Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Depression Is the Past, Anxiety Is the Future – How to Live in the Present | Tim Ferriss

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

What if reframing one simple word, and one simple practice, could reshape how you experience your life?On today’s episode, we sit down with Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, host of The Tim Ferriss Show, angel investor, and relentless experimenter in human potential. Known for his curiosity and cultural impact, Tim opens up about the intentional practices that support calm, focus, playful awareness, and deep presence in his everyday life.Tim explores how language shapes experience, why play is essential (not optional), and how to design your days for the states that matter most. He also shares the thinking behind Coyote, his new card game built to spark laughter, sync groups, and unlock connection, not just competition.What you’ll learn in this episode:How a single word reframed can shift your nervous system and your dayPractical ways Tim cultivates calm, focus, and presenceWhy play is essential to performance, creativity, and connectionDesigning for “states” vs. chasing outcomesThe intention behind Coyote: syncing up, group flow, and joyTune in to learn how one of the world’s most prolific thinkers approaches mastery from the inside out—and what that might unlock in your own life.------------------------------------------Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset!Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XExtra Resources: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, or visit the website: https://988lifeline.org/ Full List of Crisis Hotlines and Resources — https://www.apa.org/topics/crisis-hotlines See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I do not have any social media apps on my phone, having for two to three years because it feeds the I, I, I, I, me, me, me disease. And if you want to experience these slivers of transcendence, you just need to do something that takes the focus off of yourself. What if reframing one simple word and one simple practice could reshape how you experience your life? I think it's common for people to say, I have to do X. And there's a certain negative emotional valence to it. It's like, okay, instead of I have to, like, I get to. Like, this is actually something you get to do. And man, does that change your experience of things you might otherwise roll your eyes at grind your teeth about?

Welcome back. We're welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Jervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations, it's simple. It's to sit with the extraordinarily and to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Now, this week, I got to sit down with someone who's been shaping, culture and performance for over two decades, Tim Ferriss. You likely know him as the best-selling author of the four-hour work week, host of the Tim Ferriss show,

tech angel investor, and a relentless experimenter in human potential. So the idea that if I just work 20% harder, I'm going to leave this indelible mark on the universe, I find that when it becomes kind of an obsession, like I need to change the world and leave my mark and leave a legacy. There's often an underlying fear of death and a grasping for permanence. that just isn't very fruitful. In this conversation, we explore the states that help us show up fully, being calm and focused, a playful awareness, deep presence,

and how Tim cultivates those through practice, through language, and life design. I view something that seems as optional and squishy as play, basically like a recharging element that fuels the rest of the components of my life. So with that, let's drop into this week's conversation with my friend, Tim Ferriss. Okay, Tim, this is a conversation I've been wanting to reconnect with you for a long time. And so just let me just start by saying huge congrats on everything you've built, the way you've designed your life, the way you've impacted other people. And I'd be remiss to say that you were one of the first movers that really inspired me to push into the podcast space.

So you've taken up a big space for me as well. else. I just want to start off by saying thank you. Oh, thanks, man. It's really nice to reconnect. So I've been looking forward to this. I'm still looking forward to it. So I'm excited to see you do your thing and dance to the dance. Yeah, there you go. So how do you prepare when you sit down? There's a preparation phase. There's a readiness phase. And then there's the actual conversation. Like, how do you prepare? Well, it's a bit different if I'm in the interviewer chair or from in the interviewee chair since the interviewee is sort of return serve and the interviewer is server right but i would say if we're talking about in the return serve okay return return

serve then a lot of it is state management and what i mean by that is we were chatting a little bit before pressing record had had a little bit of trouble sleeping last night unclear why that's the case who knows and woke up like okay I think it's time to do some state management especially since I'm tracking HRV these days and I looked at my HRV and I was like good God okay this this is not setting any upper bound records if anything it's going to be lower bound so pretty much immediately did cold exposure probably overdid that slightly but cold plunge 45 degrees for about 10 minutes. I think that was honestly probably slightly overdose, but good enough. And that'll, interestingly, for people who aren't really tracking, and this has been demonstrated

in labs as well, probably mostly in animal models, but you go from really acute sympathetic nervous system activation, so fight or flight, but after a few minutes, you actually also simultaneously start to activate parasympathetic. And what I'm aiming for before sitting down for a conversation like this is a state of calm focus. You can have a somewhat jittery focus, if you say overdose on caffeine. So I had a combination then after the gold plunge of puerty and separately, if you mix them, it's going to be disgusting. but coffee with a ketone diester and then about 11 milligrams of a ketone monoester. And for purposes of today, that was my boot up sequence for state management.

Because really, this is improv jazz and I have to be able to react principally. So it's more of a state setup for responsiveness than it is preparation with content, if that makes any sense. Very cool. Like super thoughtful and also very nuanced about like what you're looking for. Let me go up one level really quickly and think like open up how you think about being a return server. And, you know, there's a huge range there, which is like, whatever I say, it's good. It's mine.

It's organic. So let it rip. Or it's like this is people's time and I want to, I have a sense of responsibility. And I'm just giving you two options. Then there's many, many more, of course. Sure. I would say it's more the latter than the former if I had to choose between those two, but also being reactive or responsive, I should say. For me, even if it's at a very high speed, benefits from not rushing, which is not going to surprise you. And I would imagine I've never

played at this level, of course, but even at the highest levels of tennis, right? There's a very big difference I would suspect between being calmly fast and the participant, the player feeling rushed. So if I feel like I am rushing or if I feel like I have the need to rush, I'm not going to perform as well. That includes conversation. Conversational parkour hopping from one thing to the next. And so as I think about returning a serve, it's trying to maintain to the extent possible, the complete relaxation before the strike, as a Bruce Lee might, for instance, or just any high-level boxer. That's what I'm thinking of.

And last but not least, having fun with it, which might sound superficial and might sound like a cliched add-on, but in my personal experience, you have so much, you have such a library of experience with high performers, but in my own personal experience, you If I'm enjoying it, that is an indicator of a lot of other ducks being in a row. So scratching that itch seems to be a proxy for a lot of other things that facilitate good conversation. Yeah, the reason I wanted to start here with you, Tim, is because you have a lot of time and under tension being the interviewer and maybe less, maybe significantly less time.

I don't know as being the interview. Yeah. Yeah. And so not that you you lack opportunity, but I think you're very precise with the opportunities that you take. And you're doing in some form or fashion right now what many people are terrified by, which is to be vulnerable, to make your thoughts and ideas and dreams and hopes and scar tissue vulnerable in a way that is in service of others, that's in service of what you're wanting to point people towards. And I do want to. to highlight both of those, but I don't get asked this question often, like, how do I ready myself? And I, you know, I don't know if you have either. So I just wanted to understand how you do it. And I think I heard you say that your ideal, let's call it performance state is calm and intense. Is that right? There's a calm intensity and a calm focus. It's a slightly diffuse focus as opposed to a pinpoint focus. For me,

at least, whether that's in sports or otherwise. So are you more playful or are you more intense? I know you to be pretty intense, but that's just one version of you. You know, there's many sides to all of us. So the playful thing is really important. I'll just pause here for a minute because my community knows that the last couple years. So at the beginning of every year, we don't do resolutions, but we do spend time here at

Finding Mastery and otherwise to say, like, what do I want this year to be about? And it's not goal setting, but how do I want to carry myself through all of the experiences that I'm going to have? So two years ago, it was the year of play. And I got to the end of the year and I thought, man, I need to run that back. And my wife looked at me and she was like, yeah, you do. I run pretty intense. Yeah, me too. This year is still, yeah, okay.

So this year is still the year of play. And damn, I can get sucked in the intensity so quick. It serves me well. Yeah. It serves me really well. and I need to open the aperture just a bit more. And so when you added play to the end of that, can you teach?

Like how do you open the aperture? How do you ready yourself with that playful attitude? Oh yeah. You can teach it more importantly. You can instruct someone how to practice since it's not. It's like anything else requires nurture and practice. if if you happen to have maybe overdeveloped to your benefit certain gears like intensity, which I would say certainly is true for me, maybe true for a lot of people in the audience.

