions and I refine the questions that I ask myself especially while journaling because it's easier to cross-examine and stress test your own certainty and beliefs when they are captured on paper or digitally on a laptop for instance so I I do routinely revisit certain questions that I found helpful over time I mean one that people can play with is with whatever is really causing you consternation or stress at the moment some kind of decision a relationship business could be anything just what might this this look like if it were easy right what might this look like if it were easy if it had to be easy if that were possible what might it look like and that could apply to anything it could apply to anything you know could apply to could apply to Fitness it's like look if you do really intense kettle bell swings twice a week with proper weight and load and time under tension and you do push-ups a few times a week and handle a couple of other elements you can get in pretty good shape it's so simple but hits a lot I mean hits your entire posterior chain okay fine do some push-ups and some core work but if you're not exercising at all because you've made the assumption that it's four hours five hours a week rather than completely remove that objective and call it just impractical can you ratchet down the scale how far can you ratchet down the scale until you have no excuses right that would just be one one example language learning Tech investing applies to everything making life easier is something that definitely gets my vote yeah making it easier and making it more elegant right the more pieces in your life you have floating around the more contacts the more extraneous loose connections the harder your life is going to be the cognitive overload or overhead is really high so I'm always looking for maybe like Japanese a flower arranging it's like okay how how many pieces can I remove while still like maintaining the essence of what I'm trying to achieve you and Rick Ruben man I'm telling you you know two people I am fortunate enough to know personally and that I have tremendous respect for and you know the work and uh is self-evident you know it's really remarkable so uh rewind that and listen to that segment right there folks I'm telling you I've worked hard to apply it because it's not my default and boy does it make a significant Improvement to simplify simplify simplify take some thought and question asking it's like you just can't delete things at random so you get down to some fixed number but um I'd like to ask you about another area where you really have seemed to see around corners and this is one that actually carried with it significant risk um not necessarily risk to health and to life but risk in terms of outside perceptions and that's psychedelics MH you know I've substantially changed my view on this uh we don't need to go into my former stance on I talked about that when you were gracious enough to host me on your podcast for a second time uh done some psychedelics recreationally as a kid it was correlated with um not so great times in my life stayed away from them then eventually Revisited MDMA in particular from a therapeutic standpoint found tremendous benefit again therapeutically with a medical doctor again these drugs are illegal uh soon to change perhaps hopefully and we'll talk about that but uh it's becoming clear from the controlled Studies by Robin Carter Harris uh there are many others okay Nolan Williams others um that these drugs have enormous potential to help relieve depression trauma uh help people explore their psyche their mind for sake of feeling better doing better in the world for leaning into life not tune in drop out but um you know to really lean into life with more purpose and more satisfaction in some cases they've really have saved lives I think um what was your mindset around psychedelics when you first started exploring them what led you to overcome the inevitable you know fear Gap there uh because you do seem like somebody who takes value in your health right you're not Wreckless you may have been more adventurous in the past with things like I hate the word but biohacking and self experimentation than you are now but but you obviously have some self-preservation mechanism intact we learn we learn we learn um what was your mindset around it at the time and then I want to get to what you've learned from it um and frankly the tremendous efforts that you've put that are now translating to tremendous value for really millions of people and ultimately I think it's going to be billions of people um by establishing funding for the pioneering research in this area helping to promote the movement of these compounds from illegal to legal in the therapeutic setting so on and so on so take us back to um your first thoughtful exploration of psychedelics what would that look like you're like oh mushrooms all eat them was that it or was it um or or was it a a dedicated uh research process and who' you talk to what was it all about so let's go way back to my grad experience and there were many reasons that I ended up going to Princeton I think I was very lucky to get in my SAT scores because I could never finish the damn test I was so much of a perfectionist I get stuck and ended up not doing terribly well but through S and other things ultimately was able to go part of the draw let me interrupt you and just say I think at this point we can say they were lucky to have you well thank you for saying that thank you for saying that great institution and you've done great and you're a a a great um poster on the wall for them yeah really really really yeah I just want to say it because you're not going to and I think it's important that these are great institutions have great minds go through there and you know Einstein went through there and uh and their success rests not just on the Einstein but also on the student body and what they go out into the world and do and not just in the realm of science so really they're they're lucky to have had you yeah thank you Andrew I studied Chinese in a room where Einstein used to teach it's pretty cool t set foot and spend time weekly in a space that was shared by some of these people amazing it really it really gets the imagination firing if we go back to that chapter in my life I was initially a Psychology major with focus on Neuroscience so I want to be a neuroscientist and there are many reasons for that I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family so Parkinson's and Alzheimer's so that was certainly a personal driving interest in terms of looking at mechanisms understanding what Therapeutics existed or did not exist how things were developing in the research and while I was there which later I ended up uh Switching gears and transferring to focus on language acquisition and East Asian studies hence the Chinese that I mentioned earlier and Japanese and Korean but on the Neuroscience side there were a lot of cool breakthroughs also that came out of uh Princeton around that time looking at the amazing discovery of say uh neuronal uh I want to say Regenesis but neurogenesis in the hippocampus remember exactly exactly so there was quite a bit happening at that time I was a subject I loved volunteering for studies just to try to get an inside look at how things were done in some of Daniel Conan's experiments so it was a cool time to be there and within the first two years I want to say I had my first experience recreationally with mushrooms and looking back now I mean I'm horrified by just the lack of control and meaning not control but lack of supervision right I mean the setting the set and setting ended up being fine nothing terrible happened but there were a lot of ways it could have gone sideways but that first experience and I must have consumed in retrospect just a dizzying amount of mushrooms I mean be in excess of five gram it would have been more yeah just knowing what I know now it would have been kids don't do this at all don't do that I'm not I'm not gonna say don't do it at home don't do it at all yeah yeah please I don't think I actually don't think uh the young developing brain should be exposed to psychedelics we could talk about we could talk about that I'm GNA to take my stance I'm gonna take my stance for now yeah I mean in in the world in which we live in the US um I would I would totally agree with you um there are some interesting cultural exceptions in other places uh where there things are more set up to provide for that type of use but I certainly would not recommend it but but coming back to my my recreational experience my my subjective experience was so bizarre and my experience of time so nonlinear my experience of self so different from anything I had experienced up to that point and therefore my construction of reality being so completely unlike anything I had experienced was enough to make me want to learn about these compounds and very early on I still have a scan of it somewhere I think it was in 1998 or 99 I actually wrote a paper one of my junior papers was focused on examining potential similarities between RM sleep and uh LSD MH lsd2 uh and looking at some of the patterns of of neural activity of course we can do a lot more now with with the tools that we have available but from a scientific perspective I was very curious about how much we knew and how much we didn't know and I would say that latter category gets me more excited in a way I'm like okay how how much room is there for growth here right because if if we're just putting on the finishing touches with marginal you know incremental improvements on something that we feel like we've largely figured out that's less interesting to me than something that baffles most people examining them on some level and there was a professor named Barry Jacobs who was doing some very interesting work he did a lot of work looking at the Ser energic systems and uh did a lot of work with cats ultimately I could not do personally the animal work required of the sort of indentured servitude that I would I think you wrote someplace once you know you you said you know when confronted with the uh the prospect of um installing a a a computer printer into the head of ACK on the back of a cat head they they Lally had those like those little VGA ports on the back of these cats heads because cats sleep a lot and so they're interesting study a lot that cats very few Laboratories work on cats any longer it's mostly a mouse still some non-human primate work my lab is essentially shut down um or is in the process of shutting down even our Mouse work I much prefer to work on humans they can give consent and they house themselves and um the animal research thing is tough for any for any sentient being yeah it's it's tough the cat for what it's worth the cats seem pretty happy like they were just sleeping I mean the the ports were for tracking so the cats were pretty I mean they were just normal cats the cats were fine but I would have been we would have been injecting retroviruses into rats and then perfusing them which means bleeding them to death uh to avoid bruising of the tissue because then if you're going to take thin slices and scans you didn't want to have bruising and I just couldn't I just couldn't do it I think it's important I do think I do think there's a place for it but I couldn't do it so that's why I transferred out but the the point I was trying to make is that I had the experience and then I had that drive the scientific interest and then I had probably one experience per year for a few years after that and what I noticed for myself personally because I've suffered from major depressive disorder and extended depre depressive episodes let's just say on average three to four a year and by by extended even before you had started even before from from a young age yeah from a very young age and I would say so let's just call it three to four on average a year those could last each a few weeks or a few months I mean this is this is a a very high percentage of my total year and when I had these higher dose experiences with with mushrooms so we're talking about COC mushrooms and then if we're looking at the molecule that's being examined scientifically psilocybon I noticed this Afterglow effect that was really durable and that was an anti-depressant effect or a mood elevating effect that lasted far longer than the halflife could explain right because four to 6 hours you're you're you're kind of on the other side and I would experience this this Afterglow effect for 3 to six months and that raised all sorts of interesting questions what the hell is going on here is it the content is it some structural change there were a lot of unanswered questions for me and then I had a very very scary experience that led me to completely stop use of psychedelics where again uncontrolled environment ended up in rural uh in rural New York York coming out of my trip standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night with headlights coming at me goodness gracious so you don't want to do that yeah and I was like okay too dangerous were you taking them alone is that how that is I was taking them with two friends and my two friends without telling me just went for a walk and left me alone points to the you know I mean there're these are powerful compounds yeah you're you're you're playing with nuclear power like these these are the this is the nuclear power of like psychological or uh psychoemotional surgery is is the way I encourage people to think about them and I stopped using any psychedelics completely I was still very interested in them and but I basically hit pause and I didn't revisit that until let's call it 2012 2013 where I was still struggling with major depressive disorder and I saw my girlfriend at the time completely transformed by supervised facilitated use of in this case iasa which uh was not quite as common as it is in conversation at the time and she did that in South America but she not only explained her