Know Thyself - E166 - Tim Ferriss: The Hard Truth About Self-Improvement (After 25 Years of Experimenting)

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Tim Ferriss opens up about the inner evolution behind his outer success. He shares the practices and perspectives that have most transformed his life: from the art of asking better questions and setting meaningful goals, to the wisdom of subtraction — removing what no longer serves to make space for what truly matters.Tim reflects on how psychedelics, fasting, and deep self-inquiry have reshaped his understanding of sensitivity, healing, and purpose. He explores the balance between self-development and self-centeredness, revealing how real growth begins not in control, but in surrender.To get your free shilajit today:https://fractalforest.co/knowthyself20% off Pique Life Tea:https://www.piquelife.com/knowthyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________0:00 Intro 2:40 Trusting in What Can't be Controlled6:45 Reviewing Your Life & Setting Goals8:54 Why He Devoted His Life to Strategic Self Development13:13 Asking Great Questions Leads to Great Results19:12 A Question to Shift Your Perspective on Life28:04 The Key for Growth: Addition vs Subtraction 38:09 Making the Space for Social Connection44:14 The Power of Subtraction & Fasting49:55 Ad: Fractal Forest51:32 Self Development Without Being Self Centered59:48 His Journey with Psychedelics 1:14:15 Ad: Pique Life1:16:47 How Psychedelics Changed How He Sees Life & the Mystical1:20:22 The Misuse of Psychedelics and How it Used to be Used1:27:07 Why He started Working with Them1:31:32 Red Flags & What to Watch Out For1:37:35 How His Relationship to Sensitivity has Changed1:46:50 Healing from Childhood Trauma1:58:28 Creating A Life Worth Living2:05:28 The Projects He Pours His Time Into2:10:43 Coyote, a Game of Connection2:19:50 Diversifying Your Business & Self2:23:18 Rapid Fire Questions2:36:20 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss/https://www.explodingkittens.com/products/coyotehttps://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

People overestimate how much they need to do things that are incredible. I think one of the traps of self-improvement is that the solution tends to be framed through the lens of addition. So what's the pill I can take? What's the magical stretch I can do so that all my problems will go away? It's almost like maybe trying to grab something in water really quickly and you're just pushing it away. I think that self-development is perhaps best approached indirectly. What's like the high level overview of your journey with psychedelics? Man.

The more time you spend in the psychedelic space, the stranger and more interesting it gets. Psychedelics makes me worry quite a bit. You know, let me do a little PSA real quick. First order of business, the subconscious choice to sort of cauterize my sensitivity, it wasn't on my own volition. If I may so, procure a prop. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Yeah, brutal. Poor kid. that sort of uncorking and then embracing of the sensitivity has been fundamental, feeling intact as who I am, right? Because I had disavowed that entire part of myself for so long. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today needs no introduction, but here's a small one anyways.

Many of you know him from his bestselling books, notably the four-hour work week, over 700 produced podcast episodes with hundreds of millions of downloads. He, beyond all the illustrious accomplishments that I could continue to name, he's really become a beacon of authenticity, an explorer of what it means to truly squeeze the juice out of life by testing limits, questioning assumptions, and sharing the raw truth of his own human journey. Tim Ferriss, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. Pleasure is mine. Beautiful space. Puerti? Yeah. Just the... slightest waft of comfortable air. You guys have really dialed this in. It's a process of refinement. Yeah, yeah, God. I'm glad you feel at home. I do. Yeah, I am so excited to dive into

the many different avenues that we can and somebody that is so well versed in many different areas and has many different interests. Notably, obviously, for so many incredible frameworks you have, for optimizing different areas of life, where I want to start as someone who has cold a lot of a relative degree of mastery in a lot of the external games, health, business finances. What is your journey of trusting in what can't be controlled? Well, in trusting what can't be controlled, and think about the wording because it's super interesting wording. I would say training yourself, in this case, training myself to trust in your ability to

handle the uncertain has been a lifelong process. And we can dive into it at some point if you want, but had some very rough experiences in childhood and to compensate for that or as a reaction to that. It wasn't really conscious. I think a lot of people who experience early difficulties find a way if they make their way through it. Not everybody does to control something. And that can take the form of chasing a clear what you perceive as a finish line. Make a million dollars.

financial freedom, family and kids and the white pick offense, whatever it might be. So you have this dogged determination with a singular focus, and then you control something. It could be your schedule. It could be your eating. And all of these things in excess can become some type of handicap and disorder, right, in the case of eating, anorexia nervosa, right? There's a certain rigidity and compartmentalization. So for me, I think in the beginning, the way that I attempted to,

control the unknowns was by white knuckling anything I felt like a control and that's an illusion largely. Stoicism, different philosophical systems that really harp on this and just pounded into your head over and over and over again can be very helpful. And then a lot of it is revisiting the past for me. So I remember maybe it was about 10 years ago when I started doing past year reviews instead of New Year's resolution. So looking back at the last year, every week of the calendar for peak, sort of negative and positive experiences,

positive and negative people, right? The slight battery drains that seemed consistent over time, activities and people. And in addition to that, and I joked with a friend of mine at one point, I said, you know what I should create as a journal? Because people love journals.

Everybody's putting out a journal. I was like, let me just add to the noise. But my journal will be, something like worries that mostly didn't come true, where you just look back at the things that you were worried about. And so I do this when I look back at the calendar and just what a tiny fraction of the whole, the smallest percentage that actually become a problem.

And that gives you, I would say, two insights for me. And I need to constantly remind myself of this because I'm hyper-vigilant and actually tend to, to see the world is like full of danger, strangers you can't trust, etc. That's my baseline. But one is a lot of the things you're really, really terrified about, worried about, just don't happen. So in that case, the cards fall in your favor. But real life has bumps along the way. So when the cards don't fall in your favor, you figure it out. And when you look backwards, you can see, like if you're actually sitting here, you have decent life, you have figured out thousands upon thousands and maybe millions

upon millions of little micro decisions and adaptations along the way. So it's also doing a retrospective to convince myself, and this takes reconvincing that you can figure it out. So I would say trusting in the ability, your own ability to figure most things out and recover, even if something ends up being really terrible. Yeah. Which happens. You know, that's life. Yeah, I'm reminded of paraphrasing Mark Twain, like, the worst things in my life never happened.

Yeah. And there are great many worries in my life, most of which have never happened. Or great many terrible things that befallen me, most of which never happened. There's something along those lines. Yeah. No, it's interesting. And I'm curious in your year-in-review process, like, the more that you've done that, have you actually seen the needle moving forward of not?

worrying about those things that are outside of your control? Yeah, you made progress. Yeah, much better. So that is a coachable skill or a learnable skill depending on how you do it. And I say coachable and learnable because I view those things are slightly different. Learnable is this self-improvement game, right? And there's a lot to the self-improvement game, but this social component surrounding yourself with the right peer group, people who call you on your bullshit when you're blowing little

things out of proportion. People who remind you the silver lining when you're focused on the dark side of things. People who point to the past for evidence that you have figured something else out before, or to say, hey, you're about to make the same mistake. So I really try to, I don't try. I calendar and invest in time with those people. And that's arguably the most important thing that I do at the beginning of each year. But look, every day is the beginning of a new year. So you don't have to wait for January first. It's kind of artificial constraint. You don't need to do that.