And I'll just back up for a second and say in a session of, say, competition, if I'm talking about sports, often it will start with intensity and then segue into sort of a relaxed play. once I have shaken off the cobwebs and feel in my element. So I'll often have both and they're combined in, say, competition or an interview or something like that. But you can teach it. And I would say also this word play, right, or if people hear fun, it's like, it seems pretty squishy and it can be very squishy.

But what I would say is I pay so much attention to words and labels, because, you know, because that's the way we construct our reality. I mean, just look at kids pre-language versus post-language, fundamentally very different experiences of the world. And when you're looking at, say, my friends and I will sometimes assign each other words for the year, and we can say no, we can decline. But you can look at certain words.

For me, for instance, play has an energetic unlock. So what words, if you think, about how you put them into practice, give you more energy than is subtracted. And for me, play is one of those things that is not compartmentalized. So if you have a certain type of play, it could be very minimal, could be jumping on a rebounder in the morning, which I sometimes do, which is a fancy way of saying, what looks like a tiny kid's trampoline. But if you want to use a very dignified term for it for athletic performance. For the fitness. Yeah, right. And pay 10x for it than rebounder. So it could be just a few minutes of that. That could qualify. It could be

having a conversation with a friend in the morning, even if it's remote to just make stupid jokes and catch up and put you in that state, right? That then fuels me for the rest of the day, or at least for a few hours. And there could be other things. For instance, I'm going to take a week off the grid starting next week with a number of friends for wilderness training at high altitude maybe not everyone's idea of fun but where there's also going to be a lot of joking around sitting around a campfire probably sipping some whiskey being idiots that week will fuel at least the next four to eight weeks so so i view something that seems as optional and as squishy as play just to give one example as basically like a deloading phase

or a recharging element that fuels the rest of the components of my life, for sure. Finding Mastery is brought to by NutraFal. In many of my conversations about high performance and well-being, I often come back to this idea. The mind and body is one of the most beautiful ecosystems. And when something's out of sync for too long, like stress or hormones or nutrition, it often shows up in visible and sometimes invisible ways.

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So you're looking at state as an important kind of potential outcome to target so that you can experience life in the ways that you want. But you're doing small little thin slice activities to increase your availability to be in that state. And it sounds like you're doing blocks of time. time to increase a duration of a said state. And then your precision in language, language as, you know, for you, for me as a psychologist as well, is that it is one of the great tools.

Yeah. And so is micro expressions and body language. Like those are my tools. I think they're your tools too. And the framing of like some, some words constrict and tighten up, you know, in some words open up. Totally. So play is one of the.

those things that opens the aperture. And then play is something that's always available. And it's hard to reach when you are feeling anxious, frustrated, and tolerant, tired. Yeah. And let me throw one more thing out there, which is maybe you're thinking, look, hey, guys, love the idea of play, but like, I've been in the Peloton trying to win the Tour de France for metaphorically speaking for like 30 years. I'm not sure what that even means.

one of the words a friend assigned to me was goofy. He's like, that's your word for the next year. And I was like, okay, challenge accepted. He's like, because your friends see that, but most people don't see it. And furthermore, you just don't embrace that side of yourself enough. And fundamentally, I'm a pretty goofy person underneath it all. And my sense of humor is completely absurd. And when I let that side show in any way, there's a little.

of battery charge, right? And I'll give just one example of language tweaking, which had a surprising impact on me. And I don't know if someone taught me this or if maybe I was just sitting there in the shower and thought of it. I'm not sure. But I think it's common for people to say, I have to do X. Well, I'd love to, but I have to do X. Or even in your mind, right, I have to do X. And there's a certain negative emotional valence to it. Like, ah, you know, I have to be in this. meaning, ah, you know, and I have to manage this such and such issue or such and such employee or whatever it might be. And if you're listening to this podcast, presumably a lot of people have cleared a few

rungs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? So not to minimize any of the challenges that we have, but for myself, because I can skew a little towards the dark. And we could talk about why that's the case, at least to my best guess. A lot of nurture, certainly in the family, a lot of glass half full kind of stuff, but there's more to it. In any case, I just started replacing. Every time I said, I have to.

I would say, you know what, next to that, I get to, right? I get to because chances are, whatever you're referring to is such a quality problem compared to a lot of problems in the world. It's like, okay, instead of I have to, like, I get to. Like, this is actually something you get to do. which has this not over the top, but slight positive valence, and it just changes your experience. Even if it's changing as 5%, like that 5% adds up over time, when I think at least to myself, how many times in a week I might use that phrase, I have to do X.

Ah, you know, I got to do X. And you just swap out and it takes a while for it to become reflective. man, does that change your experience of things you might otherwise roll your eyes at or grind your teeth about? That idea. So what you're pointing to as you recognize is the concept of cognitive distortions. And there's a bunch of them, you know, according to research. And one of them is the phraseology have to. And when you go to get to, it actually points to a little bit more gratitude as a framing as opposed to like, I have to take out the trash. You do actually have to take out the trash where your house will be full unhealthy, right? So yeah, right. So, so there,

there are times. But the discipline, so I locked, I like almost eradicated to my best ability. There's still some room for the properness of what I'll say is, but have to, got to must. I have almost eliminated those. Should. Yeah. Should have. And it's, it takes probably like, I don't know, three to four weeks. Yeah. To say, wait, hold on. What I just say, good. okay, how do I do it without the word should in it? How do I say that phrase? And that type of reframing, so reframing, as you would recognize, is one of our great superpowers.

Yeah. We can reframe in anything, any way we choose. Yeah. Anything in any way. But we get locked into particular ways of thinking it's the right way to frame it, as opposed to the way that serves us better or serve people. So I have a question for you with your wife saying, yeah, let's roll that back. Let's revisit play.

No, no. For me to roll that back. She's like, let me, let me plus one that for you. What are you going to do differently or what are you doing differently? So there was there was sort of play year one rehearsal and now there's there's play year two implementation. How are you thinking about that? One of the things that I help athletes or performers do is to identify their ideal

performance mindset or their ideal competitive mindset. So there's like this bullseye that that warm ups. are designed to help activate, right? So in warm, much, you want to get your body loose. You want to get joints loose. You want to get kind of your mind right. So if you don't have a bullseye, it's really hard to get it. So the bull's eyes play, you know, writ large.

And of course, there's all these sub-mindsets that are important for me to be focused and intense and calm. Okay, but writ large play. So the way that I do that is I just knowing it, first of all, is not to be under assumed the potency in that. And then what I needed to do that I was not doing properly is I was not folding into my morning wake up kind of routine, just like we ask athletes to wake up their mindset. I need to, so I'm activating that or being connected to it while I'm still in bed. So I've learned that once I get up, I uniquely am not good at setting up this structured routine.

So I've got tools and things at my disposal, but I know that one thing can be really consistent is before I, pull my sheets off, I can do something with my mind. So I do a little bit of breathing and I do a little gratitude work and then I set my intention for the day. And I don't have to be perfect with play every day because it might not be the thing I'm totally feeling. But I get some of that into my imagery. So it was part of my imagery today with you is to be playful. And it's probably for you to determine as much as it is for me to determine, but that that's part of the way. So it's a simple little practice that's been well tested in sport and other high performing environments is just do a bit of imagery around it. So that's the mental part. The physical part is now I need

to embody it. And so the next thing I do is there's a way I can't explain it better than this, but it's a way that I hold the energy behind my eyes. And I know that sounded really woo-woo as I said it. But it's something behind my eyes when I greet people, there's either I'm coming from a playfulness or in a tense or an inspected way or whatever it might be. So I need to like, there's a feeling behind my eyes. And when I'm connected in that way, I'm kind of embodying it rather than just imagining it. Yeah. That makes sense to me. And I think sometimes maybe less obvious to me is is tone and delivery and facial expressions. So sometimes I can come across way more intense than I intend to when I'm speaking

to people because like my eyes are wide open and I'm staring at them like they have a lobster on their face or something. But really, in my mind, I'm just listening intently. But there's maybe to use your phrasing like a little bit of hardness behind the eyes. and if I just pay attention to softening 20%, like the intensity is still there, but it's not as tightly gripped if that makes any sense.