experience but I was able to see the transformation in her that seemed to have some durability over time and that is when I started stepping back into researching psychedelics looking at what had been published in the last let's just call it 10 years uh as of that point in time and thinking about how I would approach it systematically with safeguards with proper supervision basically approaching it the way I would have approached any of the topics in the 4our body and that is what led me back into along with a number of other interventions I should say so I wasn't betting the farm on psychedelics I also started teach at that point I was I was just some people might uh trans uh transcendal these are like 4 to 10 day meditation Retreats this was actually much shorter it was a two or three day training and you're visiting the instructor I want to say it's once or twice a day probably once a day and getting up to speed and I did this because I was going through an a period of acute stress this is finishing the 4our chef this is actually probably in the Years preceding that and I had one friend who I'd seen really change from let's just call hyper kinetic high anxiety to low anxiety and he said you have the time you have the money pay for the course just take it yes there are all these criticisms of TM yes there are all these weird historical anecdotes of people trying to levitate and all this weirdness just ignore that I'm trying to levitate nothing against that if you actually levitate then we got to have a discussion but trying to levitate seems like why you know every kid every kid tries all sorts of things give it a go uh he's like just put that aside because I I kept coming up with push back and he's like look all I'm saying is it's like a warm bath for your mind that you take twice a day and it'll chill you the out so try it and I was like okay fine it's a good endorsement I was like I was like at this point I was i' had been burning the candle at both ends so intensely it's like okay so there was TM and then I began examining how I might approach notice I didn't just jump into using them I was like how could I approach taking adelic in a sequence in a logical sequence with proper protections with safety assurances and that took me probably a month or two and I was right in the middle of things in Northern California you have access to a lot and only then did I start looking at having my own experiences and lo and behold I mean I'll I'll cut to the chase but the the personal outcome and there there are many different benefits uh and risks I should make very clear these things can be extremely dangerous in certain ways generally not physiologically but they can be dangerous I would say instead of three to four times per year on average I probably have one depressive episode every two years that's a significant Improvement yeah right I mean from a quality of life perspective those are two different people and uh that then led me to and I as I did with all my workouts right I took copious notes over the span I mean now we're looking at 10 plus years uh so if I were to ever write another book uh it would probably be related to all of the really fine details of the experiments and my learnings including some of the more Biz bizarre things over the last 10 years but it would be a it would be just a beast to create so with with psychedelics experiences with psychedelics psychedelics and sort of psychedelic adjacent uh non-ordinary experiences of Consciousness uh which I think often are touching at edges of the same thing uh which which is going to be controversial for some folks but to to come back to the storyline just to put a bow on that when I saw the personal outcomes for me the anic data from friends who are facilitators who have worked with thousands of people right which is a pretty good sample size still anecdote but these are people who are very smart who keep records and I I believe that these people have spotted patterns that are only going to be possible to test and verify over the next 5 to 10 years so I at least as a as a means of generating hypothesis I take these people very seriously uh and then I started to connect with Scientists whose work I had read like Roland Griffith and John's Hopkins began looking at the most compelling data related to say MDMA assistant Psychotherapy and complex PTSD I I made the commitment to myself that as soon as I had enough money to move the dial because I really felt like these tools were so outside of the normal Paradigm of Psychiatry and pharmacology and that made me very excited because it was uncrowded there's very little funding coming into the space it was high leverage and I looked at it just as I've looked at my many startup Investments uh limited downside risk really high upside potential and I should say before that I had already been funding in a very small way science so the first check I ever wrote was personally to Adam gazali's Lab at UCSF yeah great lab which at the time was looking at soft Ware he's not going to like this description but I'm going to simplify it software that might attenuate or reverse age related cognitive impairment uh spe specifically related to various aspects of of attention and that was my first for into funding early stage science which was very analogous to me of uh to to funding early stage startups and then later on to touch on the reputational thing I know this is a TED talk so thank you for listening no this is great please please you're always so gracious on your podcast this is what people want this is certainly what I want to hear so so on the reputational side you're right that at the time especially let's just call it 2013 to 2015 this was not a na a comfortable National conversation of any type yeah I wouldn't have had this conversation back then no way I'd lose I I don't know that I would have lost my job it just would have raised a lot of eyebrows now that such studies are happening at Stanford the perception yeah the perception was these are a professional third rail at the very least right also illegal therefore if I talk about them am I giving someone probable cause am I going to get myself in some type of really tricky legal situation Etc there are a lot of considerations but I tested that just like I was saying I like to capture my assumptions on paper so I can stress this I was like okay I think that might be true most people I know think that is true but is it true how could we test to see if that is true or not and I decided to crowdfund for a Hopkins pilot study looking at psilocybin for treatment resistant depression and I thought to myself okay we have we have a couple of couple of things falling in our favor here number one depression does not discriminate so cross soio economic classes across gender across race this is a problem almost everyone knows someone who takes anti-depressants who is still depressed okay treatment resistant depression therefore is the indication siloc cybin is the intervention let me crowdfund and I did that throughout the time crowd rise which was co-founded by Edward Norton who had become a friend and was the actor Ed who's very smart very very very smart also one of the best investors I've ever met which a lot of people don't know very bright guy and so crowd funded and I also like to put my uh money where my mouth is so I said okay guys I'm going to seed this like I'm putting in X the goal is to raise I think it was 880,000 something like that for the following study and then I was like let's see let's see what happens and there was basically zero negative blowback and Not only was was there no discernable negative blowback a number of people and this was deliberate I wanted to see this a number of people came came out of the woodwork to support in a bigger way and I was like oh okay I see you bunch a handful of folks I knew and I was like oh interesting okay there are at least a half a dozen folks who are studying the same thing or paying attention to the same thing and then I just got Boulder I was like okay if I tested that let me push and then let's see what happens and I'll wait and lo and behold I realized that the perception did not match the reality the reality was if you're talking about IND indications that cause an incredible amount of suffering for a very large number of people even those who are anti-drug per se just say no to drugs want Solutions and the current treatments for many of these things do not work very well and in the best of cases are often masking symptoms and not addressing root causes I would say so at that point I just went whole hog and I said okay look I like to think that I am a exactly what you see is what you get right the person you talk to off camera person you talk to on camera same and if I start feeling like I have too much to protect I want to do something to counteract that in other words if if if I feel like I need to censor my true feelings and beliefs maybe not share my hardships perhaps not promote certain things because I have a reputation to lose that's a fragile position I want to be as antifragile as possible and so by talking about this I viewed it as a way of inoculating myself against fear of reputation loss like okay let me push this like I'll ride this horse other people might not but I wanted to remove the stigma for funding purposes hopefully open up federal funding that's starting to happen now from different agencies and then to focus on access and reduction of cost and insurance reimbursement and so on so I set a game plan let's call it maybe five years ago and I've just been slowly methodically executing on that since and uh the reason I chose this to focus on and I've funded other things but I've really focused on this mental health Therapeutics which is not limited to psychedelics we could talk about some other things that I find interesting but psychedelics are like I said what makes it attractive very uncrowded you can do a lot with a small amount of money unlike saying cancer research can be very hard like okay you're Deca billionaire great maybe you can do something interesting and I'm sure other people could but if you have 20,000 $50,000 it's going to be hard to make a dent there in psychedelics you can actually still make a difference and very high leverage in part because these compounds seem to challenge much of what we assume to be true about treating mental health and uh so that's uh that makes for an attractive bet so that's where I've been been going yeah I'm so glad you shared that with with us and that you did that exploration um and that you've been spearheading the funding efforts uh you know this podcast has a um a premium channel that's for raising funds for scientific studies we are in the process now making our first four uh contributions one of those includes uh work in Nolan Williams laboratory at Stanford combining trans cranial magnetic stimulation with um studies of ibigan and uh 5 Meo DMT maybe a few other things but basically that he's free to do what he wants with the funds we trust him to do great work but that again was inspired by you right uh podcast with a scientific um slant certainly um this podcast obviously has a scientific slant but the idea of doing philanthropy for the sorts of work that uh really deserves funding and exploration and um by the way um and thinking about other hybrid things that would be fun to do I mean I would love to uh contribute and join those efforts that you cu the work to continue to raise funding for psychedelic studies and all these great Laboratories continues right it continues and you've rallied a collection of um some pretty uh powerful people to contribute to this and I know you've joined arms with Michael pollen in many ways do you want to talk about the fellowships that you guys put together I find that really cool you you've got fellowships uh in the works or maybe already happening at UC Berkeley is that right at UC Berkeley yeah so the what what I try to do and for people who want to check it out it's it's the name of the foundation is Cay foundation and let me explain that for a second so it's S A II so Cay foundation.org I speak Japanese I went there as an exchange student and speak read and write it still to this day pretty well sa can mean a lot of things it means rebirth in Japanese and I've seen what can only be described or can certainly be described as rebirth and so many clinical outcomes that I thought it was appropriate to use and what I've tried to do with the foundation is I think do what I'm pretty good at which is trying to peek around corners and find something to prototype right so just like the CGM and like all right how can I just getting a hold of a Dexcom back then when it was just for type 1 diabetics was was hard it was is the thing that you have to actually go under the skin so it's like taking a barbecue prong and putting it under your ab abdominal skin it was not comfortable can you describe your um cortisol level and uh subjective terms when you're at home you got this thing and you're about to implant it and you don't have any precent it's not like this is you know like levels or one of these other uh cgms that are out there you know stamp the thing in you can look on Instagram and see someone else do it there's nothing like that so you're at home wondering if you're going to skew your liver yeah I I'm I'm at home doing it myself and I'm sweating like a stuck pig I'm sitting there I'm like my God I don't even know if I can hold is your girlfriend there like to support you in case you I think at the time wasn't because she was squeamish and didn't want to see it and I'm so I'm sitting there at my kitchen table I remember this God I'm sweating just thinking about it and no videos to watch and uh wasn't really supposed to have it in the first place and uh the device for readout by the way no iPhone right so it's like this janky pager looking thing that had a readout that made you think you were playing pong or something I mean it was very the green the green