But is looking forward to my calendar and basically once a quarter, let's just say, I have at least a long weekend going up to a week where I spend time with those people. And you can read, you can study, you can meditate, you can do all those things, or you can just surround yourselves by the people who embody or naturally do things, think things. believe things that you want to absorb. It tends to be, I think, a little bit easier if you just steep yourself in it. I'm really looking forward to exploring many of these guiding questions and frameworks that really, like, change your orientation towards life in a way that you become more available

to so much more opportunity and grace and insight. But to set the stage a bit, because I am curious if there is, like, a natural, proclivity, a period or moment in your life where you really decided to pursue this systematized way of self-improvement to such a degree, because you've been known in the space for decades now of being kind of like, the guy. You're the guy who's like dialed with it, you know? I think I just ask a lot of questions. I'm not afraid to ask dumb questions.

And I've been blessed and cursed in parentheses with some limitations that have forced me or encouraged me to approach things obliquely. So I'll give an example. In the beginning, it wasn't like I sat down and said, all right, here are these disciplines I want to master at, like, age eight, sat down with my crayons and, like, spent down the path forward. Honestly, wouldn't put it past you, though. I can see that.

I mean, that would make an amazing kind of like false genesis stories. There are a lot of those floating around, but let's put that aside for the minute. I would say in the beginning, born premature, lots of health problems that I still have some best. of today, like really impaired left lung function, thermoregulation, right? Hence the fan, thank you. And I run very hot in part because my thermal regulation is all screwy. And I was very, very small up until sixth grade. So the only sport that my mom could conceive of where I could do decently

well and not get the crap kicked out of me by bigger kids in, say, a group sport, was kitty wrestling. So I was on Long Island. My mom put me into kitty wrestling to drink. my batteries so that I wouldn't be as much of a hassle at home. I'd actually go to sleep. And I figured out pretty quickly just as a kid that endurance was not an option for me. Okay. Well, if you can't outlast your opponent, what do you do? That type of question even to a kid is sensible, easy, kind of straightforward. It's like you can't do something, but you want to do that thing. What do you do? And worked with coaches, experimented. Figured. out ways just to be ultimately hyper-aggressive and kind of a brawler with then over time

having quite a bit of power. So I was more of a power athlete. And then if it got dragged out by my opponent, if they're smart, then I was in the deep water and it was bad news for me. But it really started with, I think, sports. And then ultimately the main laboratory for all of that was academics because didn't grow up with a lot of money. We weren't dirt poor, but I mean, we were, you know, we had to scrape by it for various things. And the story, the narrative, whether it's true or not, is kind of secondary,

but the narrative that I was taught that was very helpful. And there are narratives that can be very, very critical and helpful, even if ultimately they're not true long term. So the story was, if you get great grades, if you do super well academically, like you can write your ticket, right? So, for some people, it's like using sports and a scholarship to get out of whatever situation they might be in. For me, the promise was if you do this and you're really good at it, like you can do whatever you want. So school was where I tried to figure out every possible. I wouldn't say shortcut, but just like a little efficiency here, a little question here, asking the teacher a lot of pointed questions, not just during class, but after class, like about tests and where. was going to be on the test. It's shocking, like how few people just ask that. It's like half the time

they'll just tell you effectively. And then, man, it makes things a lot easier. So I would say that a lot of it started as, you know, necessity, not to be too cliched, but being the mother of invention, just based on limitations. And I've realized that you can actually make these incredible leaps forward through having constraints and limitations imposed on you. So sometimes that feels like a weakness, but you can actually turn that around a lot. Or if you have a paradox of choice in your life, and most of us do, frankly,

anyone watching this probably has some degree of that, it's imposing constraints on yourself. And so I think that's also a practice that is very, very, very coachable and learnable. So you can surround yourself of people who do it well, and you can also work on it yourself. I think those are both important to do in tandem. It's fascinating because I'm sure as you've been able to interview hundreds of people, and I get the pleasure to sit down across a lot of amazing minds, you see, you pick up patterns.

You see how in so many different cases, the challenges that we're faced with, for whatever reason, early in our adolescence, in many ways, become the way of us. actualizing our gifts, our unique fingerprint of how we show up in the world. And it seems very much so like the way your mind works, which many people admire and how you're able to bear many fruits in the world, was really started in that origin of the difficulties that you were faced with and placed with early on. Yeah. And then I should say that it wasn't like I figured out it worked in one area and then applied it all over the place. I just followed the script that I felt like society would reward. So whatever the dominant story happened to be about doing the job, getting promoted,

retire, whatever. Like, I just followed that mindlessly. Right. So it wasn't as though I was questioning all assumptions from the very beginning. And I think this is true for a lot of people that almost everyone has some area. Maybe it's making cookies. Who cares? It's like maybe it's playing soccer. Maybe it's watching, like, crafting DIY videos online or tinkering with electronics. It doesn't really matter. But there's one area where they're really good at asking assumptions. Then there are a bunch of other areas where they don't actually do the same thing. Right. They're sort of running on autopilot with other people's programming, right? The beliefs they have are not beliefs that they arrived at on their own. And that was true for me. So it took a long time.

and a lot of sort of mistakes and stumbling wrong in the way. And then in the case of the four-hour work, we got a complete implosion in around 2003, 2004 to catalyze the asking of questions. And then at a point, I was like, well, wait a second. Every time I have one of these breakdowns slash implosions, then I have to ask all the questions. Is it possible that I could just maybe preempt to that

and start doing it early? And then I started seeing how well that often worked for just finding option C, when you feel like the world is offering you options A and B, it's like, yeah, maybe that's true. Sometimes it is. Like, if there were an option C or D, what would those be, right? If you had to name them and not letting yourself or other people off the hook. I remember having a conversation with Adam Grant, well-known professor and researcher and author. And when we finished our conversations, this is for the podcast.

And by the way, I mean, if you keep doing this by the time you're my age, like, you're two decades younger than I am. I mean, you'll have interviewed thousands of people. So you'll be well ahead of me in short order. But in the case of Adam, the point is we stopped recording. And after that, he stayed on my ass for probably five minutes. asking for ways he could improve. And the first few times, I don't want to be rude, right? And nothing was super obvious.

And I was like, you were great and he was great. And he's like, I appreciate it, but I'm not going to let you go until you give me one thing. If you had to give me one piece of advice. And so I did. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to, I don't necessarily need to share it here. But he would not. He was like a dog with a bone. He wouldn't let me go.

And fundamentally, I think that is an easy. way to get incredibly good results to kind of put you in the top, I don't know what the number is, but like 10% of performers in X, is just to stick with a question and ask follow-ups for like two minutes longer than everybody else. You're going to get that last little piece, and sometimes that last little piece is the piece that makes the difference. And so when you look at someone like, say, Adam Grant, who even to my mind, I'm like, I don't understand how this guy is as productive as he is.

I mean, he is prodigious in his output. It is shocking how much he can get done. But when you have that type of interaction, and I assume, and I would bet on it, that he's doing that every day in and out, it starts to make more sense. It seems less miraculous, and it seems just like daily deliberate practice.

But it's not like being yo-yo-mon, putting the finishing touches on being the 0.000-1-1-1 percent at the top, it's just asking the right questions and insisting on people giving you or attempting to give you some kind of answer. And people can learn to do that. Might be a little uncomfortable. Yeah. You know, most important things are.