That's it. Yeah. And so two things I want to kind of slide into, and I'll start with what I think was really fun. When you had me on your TV show, I don't know if you remember, but as I was saying something to you, by the way, I had a lot of fun.

That was fun. Yeah. Yeah, that was cool. When I was speaking to you or answering the questions you're asking, I don't even remember me telling you this, or maybe I just made it up because it was, you know, it was a while ago, that you would say with me the words I was saying, but you were saying them privately and quietly to yourself. And the only way I could tell is because your lips were kind of moving to what I was saying. And I was like, that is awesome. like you are so intently focused on what I'm saying that you're you're almost repeating exactly

what I'm saying a fraction of a second after I'm saying it is that is that something that you're consciously doing or is that it is not something that I'm consciously doing I do remember this and it is something that comes up every once in a while and it's cool it is cool and I think I've definitely seen it in other people and I think there's I'll probably be technically using this term incorrectly, but only when you are relaxed, in my personal experience, does that type of spooky and very, I would just say beneficial entrainment happen, where suddenly you're finishing, you can finish each other sentences or mirror someone in that way. And that type of sinking can be applied in a million different contexts.

And it's not so much an NLP thing or anything like that. It is, it's a very physiological thing. And I hadn't thought about that in a very long time, yeah, since the TV show. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday. What you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not

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and use the code finding mastery to get 15% off your first order. Again, that's branch basics, B-R-A-N-C-H basics, B-A-S-I-C-S, branch basics. And use the code finding mastery for 15% off a simpler and safer home cleaning routine. Yeah. So, and I thought that this would be a nice segue because I felt that you were giving me all of the dignity that I would hope somebody would. You were so focused, but not inspecting. and like your eyes weren't crinkled up, but you were so tuned that I felt the connection,

like you were in it with me. And then, so this is going to almost sound like a cheesy slide in. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So this was kind of by design that I wanted to bring that up,

to bring this up to talk about play, which is your new product. Yeah. Which is a card game, Coyote, which is about in training. Yeah, yeah, it is very much. So I don't know if you were connected. to the concept of group flow when you're designing it.

Flow is obviously the most optimal state of human could be. And group flow is when we're doing it together. It's like a swarm of birds that are kind of moving in harmony. And that's what this game is about for me. Yeah. So well done. Yeah, thanks. And probably better with a little bit of whiskey.

I don't know talking about like you're going to want to your friends. You'll definitely, well, yeah, I'm going to be packing this. Actually, my friend Matt, I don't want to docks him. But yeah, former Olympic athlete, he said, don't forget to bring the. game. He's coming on the trip and he was like, don't, don't forget to pack the game. I'll tell you actually part of the origin story here, which is, in brief, I'll just explain. It is, it is kind of an entrainment game where you also try to sabotage people. So imagine it has rock paper, scissors on steroids with 20 different gestures and color coding where you have to synchronize different

things. And like 10 year olds can play. You can learn it in a few minutes. But I wanted to create something. It took two years with this company called Exploding Kittens. Alon Lee, who's a genius at game design and his team, something that was very lightweight in terms of Lyft, very fun, that also as a Trojan horse had a lot of brain training, basically. That's what I wanted to make. And to your observation about the entrainment, I haven't mentioned this to anybody, so I'll mention it now. But part of the reason the origin of this was I did a number of, let's just call it, one to three

day sprints with Alonle, who's the CEO of Exploding Kittens. He worked on the original Xbox, Halo. He's done alternate reality games, augmented reality games. He's created a whole new genres of games. The guy is a genius and a polymath. We were talking and talking and talking and brainstorming over many months, collaborating, trying to create something. And we could have created a million different things. But the way this one came about is we were having a lot of coffee walking around a lake in Canada and Ken, one of his top game designers who focuses on mechanics was there at the same time. And through the bobbing and weaving of this conversation, we're stochastically bouncing all over the place. I brought up rock paper scissors.

I was kind of embarrassed to bring it up because it's so simple. It's viewed as kind of dumb by some people who are professional game designers. And yet, this game is ever. And yet, this game is everywhere. People play this game. And part of the reason that I have found rock, paper, scissors so interesting. And I'm not saying there's any magic involved here. There must be an explanation. But sometimes when you play with friends, and yes, a few drinks helps, these are smart friends. But you can get into a rhythm where one person wins like 30 times in a row. And it's, okay, what is going on here? Like, there are just some very interesting interpret. personal dynamics. So then the question became, could you create something like this in a group?

What does it look like with four or five people? And then we basically just kind of jogged back to a kitchen table with blank cards and started prototyping it. And it took probably nine to 12 months to find the proper kernel of an idea to build upon. And then it was just thousands and thousands of rounds of playtesting and playtesting with families and so on and so forth. But it is fundamentally kind of a movement, social entrainment game

where you are trying to win the game. So you can also sabotage your friends or a smug or really good at it. Mathematicians or people who are very good at math and musicians both very, very good at this game because there's a lot of reaction speed and

some kind of interference effect, which I mean, man that applies to everything right so if you think about kind of patting your head and chewing gum and rubbing your belly at the same time dealing with interference whether it's professionally in a sports context that is kind of at the crux of so many ceilings that people have in performance so i'm hoping that this game will help people very much under the hood right it's got to just be like a silly fun game that you can play after dinner. But under the hood, I'm hoping that it will help. And I'm actually talking to some neuroscientists about potentially

designing a study to look at this. But have transference to a bunch of other stuff is kind of the idea. You're going to crush a business, you know, or a financial vertical on this game. You hit it. And of course, all of that hard work and years of and, you know, the discipline to carry this through makes sense because I've talked to to myself and my team a lot like, man, we need to do like a game. You should. You should. Yeah.

Like, oh my God. Oh, my God. Well, like. Yeah. And then as you described the three year arc and when I opened it up and I saw that, you know, brought to you by exploding kittens, which is a phenomenal game. They're so good. I was like, of course, Tim partnered with them, you know, like, well done, mate.

I'm rooting for you. Thanks. I think this is one of those ones that has the potential to be around for really, really, really, really, really long time. Maybe not as long as rock, paper, scissors. You know, that goes back to, yeah, who knows. Yeah, who knows, thousands of years. Yeah, who knows.

Thousands of years ago. And you don't need a card for it, but it's, you know, but you hit some really important, I think it's group flow. And in that entrainment with other people, the coyote is a perfect emblem because it's like there's a sly fox in there somewhere that's going to screw up the whole game. Trickster. Trickster god also. Trickster mythology, at least.

And I would also say that, and I'm saying this to my younger self as much as I'm saying it to anyone else, that play can also help you with all the serious stuff. And, like, microdosing play can actually be as this game is designed to be, right? A Trojan horse for a lot of other stuff. So, for instance, when I was competing seriously in collegiate wrestling and then also freestyle wrestling, a lot of, like, Some of the top wrestlers, still to this day, of course, are out of the former Soviet Union. And a lot of these teams, even though they competed in practice to different weight classes, they would warm up by doing what? Playing basketball.

Right. And wrestlers, as you might guess, are not necessarily intrinsically great looking at basketball. They look kind of like cavemen. They're not really designed for basketball. But they're having fun. They're warming up physically, psychologically. There's teamwork involved. And trust me, like, the Soviets did not do things without a very good reason.

I mean, the degree of study and observation and note-taking across disciplines is still, to this day, mind-boggling. Certainly China has sort of picked up that mantle. Yeah. And I think that, you know, notwithstanding the most obvious, is that if you're in a playful state, that means you're not in an anxious state. Yes. You're not in a depressed state.