tint screen yeah green tin screen do font it was so primitive and uh put this thing under my skin would tape uh I would cut a Ziploc bag and put it on top and and masking tape it to my skin to take showers because otherwise it wouldn't work and it was it was great and I'll just say that I don't use a c it was great you realize you said it was great I did I did say it was great because sweating and it was I was afraid but it gave me a lot of insight okay and uh then once I had the Insight over a course of a handful of weeks then I felt like I didn't really need it anymore and that was also just a a heavy tax to pay to have to wear that thing around look like you have a you know what is it called a colostomy bag or something it just like it was big it was bulky um so just like I did that I wanted to do proof of concept right the goal was can I use this for healthy normal applications will the insights be actionable and they were lo and behold similarly with the foundation since I'm dealing with smaller amounts of money you know I'm not uh in the billionaire club by any stretch of the imagination and science can be expensive I'm looking for small bets where can I pilot something that if successful will be emulated or can be scaled and so and say the crowdfunding for for the Hopkins treatment resistant depression pilot study we ended up exceeding the goal they were able to recruit more subjects in the case of UC Berkeley Michael poen and I partnered on this and my Foundation funded it the ferris UC Berkeley journalism Fellowship psychedelic journalism Fellowship is providing funding to up-and-coming journalists who want to focus on psychedelics as their beat which to this date has not been financially feasible you just don't have the space to do really long for investig investigative work the Hope being that these journalists can apply their skills and their dedication to examining different facets of the Psychedelic ecosystem therapeutic potential uh regulatory issues ETC in a way that can shape and inform National and international discourse in a in a very critical way because these things are not a Panacea there's a lot of claims that are made about these that are totally unbacked by any type of Science and there're a lot of charlatans and so I want wanted to also invite really competent really good journalists to the table who might want to watch for Bad actors I think that's really important and so this Fellowship has been been uh has been awarding fellows with these grants and I think it's a relatively small amount of money it's like $10,000 per something like that but the outcomes have been amazing we had a huge I want to say was 7,000 word piece that was one of the main features in Rolling Stone magazine huge piece in National Geographic focused on iboga and fair trade and some of the implications for uh local harvesting and or over harvesting all the Dynamics present in that which I think has some incredible promise for particular forms of um opioid use opioid use disorder in particular but uh that has been a huge success so the hope is that other journalism schools will say that's a great idea and I will have DER risked it for some other philanthropist or Foundation or government say director at an agency to say okay well green like that right because I've done it and it's been received very well and it's had a real impact on how things are moving along another one would be say at Harvard popper this is at Harvard Law School was the first is the first dedicated team focused on law policy and regulation related to psychedelics from a legal perspective super important super important super super important also another pilot let's just call it uh proof of concept that Cay Foundation funded was helping to develop curricula for I think it was Yale John's Hopkins and NYU effectively an creditation or module that they could put into their existing Psychiatry MD uh programs such that people could develop the skills necessary and the understanding necessary to administer psychedelic assist therapies if and when they become legal prescribable which it if I understand correctly it sounds like within the next 12 to 24 months MDMA assisted Psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma is is likely to become legal in the hands of uh psychiatrists at least and maybe certain clinical psychologists as well in the US is that right through the M through the efforts of the maps group yeah through through the efforts of maps.org and Rick doblin and many others that is the tip of the spear so I think anyone who's interested in psychedelics should have a vested interest in supporting those efforts not because we know everything works I want to be clear not because we know a priori that all these things do all the things no but if if MDMA fails it's going to be very hard to draft it'll be impossible to draft on that with commands that are more difficult to administer like psilocybin which would be next in line for alcohol use disorder also major depressive disorder so I I I really feel that just like everything I've talked about whether it's networking putting together the 4our body or trying to change National policy and say uh uh reclassification of these compounds getting them out of schedule one to some extent you want to break it down into its constituent pieces you want to do an 8020 analysis figure out what the critical few are and then put them in a logical sequence and execute the plan one of the greatest weaknesses in the Psychedelic ecosystem is there are a lot of people who just want to do all the things and save all the people and the animals and all the places all at once and that just doesn't work very well there are also some really good people who are executing um and we could talk about the for-profit side and so on but uh I've been very very very pleased with the outcomes that Cay Foundation has been able to achieve with very limited money I'm prouder of those outcomes than I am of the startup record and the startup record is pretty good um and it's the same lens I'm using the same the same filters and the same approach which uh which is kind of what I'm always looking for I'm looking for stuff that'll translate across Fields if possible and then you mentioned one like TMS I think TMS very interesting transcranial magnetic stimulation yeah which at one point was um more commonly used to inhibit specific brain areas this is a non-invasive technique uh I've had it done where it's over my motor cortex and you're tapping your finger and all of a sudden you can't tap your fingers it's pretty eer but now it can be used to stimulate at particular frequencies enhance neuroplasticity and and in combin with psychedelics is the that's kind of the burning question now can you get a uh a synergistic effect of TMS and and uh psychedelic maybe um not just during the the psilocybin or uh iboga Journey but in the days and weeks after when we know for sure a lot of plasticity is still occurring so keep the plasticity on board or accelerate it yeah yeah so T TMS uh also is a monotherapy very interesting to me for depression anxiety even substance use disorders super interesting and there are many different protocols all sorts of different technology uh I would say low intensity or low power ultrasound also super interesting uh for various various applications potentially to addiction so I'm not to be clear a card carrying evangelist for psychedelics I am a proponent of looking for high leverage on crowded Bets with limited downside and testing them out and very optimistic about psychedelics if anyone listening has a family history of say schizophrenia borderline personality disorder uh which we might which this is being very simplistic but categorize or describe as more chaotic conditions compared to hyper rigid conditions like an OCD or anorexia nervosa uh chronic depression Etc and we can talk about why some of these psychedelics at least some of the classical psychedelics seem to have cross efficacy with multiple conditions but psychedelics seem very helpful for certain types of hyper rigidity when you get into schizophrenia borderline personality disorder they can be really heavily contraindicated not to say that they cause those cons those conditions but they can precipitate the onset of those symptoms and for that reason can be very destabilizing and dangerous for for certain people however that's where something like metabolic Psychiatry comes in and the use of ketosis and the ketogenic diet which appears to be very effective in some patients for that grouping of say more chaotic conditions which is very exciting so I'm interested in in in any tools that are off the beaten path that seem to raise interesting questions that have not been answered in a satisfying way yet in medicine uh and I think we're still largely in the Dark Ages with respect to Psychiatry oh I think um the best psychiatrists would agree with you yeah and and the best psychiatrists uh and the best scientists and the best fill inth the blank are acutely aware of the limitations of our current methods and the limitations of our current knowledge uh so I think the mark of a good thinker the mark of a good scientist the mark of a good fill-in theblank anything is someone who says I'd have no idea or we have no idea a lot and hopefully they also say let's go figure it out or try some things and I I I really want to thank you for sharing um that narrative especially because it makes clear that you brought the same systematic process of using and asking excellent questions to arrive at Solutions to arrive at more questions to fund areas of inquiry and to do it all in this really structured way as you said from policy all the way down to like how many grams or uh you know X of of some substance somebody might take I mean I think Matthew Johnson's laboratory at Hopkins uh Roland Griffith uh Robin cardart Harris at UCSF uh Nolan Williams the maps group Rick doblin Peter Hendrick at University of Alabama looking at cocaine addiction things yeah you Michael pollen um you know I'm leaving some names out here and I don't want to take anything away from the um classic uh as they're called um explorers of psychedelics and and writers about psychedelics but we are in the moment of a Renaissance now and it's important that this have a lot of uh fuel so we'll put a link to um your philanthropy efforts and and the journalism uh fellowships as well because I think there's going to be a lot of interest there and I'm huge supporter of what you're doing as as you know and I just think it's the way great science and clinical progress is made so you um thanks Andrew yeah it's which brings me to another parallel topic you know it used to be that meditation and psychedelics were have nested in the same territory this would be in the late 60s early 70s the birth of places like esselin Etc or the consequence of the Dual exploration of those things meditation sort of escaped from the psychedelics umbrella and vice versa um starting sometime in the you know mid 2000s when neuroimaging became a little bit more accessible and you know I think nowadays if you told anybody okay um you know meditation is good for you it can help uh ratchet down your anxiety give more self-awareness um you know improve sleep and on and on maybe even give some insight into Consciousness no one's going to bulk there just a lot of studies there are thousands of studies um my laboratory's done a few of them there are other Laboratories who have done uh far more the book altered traits is the one that comes to mind group out of Wisconsin was early to early to the game on this um in any event you talked about TM um I'm curious from a practical standpoint do you still meditate daily do you do meditation Retreats um what sorts of meditative practices do you have because I realize this can be done walking writing as its own form of meditation what sorts of formal practices do you still engage in now yeah I do 10 to 20 minutes in the morning so I am not currently doing the TM twice daily 20 minutes I think that would be better for me probably do you set a clock and you or yeah I'll set a clock uh which would be more of the concentration practice of say a TM where you're repeating a mantra honestly it could be any in my opinion some TM purists will bulk at this but uh it could be really any nonsense syllable could be a word although I think something without any attached meaning is probably more beneficial for a host of reasons so con could be a concentration practice with 20 minutes of sitting it might also be a guided meditation and I have no vested interest in this app but I think the waking up app by Sam Harris is fantastic I have do I I have used the introductory course which is Sam leading you through my catnip which is a logical progression of skill development from day one to three and and forward I have gone through that course multiple times when I'm getting back on the horse for meditation as a bit of a reboot once you develop I think a certain degree of awareness and mindfulness I do think there are other activities that probably allow you the parallel experience of doing one thing while experiencing some of the benefits of meditation and so for me I wonder at times are the benefits of meditation the concentration practice itself is it just sitting still with my eyes clo closed downregulating my system a little bit activating my Paras sympath atic and not rushing or doing anything for 20 minutes is that it maybe is it simply correcting my posture for 20 minutes how do I wait these different inputs and the the short answer is you probably don't need to know but I have found that spending time in silence in nature without anything to do disallowing myself from doing things no note take no reading Etc and spending I I have spent a number of extended fasts in nature just like water only by myself no talking no reading no writing what's extended seven days generally wow so you're camping in nature MH with just water yep that's it by myself and there