But it's not complicated. I, too, am a lover of questions and how they have the unique capacity to kind of penetrate us into a deeper way of viewing life. And it's an art form in this medium, especially in this format. You're on the right job, it would seem. Yeah, I'm honored to be able to do so and have that be such a strong part of it. I'm curious, though, if you have, because I know you're a fan of collecting questions. And as they do very much so shift our focus and what we can perceive as possible and the

where it takes our attention. What, is there a predominant question that is like alive for you most now or maybe in this past year that has been providing that like new perspective for you? Yeah. Okay. You know how some people as a lazy tick, they're like, good question, good question. I don't do that, but that is a good question. And certain very simple questions are really present for me.

Because, for instance, we met and I gave you a fist bump. That's not really how I roll. but I just had elbow surgery. I'm pretty involved elbow surgery. I just had a procedure on my low back yesterday because when in L.A., why not get injections? People in L.A. love injections. They seem pretty good at it.

So I got PRP along the spine. Got a lot going on right now. And as you're trying to sort, and this is especially true in L.A., my God, but it's true everywhere. To separate fact from fiction. Say, credible science from pseudoscience. Where do you even begin?

Right? And there are some recommendations for doing that. That's not the focus of where I'm going. But I would suggest checking out Dr. Peter Attia's studying the studies, just to get a basic literacy of looking at published research. There's a lot there, and it's incredibly valuable. But to give you an example, one question that I ask a lot is, what else might explain that?

If I had to, you'll notice I've used this term. a number of times already just in the last few minutes, you could ask, like, what else might explain this? That's pretty good, but you can let yourself off the hook. So you'd say, all right, maybe you think nothing else can explain this, but if you had to invent, if you had a gun against the head, other things that might explain this, you know, give me two or three. That is really valuable when you're trying to debug any type of challenge.

So, for instance, it's like my elbow is actually in quite a lot of pain right now. It wasn't three days ago. I'm trying to figure out if I did something strange or if it's a natural progression, should I have some intervention? Should I do something or should I leave it alone? These are like daily legitimate questions. And you can ask that question. And right now, fortunately, one of the upsides of AI is there are tools like consensus.

dot app for looking at published research. And you can get better at being a spellcaster, meaning if you get good at asking questions to a human, you're also getting better at asking questions to the Borg, whatever LLM or AI tool you might be using. And for instance, we're not going to spend a ton of time on this right now, but, I mean, we could, but launched, you know, spent two years developing a card game launched that. There were all of these strange things happening at retail. Yeah, there it is. Oh, look at that. Nice. Yeah, I played it with some friends last night. Oh, amazing. Yeah, so you got, this is, this is thanks. Yeah, this is the, the,

the larger edition, which I like. And so with this, when you have it at 8,000 retail locations and there's a hiccup in the data, whether that's like sell through over a week or some other metric, everyone will have a guess as to what is causing it. But there are a bunch of other questions that I'll ask. And I literally just did this yesterday. Number one is, like, there's a bunch of variation before we do anything. And I think Americans are particularly prone to trying to like do.

more. Like, when in doubt, do more. But subtraction can be important. Ignoring can be very important. So it's like, before we do anything, like, does anyone have a statistics background? Could I upload this graph to chat GPT and ask it if these variations are statistically significant? Because if not, let's chill the fuck out. And like, wait a few weeks before we overinterpret this, right? That's like number one. Like, is this meaningful broadly? As a, whatever we're looking at that we perceive, is a problem, is it meaningful? Or is it just some kind of like natural variation? That could be true if you have like two days of bad sleep.

Like before you, you know, throw everything in the kitchen sink at it, it's like, well, like pause. Like maybe this isn't actually meaningful enough to act on. And then look at it and it's like, well, some people might say, we think we should change the name. We should change the box. Maybe it's like the hang tab. So on the smaller edition, it's intended to hang.

Well, it turns out there was an issue with some of those hang tabs, and they had fallen off of the metal prongs. And so ultimately, I had to send people into the stores to try to put them on the shelf properly, but it wasn't designed for the shelf. So anyway, the point is a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved. I think that's John Dewey. And a lot of these little questions are dominant for me

when I'm considering medical interventions for myself. right so you might look at and then i give you another question that i apply to a million different things like can you cap the downside i'm like what is the low downside or no downside but seemingly promising upside option right and that type of question is important for everything from deciding which supplements to take or not take which diets to follow or not follow which type of investments to pursue or not pursue And historically, you look back at people who are famous for being these wild maverick risk takers like Richard Branson. If you read, losing my virginity, I think the book was, you realize this guy is above all else and expert at absolutely capping his downside.

He is a risk mitigator. Genius. But that's not exciting. And at the time to get on magazine covers, that's not a very sexy story. So you have the theatrics of kind of being a showman, but in reality, an expert, risk mitigator. So those are a couple of questions that are really alive for me. And honestly, the follow-up questions, little follow-up questions are kind of, I think, the secret sauce for learning. So when someone tells you something, you just ask something like, you know, what were you saying to yourself when you did that?

or if it was some big decision and they're like, I made this big decision and then all these amazing things happen. Or so these terrible things happen. I mean, like, well, what was the conversation like with your partner or spouse beforehand or afterwards? What did you make of that? How did you feel when that happened? Like these little follow-up questions,

the entry point is almost less important than the follow-up questions that then lead you somewhere potentially very, very interesting. Because you can come up with a script, let's just say someone's starting a podcast. I still don't think it's too late, although it's competitive. You can now use an LLM to copy me or Lex Friedman or Rogan or you. Right? You have enough material out in the world. If I was like, give me 10 questions in the style for interviewing person X.

The questions will actually be pretty good, right? what the LLMs are less good at replicating is the flow of a conversation using follow-ups. And so I think that whether it's in podcasting, but also just in life and in learning, that those little follow questions, by the way, they don't need to be long. Why? Why is that? Why does that matter?

Does that matter? Or if somebody gives me an opinion, I'll be like, who's the person you respect most who disagrees with that? Just these little short little ditties. So I think the older I get, you know, I'm not Gandalf or anything, but it's like the older I get, the more I strive for like the fewest moving pieces. I'm looking less for optimizing and productivity and more for a certain elegance to things.

I'm curious about in that elegance as you've grown in your journey. There you go. Prop it up, dude. Let it rip. Let her out. I'm excited to circle back on that. Yeah, I'm not a rush. And the elegance of like the journey of growing and maturing as a human being,

what starts off as a sincere quest for self-improvement and the unending ways that one could try to fulfill that, you go to examine those deeper held core beliefs, those assumptions on reality that we often don't question enough consciously, but subconsciously direct the fate of our life in so many ways. And so to kind of dig a little bit deeper here into the process of these intrinsic motivating factors and the things that are running the show that we're not always consciously aware of that we've alluded to throughout this conversation,

what do you see at the stage of your life growth being things that you're adding on in a pursuit of self-improvement versus things that you're removing, letting go of, and making space for? What's the balance there? Yeah, I would say for me it's maybe a combination of the two. So it's not, in some cases, it's pure subtraction. Like, yeah, should I eat like fewer cookies? Yeah, probably.

I don't eat a ton of cookies, but typically it's one cheat day week. It's been that way for decades. But anyway, this week has been a bit of a slippery slope for reasons I won't bore people with. But it's like, okay. So that's a kind of bit of a trivial example. I mean, like, over time, yeah, you don't have. to become diabetic, but I'm not really at risk of that. The, and then there's adding, right, where it's like, I'm doing these 10 things.