So it's an inoculation to the more scratchy, difficult internal states that most of us want to minimize as opposed to maxim. So, you know, it's a nice antidote to it. So, yeah, let me add one more thing to that, which is, and look, I could list off a bunch of other games that are kind of fast, casual, that Monopoly Go is great. you know the taco cat go cheese pizza is great poetry for neanderthals by exploding kittens is actually

the game i was testing dozens of games on my own and that's the one my friends and i wanted to play again and again and i was like who made this exploding kittens who are these people oh okay let me try to find lonely maybe i should interview him just to like feel out how i feel about him and his expertise and i was like wow this guy's awesome this is the greatest gift of a podcast isn't yeah yeah yeah it's just like it's just like the perfect context to have an awesome conversation. And the other aspect of Slay is that it is almost always non-self-focused. I've seen this in my audience, and this is very well documented. I'm sure you've seen it in, and I've seen it in people firsthand, but also just through kind of the loose ties of tens of millions of

people, anxiety, depression, loneliness, all on a huge upward ramp. And so, it's social media platforms and so on. I haven't had social media apps on my phone. And keeping in mind, like, I work in tech. I invest in tons of tech startups and kind of like we're in the trenches when it comes to tech. And I do not have any social media apps on my phone. Haven't for two to three years. In part because it feeds the I, I, I, I, me, me, me disease, which in turn breeds these symptoms of depression, anxiety, loneliness, et cetera, this endless comparison, seeing people's highlight reels, doom scrolling. It's so self-focused. And if you want to experience these miniature moments, these slivers of transcendence, you just need to do something that takes the focus

off of yourself. A lot of sports are great for that. Like, you get punished immediately if you're focused on, if you're daydreaming about your email or what you need to do tomorrow or some petty grievance, like you get punished immediately, which is also why I love doing archery. Like, have to be focused on what you are doing. And you might think that that's self-focused, but no, it is like process, target, biomechanics focused, but it's not the I, I, I, I, me, me, me. And so I would encourage people just to do anything, anything at all that, because every cultural and technological force is sort of driving you to I, I, I, I, me, me, because that is the easiest way to sell you something and create needs that actually have no real basis.

So whether it's something like coyote, whether it's playing any other game, playing music, figure out what it is that you can add into your life. And the difference between like zero and 10 minutes is the biggest jump, right? That's the most critical piece is adding a dose no matter how small. It could be, for instance, just proven yourself, and I had to do this for myself, you're not the president of the universe. If you take five minutes to read a graphic novel or watch a TED talk in the morning, your entire life and all of the people around you are not going to collapse. Everything's going to be fine. So finding just really looking for the options to just add five to ten minutes of microdosing, focus that is off of yourself.

Again, this might sound very new agey. It's not. It is not at all. There are studies on all. There are studies on kind of engineering these experiences of wonder out of Johns Hopkins, for instance. and you've got to do it. As we march into the AI age and everything else, you have to get to play social, interpersonal.

You need to proactively add this into your life because all of the forces of the be are going to squeeze it out. Amen. One of the, especially with the impending narrative that's taking place, not a narrative mandate of figuring out how to work well with AI, that this counterbalance to play

and engagement with others and to be in nature is cannot be underscored deeply enough. All that being said, I think you'll find this to be fun and playful, is the science of awe. So one of the signatures for awe, it can be when your hair stands up. And you've got that technically, it's called pilo erection. So like there's an erection of your hair. Definitely going to use that again. Yes, you want to part of that one. So your hair comes up on end, right?

that can be from fear, but there's a thin slice with awe. Like, wow. Okay. So in the NFL with coaches, you know, it's on. It's intense. You get there like the coach will get there around six in the morning, maybe earlier, and then doesn't leave until around 10 at night during the season. Wow. Didn't not realize those were the hours. Yeah. It's on. It's on. And so there's a, there's a cost to relationships. There's a potential cost to health. There's a, there's a cost. And when you, when you invest so much in this one thing. So what we would do is we would compete, this sounds counterintuitive,

compete on how many moments of all we can have in the facility. So you don't need to be, you know, in the high Sierra, you don't need to be on the beautiful lake. You can find it is maybe easier to find and be in awe on those experiences, but you can do it in the seemingly mundane as well.

And so at the end of the day, we keep a tally. How many moments? And it was a competition. It was fun. It was playful. And, you know, I won't tell you the number to not bias the average. But it was a really nice, fun way to stay people connected to this feeling of being small

and being the sense of like the magnitude of something, like at the same time. Okay. All right. I want to hop on on this train for a second because what you were describing, it's super present. for me, and there are a few things I'll throw out that have helped me to not slow down necessarily from the standpoint of a video camera looking at what I'm doing, but to slow down internally enough to have more of these moments that you were just describing, right? That's right.

Okay, so a few things that have helped me, one, because this ties together, what I said earlier, is taking five to ten minutes in the morning to do something that is not productivity focused could be again reading a little bit of a novel with your coffee i i just bought a ton of frank miller graphic novels to reread because that guy's a legend he's one of the top five comic book artists and writers of all time i mean who does that it's insane so i have a bunch of them downstairs right now it could be meditation right using something like the way app by henry shookman or anything else that just teaches you hey five 10 minutes everything's fine in fact everything might be better because you're not white knuckling psychologically through your entire day. You realize

it's unnecessary and actually unhelpful. And then I'll just throw out a few resources that might click with people. There's a book called Awareness by Anthony Demello. I think the subtitle is the perils and promises of reality. And they're effectively cleaned up transcribed lectures by this. He's been dead for at least a few decades, I want to say. But Anthony to mellow jesuit priest based in india also a psychotherapist it is very much a collection of tools to help you do more of what you just described so i would say hey those are just a few things right very cool yeah you know what i'd add so i'm going to check that out and i don't know if you're familiar with the work of dacre keltner he's awesome don't know that name actually this is a new one so i'm gonna this is why i'm

I take notes. I've got my paper and my pen. Okay. He wrote the book, A, the new science of everyday wonder. And you spell it, K-E-L-T-N-E-R, Dachar Keltner. And the first name is D-A-C-H-E-R. Dac-R.

Dacker is out of Berkeley, and he's got a bunch of science. He's got the, what's the name of his lab, the Greater Good, I think it is, the director of the Greater Good Science Center or, yeah, something like that. It's a good name to put at the top of your grant applications. It is. Yeah, it is. Right. And so he's got a book on this on awe. And so he compiled the, I think it's a pretty dearth in the literature around awe. And he put it together and put his lens on it. Yeah, well done. He was on our podcast. He was amazing, really smart, switched on, very bright. And the thing that there's a through line between play and awe that I think we should probably just tie up, which is to be in awe, you must make yourself vulnerable. To play. there is a vulnerability that's required because you think about the young line and the old line right so the young pup is rolling around on its back soft belly exposed you know no care

in the world that there's a predator you know across the river or lake or whatever like no care in the world just doing the play and in the same point when you're in this moment of wonder and awe which is this radical gift of experience like like it it quiets the vagus nerve there's a lot of things to take place, that you are vulnerable to pray in that moment. So there is a luxury for awe. There is a luxury for play. And most of us do not step into that luxury because we're so keyed up on the dangers of the world.

And most of those dangers are really not that. They're no longer as physical as they once were 200,000 years ago. Yeah. They're more psychological. Yeah. No one's died from too many email as far as I know. I'll borrow that one too. Yeah, good.

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Kachava, go to kachava.com and use the code finding mastery for 15% off your next order. That's Kachava, Kachava, K-A-K-C-H-A-V-A, Kachava.com, and then use the code finding mastery for 15% off. Okay, Tim, this is awesome. I've got this idea that, like, people and experiences, you know, are fundamental in our shaping. Yeah. We have to put the framing of those experiences, but who are the people?