are risks associated with that right you gotta be careful not stupid about it but uh that does a lot for me with some persistent benefits are there some favorite places that you've gone uh into nature it doesn't have to be to fast like for instance I'm a big fan of um some of the national parks up in the Pacific Northwest because it's like being transported to a different planet Y is obviously amazing but any favorite spots um where we won't go people won't go looking for you there don't worry yeah I you live in Austin all the time so they right yeah so I would say uh Colorado Utah New Mexico spending time in mountains around River rivers lakes I find very therapeutic and just gorgeous I I I do think we suffer from uh awe deficiency disorder you know a bit of add when we're trapped in the mundane for too long with too much distraction with too many to-dos with too many relationships and there's no space for a there there isn't the room necessary a isn't from my perspective generally a quick hit that you get in the 30 seconds between using two apps there's there's more Breathing Room required for a genuine Transcendent experience of awe so I try to on a yearly basis as one of my top priorities block out these weeks of time in nature yeah last year was the first year I did that I went out to Colorado um in August and just took daily hikes I stayed in a hotel was I'm not as beasty as you doing water fast I was eating every day but um it was spect acular one thing I noticed and I'd like to know your process on how do you handle going back into life um great question you know because those days were and are amazing right you like detached and you know maybe one text message here or there in between hikes or something and then you just really clued in even the the process of watching a show at night like one felt so rich and like enough so I wasn't um as aesthetic as you were and uh like really cleaned all the Clutter but once you return to life mhm it's almost like get being a wash in demands and and I can see from a place of more Equanimity how one could make better choices but how do you handle those transitions the re-entry yeah so before getting to the re-entry I think it might make sense for me to talk about what comes before so let's say it's like pre during post part of the reason I do these one week or longer periods Off the Grid is because it forces me to put better systems in place so there's the benefit that you derive from say that week and I have three weeks coming up right after this interview where I'm going to be off the grid to set myself up for three weeks off the grid I have a team I have the podcast I have a lot of things that are in motion at any given point in time if you disappear for say a two to 4-we period generally you cannot let the whole house catch on fire then come back and put it out effectively which means you need put some policies and rules and so on in place in advance and there's a carryover effect that has a host of benefits and makes things smoother for the re-entry so they're related like the more you set up the pre the easier the post is going to be and then you have this beautiful expansive experience in nature whatever it might be whether you're making it a sufferfest like I do or at a hotel at night either way these things can work and nature in and of itself is super helpful I do think that a lot of the time we like to imagine because we're driven smart accomplished people that our problems are very complex and at the end of the day it's like you just need some time in nature and a cold shower and some macadamia nuts and you'll be fine you don't need to solve like all the existential dilemmas of humankind actually or fancy Pharmaceuticals so you have this experience over this week and what I will do then is set at least a let's call it integration period of two to three days where I will slowly Edge back in to my previous routine I will not within 12 hours of getting back to so-called civilization have a day full of calls or meetings I will not do that it's too much of a shock to the system and I think it robs you of a tail end of benefits which would also be the case with say fast or ketogenic diet or any number of interventions you can squeeze out a longtail of benefits if you make a handful of changes for instance after an extended fast what if you started with a subc caloric ketogenic diet for a few days you get to extend some of the benefits as opposed to going straight back to say a diet that includes a lot of carbohydrates similarly when you create more of a vacuum more space for awe Insight reflection recovery I I think you're doing yourself a disservice if you jump from park into sixth gear and so I plan for that and it's a function of scheduling I also have a predictable weekly schedule so I tend to schedule podcast recordings on Mondays and Fridays in preparation for an extended trip I will batch a lot of similar activities that we have say a bunch of episodes in the bank that are prescheduled everything is figured out in advance and over time the more you take these breaks the better your systems become and the more liberated you are from the day-to-day which means when you get back you also don't need to rush as much into hyperactivity and if you do you know that that is more from a compulsivity than from a necessity while you on these nature Retreats are you writing on a daily basis are you just thinking and allowing thoughts to enter and leave your system depends on the retreat so sometimes I'm writing but writing I think can underscore for me a desire to be compulsively productive and I think that is inversely correlated to my happiness or sense of well-being a lot of the time so there are many areas in my life now so if you were to ask me like what has changed significantly since the time that you wrote for our body I would say that rather than looking for areas to optimize I am looking where I can very deliberately de optimize certain areas to increase sense of well-being where can I de optimize where can I stop measuring where can I stop reading books which areas can I ignore completely what types of information can I just excise from my life altogether for a period of time delete Twitter stop reading about books in X related to say AI or whatever it might be like where can I de optimize selectively to sort of optimize the whole does that make sense makes good sense yeah and before we started recording I gave you a book which is a short collection of poetry by uh haliza Gori which is called gold it's a collection of roomy poetry reading poetry is an activity almost by definition which is is the antithesis of optimization so I've tried to also integrate more of those activities into my life and this relates to your question because there are times when I will just force myself to sit on my goddamn hands and not write not read just do the thing that is so uncomfortable sometimes which is just sitting there with yourself you know it can be incredibly uncomfortable and in part because of the fear that it could become comfortable yeah right especially for proactive people with a yeah strong to use Paul K's words generative drive you know you're going to that's a uh you know the which is a good thing uh I believe it's a good thing and it it can be a good thing it can indicate really incredible adaptations it can also sometimes I think indicate Mal adaptations right and so I think it's it's helpful to take a break from that generative drive or at least just put it in park position to see if that generative Drive is is perhaps indicative of you leaning towards something in a healthy proactive way versus running from something in a long-term destructive way yeah well and I think Paul would say that part of the generative Drive process is um Peace you know not as necessarily even as a still state but as a um you know being able to experience peace even in the Transitions and there's a lot more to say about that and would say it far better than I ever would so I'll uh leave it at that and um I mean for people who have the option getting in nature it doesn't have to be all day every day on a water fast I just take certain things to an extreme because that's who I am but sorry when you say water fast that means fasting with water right it just fasting but yes drinking water it just means you're allowed to have water and nothing else for for a long time I thought it meant that you're not drinking water oh yeah no don't do that some people do that right they do these crazy food water fasts um as a weight I think they believe it clears senent cells or something but um probably clears a lot more than just cocin cells yeah I uh there might be something to it I mean look there are people who recycle by drinking their own urine not my jam uh but I would say it's like three hours without shelter three days without water three weeks without food general rule of thumb so be careful with dehydration you can go a long time without food if you have I don't care how ripped you are you get 8% body fat man you got plenty of time you can go couple weeks no problem you got calories St 9000 calories per pound stored body fat you got plenty don't worry uh so for people who have the option to be in nature and just exercise several hours a day to exhaustion see how many of your problems seem to just go away just try that yeah well my Sunday routine uh is to try and get outside and move as much as possible yeah I don't always succeed but um I'm going to try a longer retreat into nature I think um Olympic National Forest is is calling me again it seems like once a year I just want to get back up there it's uh it's calling you you you should get back out there it's spectacular I have a question about mentors I'm a big believer in mentors either uh mentors that know us and we know them or U people that we assign as mentors without them realizing it um this sort of thing uh do you have mentors at this stage of life um for particular areas of life are you uh you mentoring yourself are you flying with um a few voices in your head uh that serve you well who are your mentors I definitely have people I consider mentors it's I think at this point rarely one way in the sense that they tend to be friends I spend time with they get something from it I get something from it not in a transactional way but they find it fun or beneficial or amusing in some way redeeming to spend time with me that's the hope but how is that different from like traditional friendship you know just sort of standard friendship are you focus are you spending time with some orientation toward like their embodying areas of life that you would like to emulate totally I mean I spend I spend time around people I hope to be more like in some way because guess what you're going to average into say the the just the the sum holistic ho of the five or six people you spend the most time with so you should choose that very carefully that includes virtual parasocial relationships like okay if you're listening to fill in- the blank person for four hours a week five hours a week two hours a week whoever that group is comprised of is going to influence who you become come and for me then I think carefully about my friendships and they could be older like a Kevin Kelly who's become a good friend who has a wealth of life experience that I don't have and so I might just call him and say Kevin I have question for you but I do that with my younger friends too and they could be younger than I am and I might still view them as a mentor in xwi Z I think Mentor has a heavy weight to it it has a connotation of maybe NeverEnding time consuming obligation so I I would never for instance and I know a lot of people try this ask someone to be my mentor it's like would you like to be my free life coach forever you know it's like that's kind of how it sounds to the recipient it it sounds very formal yeah it sounds very formal and so for me I would say there have certainly been mentors I've had wrestling coaches I've had teachers I've had resident advisor who were reverence who had a huge impact on my life and followed up with me and paid attention to me and cared for me in more of a one directional sense right I I view myself as the beneficiary of course they they certainly got something out of it if they had that job I they probably found it to be very gratifying in its own way and teachers like Professor Ed sha at Princeton I feel in incredibly indebted to these days and for a long time I've believed that you can learn something powerful from almost anyone probably anyone you interact with could be an Uber driver could be someone taking garbage out of a restaurant if you really take the time to dig you can find something and before you can I think as an adult effectively think about who you would like to learn from if I put it that way it's helpful to have a baseline of self-awareness that you know what you might want to work on to either amplify strengths develop skills address weaknesses and so for instance one of my close friends Matt mullenweg is younger than I am he's the he's the founder of automatic which runs wordpress.com he was the leite developer of Wordpress although was an open source project of course with many many contributors he was one of the lead developers Now power something like 32% of the internet and he exemplifies a cool and calm temperament even in the most chaotic periods imaginable during the most chaotic events imaginable and when I find myself getting disregulated to use a fancy term losing my or getting carried away by emotion getting righteously angry or whatever it might be and I recognize at some some point that it's really not serving me that I am being owned by the emotion right like I'm the dog on the leash not the other way around then I think of Matt I'm like what would Matt do what advice would Matt give me right now how would Matt act in these circumstances and I do that with with with many friends I also think a lot about and this is borrowing from someone named Kathy