Let me add 11, 12, 13, 14. I think a lot about substituting. So from a behavioral change perspective, this is true, certainly for anyone with addiction. Like, yeah, you can just subtract it, but then you have a void. And the nature abhors a vacuum and humans and, humans. schedules tend to pour a vacuum. So the question is, what's going to fill it? So I find substitution.

Like, what are you going to substitute in your life to be a really good question? And in my case, just make a list of hypotheticals, right? And Seth Godin, author's become a friend of mine. He's got a lot of wisdom, and he really walks the walk in a lot of interesting ways and crafting a unique life for himself and his family. But he will say the best way to come up with, great ideas to come with a lot of bad ideas. And so I do this a lot.

And I'll just say, all right, let me come up with 20 different ideas for substitutions. So replacing a lone time with social time, right? Replacing digital time with analog time. Replacing fill in the blank with fill in the blank, right? Strength training with cardio zone two, which I think is boring. It's so boring, but it is important. Right. And then you look at each one.

You're like, all right, well, what would that look like is a test for two weeks in my calendar? Okay. And so you've got maybe 20 of these options and you pick a couple of to test out and you see what the results are. It's not a forever decision. It's a two-week decision. So I will often do that. To give you a real example, the first one is probably the biggest, which is alone time versus social time. We are evolved to be social creatures. And yes, some people are introverted or more introverted or extroverted. And I would self-describe as an introvert. I get very drained in large group environments, like my nature immersion, and I've spent a lot of time alone, right? Book writing, thousands of pages in these books, and so on can be very solitary, and my predisposition has always been to suffer in silence. It's like, figure it out, don't subject anybody else to your nonsense or self-generated inner turmoil or self-inflicted wounds. like sort it out, go in a corner, lick your wounds, get it sorted. And I've just come to question any type of hyper-independent mindset. I think it can be very enabling for quote-unquote productivity.

Yeah, you want to make a bunch of money. Okay, sure. You want to go fast? Sure, like by yourself isn't a bad way to do it. And if you want to sort of climb over people like a crab in a bucket to get to the top, but yeah, that's one way to do it. And you can become very financially successful doing that. But as I have looked at, let's just say, and I can talk about what I view as one of the traps of self-improvement.

And I say that because I've stepped into this particular bear trap many times. But let me just talk about that now. I think one of the traps of self-improvement and sort of the optimizer's curse is, is that as you get good at solving problems and you get rewarded for solving problems, whether that's people patting you in the back or people giving you money, you start to scan the world for problems.

That becomes your lens. And that does not, in my experience, lead to a great, reliable quality of life. So as someone who has prided himself on being a problem solver, like it's taken some rehab to reorient, and not to beat a dead horse, but I have found the easiest way to do that

is not by reading a book on positive psychology. It's not by watching a documentary on the happiest people in Denmark and Singapore. It is by surrounding yourself with people who embody what it is you're trying to develop. You cannot help but absorb that. So for me, it's social, social, social. Instead of it's the economy stupid,

it, I would frame it as it's the relationship, stupid, right? So for me, the biggest quality of life upgrade in the last five to ten years has been that booking of time, getting it in the calendar, creating the right sunk costs. So I will often, and not everybody can do this, but it doesn't have to be expensive stuff at all. I think people would be kind of shocked at how low burn my life is, broadly speaking. Time with friends, time with family. And just getting it on the calendar, protecting it.

the most important business conference or payday of your year. Easier said than done sometimes. But that, I would say, is the dominant ad subtract combination replace, replacing a loan time with social time. And you do that, what, like a few weeks out of the year, schedule different adventures with friends. Yeah. So, for instance, a few weeks ago, and I recognize not everyone has this flexibility.

However, and this goes way back to the, the four-hour work week, people overestimate how much they need to do things that are incredible. They also underestimate how much flexibility and leverage they have all the time, all the time, all the time. I've seen so many employees take many retirements, thousands at this point, since the book came out. I have seen well before COVID, right, like tens of thousands of readers negotiate remote work agreements back when that was not common and get raises. etc., etc.

Since I question the assumptions you have about what you can or cannot do. Also, like, what's the downside of asking for something? They say no, okay, boo-hoo, move on, right? They might say yes, or they might say maybe, or they might say come back in six months. So the point is, what I'm about to describe might seem like a lot,

but you can do this with relatively few resources. So a few weeks ago, four or five weeks ago, I took a week off the grid in Montana and Idaho to do wilderness survival training with this amazing guy who I won't name by name because I'm going to docks him appropriately in a couple months. But along with a handful of my friends. And it was just a week. No computers, no phones, nothing. Didn't have any devices on me whatsoever in the mountains. For how long?

About a week. Okay. But a week. Which will feel like to many people, like a three-month. vacation. And then in October, November, taking another group of people, booked the housing in advance, Day of the Dead in Mexico. Right. Completely different experience. And then in November, December, taking another trip to Japan. This is going to be for about a week. And it's all set. and I mentioned earlier,

I've thought about writing a blog post on this, but writing's hard, so I'll just describe it here. Maybe I'll write about it at some point, but finding the right sum costs. So if people are familiar with cognitive biases, go on Wikipedia and just search cognitive biases. There's a great entry with like 30 or 40 of them.

And this overlaps a lot with, say, I think it's Poor Charlie's Almanac, but Charlie Munger and various mental models and so on. There's a lot of overlap, but becoming aware of cognitive biases. And they're generally looked at as a very negative thing. So sunk cost fallacy would be something like, I've put so much money into XYZ shit coin

that I can't sell now and I should put more in. It's like putting good money after bed. Or you invest in some real estate project. It's going south. It's almost certainly to continue to go south, but you spent two years on it and a bunch of money. So you have this resistance to admitting that you were wrong and shifting course.

So you continue to engage with that. That's sunk cost fallacy in the negative sense, right? It can be very expensive, do a lot of damage. But how can you use that to your advantage? You could prepay if you've failed to get in shape and you're price sensitive, prepay for a personal trainer. You can't get the money back. Do something like that, right?

Have a bet with a friend. or in my case, I'm paying for trips and then basically burning the ships on like refund policies. I'm like, hey, go spend the money. I'm like, don't allow me to get a refund. And then for friends, I don't have them ditching out. So I'm fortunate at this point to be able to do this. You don't have to do this.

But generally, let's say in the Japan trip, I'm like, hey, I'll cover all the housing once they're there and I will do X, Y, Z. I will cover it. I also used to live in Japan. So it's like, I know my way around. It's your job to get yourself there, right? Because I don't want anyone ditching last minute

because they don't have the right some costs. It's like, all right, everybody has to have some skin in the game. And it doesn't have to be some big thing like a trip to Japan, right? The thing to Montana, I'm not going to name the price, but like incredibly affordable, right? Especially if you're splitting the cost with friends. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, camping is pretty big. cheap, just making the space and the time to just come up. Yeah, I mean, look, it could be having a long weekend where you're just like camping out in your living room with sleeping bags and like doing a little stoic exercise, which my friend Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired used to do. He would just like camp out in his living room with a sleeping bag, having like beans and instant coffee and rice for a couple of days. And he's like, this is pretty sweet, actually.