Can you help me understand who those people were, who the experiences were, one of those two, that have led you to designing life, I'd say, in what seems to be very, very successful. With the framing of your question, which was leading me to sort of design what people might consider of kind of an unorthodox life. And this was my guidance counselor in high school, who was specific, let me be very specific, my college admissions kind of guidance counselor. And I had high aspirations, as I often do, as I still do. And even if they've sort of lost their importance as the, if I do this thing, it'll solve all my problems. It's like having external goals and very explicit ways you want to hit the bullseye, right, put points on the scoreboard. They're still very helpful for creating structure and focus. So I wanted to go to either, say, Princeton, which had the best East Asian Studies program, one of the best in the country, also one of the best neuroscience programs at the time, which was what I hoped to major in, which was in the psychology department, or Stanford. those are my top two choices for a lot of reasons and the this guidance counselor had asked each student

the same thing create a list of your stretch schools those will be your a schools these are the schools that will probably be tough or could be tough to get into you're going to put those in the a category then your b schools are going to be can probably get into still good schools and then then you have see schools as your safety schools. You absolutely should be able to get into these schools. These are your backup. And I went in to meet with this guy and effectively he took my entire list. He said, yeah, forget about everything in the A. Okay. And he said, you should really take your safety schools and make those your B or A and effectively asked me to rearrange the whole thing to aim as low as possible. And he gave me a bunch of reasons that seemed

at least plausible. This guy's an adult. This is what he does all day. Presumably, he knows what he's talking about. And then I'll give another example. There's Reverend Richard Greenleaf who was... Wait, wait, wait, stay with... No, no, no.

Well, they're interrelated. So what Richard pointed out to me and what I realized was he was, he was, this was like hours later that I had this conversation with Richard Greenleaf that incentive, shape what we do. And what is this guidance counselor want to be able to say? He wants to be able to say to get his raise or whatever that X percent of my students got into their first

choice colleges. What's the easiest way to do that? Is it to help lift them up to perform as well as possible to create the best essays, the best presentation? No, the easiest way to do that It's to have them aim as low as humanly possible. And so I realized, wow, oh my God, I don't think this guy's evil. He's just reacting to incentives. And that led me to wonder, how much am I accepting at face value from adults who I hold in such high esteem or experts, broadly speaking, where what they're telling me doesn't actually, it's not actually the best path. They've been shaped by their incentives and their circumstances and maybe

they realize it, maybe they don't, but it called so much into question for me. So I owe that in some ways. It could have steered me in a very different direction, but I owe that below the line college admissions counselor, a debt of gratitude because it just kind of blew the doors off my perception of adults and experts, broadly speaking. So that's the first one. Do you, yeah, do you remember tragic story? I mean, not, I don't know if this is traumatic or not. So I don't, I don't want to presume anything.

But can, do you remember that, the feeling that came with that or the age that you felt or the experience that you felt when you were in that moment? with that particular guidance counselor yeah it was i would say it was a and he gave me a bunch of reasons right i had spent a year abroad as an exchange student he said yeah the credits aren't going to transfer he's like yeah you switch schools once already and whatever it was the regents or blah blah blah from from new york didn't transfer to new hampshire i would say it started with just confusion right? I was like, wait a second. Like, I have good grades. I've worked really hard. That's why I transferred schools was to go to a better school. It was confusion. And then it was feeling kind of

crestfallen. And I know these might not be emotions, but a lot of self-doubt. Like, how could I have been so off? I think these are within reach. And then thankfully, I didn't really put the punchline on Reverend Greenleaf. But he said, are you kidding? He's like, what's the downside? Just, he's like, I think you can get in. He's like, apply. Apply, apply to the best schools you want to apply to.

And he was like, I see you every day. It's like, I think you can get in. And I was like, okay, I just needed, I, but I mean, man, if he hadn't been there, different story would have unfolded, I think. I didn't just jump up with complete resolute confidence to overcome this below the line mentor like it threw me into a washing machine of emotions and confusion and i i got very luckily i got very lucky that i had someone literally mere hours later who was down the hall from my room who i walked into and i guess i had at least the proactivity to be like hey man i'm really

confused and having a very hard day i don't know what the hell is going on which way is up like what do you think about this situation i think that that probably captures much of you pretty well let me see if i can play this out yeah yeah yeah is that one of your great resources is um uh your relationships with others and you had somebody to go to yeah and if you know modern times you're going away with a group of friends and you're going to experience something that's hard and wonderful and fun, you know, in this, this camping-esque hiking trip that you're going on. So they're still there today. But that was the great resource for you.

Yeah. Is that you are vulnerable enough to be a member of, you know, friends or colleagues or mentors. So, like, you went to somebody. So that was your great asset playing out. And probably the wound that's kind of underneath stuff is what this seemingly innocuous, oh, let's just be adult here, shithead said. to you yeah right like you know by the way all below the line people are in it for themselves not for you yeah they're in it for themselves so but the three things that you you ticked on which is like

yeah you know when i feel really confused i don't like that yeah that feels scary to me and when i have this idea that i'm press fall and i have this i can do a lot i know that i've got some efficacy and some agency and i can i can i can see a better way oh shazam like whoa so that that feeling is really unsettling and it leads to some self-doubt i would imagine that that self-doubt self-critique crestfallen confusing state is the thing that you are designed your life to avoid and yeah yeah i think those came from somewhere where did those come from why are those so important to well i mean i i would say probably and like who knows uh since it's doing my best job to guess here but i can't i come from a family of people with not necessarily my media family, although some of it's pretty close, and also

childhood with friends where there's a lot of addiction, people overdosing. I've had relatives overdose and die, alcohol, just cardiomyopathy. Like, I mean, just a lot of, that's the right word to use, at least for a young kid, a feeling of unpredictability. And what does the kid do to try to create some semblance of agency and control. I mean, I guess kids control what they can control. And I was lucky that in my case, it didn't end up being something like an eating disorder. In my case, it was schoolwork. I was like, this, I can do my homework and I can ace tests if I work hard enough.

Like, this is something I can control. And I saw that as my ticket out of Long Island where I was like, I don't know what's out there, but there's got to be something better than this. No offense to Long Island. But there was a lot of mess around me and a lot of, like, fortunately not my family, but a lot of families with also alcoholics and other issues and like the dad would beat the kids and beat the wife. And I was like, this just like, I know that this isn't all that's out there. And I didn't have, I wasn't going to be getting any MBA contracts.

So it's like my ticket out, as I saw it, and my mom really emphasized this also to her credit, which was basically, and there's like, there's some truth to this. There's enough truth that I think it was, it was good advice. If you get great grades, like, you can write your ticket, basically. Like, if you do really, really well, like, you can do whatever you want. And that became it. That was it. And so I think particularly you track forward.

Like doing well in school was my ticket out and like, I busted my ass and I took it very seriously. Going from a crappy public school to a very, very, very difficult six day a week, seated meal with coat and tie kind of situation at boarding school. That was my idea. It wasn't my parents' idea. And that's expensive. You know, I had to find scholarships and get money from extended family and do the whole thing. I did have a math teacher. It was like, you got to get the hell out of here.

Again, that would be more of an above-the-line example, but these little influences, right? Not necessarily someone I saw every day, but he's like, listen, you're good at this, but right now you are a big fish in a very, very small pond. He's like, you've got to get out here. And so then, to flash forward, right, I've done my best.

I've made things deliberately harder for myself so I could prove that I could handle it and thrive in those environments. And then this guy's like, yeah, that's all cute. But you need to make your safety schools, your stretch school. So I'm like, what? Jesus, wild. And fortunately, I've had a bunch of above the line folks as well.