Sierra a long time ago focusing more on just in time information as opposed to just in case information so just in case information is like I'm going to read these 20 books because in two years I might be interested in X Y and Z that I think is often a waste of time because if it ever becomes relevant you're just going to have to reread those books people do the same thing with humans they're like I want to meet so and so and have them as my mentor because maybe five years from now I'll do X Y and Z and then they'll be useful for ABC that's too speculative and I think it ends up in a lot of wasted energy so the podcast for me writing the books and doing the interviews even prior to the podcast becoming involved with startups delving into the world of science and scientists all helps me to develop a confidence that almost any question I could ask I can find some semblance of an answer for by just reaching out to a few people and saying who do you know who might be able to answer this and that's very reassuring and it it relieves some of the anxiety or pressure that people might feel to assemble some personal board of directors of like X-Men and women who can help them with everything uh and and then there are people I hire to be accountable to right so I might work with coaches therapists and so on who I would view as they just Happ to get getting paid for it right yeah the reason I asked the question is because we were talking about the meditative process going into nature and even with psychedelics there you know they can be viewed a lot of different ways but I think of them largely as going inward to explore I mean you're out in nature and learning from nature um there's such a core truth to Nature I know that sounds a little bit you know uh wishy-washy but it's uh it's true like if it's there it's concrete it's really something uh it was there long before any of us and it'll be there a lot longer than any of us will ever be we hope um uh certainly if it goes we go so um but the process of learning from others and paying attention to others is is really an outward-looking thing I mean we have to bring that in but I was just curious how you balance those and as a way to really understand not just your time allocation right I think uh we could talk about that you know what's how's your morning structured Etc which I think there's Great Value in in in knowing but more um what what's your mind allocation right I think about this you know like where's my brain is it am I focus on what's going on in here and you know is that is there a need to excavate there sure you know but how much time am my out of my head and bringing things in from the outside world and back and forth so do you have some sense of um across the year across the day how you mind allocate I don't know if um that's the best phrase but I can't think of any better one if you can think of a better one please please uh table it cuz I I'm happy to to use that how do I think about mind allocation or attention [Music] allocation I try to and most frequently think of my mind share across a year and across week a weekly time frame and I find that to be manageable in the sense that on a yearly basis on New Year's Eve or roughly around New Year's every year I'll do a past year review pyr past year review where I'll go back and I'll look at my entire last year have a piece of paper in front of me line down the center plus negative and I will go through every week in my calendar for the pre previous year and I will write down the people places activities commitments Etc that produced Peak positive emotional experiences so right we're doing an 8020 analysis here like what are the big rocks that really move the needle in a meaningful way and conversely who are the people what are the things what are the places that just made me go g and we're draining produced Peak negative experiences why the hell did I commit to this type experiences and that presents me with a do more of do less of list then I look forward to the next year and I did this I suppose just a handful of months ago around New Year's with the Positive I'm like okay here's my list of do more of it's not real until it's in the calendar let's get these things in the calendar and then I will start talking to people booking things having people help with organizing if that is qu ired and getting things blocked out so I have already this year and we're in the reasonable beginning stages of the year I have things blocked out until November of this year and those provide the breaks in the action not just the breaks in the action but the fun stuff because by the way guys I thought for a long time like yeah you take care of ab andc and the good stuff just takes care of itself I have I do not any longer believe that to be true unless you schedule these things that you claim are important they're going to get crowded out by and maybe not but just less important things the Urgent will crush the important so I get these things on the calendar and then I back up and I look at optimal weekly mind allocation right attentional allocation and there's a there's there's an Incredible cost to cognitive switching if you're just test switching all day so I will try my best to format a weekly Rhythm a weekly sequence that allows me to focus on certain types of tasks so Monday is very frequently admin of some type just bits and ends flats and jets them all the miscellaneous pieces that are part of life you got to deal with them that tends to be Monday whenever possible and especially if I am focused on physical activity let's just say um in a place like Colorado I will try to schedule most of that for after lunch to ensure that I get in a lot of exercise and movement in the first portion of the day not everybody has that ability but I will say more of you have that capacity than you might think because most of what we all do is just not important yeah time on social media first thing in the morning is probably the most poisonous activity that I could take part in I I don't want to you know point fingers at anyone else but oh yeah I think if people ask you know what is the you know amount of time it takes to get in a really good workout it's going to be about an hour you know but a lot can be done in 45 or even 30 minutes you think about how quickly that time goes by on social media like I'm sure I'm not the only one uh that this part of the reason I deleted a lot of these apps from my phone it's like I would be I'd go into the bathroom to take a you know quick bit of business and then 45 minutes later I'm like how have I been looking at Instagram 45 minutes yeah lines in for restrooms have gotten very long in the last 10 10 years has anyone noticed that the wait for the restrooms has gotten very long so you have time for the important stuff it's like and and just look at some of the extreme over cheers out there they have the same amount of time that you do have you I was gonna ask this later about just we'll just quickly interject this now um I saw perhaps it was on Twitter maybe I overheard this that you're back on Instagram it's uh I mean you've always had an account yeah that posts but are you back in there are you out of there um I mean look my the Dirty Little Secret I'm single again and that's a great way to connect with with eligible ladies who might be of interest is Instagram so you're on um so you're on Instagram I'm willing to pay the tax of dealing with the brain damage of using Instagram as a result hey look finding a great life partner is exactly EXA exactly so that's that is the reason for that but otherwise it would not be on my phone it's too it wouldn't even be on your phone absolutely not it's too welld designed these companies are very smart they have very good data scientists they have very good UI Specialists if anyone out there thinks that they can look maybe maybe Joo can can discipline his way through it I'm sure he can because he's he is Joo but in my case and in the case of most people like you're bringing a knife to gunfight if you think you can use your self-control to keep your use of Instagram to say 10 minutes at a clip good luck yeah and even if you can people say ah but I do that anyway I'm like all right how much time do you spend sending memes and links from Instagram or fill-in the blank platform to your friends and group chat how much time does that consume I spend a fair amount of time on Instagram and Twitter posting things related to the podcast but um I don't have someone to do that for me and I I actually enjoy doing it and it challenges me in certain ways but I completely agree with everything you're saying I also want to note that you didn't say that you're on Twitter uh possibly to meet somebody um which is more a statement about Twitter yeah yeah it's not the it's not the not the friendliest neighborhood I've found and uh I would say Twitter has its use cases I I find it useful in some respects it has become much less useful and much less practical in the last year with a lot of the product changes but it has its place it's it's not on my phone it was on my phone for a very brief period of time I do not want I find that my ability to be still and calm is eroded if I am too easily able to escape boredom if you cease to have the ability to be bored for 5 to 10 minutes I think that makes you very fragile it makes you very easy to manipulate also and there are a lot of forces at play online that want to manipulate or shape your behavior in different ways so I feel like it is imperative for me to cultivate the ability to just sit still and not consume the five minutes in line waiting to get into a restaurant by hopping on Twitter or Instagram so that's part of the reason they're not on my phone could you tell us about punch yeah I can tell you about punch so punch is a creative project intended once again to make me less precious about protecting whatever brand I think I might have and this is an investment in my long-term mental health also and I think in my career flexibility my willingness to experiment punch could be a long story but the gist of it is I wanted to experiment with fiction writing I been saying this for years and I've never done it that's the backdrop on top of that I have wanted to get back into illustration and work in the visual arts which I did for a long time when I was younger and I've not done that consistent why not because I haven't had accountability I haven't had deadlines it hasn't been in the calendar this should sound somewhat familiar by now and at the same time I was becoming very interested in web 3 and what was happening in the world of nfts this is probably 2020 and I know theyve they've developed a fairly negative connotation for a lot of good reasons but I started to think about fundraising for early stage science and if I could do if I could conduct an experiment as a proof of concept with different novel approaches to fundraising so rather than just calling the rich friends who might sort of Bend to the pressure or be willing to fund I wanted to look at say crowdfunding back in the day then I wanted to look at different options for perhaps art auctions and I was going to do this with with Contemporary Art this is many years ago and in the process of wanting to fund the the Hopkins Center focused on psychedelic and Consciousness research which which the was the first of its kind in the United States and the technology gave me the opportunity to learn about a new let's just call it set of Technologies so to develop skills and knowledge it would give me the opportunity to reconnect and deepen friendships with a number of my very very smart friends who are playing in that area also test fundraising also get back into fiction and art and all of that combined into this thing that I end up calling punch because it made me laugh and you know what man if you take your work too seriously you're going to burn out before you get the really serious work done and I think it was uh berand Russell who said it's a sure sign of an impending nervous breakdown if you start taking your work too seriously or believing your work to be very very serious and for that reason I wanted to give it an absurd name that would also have some Word of Mouth benefit and that to see what would happen honestly just see what would happen because someone like all right look what is honestly the worst thing that happens like people write a bunch of pieces where they're like shaking their fist at the sky how dare Tim Ferris Co create a project called punch you could turn it around on them and just say that what they were doing is a punch no well attempting attemp that well that was kind of the thing uh that was kind of part of the thinking that it would just be entertaining to watch people seriously trying to critique something called punch and uh the upshot of that is it raised almost $2 million sold out out in something like 30 minutes or 40 minutes for the foundation all that money went to cam Foundation all that money has already been distributed in the form of Grants wonderful and uh along the way I got to work with artists with programmers learn new technologies reconnect with old friends and now we're back in touch and it's it's extremely fun to be back in touch with these folks and I've written the equivalent of a short book in fiction in the form of short stories that are this Fantasy World building exercise for me and I'm having a blast so I'm exercising new creative muscles that has led me back into the worlds of comic books which I haven't created yet led me back into the worlds of gaming led me back into my fascination with tabletop gaming because I played D and D forever when I was a kid that was my refuge as a runt who got the crap kicked out of him left and right and I having just a blast and the the takeaway I think on some level is that you should do things should is should is a is a is a loaded term it's helpful for me to consider doing things that give me energy right because if we say all right time management