It's very simple. And you're able to let go of the burden of thinking that you need millions of dollars to live comfortably. So a lot of these trips also have an element of self-deprivation that ends up being closer to self-liberation in a sense. But that stuff is great in theory, but it doesn't, at least for me or most of my friends, stick unless you practice it. Yeah. It's fascinating how often we overlook the sometimes most powerful levers we have for well-being and feeling like we're living a meaningful life in search of all the different biohacks and all the little things that we can do. Yeah, yeah. Community, obviously, being a huge aspect of that, having a purposeful aim in life. I'm curious about, like, what you think those most low-hanging

fruits are that we often overlook and search for the, all the other. Magic bullet. Yeah. Well, let me give you, because you mentioned the social time, an example of using that question I mentioned earlier, which is what else might explain this? Remember that? All right. So there's this sometimes delicious, quite enjoyable beverage that humans have been consuming for millennia, ethanol, alcohol, booze. Delicious is an interesting adjective. Well, it depends on your association, right? Like, if you give, yeah, if you give like tequila to a baby, they're not going to be a little.

like, I love this. That's generally not going to be the first response. That's true with probably puberty and coffee as well. They're required taste. But the point I'm going to make is that alcohol is objectively not great for you, biologically speaking, right? There are all sorts of effects that you want to avoid. And so alcohol writ large has sort of been thrown under the bus in the past handful of years.

and I would say for a lot of good reasons. But, but, but if humans have been doing anything for thousands of years, usually I feel like there's a baby in the bathwater somewhere. They're getting something right somewhere. Possibly, possibly, possibly, right? And so when I look at alcohol and I don't drink a lot of alcohol, but occasionally, especially after medical procedures, I'm not like drinking really any booze, but I will drink occasionally.

And it's like when I go to Day of the Dead, am I going to have Miscale? 100 fucking percent I'm going to have Miscal. And if that subtracts 3.2 hours off my life, like, so be it. But I don't think that's going to be the case. Because when you look at these blue zones and there's a lot of conversation around blue zones and so on, and I try to figure out like how the Italians and such and such a place in Naples or whatever live to be incredibly old. I think first of all, we understate the importance of genetics. Like, I do think you got to pay attention to that.

But my what if, what else might explain this? Because people were trying to make the alcohol fit for a long time. They're like, well, there's like resveratrol. And the pumbats must be the polyphenols in the olive oil. And I think there's partial truth to a lot of this. But my bet or my pet theory, and very hard to prove such a thing in any kind of randomized controlled trial. is that as a social lubricant, if alcohol means that you spend substantially more time with your

closest connections, using all of the hardwiring that we have evolved over millions of years to use to suss out nuance and social interactions, that that will up to a point, right, more than offset any of the negative effects of alcohol. So does that mean I drink all the time? No. But if I take a trip to Italy, am I going to have pasta and drink some wine with my friends? Yes, absolutely, I will. So I think that question of what else might explain this.

Also, with any type of trend of the people's spot is really, really important. Plus, to psychedelics big time also. We could talk about that at some point if you want. So in any case, I know I took us down a bit of a side alley. But maybe we can use that as a jumping off point. Sure. Or wherever you want to go. Yeah, all those intangibles, the medicinal quality of laughter of time spent with people

you love, like all those things, you don't need a clinical study to feel the felt benefits of in real time. You know, it's tough to quantify. But, yeah, it's important. I can come back to the Magic Bullets question, though. Sure. So I typically, I would say, I feel like. I'm kind of slapping Americans a lot in this, but like America became in part, there are a lot of

reasons for this. It's not, I don't want to oversimplify it, but this economic powerhouse that is legitimately the land of opportunity, right? People move here, not because it's the land of the free, I hate to tell people. Objectively, that's probably not true on a bunch of different levels, but it is an amazing land of opportunity economically. That is why we attract so many people, I think, in part, and at least up to, you. to very recently, largely a rule of law and so on.

We'll see what happens. But the reason I bring that up is that when you then kind of infuse the culture with this Protestant work ethic and that has had incredible outcomes for us as a country and individually, the solution tends to be framed through the lens of addition. Right. So what's the pill I can take? What's the magical stretch I can do? What's the new muscle du jour that I need to strengthen

so that all my problems will go away? Right, combination of the peptides and all the supplements and all the things. Can I snort a couple of lines of peptides and then have my chaga suppository and walk on water through the rest of my week? Maybe. Let me know of that happens. Yeah, I've been trying for months. It hasn't panned out yet.

Been watching slow-mo videos of the Jesus Lizard. Can't figure it out. Jesus lizard. But the reason I mentioned all that, and I've been guilty of this for sure, because I think that it is, if you're very curious and you like learning, oftentimes you want to do that through addition, trying something new. But I will frequently, as a forced question, right, and it may not have a great answer in any given context. like what might subtraction look like? Have humans approached this with subtraction in the past at any point? And for instance, fasting, removing certain foods instead of adding foods,

seemingly can address conditions that even the most advanced front-line treatments fail routinely. So psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, very ill-treated with psychedelics at this point, by the way. Right? So people who are trying to join, say, a clinical trial for psilocybin or something like that would be excluded if they have family histories typically of schizophrenia. It's very challenging to treat. But then you look at another leg of the stool that I think is very interesting on the cutting

edge, but it's old technology being revisited, metabolic psychiatry. Put somebody on a ketogenic diet and people can check out Chris Palmer of Harvard and others. Dominic Agostino is. and other scientist who's really interesting. And you put someone on a ketogenic diet for a few weeks, and they get off 15 medications they've been on. And they have near or complete remission of symptoms. It's, and it doesn't work for everybody.

I'm not saying this is a panacea, but it is very interesting that these are demonstrated effects in certain case studies and in clinical trials. Epilepsy, et cetera. They're also profit motives, and you don't have to, to be a conspiracy theorist to just follow the puck or follow the money and realize that if you want to sell someone something, generally it's going to be a thing they add, right? Whether it's a pill, a program, a training, a class, whatever it might be. Very hard to monetize fasting. Very hard to

monetize a proper ketogenic diet, right, which does not include tons of like keto candy bars. I hate to tell people. There's no biological free lunch. So if it sounds too good to be true, generally there's going to be a catch with that stuff. But the reason I'm bringing it all up is that it should be hopefully reassuring to people that you don't need a bunch of money to fly to Honduras to have some questionable cutting-edge stem cell therapy to like reverse your reseating hairline, right? It's just like maybe you just need to only eat within a window of eight hours each day for two weeks and see what that does, right?

Try intermittent fasting, which I've been doing for a few months. continuously now. I take a few days off here and there. I have access to very, very good doctors, right? And I'm fortunate that I have the financial means. I can try whatever treatment I want to try. And I have spent my life trying all sorts of crazy things or dull-edge technologies,

and some of them have stuck and been very interesting. My blood markers now at 48, after a few months of intermittent fasting, but truthfully, even after four weeks, are the best they've been in 20 years. and I've reduced everything else. Might there be something to that? Maybe, maybe.

And there are many, many, many documented cases of reversing type two diabetes with something as simple as time-restricted feeding, right? Intermittent fasting. And it's a lot easier to do than people might think, right? Sure, you'll have a week when you're kind of pissy and whiny and irritable and might send a few emails that you'll regret. But once you adapt over the span of a week, like it's pretty remarkable. what happens to your entire physiology.