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$75 off. That's summer and the number 75. Summer 75 at finding mastery.com slash course for $75 off because it's not what you know that changes your life. It's what you train. Yeah. Just I think for the community you would

likely know this that when we have some sort of trauma in our childhood, it's pretty predictable that we those folks that are navigating the young minds that are navigating adopt a persona they're the angel i'm not making it i'm just going to be the one that never causes anyone to lose their stuff so i'm going to be the there's the there's the rebel oh yeah that's how it's going to go screw you guys screw the whole thing you know and so that's how they gain control there's the high performer yeah

which is i think what you what you were sure like you you adopt like through through academics and there's like six or seven let's call an emblems of personality are you still is your identity still fused with being a high performer or have you is there a moment in time or a phase in your life that it feels like you have changed from that i think i've changed i would say also i don't know if this is one of the emblems but i was probably a combination of high performer right this is my ticket out and also maybe some kind of savior complex where I was like, okay, we weren't dirt poor, but we had money challenges, right? And there was a lot of talk about like, well, if we only had more money or it's not what you know, it's who you know. And a lot of things I took to be true that are just

not true. You need money to make money. And I was like, wow, this money thing's really hard. And it causes a lot of suffering. I mean, I didn't word it that way to myself as a kid necessarily. but I was like, wow, if you don't have money, you have a lot of problems. And it seems like if you have money, you can just get rid of all those problems. So, like, I'm going to be a high performer and also, like, I'm going to make enough money that I can not only solve these for myself, but I can solve these for my family also. So those two were kind of hand in hand for a long time. And I think I still have a bit of the savior piece.

frankly, I am glad that I'm in a position to help my family and because a lot of people in my family who need the help. But that savior thing can also take on a martyrdom and a weight and I should do X, Y, and Z that is really unhelpful, I think, ultimately. So on the productivity side, though, to answer that or the high performance side, I think that that is definitely changed and I could point at a lot of different things. I could point at 4,000 weeks. I could point at psychedelic assisted therapies, the related science of which I've been funding at the very earliest stages since 2015. I could point to cosmic insignificance therapy. All these things are kind of closely related. I could point to the podcast and writing the books. It's like when I've

interviewed hundreds and hundreds of very, very high performing people who are at the top of their fields. It's hard to take myself too seriously, honestly. I'm like, okay, for any attribute that I can point to in myself where I'm like, I think I am a high performer in X, I can point to at least a dozen people who have three to ten times the capacity with seemingly less effort. So when I, when I, it's, it becomes a bit harder for me to in any way put myself on a pedestal and take that identity too seriously. I still strive for high performance for sure. But as you and I both know, there are mutants among us. And it just ends up actually being very comical.

It is. Like, you think, you think that you're a good basketball player. and then, you know, Michael Jordan tosses you the ball. And you're like, oh, what have I been thinking? Yeah, and that's in everything, yeah, that's in everything. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I don't know you to be humble, but that sounds like you have, I'm not saying that badly.

I'm just saying that that's not a way that I think about you. But I hear the framing, like, there's a humility and like, look, I've sat next to the Michael Jordans in multiple disciplines. And I'm reminded that I got a long. way to go to get really, really, really good at stuff. But my question is more about your identity. And so maybe another way to intuit is, how do you answer the question, who am I? Oh, man, we can get, we can go a lot of directions here. I won't get into the illusion of the self stuff. I'll let Sam Harris handle that and other people. But as far as who am I, I mean,

I think it's, of course, constantly changing and like who you are as a construction. too, as I've seen with people in my family with neurodegenerative disease, it's like when they start to lose their memory, like who they are changes. So it raises a lot of questions. But for me, I would say on some levels, I view myself as a learner and a teacher. And that's it. If somehow that makes a couple of lives outside of my own better along the way, then fantastic. I'd say that's often how I view myself. I would say also part of the antidote to product. slash high performer induced anxiety is letting go a little bit. And this might be controversial, but like loosening your hold on this fixation of legacy,

I find that that when it becomes kind of an obsession, like I need to change the world and leave my mark and leave a legacy, that there's often an underlying fear of death and a grasping for permanence that just isn't very fruitful. And also, you know, I just like this. I have a coin, a very, very old coin. I bought at some shop in New Orleans. I just thought it was awesome. It's very old coin with Alexander the Great on it. And I have that coin because it's a reminder of how few people could ever tell you anything about Alexander the Great, including his full name. It's like, this is one of the greatest conquerors in the history of documented humankind. It's like, what's the guy's name?

I've no idea, right? So, so he was just great. So the idea that, you know, if I just work 20% harder at cracking YouTube to grow my podcast, like I'm going to leave this indelible mark on the universe, it's so hilarious when you start to peel it back, that you can actually take this huge rock you been carrying that's really heavy. It's causing all this pain and just drop it like it's not heavy if you don't carry it. So this might sound a little esoteric, but it's that's all related to letting go of this identity as high performer. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the longest

distances to travel is from from our traumas, micro or large, and shedding the identity that was born from that drama, you know, to be able to survive or navigate those complicated times or phases of our lives. And I hear a lot of the Zen traditions in your thinking. And I am nauseated personally by thinking about legacy. So I thought that would be something actually you would grasp or cling to, but it sounds like you're not. It sounds like you are on that trajectory to be like, you know, it's more about learning and teaching. And it feels like you need to also counterbalance that because those are both pretty active, engaging. The doing and the being, it sounds like there's a counterbalance to you being more than just the doing part of you.

Yeah, yeah, because the doing, the doing often has a future focus, right? And it's like a, or an identity filling focus. Yeah. So if depression, I mean, depression anxiety, a very similar characteristics. I mean, they're often, they have a certain type of rigidity, a certain type of repetition and thought loop associated. I say this also as somebody who's really battled. And this is partly congenital, but who knows what else, battled with depression and anxiety and various things. You have, oh yeah, absolutely. And there's a, there's a, there's a rigidity and repetition to both. And sometimes depression is being caught in the past, like there's a revisitation, then anxiety is being caught in the future in a sense. And the simplistic way to put

it obviously in their different shades of gray, but the productivity, high performance, hyper focus, where you're too much of anything becomes its opposite and where it's like the dose makes the poison. And now it's, it's, it's, there's collateral damage. A lot of that productivity, high performance focus has a future payoff, right? There's always a future payoff. and the rabbit around the greyhound track is always just a hundred yards in front of you. It's always just a hundred yards away. And then it's a hundred yards way. But living that way is not really life.

It's like you're imagining. You're living in your imagination. You're not actually soaking in what's around you. And that includes interpersonal relationships and the social bonds that really make us who we are evolved to be in a sense. So I'm not sure if that's helpful to anybody, but it's been, it's been helpful to me, I suppose. There is an important skill of being able to reminisce and to think of the past, but when we're stuck in it and it frames our current experience in a negative, let's say, or sad, or or an anxious, whatever state for in a long period of time, it feels like we can't really do anything to get out. of it. This is what it feels like. That's what we're talking about. But there's a good reason to reminisce than to think of the past. There's good reasons to think forward and

planning. But when you're we're stuck in it. So the counter rotation is like what are you doing to be more present? Like what are your set of practices or exercises, if you will, to spend more time in the present moment? First thing I do each year, one of the very first things I do a past year review and go through my whole calendar. This will get to to the present question, but I go through every week in my calendar and just make a list of kind of peak positive, peak negative experiences or like feeling of energized versus being depleted. And, and you just, you look for the most reliable triggers for these things. Could be people, could be activities. And then I'll book extended experiences with kind of the top

10 people who are energy givers that's always going to have a core that's a strong that's going to have complete correlation to kind of present presence and experience of the present and then I book stuff so I have sunk cost working in my favor so I'll book and pay for things and not everybody can do that but like a lot of things are surprisingly inexpensive and then I'll invite my friends and I'll give three different sort of Christmas story like goes to Christmas past, present and future ways that this pays off because maybe a month out or two months out, I'll create a group WhatsApp thread and you have all of the payoff of anticipation, brainstorming and talking about this adventure you're going to have together.

You have the experience. Let's say that's three days or a week. And then the thread continues with photos, reminiscing, and new bonds made. I love introducing friends to friends who have not yet become close friends. And my God, the payoff of that is huge. So on a macro level each year, that is one thing that without fail, I make a point to do. And I'll have three or four of these things. It doesn't need to be a week in the Himalayas.

It could be all day barbecue with your friends. It doesn't need to be expensive. It doesn't need to cost anything. Very cool. And then on a daily weekly basis, meditation, people have heard this so many times. A little is worth a lot. So whether that's Transcendental Meditation, TM, which was my first, my first successful attempt at meditation was with TM.