is fine but time doesn't really have any practical value unless you have attention right so then there's attentional management but that attention is limited also phys physically and sort of metaphorically by energy right so you have like substrates diets neurotransmitters and so on if you do not have the the basic batteries required the rest of the things that are higher up on that pyramid can't really be executed properly so for me it's like okay let's say cockp punch doesn't do anything it's total failure right coming back to like it already raised $2 million for Science and that science could be breakthrough science so so punch sorry I yelled sorry so punch is at least thus far a success it is but coming back to Seth Gooden's question I asked myself would I do this even if it turns out to be a complete failure financially and I was like yes because I think the relationships and the skills even if this quote unquote fails from the outside looking in those will transcend this project and be life affirming and helpful and fun in other areas and that's proven to be true even though the project is ongoing and I have more energy now because of this ridiculous project I'm very proud of the fiction actually this ridiculous project called punch people can find the legend of punch on uh any fine provider of podcasts and hired voice actors did the scripting the production I it hit number one fiction worldwide on Apple podcast for a while the whole thing's hilarious and um and if you could could you explain a little bit about the characters in Punch Yeah I gu who's who's punching who's yeah yeah or which are punching yeah which are punching which how does this work so here we go all right so Co The Legend Of punch takes place in this realm called varata and verata is being described through the narrator who we know as the seventh scribe we don't know much about the seventh scribe but the seventh scribe makes an appearance in episode one as the reliable but possibly sometimes unreliable narrator of this space and there's a there's a mind-bending Time component where there's something called restarts something like the edge of tomorrow if people have ever seen this movie where time restarts maybe like Groundhog Day time restarts and it's unclear as of yet in the story why that is the case but people basically snap into being they know who they are and what they do but they have no real memories to speak of so the world is constantly being constructed and pieced together by these scribes the seventh of which is the narrator so you can you you might read into this that I am a fan of fantasy tolken you name it URS Ursula kwinn the wizard of earthy Etc then there are eight primary houses these are the greater houses some might call them Clans and they have different characteristics just prior to this seventh scribe beginning his piecing together which turns into this story in the podcast there was a Waring States period this much he's been able to establish and the peacekeeping mechanism that was devised is something called the great games and the great games is a combat competition and the eight greater houses send their best fighters who've been vetted through preliminary competitions to the great games which is in the free trade zone which is this one place where all of the races mingle and trade and so on and all these characters happen to be anthropomorphized roosters so they have uh generally each one Gauntlet of some type and clearly they punch each other with this Gauntlet and they're many other types of weapons so the colloquial nickname for this Olympics of combat is punch and that is the that is the etymology uh so the scholars say of punch The Legend Of punch and there's a lot more to it and there are many wrinkles a lot of Easter eggs in this entire story the idea came to me and it started off as a bit of a farce right it was just going to be something funny see if it works maybe it raises some money very light lift but once I got into the fiction I started taking it super seriously so it's become very very elaborate it's become really really elaborate and I'm loving it it's great so who knows where it'll go I have no idea that's part of the reason why I called it an emergent long fiction project I didn't call it an nft project I was like this is an emergent long fiction project where I'm taking inputs from the audience I'm I'm watching very closely what people understand or don't understand or find interesting I'm looking at for instance what is generated when I host an an AI assisted art competition which I did with the fans and a lot of these bits and pieces get integrated in some fashion into this thing that chapter by chapter is coalescing so that's cockpunch amazing and I had to buy cockp punch.com in the at cockpunch Twitter you had to buy it from somebody oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah the whole process I don't want to ask what it was being used for prior to your purchasing it was not being used for uh Fantasy World building I'll put it that way got it amazing and for so many reasons I have so much to say about first of all your excitement about it is tangible yeah the energy you have around it is infectious um and while I don't want to go into the total um depth and Contour of uh what Paul kti has been telling me over the last week of preparing this mental health series about what's really great in life that we all should cultivate it has a lot to do with this generative Drive which has a lot to do with positive energy not just positive thinking but positive energy but this um this Triad of Peace contentment and delight and as you were explaining it it's clear that it brings you great peace contentment and Delight as action terms not like sit there and just hover in the Basking in it it's just so clear that this was a great idea um and I love that you started it as a way to kind of um uh I don't know like knock the fear out of yourself a little bit by knocking a little fear into the whole thing yeah like like what would happen if you let your mind go and and allowed yourself to explore this and and what permission would it by you if it's not a total disaster this is true for the 4-Hour Body too I'm like what if this partially works it's not even a home run but let's say I get on Bas what permission does this then buy me what other Impossibles in quotation marks am I willing to challenge and I was able to make the Hop from one category in the bookstore to a completely different category and then the sky's limit I was like I can do anything I can do whatever I want I've given myself permission and the market has given me permission but the most important first is you giving yourself permission and with say punch as ludicrous as it is now that I've done that my career hasn't ended hasn't had any negative impact on my career whatsoever I'm like okay that's actually kind of surprising to the contrary it seems like it gives you energy raised money for science is it still raising money is there still an opportunity for people to No it's contri it's sold out um if people want to contribute to to say the early stage science and let's just say specifically psychedelics I would say it's very very hard to get a very solid understanding of the field and the shifting Sands and the projects and so on it's it's very rapidly changing so I would say just provide money to a foundation that's already doing good work it could be riversticks Foundation it could be Beckley Foundation my Foundation Cay Foundation I think does pretty good work and Cay is not just the Jour uh the journalism fellowships they're also the it's funding for psychedelics oh there's tons of stuff there's a project page on Cay foundation.org you can see the projects they're probably 15 to 20 of them and they can see the basic science all the way from really basic science looking at possible mechanisms of action for something like dip which is a very strange compound that D yeah most people aren't going to know it that that produces profound auditory distortions and hallucinations in humans very hard to animal model and from that all the way up to really sophisticated Imaging studies from that to say at least a year or two ago supporting phase three trials for MDMA assisted Psychotherapy then the journalism then the this then the that but a lot of a lot of different uh scientific studies that are that are being supported so that's that's very exciting to me and but the the cockpunch side of things is all done Money's been distributed uh and maybe I'll do more of this kind of thing but I I might take a different approach I I feel like okay I learned what I feel I wanted to learn from that and maybe I'll try something new next time one thing's clear nobody tells you what to do um except you and but that's vetted through many important filters like structured filters and um very thoughtful filters are the words that come to mind when I think about yeah your process as you're sharing I one more thing which is one of the sources of Joy Of punch is that it is not over planned I set some initial conditions and now it's emerging and as someone who has hyper analyzed and meticulously planned most of my life for decades I think it's helpful to have an improv component so if you are a hyper planner if you're a hyper measurer if you like that degree of control maybe you should try something that's a little less controlled take an improv class try fiction writing do something that isn't totally scripted where you don't know the outcome I think it's really good medicine for people just like if you spend all your time in a yoga class maybe you should spend one day a week lifting weights see what that's like and if you spend all your time in the gym and you can barely touch your toes maybe you should do some more downward dog try some yoga similar I think the spectrum of hyper planned to completely free flowing and improv provides ample opportunity to uh enrich themselves and maybe address some weaknesses at the same time so for me punch has been incredibly therapeutic probably the first time that anyone has ever uttered that sentence but yes probably yeah but that's part of what makes it so cool yeah totally I love it I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit about your mindset um maybe even your motivation but um certainly your mindset around sharing some of the hard personal tribulations that you shared uh in preparation for this discussion today I went back to some of those posts that you did and the um podcasts that you did around this and um I listen to them at the time and um you know they deal with quite serious violations of childhood and of self and um they're hard I mean they're they're hard to listen to and I can only imagine they must be even far far harder to to experience and I was curious what led to your willingness to do that and um yeah I mean I have my own ideas about what might have motivated it but I'd like to hear it from you sure happy to talk about it uh and I think there are two particular examples that come to mind so one is my near suicide in college and uh if people search some practical thoughts on suicide and my name it'll pop right up I mean if you just search my name and suicide it'll probably pop right up pretty well indexed at this point which is very deliberate people can look at the URL structure for a little wink and uh hat tip uh it'll tell you something about optimizing for Google if you look at it I'll just tell you the URL is spells out how to commit suicide but clearly I'm not teaching people how to commit suicide but I wanted that to be a Honeypot for some of that traffic uh because it's a lot easier now to find that type of practical implementation advice and it's a bit harder to find I think compelling vention so first of all if you're feeling suicide obviously call Suicide Hotline please right uh that's sometimes the last thing that people want to hear when they are in a place of suicidal ideation and the reason I ended up writing a long post about this which was terrifying to write because I had never told my parents I had never told my closest friends this was a secret this is a dark dark secret and I wrote about it because I went to an event in San Francisco I was interviewed on stage by Jason calanis who's a friend and a very good interviewer at an event and after I got off stage a bunch of people approached me and I was saying hi and taking photos and signing things and so on and there was one young man there very well-dressed uh which isn't really relevant I just it was striking cuz in San Francisco sometimes people are very underdressed and he was he had dressed up for it like he' taken it seriously and he was in a suit and tie and he asked me if I could sign a book for his brother and I said sure no problem and I asked him what would you like me to write to your brother and he kind of blanked he didn't kind of blank he totally blanked but the look behind his eyes was unusual it wasn't just I don't know what to say blank there was something else behind it and I could tell that he felt under pressure and I said no problem take your time I tell you what I'll just chat with a couple of other people and I'll sign the book no problem I'm not going anywhere and chatted with the other folks and then he asked if he could just walk me to the elevator and then I could sign the book I was like sure and he explained to me as I walked to the elevator how his brother had been a huge fan of mine and that I'd really kept his brother afloat for a long time and eventually his brother killed himself and that they' kept his room exactly how it was and he wanted me to sign the book so that he could put the book in his brother's room and he asked me if I'd ever considered talking about mental health and mental health challenges publicly because he thought it would really help a lot of people and that just I mean I'm like feeling myself tear up right now I mean it's it it was so crushing to hear the story and totally unbeknownst to him I had a lot