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Try it out. See how you feel. Back to the show. Yeah. And I'm someone like you who also loves all the different ways we can affect and pull levers in our environment that affect your physiology and, you know, nature is unbeaten in that context. and it's refreshing to just come back to the simplicity of how we've evolved,

what really works well for this human meat suit, which turns out not eating every day all day. But it's an interesting paradox, which you definitely see in the biohacking space. You also see in spiritual spaces in the search for quote unquote freedom in some context. And it's this paradox of putting a state of freedom or perceived ideal state

of being some place in the future reinforces your own belief of insecurity and inadequacy in that moment. And it's an interesting paradox because meditation as a practice has amazing benefits. And yet to seek it from, which often can come from this place of something's missing, is to reinforce a state that is anything but meditative, you know? Yeah, sure.

So it's, yeah, you're perpetuating the problem that you're seeking to solve in your first place. Yeah, it's super common. I think it's very human. Yeah. honestly, and it does speak to real pain that people are feeling, right? So, like, the suffering is real. And I would say that here's a question, right?

Just something people can think about. But if you could not focus on self-actualization at all, you had to focus on group actualization. Pick some of your most important relationships, and it's about actualizing the group. What does that look like? How is that different from your pursuit of self? self-actualization. I think people would make a lot of progress with the self-actualization by not focusing on

it directly. Right. And I can't remember the quote. I'm sure I'm going to misattribute it, but it's either Emerson. I think it was Emerson, might be thorough. Who knows? Abraham Lincoln, Groucho Marx. What are those guys?

Who said, and I think it was actually misattributed and it was somebody else. Like a hundred years ago in some newspaper in the U.S. but, you know, happiness is like a butterfly. It's like if you try to grab it directly, it will elude you, but if you sit quietly and focus on something else, it might just a light on your shoulder. I think that self-development is perhaps best approached indirectly.

That shouldn't be the objective. And in fact, if it's the objective, it's almost like maybe trying to grab something in water really quickly and you're just pushing it away every time you try to grab it. that might be the metaphor I would use. So as I've looked at my own goals, often I've begun to ask the question, like,

what if this had to be a downstream effect of doing something else? Like, what's a different target? That's sort of a bigger domino? And if I hit that, I'll naturally get these other things that I want. It can work pretty well, particularly when it's group actualization or what if the ultimate route to feeling the feelings you want?

Because freedom, what is that? It's kind of abstract. That's not a feeling. Like, what are the feelings you hope to have from that freedom? Is it finally being able to go to sleep without your heart raising? Is it waking up without the first thoughts in your head being what you have to do? Is it lessening the chronic anxiety that you feel? I think that it's a mistaken target freedom, right?

Sounds very good. No one's going to be like, freedom's terrible. No one's going to say that so it gets socially reinforced. But what are the feelings you want from that? This applies to possessions too. Somebody wants a big boat. All right, well, fine. Like, hey, if you can have it, you enjoy it, great.

Like, what do you hope to get from that? And this goes way back to the four-hour work week. And like, what are the alternate routes to those feelings? And I think that in the case of the self-to-sufficiency, and personal improvement spaces, often it's like, if you try to do it alone, you're not doing it right. Like, see if you can focus on the group. And it's like, man, I'm going to blatantly steal from Tony Robbins on this one,

but I remember going to one of his events. I've only been to two, I suppose. And like, what a machine that guy is. But he said, you know, I, I, I, me, me, me starts to become a really fucking boring song. And it's like, as soon as you take the focus off of this, and I don't want to get too esoteric, but kind of illusion of a permanent, persisting self,

like, just leave all that alone. It's too messy anyway. Like, sure, like, if you're Sam Harris, you can figure it out and, like, free well on this, but I, like, I just get confused and, like, neurotic. It's like, just focus on, like, helping your friends out and helping your family out and doing things together and blocking that out in your calendar

and just see what happens. My suspicion is that a lot of that stuff you're trying to shake off will just naturally kind of kind of comment off like a snake shedding its skin as long as you're not fixated on yourself and I've spent most of my life I mean I have diagnosed moderate severe OCD and like there's some upsides and there are definitely some downsides a lot of downsides in terms of like hyperrumination and anxiety and insomnia and stuff and at least in my experience tends to be very I I I me me focused and looking at mental health and therapeutics over the last 15 years, but certainly investing in early

stage science for the last 10 very heavily, you see this sort of internal self-focused rigidity in a lot of psychiatric conditions that are hockey sticking right now. And yeah, we could talk about social media and Instagram and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows the story. I don't think we need to beat it over the head. but as soon as you that's part of the reason for instance that I think that group administration and pre-andpost

sort of prep and integration with psychedelics will not only be cost saving which will allow potentially greater access and scaling although there are questions around whether we should or should not scale these things it will actually I think in many instances depends on the indication but improve outcomes substantially. And we've already seen some early indications of that. And I funded at UCSF some of the very first studies. This was probably close to 10 years ago looking at long-term demoralization and aid survivors. And it was done in a group context. And the reason that I put money into that early on was specifically because the group dynamic, I think, is so important. You don't need drugs for that,

but that happens to be the sort of sandbox in which I have been involved for a decade, right? but yeah if you're playing the i i i me me me self-improvement game like try the group actualization thing for two weeks try it just like see what happens might be surprised i've been surprised yeah i think many people can verify that in their own experience the more navel-gazy the more focused on self there is a direct inverse relationship between experience of of joy in life. And it's interesting that you, all of the ways in which you described access to that feeling or state that we, qualities we would attribute to freedom were actually in the way that you described it removing things. They were as young as quoted, pleasure is tension reduction.

So that there is an available, bountiful chemical factory in us that produces this experience of bliss, of joy, of a sense of freedom, uh, that, becomes available when we remove what's often in the way of it. And I know psychedelics has been a big you know avenue that you've explored, which I'm sure has garnered you bountiful insights in that regard of letting go, of making space for those things. And what's like the high level overview of your journey with psychedelics? Because I know you've recently been stewarding many rounds in deeper clinical research and studies. And it's been a big part of your life, yeah?

Yeah, it's been a big part of my life. I had my first exposure in high school. And I continued into college. I actually chose Princeton University in part because I wanted to study under Barry Jacobs, who was a professor at the time who was very experienced with LSD, which was a rarity, because I was certainly in the middle of prohibition. And that was from kind of decades prior. and led me to be initially a neuroscience major within the psychology department and so on.

So these early experiences raised a lot of questions about the nature of, if not reality, certainly perception, and time as a, is it a constant or is it a construct? Is it something in between? you know, how much of reality is us perceiving it unadulterated versus creating it. I mean, I think people can guess probably where I lean on that. But those were early questions. And then because I was experiencing these things in very uncontrolled environments, had a couple of, you know, 10 out of 10 terrifying experiences. And I was just like, yeah, that's enough.