And I think a big part of that is because I had a teacher holding me accountable and we had follow-ups and I like to do well on my report card. I didn't want to be the ass who would show up and they'd be like, okay, how's your practice going? I missed half of it. I didn't want to be that guy. Having the accountability really helps. And then the other, you know, you mentioned these touches of Zen is following Henry Shookman's work, S-H-U-K-M-A-N. He is a Zen master. I hate the term master, but that is the labeling that they use. And he would kind of laugh, chuckle about it as much as anybody else, but within the traditions in English, that's the word they use. And I was very resistant to Zen, which might sound funny because I was an East Asian studies major. And I've lived

in Japan, lived in China, speak the languages, et cetera, et cetera. And yet I had a very strong resistance because I was like, these co-ons are just nonsense. I'm not convinced these do anything. I'm not convinced these do anything. And sure, I can confuse someone into thinking I'm enlightened just by creating some riddle that makes no sense. I can do that too. But the more I dug into it, and particularly after having, I suppose, a handful of transcendent, let's call the mystical experiences, and yes, some of them were enhanced. When you start to stray into the ineffable, and you can get this from the awe that we were talking about earlier, you realize that like the rational mind only has dominion over so much.

And actually, like, rationality has some very hard limits. language has even more hard limits and zen plays with that a lot and i've come to realize there's there's a lot of value in that but fundamentally sitting down whether it's through a zen practice or transcendental meditation or vipassan or something else and simply observing what's happening as this self the thoughts that are coming up the movies that are playing the radio that is playing meaning the words that come into your mind, the breath, focusing externally, internally, and just becoming a keener and keener observer of these things, bleeds over into the rest of your life.

And for me, it takes about a week or two, I would say, you're going to feel like it's a complete waste of time. In the beginning, your monkey mind is going to go berserk. It's going to seem pointless. And as Sharon Saltzman, I think it was, said to me long ago, she said, actually that's the rep. Like when your mind wanders and you realize it's wandered, like that's the bicep curl. That's actually the practice. The practice is not being perfect and pristine like a still lake. It's every time it wanders, reeling it back. And as you do that for me, it takes about

typically when I fall off the train, which often happens, takes about like seven to 14 days. And then when you get there, you think to yourself, how could I ever not do this? this and then life gets busy or you have a fight with your partner or there's some crisis at work and yeah you fall off the train then you get back on it very cool and so that idea of when your mind actually does wander it is actually you can you can play with the one more level which is like oh great you know like i'm aware yeah so you're now actually in the seat of awareness once you notice that you're away from the breath the one thing whatever and then you the rep just to be more clear is it's a rep of refocusing.

Yep. So you gently, quickly, swiftly refocus back to what? What's ever happening in the present moment? Whatever it is that you want to place your attention on. It's magical. Like it's been around 2,600 years. Like it's, at least, it's magical. Yeah, at least.

And there's a structured way to approach it. So the reason that I like, for instance, the introductory course on Sam Harris is waking up at the very first course he ever recorded 30 days. The reason I like that and the reason I really like, Henry Shookman's stuff is it is a sequential log logical progression of skill development so each 10 minutes I do 10 minutes each 10 minutes sit will entail focusing on a particular aspect of experience it could be the soundscape externally it could be your breath in different facets of the breath

it could be just what's playing on the movie screen in your mind and as you layer these skills you actually do develop a toolkit. And that can really help you. I'll give you one example. It's so simple. But I took a trip with a number of friends. I'd always wanted to go to Mexico to experience Dave the Dead. Never had done it. I said this every year. And then following my own device, I was like, you know what? Even if I don't go, I am going to pay for, like, I'm going to book a hotel. And if I lose it, I lose it. So, yeah, sunk cost fallacy. Yeah, the right, the right sunk costs. And ended up going to Mexico and my first dinner, I was so excited to be there. And I was at this restaurant.

And lo and behold, there's one other table of Americans. I looked like a bachelor party or something. And they're just drinking their faces off, cackling, kind of yelling in the restaurant. And I was getting so pissed off. I was getting so irritated. I'm like, I come all the way here. And this is why Americans have a bad reputation. I mean, there are many reasons we might.

but this is one like loud and obnoxious what the hell and i'm getting all wound up and then i pulled from one of henry's 10 minute sessions where he's looking at the hindrances to meditation or mindfulness and each one is focused on a hindrance and one of the hindrances is aversion and in henry's 10 minute practice you don't try to change anything you don't try to quell your version you don't try to like the thing that you're hitting you just note it aversion a version. And I did that for like 30 seconds in this experience having dinner in Mexico City where I was so pissed off. And literally within a minute totally transformed my experience and I can just go back to my dinner with my friends and enjoy it. Like that to me is concrete

value for meditation. It's not some airy, fairy thing. It is a it is so intensely practical. And doing something like 10 minutes twice a day, which I think is kind of, there seems to be some critical mass with the twice a day, whether it's TM or with Henry's stuff or any other app, it's like 10 minutes right when I wake up and then 10 minutes before dinner or before bed. But like don't skip it. This is like brushing your teeth. the twice a day and then combining that with some reading like awareness by Anthony DeMello, like those really

synergized nicely. Without fail, if I'm just feeling lost in the murk of some nebulous cloud of worry and like all my problems seem to be blending together in some way that makes them really hard to tackle and I start

one thing and then I get distracted and do another, whenever I'm in that type of chaos, which is all internally generated. Two weeks like what I just described. And I'm a different person. It's a different life that you're having. I love the point that you just made about the practicality, the practice of, and that our states are, for the most part, internally driven. Yeah. And, you know, there's always external things that are taking place. And but the way we frame those and the way that we experience those is up really to us. And so the more connected you are,

to what's actually happening inside of you, the easier you can shift and play with, dare I say, the way that you experience it. So I didn't know that you had such a depth of a practice there. I figured, but it makes perfect sense. And I could go on and on and on. I want to do two more things with you. Yeah. One is we're talking about relationships a lot.

And I think it's one of the most significant mindsets is to tune to. the relationships that we have with self and the relationships that we have with others. And, you know, I don't know about your love life. And maybe that's because it's really private. Maybe it's because it's very painful. Maybe it's wonderful. I don't know. Maybe all the above.

So, yeah. At some point, hopefully all of us say all of you above. But like, I don't know. Are you currently in an intimate relationship? Yeah, yeah. I'm dating a lovely woman at the moment. Yeah. And I'm not asking for.

anything public is what I'm saying. But how do you develop attuning to being relational? What do you do to make sure that that's part of the forefront of all of the millions or thousands of thoughts that you could have every day that you are tuning to being relational? This is still a work in progress. I've been I've been trained very well like a hyperactive puppy by two or three exes who are very patient, still close to them. But I would say intimate relationships, I never had a model for this, first of all, right? There's a lot of yelling in my household, never had a close model for what it looks like to have, like, civilized, regulated conversation.

So that, this had to be a learned, a learned skill. There are a few pieces. I'll throw out a number of things that have been very helpful. to me, if people, I would say if there's any department where I would view myself definitely as still on training wheels, this would be the area. But 10 years ago, I didn't even know what a bike was. So it's like, at least I'm on the bike and I'm peddling around and making progress. Yeah, good framing. Good framing. Yeah. I've made a lot of progress. And a few things have been very helpful. Number one is, and this is not in a ranked order, but there's a book called Fierce Intimacy

by Terry Real. I highly recommend his stuff. I've I've looked at so many different books and resources related to relationships and intimate relationships. I find some of them to be just too idealized and ridiculous, whereas Terry will talk about things like he has a phrase normal marital hatred, which I just like every once in a while. And he'll, you know, he was quoting this old therapist who'd worked for like 60 years solving all these really, really tough couples challenges. And this couple's therapist said, you know, there will come a time, maybe it's the next day after you get married, maybe it's two or years later where you'll turn over and look at your partner or your wife or husband and think, I have made a terrible

mistake. And that is the beginning of your marriage. Now, I know that can sound depressing, but even with my closest friends, certainly with intimate relationships, I think it's, if you spend a lot of time around someone else, you are going to have both sides of the coin. So you need to learn how to contend with that. Expecting it to be some troubadours version of ultimate romantic love all the time is an invention, just like Haramart cards have invented a lot of holidays. It's not reality. Reality has a surprising level of detail and messiness.