of history with depressive episodes and when I say near suicide I had it on the calendar I had a plan I was going to kill myself I knew exactly how I was going to do it I knew where I was going to do it I knew all of the variables that I needed to account for to get it done and and the only reason that didn't happen for people who don't have the contacts which most people W is I had tried to reserve a book at Firestone Library this is at Princeton which had something to do with suicide it was like assisted suicide like the the clinicians guide to euthanasia something like that and it wasn't in and I had forgotten to change my address at the register office I was taking a year away from school and that was to focus on finishing my thesis it was to try a few jobs but ID ended up in a very bad place and was feeling very isolated and my friends were graduating a year ahead of me and I was stuck on this thesis and there's a lot of backstory that I won't bore people with but it got to the point where I decided not that objectively objectively my life is bad I think this is where people who haven't experienced depression get a little confused or it's hard for them to identify when they give advice to a depressed person because you might say to a depressed person like but look your life is so great like there's this there's that there's this and for a lot of depressed people to say yeah I know I look at that and I can't fix my state because I am broken and if this is how I'm going to have to live forever with being this broken and dysfunctional and to have this internal hell that I live day by day I just want to escape it's like someone jumping out of a burning building it's like they don't want to kill themselves but they're jumping out of a burning building and so I had it on the calendar and thank God this was back when they would still send you a physical reminder in the mail a little postcard that says your book is in and that card went to my parents house and my mom saw it and panicked and called me and I lied I said it was for a friend who went to Rutgers who was doing a project on AB andc but it's it was just enough to kind of snap me out of the trance and realize that killing yourself is like putting on a suicide vest with explosives and walking into a room of all the people you care the most about and and blowing yourself up so that snapped me out of it but no one knew this this guy certainly didn't know that and that is when I went home and thought about it and just decided okay there's a chance if I write this it's not certain but there's a chance that this might help someone it might prevent someone from doing what I was almost about to do and so I spent months getting this post written and put it out and I and I know for a fact it has saved minimum dozens of lives and there are other things including a very extensive list of resources and uh so that gave me I suppose uh not a toe in the water but sort of jumping feet first into the deep end and experience of being that vulnerable and this was a long time ago I mean this is I want to say at least eight to 10 years ago when I put that post out and uh then uh I want to say it was just before covid lockdown I was in Costa Rica visiting a friend I was with my girlfriend at the time and she knew a secret of mine and she was one of maybe two or three people who knew that i' had been sexually abused when I was a kid by babysitter's son from 2 to four roughly and routinely all the time kind of thing and like what you're envisioning is is is is is what happens so it was not good and that had been compartmentalized and locked away for my whole life I was like that's in the past we're Focus on moving forward and uh nothing to be fixed nothing to fix and that was my my perspective on things uh it turned out wasn't quite that simple right and so I had done a lot of work a lot of therapy used psychedelic assist therapies as well uh which once again are not all upside potential there are some significant risks but I had come a long way and my plan had always been to wait until my parents passed because I didn't want them to blame themselves for this and then to write a book and there was something though at the time when I was having dinner with my girlfriend that was dissatisfying about that plan it there's something about it that bothered me and I couldn't quite put a finger on it and I was talking to her about it and she said that's going to take a long time she's like have you ever thought about how many people people are going to pass away or die or suffer between now and when you publish that book and uh I thought about it and it was at that dinner that I decided to at least record a podcast covering this terrain I was not at all convinced that I wanted to publish it I I I was terrified of publishing it also because it meant open myself up to a lot of conversations or maybe just uh hurtful commentary online who knows like people are there are a lot of idiots out there and a lot of otherwise fine people who are idiots on the internet so it's very hesitant ultimately decided I I didn't want to do it as a oneman show I didn't want to make it a monologue so I asked my friend Debbie milman who had been on my podcast she's amazing graphic designer and teacher but she had unexpectedly on my podcast based on some of my questions for the first time publicly told her story about being sexually abused and so I had leaned on her in years after that in private and I asked her if she'd be willing to have a conversation with me about our respective Journeys and what it felt like what it looked like what helped what didn't help what worked what didn't to provide at the very least a glimmer of hope for people who were keeping some of these dark secrets or contending with them not knowing what to do with them and we had that conversation and I sat on it I sat on it I sat on it and then I put it out and decided in advance that I would not look at any social media for at least several weeks afterwards if my team saw anything on social media or got email I didn't want to see anything other than positive feedback which is not my deao I I'm usually eager to solicit constructive feedback but in this case I I knew that my own position was too vulnerable I I I I didn't want to open up the possibility of of destabilizing myself and I put it out and I think it's the most important podcast I've ever put out so I kind of felt like my job was done from a podcasting perspective after that and it's been incredibly gratifying I think it has certainly helped a fair number of people and it was also really hard because what I didn't anticipate was I would say of my really super high performing close male friends maybe half reached out to me to tell someone for the first time about their extremely awful graphic firsthand experience of being sexually abused the percentages were mind-blowing like the the actual percentages were super super super high uh which is part of the reason I mentioned earlier I think it's good to spend a little bit of time in those empty spaces to see you know am I in a positive energetic sense pursuing something good or am I running away from demons whipping my back and for a lot of those guys I'm sure it's true for a lot of women too like they they find medication through intense focus and achievement uh which is super adaptive in a lot of ways but it doesn't always have lifetime reliability [Music] and that's the story um it's impossible to hear those stories your story without um feeling some substantial emotion I'm not trying to intellectualize it's um both both of those uh aspects of your history that you shared are huge they really are they're obviously huge for you and and they're huge in terms of the positive impact in the world I I know this because um I have read the comments right and I and I've talked to people who have listened to those podcasts and read those blogs and um and have similar or maybe different stories of trauma but I think uh as with your work in the Psychedelic space as with your work in um the physical augmentation space whatever you want to call it um it's apparent that you're willing to be first man in on a lot of things and really make you're sitting alone there in those moments and uh these categories of revealing trauma are in my mind anyway so much more substantial in terms of their impact positive impact and the other aspects forour body and psychedelic work etc is also tremendously impactful so that's saying a lot so just want to say thank you for for your uh bravery and um thanks Andrew yeah it's um it's crazy because I think that a lot of people um can imagine telling a story or to a close friend or something but you know to put it out into the world you know it's like it's huge like you don't know how that's going to Ripple um and you've been a real Pioneer and example for uh for me for for LAX for other people and revealing things not like that um but different and Peter AA has recently been opening up about some serious challenges that he's had in his in his book he does that on podcast he's been doing it so um you know yet another category um arguably the most important category for um exploration and sharing and you know thoughtful bravery right because you didn't just put it out there in any form so uh one thing I do know by experience is there's nothing weirder than being uh told thank you for the painful thing that you did so I don't want to push that too far but I'd be remiss if I didn't because it it really has its impact and for doing it again here today because um so yeah that huge thanks for doing that yeah my my pleasure and I also say you know I got advice from a very very experienced uh psychedelic facilitator at one point who said take the pain to make it part of your medicine and the way I think that applies here is we all experience pain we all experience suffering many of us have experienced trauma of one type or another and that can consume you I mean it can consume you but it's like fire right it can consume you but you can also harness it and use it for different things and I know for I think it's I'm not going to hedge I'll say I know for a fact that there are people I've spoken to who are suicidal and by the way I'm not inviting everyone who's listening if you are suicidal to reach out to because it won't work I've had to disengage from that because it gets too heavy right just to engage one-onone with people who are suicidal but there are resources in that post Dimension the Practical thoughts on suicide but let's just talk about closer friends people you would never suspect in a million years who were this close to blowing their brains out people folks would recognize in some cases the fact that I was also there once is why they listen to me because I have unfortunately I'm a sub matter expert right I have credibility and that actually is very redeeming it provides some meaning to the suffering that I experienced it's like okay here I am for whatever host of reasons I am put in this place and time with this person and they don't trust the input of these other people they're talking to because those people don't know what it's like but I can look at this person in the eye and be like oh I know and that's just a different thing so you can you can find a way to transmute that pain into something meaningful into a gift that hopefully you can share in some way not necessarily with the whole wide world just one person that's a big deal one person's a big deal there's a lot out there that is intended for Mass consumption that gets in front of millions of people doesn't really impact a single person very much so even if you don't have podcast you don't have books if you have the ability to sit down with one person and really make an impact that's actually more meaningful than most of the crap that gets put out there so take heart Amen to that i' like to spend a little bit of time talking about the roles you see yourself in you know I I had this list coming in here of okay you've done the um exploration of the health sphere you um self- experimentation you you're uh you've been an investor you are an investor you're podcaster you're you know I think these are more than titles I I think titles are great but titles are what we get from other people telling us what we do or deciding what we do um I'm more interested in how you think about yourself like your your own role identity and you know I have to assume you've spent a little bit of time on this like if when we to go through the the the checklist of possible roles yeah right okay I confess I do this I think like okay like I I think I call I think I check the box of animal because we're we're animals after all and we're you know humans you still pole dancing I think he's a pole dancer absolutely not um are you still Tango dancing I'm planning on getting back into it great that that does have some background I have Argentine lineage and I'm embarrassed to say I don't Tang uh know Tango but you got the you got the mate in the in the green room so you're s my my uh grandparents uh Tango into their 80s I think late ' 80s yeah late 80s yeah ate steak and smoked cigarettes and uh lived until their 90s artine dieted Champions exactly um but I'm curious about the roles that you see yourself in like you know um role identity to me is so important um in terms of where we see ourselves now and where we see ourselves going forward and who knows maybe you don't have any Ro identity plan but you know what are some boxes that you see yourself in now that you really strongly identify with and then what are some boxes that um you'd like to check off going forward so current boxes I would say the two that I probably identify with most maybe three but I I'll I'll focus on two experimentalist which can take a lot of forms that can that can apply to a whole lot of different spheres so experimentalist and then teacher and for the longest time long long time I thought eventually I would go back and actually be a ninth grade teacher because I