A couple of bad trips? That's enough. Yeah, well, I mean, I had one where I was, in the countryside coming out of a trip because I was standing, like walking between two houses on this country road in complete darkness and almost got hit by a car, like coming at me with headlights. And I was like, not worth it. So I stopped. And then didn't revisit it until 2012, 2013, because my long-term girlfriend at the time was really transformed by this trip she took to Peru and she did two or three nights of ayahuasca in the Sacred Valley and had this very

transformative experience. And then we talked about it at length and I was like, okay, if I'm going to look at this again, I'm going to do it through the lens of first, like precaution, safety measures, and I'm going to absolutely take a deep dive on the scientific literature and do as much rating as humanly possible. So that's where I started. And as fate would have it, I was in Northern California, so didn't have to look too far for options for doing things safely. And that was the first-person experiential re-entry into things. And, you know, I would say over the years that I still believe psychedelics, and we should kind of define that term or constrain it,

because it gets applied to a lot of different things. But let's just for the time being limit psychedelics to the classical psychedelics, which might also include some of Sasha Shulgin's inventions, but let's just say the ones that your parents might know. My parents never did any of that stuff, but mushrooms, LSD, mescaline, or like peyote-slaic-s, they're not the same, but similar composition in some respects. I would include the, you might throw in like a 2CB

or some of the 2Cs, but compounds that at sufficient doses, I would say, produce reliable experiences of ego dissolution and loss of self. Those would be somewhat synonymous. But that particular experience, and yes, you can do it through other things. There are thousands of psychedelics. I would generally encourage people not to weigh it into the edges of the alphabet soup. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble. We can talk about that. But the experience of having that ego dissolution and a perception, whether it's real or not, of touching something timeless, I think is one of the greatest adventures a human can experience. I think it's one of the richest experiences a human can have.

I became very close friends with Roland Griffiths, who may rest in peace, died of cancer not too long ago. but he was certainly one of the pioneers who, through prohibition, helped to reopen the doors to scientific study of, in his particular case, Sillacobin. And there were certainly others, Rick Strassman and his experiments with DMT, not to be confused with five MEODMT. These are different things, NNDMT and five MEODMT. In any case, there were a handful of people who really helped reopen the doors to scientifically examining some of these kinds of. compounds. And when Roland and others at Hopkins did their very early first studies with psilocybin and providing doses that were pure psilocybin, so synthesized, not mushrooms, but the equivalent of, let's say, five to seven grams of dried mushrooms. Hero dose? Yeah, like a Terence

McKenna, heroic dose. The subjects who were all psychedelic naive ranked by and large, they ranked the significance of that experience alongside and as equal to the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. That's pretty nuts to think about, right? You take this molecule and put it in your system and you have this seemingly pretty reliable experience. Can that cut in other directions? Yes, it can. And I do worry, after funding the space for 10 years, about scaling the use of psychedelics, which excludes MDMA in this case, because it doesn't really produce the type of effect that I'm describing.

Maybe it's some astronomical dose that would put you at risk of hyperthermia and melting your organs, maybe. But typically, it's more of an intactogen and very useful for conditions like complex PTSD, but it doesn't produce the typically ego dissolution that I'm describing. It's sort of fundamental to this classical psychedelic experience.

So MDMA is relatively easy to manage as far as this broad class of things go. And so I'm not that concerned about MDMA being applied to say millions of people. But if we're talking about psilocybin, we're talking about potentially LSD, which I think is very much underrated in a lot of respects, but it has unfortunately a lot of baggage from sort of Nixon era issues at the time and culture wars and various things. But I don't know what that looks like when you have millions of people taking it. And the psychedelic ecosystem suffers from some of the weaknesses that you see in any other group of diehards, at least when you're talking about true believers.

And the true believers can include, even though they would deny it, people in the scientific world or business people who are very vested in the success of these things. There is a survivorship bias in terms of reporting. So you tend to hear about the good stuff. If somebody goes to a party and they're telling you about how they saw thousands of crocodiles with diamonds on their faces and they were spinning and put you in the 17th dimension, that's a hell of a story, right? It's not as fun and less likely to be heard that you had this harrowing, psyche-splitting experience where your soul was shuffled by a Mesoamerican demon and then you were suicidal for six months.

Generally not going to have somebody volunteer that at a party or at a dinner, but that stuff does happen. I mean, look, I'm kind of joking about the Meso-American demon part, but people, they're very, you're playing, as Roland would say himself, you're playing with, not playing with, but you're using sort of psychological, psychiatric nuclear power. And you're, these are my words now, but inducing such a potent level of neuroplasticity, you're really softening the Play-Doh of what makes you, you, and it's not a foregone conclusion that it's going to come out as a beautiful sculpture at all.

So I do have, and this is just my nature with everything, so I want to recognize my own bias. I tend to look for risks and downsides and dangers everywhere. Not always to my benefit. But not in the history of the world. Have we ever had an experiment of that scale with psychedelics? And in fact, when you look at almost any indigenous group that has a long history of using these compounds,

it's a very small fraction of the community that ever touches this stuff. it's not like everybody's doing ayahuasca circles twice a month. That is, I have never seen that. Never is a big word. So it might very well exist. But when I've spent time with the indigenous groups and I've done a lot of work, I think more work should be done, but with credible groups like Amazon Conservation Team and so on

to really try to protect some of these groups and to reciprocate, that's also politically charged. word, but to provide some recompense and also some protection against biopiracy and things like this, it's a very, very tiny fraction of the population that ever touches this stuff. And there's a reason for that. So there are a lot of open questions, I guess. But these compounds, certainly, I can't imagine my life without them. I have barely touched them in two years.

But they held a very important role and continued. in my exploration of self and connection. And I suppose we want to get a really woo-woo, which is like reality. And to what extent what we're looking at is quote-unquote real versus like a user interface, like icons on a desktop, Donald Hoffman, who's a... Yeah.

He's coming out in three days. Oh, great. Yeah. He will, he's going to take you, he's going to be a buck and bronco. It's going to be... No, I love him. He's going to take you all over the place.

Say aye for me. And just to kind of land the plan, I'll say that psychedelics should me the potential of questioning some very fundamental and basic assumptions around psychology or psychological interventions, psychiatric treatments, and even how we conceive of disorders, the possibility for dramatic and durable change in people who have seen no success with any convention. treatment over 15 to 20 years or more. You see durable sobriety after one or two experiences that last decades in some people. You see complex PTSD, meaning it's failed multiple interventions. Diagnoses that have last 15 years plus go to total remission after two or three sessions with the appropriate therapeutic container and everything, which is critically important, especially the post period.

I encourage people to check out Gould Dolan, who's now at UC Berkeley, and her theories around critical periods. But once I kind of saw the possibility of these really high effect sizes, which raise a lot of questions around why and how we're doing things currently. And I'll give credit to Stan Groff, Stanislav Groff, who said something along the lines up, you know, what the telescope did for astronomy and the microscope did for biology, psychedelics were due for the mind. I think he's dead on with that. However, I am tool agnostic. So if you look at what my foundation has done over the last 10 years, yes, we did a ton with psychedelics, right? So helping fund the first dedicated center in the world at Imperial College London, then at Hopkins and tons and tons and tons of stuff. But right now, my attention is actually focused on

non-psychedelic interventions because looking at brain stimulation, different types of brain stimulation, like non-invasive accelerated TMS, or the results of metabolic psychiatry, which are, in some respects, far, far, far lower risk than psychedelics. I have seen some of the same changes. I have seen changes that psychedelics, as far as I know, cannot produce. And a lot of them are durable. So for me, thinking about what does this look like if you apply it to 10 million people? Psychedelics makes me worry quite a bit. And there are a lot of charlatans and there are a lot of, I think, amoral at best investors and CEOs in the space as well. I have a lot of trepidation around it.