So there's that, I would say, having shorthand shared language, and I'm blanking on who it was, there are two different couples who have the last name Hendricks might be conscious loving those Hendricks it could also be more along the lines of the sort of 15 commitments of conscious leadership Hendricks as as their mentors but the point being having agreeing upon shared language such as hey can we do a redo if something that was said hurt your feelings and keeping it short, keeping it sweet, but having that as shared shorthand, man, does that save a lot of grief? Being able to say also, as someone who grew up around at least one parent who was very conflict avoidant, having the ability, and people might not expect it, but I'm very introverted and very sensitive,

just from a sensory perspective, like my hearing, my vision, everything is very, very sensitive. So I can feel overwhelmed easily and Stonewall. I'm not a yeller. I won't do that. I decided very early I wasn't going to do that. But I can just put up a block. And I've learned, and I think this is more shared language, to be able to say, let's talk about this.

I just don't feel resourced right now to have this conversation without getting super dysregulated or just not doing a great job. So let's come back to this like tomorrow afternoon or let's decide tomorrow morning when we're going to talk about this. So that shared vocabulary, I think, is really important because if you look at it, and maybe I'm really talking about my pay grade, but if you look at the history of humankind, like a single couple, two people, husband and wife, let's just say, spending the degree to time together that seems expected in, say, modern coastal U.S. society is a complete aberration. it is a complete aberration. If you look at any, any society, any culture that has been around much longer than the U.S. has, and you just go back through time. Like, this is, it's very recent that we're expected to like raise kids as a two-person couple and spend the amount of time together that seems to be the norm. So I do think you need new tools to handle that. If you were in communal living, if you had a lot of female only time for, women and a lot of male only time for men, I think it would be a different picture and a different map to navigate. But I'll stop talking because that's quite a mouthful. But those are some of the

things that I think about. No, I appreciate it. And it's the second time you've hinted on like the importance and modernity for new tools, like with AI and with the duration of relationships. We had the Gottman's on. I don't, did you have. Yeah. I've never spoken to the Gottman's. But I definitely know I'm a passing familiarity with their work. Yeah. So they're legendary for their research on relationships and they shared a handful of key components and just for i think you're going to enjoy this is like the first they call it it's love maps which is understand your partner's inner world their hopes of dreams of scar tissues like so really be able to map you know and it's a very loving thing to do that's that's one and then that haven't just like an admiration for what

they carry how they do what they do admire them like share that how you feel about them more than you think you need to, you know, and then keep turning towards each other instead of away from each other. This is the third one. Turn towards. So your example, like, I don't have the resources right now. I'm not pulling away. But I think if you kind of keep coming at me, all I want to do is, is pull away. I need some time away right now so that I can really stay tuned to you, which is a cool thing to do. And then make sure that you're managing conflict. Like, hey, I need like, I'm not going to yell. I know that if I'm in a bad way, I'm just going to put up a blocker.

I don't want to do that with you. Like, I need help to manage conflict. Let's talk about it ahead of time. God bless us. Tim, you are awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. For everything that you've done quietly without even knowing how you've impacted me. So, and millions.

Yeah, like for sure. Thank you. Yeah. Such a joy to be on with you and have this conversation, man. Really, really awesome. Yeah, I hope we find some time, you know, at some point to enjoy some of the tequila that you sent over. Let's do it. That was very kind of you.

Yeah. That would be great. Yes. And then one little parting gift for everybody, you're great at seeing around corners. Like, what are you thinking about? No dissertation here, but just like, what are you thinking about? I know you've got an AI position. I know you've got a psychedelic position.

But just like, where do you go when I say, what are you seeing around the corners? Yeah. Where my head goes, just because I've seen so many people torture. from let's call it broadly mental illness who knows what the PC term is now but let's just everybody gets what I'm talking about mental illness you know I've lost friends to suicide I almost off myself in college I mean I've just seen a lot of darkness around me and I would say that when I started my foundation way back in the day of Sisei Foundation which means rebirth in Japanese means a few things it was all mental health therapeutic focused

and that's not exclusive to psychedelics. It's tool agnostic. So the most impressive things that I have seen and that I'm investigating, I would say, include different types of brain stimulation, like accelerated TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, incredibly interesting for addressing. So interesting. Treatment resistant psychiatric conditions. And then also metabolic psychiatry, which is actually not that new. but applications of mostly nutritional ketosis to conditions that would be heavily contraindicated for anything like psychedelics, which definitely carry real risks. So schizophrenia, borderline

personality disorder, certainly epilepsy, that goes back to the early 1900s. And I would say those three, so nutritional interventions for any type of mental disturbance or mental health disorder, in addition to that bioelectric medicine. So bioelectric medicine could include something like accelerated TMS ultrasound,

focused ultrasound for a number of different things, possibly addiction, like hitting the nucleus accumbens, also for vagus nerve stimulation, which you alluded to earlier. So using focused ultrasound for vagus nerve stimulation.

And also the place of, and then I'll stop, anti-inflammation and modulating the immune system for impacting mental health. All of this is integrally tied together. So if I'm very long nutritional intervention and case in point, we were talking about this before recording, but just experimenting with things like intermittent fasting, so I'm doing 16 hours off and then eating within an eight-hour window, say from 2 to 10 or 12 to 8, it's astonishing what that can do for your insulin sensitivity and then mood regulation and then

guess what your state of mind and function it's really remarkable what can happen so the nutritional interventions which are i'd say one leg of the stool that i'm investigating right now and then the bioelectric options from credible scientists there's a lot of nonsense floating around out there But I'm very long the bioelectric interventions. And I think that a lot of the conditions, especially where I should say including autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, that these will be treated with electricity instead of drugs, at least as a frontline intervention within the next hopefully five to 10 years. because the at least as far as I can tell in the literature so far, the risk and side effect profile is very, very attractive compared to a lot of the medications that people would take as maintenance drugs. I was part of an early startup. It was probably 15 years ago.

We were the first to hit market on portable EEG. And I'm so into that science. Now, there's a lot of toys on the market. you waste your time and money on them there's some real tools and um they're i'm super interested in those as well so very cool nutrition biomedulation basically and then uh it sounds like there's a lot that hangs off of that yeah so very cool mate appreciate you keep leading from the front i hope you have enough time for to dry off you know from the rapids of life oh yeah so i appreciate you man yeah thanks so much and i'll just say

lastly just because I always there's somebody listening to this probably who's suffering or knows someone's suffering with mental illness I would say look up metabolic psychiatry Chris Palmer at Harvard is a good resource he has a book on this and then on the accelerated TMS and things like that Nolan Williams at Stanford look him up and there are options out there there are tools I used to have three to four major depressive episodes I used to year. Totally crippling. I mean, this is probably three to six months of my year. And now I have maybe one episode of two to three weeks every two to three years. Those are fundamentally two different experiences of life. So there are tools out there that can help. And if anybody out

there is suffering or you know someone who is, this is very common. You're not alone. And there are actually some amazing technologies that are incredibly inexpensive in the case of, say, metabolic looks like hiatry that you can check out. It's all I got. And I will make sure that we put all of that in our show notes as well as hotlines. You and I have both lost loved ones to suicide. It's tragic. And so reach out to your people and we'll provide some resources as well.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Mike. Great to see you. See you, buddy. Let's break Brits in. Ditto. I love it. Okay.

Bye. Next time on Finding Mastery, Simon Sinek is back for a conversation about the true value. of friendship and why most of us are doing it badly and how connection, trust and optimism are our greatest tools in a world obsessed with metrics and AI. Join us on Wednesday, September 3rd, 9 a.m. Pacific here on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're in

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