feel like that is such a critical window for so many kids where they can either hit an inflection point and go in a really good direction or they can go in a really bad Direction and I certainly saw that on Long Long Island with a lot of my friends a lot of overdoses bunch of friends who have died of opiate addiction and various things and I had some intervention with mentors early on that that sort of flipped the switch on the railroad track and sent me in a different direction so I thought for a long time I would go back and be a ninth grade teacher and my impulse to experiment leads to enthusiasm for teaching if that makes any sense because I feel like as good as I might be or decent at taking a complex subject deconstructing it applying 820 putting things in order and learning things very quickly uh which includes stress testing assumptions in that uh sort of assumed progression for skill like language learning there's so many myths in language learning as an example if it takes me say six months to become reasonably competent in field X I can usually get other people to that same point of competence in a third of that time so for me it's very gratifying to teach and I view all the books as teaching tools I'm no totoy I recognize I'm not the world's greatest writer I take the writing seriously uh I don't have asset I do many many many revisions even for punch it's like 27 revisions for a short story called cockp so I take it seriously but I recognize that I'm not the world's greatest Wordsmith but I am looking for outcomes in readers or listeners and I view my job as that of teacher so I'd say experimentalist and teacher of the two and those both go a long way and applies to say dog training you know lots ran lots of experiments and then for was listening to him just looked under the table one thing I should have said at the beginning and I did not is that um this is the first H Lab podcast to feature a guest who brought their dog so we have Molly is here as well and we're absolutely delighted uh there has not been a dog at on the hubman Lab podcast since uh Costello passed away and uh I'm you know practically floating in in Delight that Molly's here today she's she's amazing and you've done amazing job training her too so thank you yeah she's she's laying right next to my feet licking my hand as I speak so good and I'd say if I were to expand that by one I would probably say explore but the exploring goes hand inand with the experimentation uh so that could be Geographic exploration it could be spending time with people who are excellent at anything in any field MH and seeing where that gingerbread Trail leads me and I think the the the exploration and the experimentation are for me bed fellows they go together what about roles that you would like to explore or potentially see yourself in I mean I don't have a magic wand but if I did as a fellow podcaster and I consider you a friend uh I would say okay like if I could wand you to the success in given role that wouldn't be the way it would work that wouldn't be as gratifying as having to figure it all out cuz that's part of your your Machinery uh as you just told us so yeah what are some role life roles that you're interested in expanding and uh or stepping into that you haven't explore I'd say more more artists more Artistry especially in the visual sense because I wanted to be a comic book pencor for a really long time got paid as an illustrator uh towards the end of high school and during college so Illustrated books and magazines and so on then I just dropped it I dropped it when I graduated because I was kid stuff and it was time to get serious and be an adult and I just cold turkey just stopped all of it and so the skills have atrophied a lot but there's still there's still a bit in there I've seen some posts on Instagram that were yeah quite good so I'm still messing around I'm still messing around and especially when I have some structure I do well so I'd like to pursue that I would like to experiment with animation so I don't know if animator would be the right label CU I most likely would not be doing the animation myself but playing a role in visual art would be one uh father would be another one eventually and uh try not to be attached to it but we all play games of various types and if we get really good at certain games that are socially rewarded then you make money doing a podc or investing or whatever might be but when my when when when the sort of ramp of my learning starts to flatten out a bit I tend to get bored of those games and I think that certainly one of the biggest adventures must be Parenthood so at some point I think father would be on there and I should say this is very judgmental of me to say but I think there's a big difference between wanting to wanting to be a parent and wanting to have kids I'm I'm very cautious about saying I want to have kids because that doesn't automatically imply you want to be a good parent which is also why I thought it was very important for me to spend a lot of time training Molly and a lot of learning there right yeah to she's like all right am I going to do the heavy lifting and the hard work recognizing that kids are not deferred dogs but I do think there actually a lot of similarities uh in terms of just predictive ability if you see someone who has dogs that are terribly trained look at their kids you might see some similarity my my good friend um my good friend I'll out him here who's a mdp is their chair of Opthalmology at Stanford Jeff Goldberg I once asked him if he has any pets and he said that he and his wife had three children as preparation for having a dog that's there is there's a quote also from a book called Don't Shoot the dog which is terrible title but excellent book written by Karen PRI who was a an aquatic mammal trainer so she's training dolphins and whales and so on which don't respond to negative reinforcement you can't really hit them with a rolled up newspaper if they don't do what you want and there's a quote in that book which is something along the lines of I can't remember the attributions another trainer and it was people should not be allowed to have children until they've successfully trained a chicken because also chickens like they they just don't have the brain power to respond to uh much negative reinforcements so you have to coax them to do what you want them to do with positive reinforcement and I mean Opera in classical conditioning it's kind of same Sam across the board uh whether you're like uh the CIA trying to train cockroaches to flip light switches not making that one up by the way or training will or training a cat or training a human uh training sounds bad cultivating a wonderful human yeah then I think there's a lot to be learned across the board so I've successfully proven to myself that I can keep a dog alive and happy yeah and train up another happy nervous system yeah you know curate another nervous system that's a big deal oh yeah well she's also like my external nervous system so we we sort of work in tandem I pay a lot of attention to how she relates to different people I saw earlier today I mean as someone who is the owner of a Bulldog Mastiff who knew one command which was weight which is which is the the by default the easiest thing to train a bulldog because it when when you by the way folks if you stop a bulldog on the street to scratch them and they look delighted they might like you but chances are they're just really relieved that they get to stop so and um Costello he had a forbrain and he was smart about what he need to be smart about but Molly is exceptional like she knows where she needs to be and she's super connected to you and she knows a ton of commands it was ridiculous staff was like delighting in the number of things that Tim could get her to do just by looking at her yeah yeah yeah she's uh she's also quite calm out of the box uh which helps although it makes it harder in some respects to train because she doesn't have much food drive she liked those Maui Nei sticks we ma sticks yeah she loves the Maui NE venison sticks but she well okay I'll I'll give I'll say two things so first is if your dog is a spaz about food that's actually great news it will make your dog very easy to train in some respects uh read don't shoot the dog it's it's excellent and there are some others I could recommend I had a woman named Su uh Susan Garrett on my podcast because I wanted an objective measure of successful dog training and competitors have objective measures so she was an a dog agility Champion for many years which has a lot of metrics so anyway I had her on for people who are interested but the the the tip that I got from one dog trainer early on because I was trying to train Molly and I was using just some of her kibble I'd like put some kibble in a bag and carried around and she was like what are you doing and I said what do you mean what am I doing she's like is that kibble I'm like yeah it's kibble and she goes she's like hey pal she's like you're at a crowded bar you got a tip with 20s nice to get your dog's attention you take your to the dog park it's like squirrels other dogs grass piss on the pavement whatever it happens to be you have to have good treats so if your dog isn't responding chances are maybe you're trying to tip with singles I love it I love it well thank you for sharing the roles you see yourself in and the ones that you'd like to step into more uh I certainly feel I have the jurisdiction to say that you are an exceptional experimentalist and a phenomenal teacher we've seen this across so many you're welcome and and I'm not just speaking for myself I'm speaking speaking for so many other people as well we've seen this across so many domains it's like blogging podcast in book writing stage lecturing being a guest on a podcast you know and on and on and um in terms of the roles that you want to expand into more I can't wait to see the illustrations that that emerge yeah please do uh grow that flame because I I'm excited for what comes out um punch being um just the first of them leading the charge yeah um and uh you know I can say because I know uh because I have one and because I um uh have observed many uh kids and friends uh who are fathers you're going to be an exceptional father I'm absolutely confident of that yeah I appreciate that yeah and I want to say thanks for taking the time to talk with me today I've been looking forward to this so much my team knows this wait we were sort of buzzing like you we've had some Heavy Hitters on this podcast you know uh we only look to the top 1% in field and they are you know incredibly credentialed by whatever standards we happen to be exploring and they have to be people people that I really want to talk to so um I have so much respect for what you do and the way you do it uh you certainly inspired me this podcast would not exist I don't think the genre of podcasting would exist and look the way that it does had you not made the decision to start podcasting and um in anticipation of this episode did put out a ping on Twitter for questions and there were many many of them um that maybe we'll do a Q&A sometime maybe not who knows but you know one of the questions that really stood out to me was you know how does Tim feel about all these other people coming into all the spaces that he's worked and doing um successful work that builds off so much of what he's done and uh I'll let you answer but for me I can say that um I've been positively inspired and built so much of what we've been doing here and um and what I think about based on the ways that you've podcasted and communicate with the public to maintain your stance and integrity in the way that you interact with people it's really inspiring and you've always been so gracious to me and uh so humble and so giving and um and at the same time I know there's a fierce guy in there who likes to get it done so once again thanks for being first man in thanks for taking on all the roles that you have and that you are and that you will and thanks for being a giver we all benefit thanks Andrew uh really appreciate you saying all that and I want people to just get after it take things seriously have fun and be really really good so watching for instance what you've done which has been so spectacular so well executed makes me super happy and I don't view anyone as competition uh in the podcasting world for instance in the book world I don't view it that way either and I just hope that people keep experimenting pushing the envelope and if people aren't say getting better over time if people aren't following who are substantially better than me in all of these ways uh then I would be super disappointed so every time I see someone doing something really impressive or doing something I never would have thought of I get so extremely excited I I find it really fun to watch so appreciate you also just getting out there and hard charging and taking your podcast as seriously as you do I mean I I've seen the notes I've seen the setup I met the team it's it's very inspiring for me also makes me want to dust off my cleats and get back on the field so oh man you've never left the field and you've had a hand in it all so thank you so much and um hope you'll come back and visit us again here yeah I hope so it's been a real pleasure I've been looking forward to this for a long time time as well and I appreciate you inviting me on till next time till next time man thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Tim Ferris I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did for links to Tim's books as well as for a link to his weekly blog please see the show note captions you'll also find a link to Tim's podcast the Tim Ferris podcast and I highly recommend that you subscribe and listen to the Tim Ferris podcast if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests that you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please 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