When you look at something like accelerated TMS when done properly or metabolic psychiatry when done properly, the risk profile is pretty incredible. So I would say too agnostic, psychedelics are incredible, kind of like cover my eyes and point towards psychedelics because I don't want to be responsible for what happens to people. But I'm sure, look, given where you live and given the waters that you wait in that you've met people, you tell me who have been, I certainly have met many of these and a lot of them sent me emails, but destabilized by psychedelics. Like, these are incredibly powerful compounds. So would I do it again? Yes. Have I not touched practically anything in two years? Yes, that's also true.

And I'm like there are reasons for that. I feel like I owe it to myself and I owe it to people who might listen to me to explore other technologies and other options. Hey, fam. Sometimes I get asked what kind of tea my guests and I are drinking on the show. Often, guests like Tim at the beginning of the episode, they compliment it. and I drink it all the time. I love it. I just want to give a quick share

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yours now. That's peaklife.com slash no-layself. Link in description as always, or you can go to our website. Check that out. Know-liselfpodcast.com slash partners. All the discounts are there. I hope you enjoy. Drink some tea. A gain in awareness through some of these experiences doesn't always and really does sadly come with the necessary integration to to make it a like a yeah an integrated way of being in your life and and so i've met plenty like you have of individuals who continue the hunt for experiences and hope that there's going to be just the next transformation and the next insight and often if we're honest with ourselves i find at least in my myself there's there's enough awareness if you ask the right questions of what you need to focus on

right now, and it's usually not another experience to go after. There's a couple of things that you brought up, both the slightly woo-woo or mystical encounters and contemplations of time and space, which is fascinating for me. I can talk about Crazy Town if you want. I can go there. And then another avenue as well, but why don't we start there just because it's up here. I'm curious, what fundamental, if it has, what fundamental reorientation towards how you perceive what life is and the purpose of life?

have these experiences, you know, really brought for you? Yeah, the purpose of life I can't speak to. I mean, the sort of cliched example that comes up repeatedly for everyone, including myself, it's like, you know, suddenly, you know, love comes up again and again and again and again in these experiences. I don't know how culturally dependent that is, to be honest. I will say that at the risk of hurting any shred of credibility I might have, I will say I'm not convinced that the totality of what people experience and see is totally internally generated in the sense that there tend to be some recurring features.

And for instance, and there are lots of ways you could debunk this. I could take a counterposition and tell you 20 different ways or 20 different explanations that might cover what I'm about to describe. But for instance, in ayahuasca, particularly, and I think it's due to format and part, but shared visions are incredibly common. People seeing the same thing, hearing the same thing, there's some very bizarre things that seemingly happen on a fairly routine basis. All right. So I've become much less attached to, I'd say a few things. One is the idea that the fidelity of my senses is an accurate representation of more or less all there is to like a reductionist materialist explanation of things. I would say secondly, one of the, and this is not answering the purpose of life question, but I would say part of the reason people are looking for a purpose of life is that.

they're trying to avoid nihilism or address some type of latent fear of death, which most people have. I don't really have much fear of death. And so I do feel that fear extinguishing of death to be not just anecdotal, but pretty well documented in studies involving terminal cancer patients and things like that. that's worth examining more closely, I think. That's quite remarkable, even if it is pure internally generated sort of abnormal firing of neurons, it's still pretty interesting. I would say psychedelics, for me, raise a lot more questions than they answer, and I think that's going to be true for a while.

And there's a lot of good science being done. in the space. I mean, my intention from the beginning was to try to de-risk it and destigmatize or contribute to destigmatizing with a very small foundation. I mean, I contributed at one point like double digits my net worth to all this stuff, right? I mean, it was a huge commitment at a certain points of time. But I never planned on doing it forever. That's another reason that I'm moving on. It was like, look, I want to bring more people into the space so that larger foundations and hopefully federal money and state governments and so on will actually fund it. But if I can help get the flywheel started in some way, fantastic.

A lot of open questions. I mean, the more time you spend in the psychedelic space, the stranger and more interesting it gets. And I think at any given point in time, and this also comes back to when you're trying to solve something, should you add something or should you subtract? I'm not saying you should subtract psychedelics. there's been human consumption of a lot of these compounds for millennia, although some of them

are incredibly dangerous, so you've got to watch out. Don't chew on any tourist seeds anytime soon or anything like that, but yeah, be careful of what you read on Reddit. And in any case, what I would say is I most certainly do not have a Newtonian orientation towards the explanation of our some experiences. It's just there's too much bizarerness in the whole thing, particularly when you spend time in the psychedelic world. And it's not to say that you need psychedelics. People can have spontaneous mystical experiences.

There are other ways that traditions use, dance and chant and drumming and so on to enter breathwork, to enter altered states. And their explanations will differ for why and how. for what purpose they do this. But you see some really weird stuff, and I would like to think that I'm a reasonably credible witness because I come into it very, very, very skeptical. I'm still skeptical of a lot of psychedelic stuff in terms of claims around how it could be applied to curing things

because the promises are often overstated, as is true with any hype cycle. I'll just throw one more thing in there, which leads into the, or, I'd say doubles down on the weirdness side of things. If you go to say, and despite what people might think, it's not like every culture has a history of psychedelic use. There happen to be certain areas where there's a lot of concentration,

like South America, but it's not true everywhere. But if you were to spend time, let's just say in South America, and there's a lot of diversity, right? Like, South American is not really a thing. It's like these cultures are vastly, different. But the modern Western use of psychedelics for treating

individual psychiatric disorders that are viewed as medical problems is really new. Very, very new. And for instance, I mean, ayahuasca was used, still is used, but particularly before

contact with, say, missionaries in Christianity. And I can explain why that's the case. But it was used for hunting and warfare a lot of the time. And then if there was a problem or hunting was going very poorly or something else, it might be used for addressing spirits, improving hunting luck, etc. But when you look at a lot of the use cases, hunting warfare, and then a handful of other

things, but it's not because, like, Juan is really sad, right? That just wasn't an application. And why would they use, say, ayahuasca for these things? And also, ayahuasca is like a, it's not always the end-all-be-all. It's sort of a conduit for other types of plants in a lot of these cultures. Not always, but in a lot of them. Putting that aside for the moment, the reason that they would use these, is also how mushrooms, certain strains of mushrooms, were used by, say,

probably still are, but especially historically by the Mazatex in Mexico, was for divination of some type. What the hell does that mean? Well, that sounds like a bunch of hocus pocus, like, you know, I'm sure there's a psychic reader somewhere with a neon sign, you're 20 minute drive from here for like 10 bucks a reading. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about specifically in this case,

and all the examples I just gave, finding things that are lost or in an unknown location. So someone's donkey gets stolen in a village in Mexico And they're like, who fucking stole my donkey? All right, let's go figure it out We're going to go to this Cudanderer who's going to eat mushrooms And like try to figure it out

It was very like kind of brass tacks Practical shit. It wasn't. And then in terms of hunting and warfare It's like, all right, where are the peckery is going to be tomorrow so that we can choose our hunting location Or like a tapir or whatever it might be?

And then in the case of warfare I mean, it's the same idea, right? It's like, all right, if we're going to defend against a rating party or we are going to be a rating party, an intertribal warfare was intense, intense, in South America, as it was in North America, then how do we gain a tactical or strategic advantage by knowing where things are going to be at certain times?

That's very different from how these things are positioned in, say, North American culture. And frankly, a lot of the capable I don't like to call them shamans because it's not really a word that they would use but healers let's just say in South America

don't know what on earth to do with a bunch of gringoes who have self-loathing it's just like not a site it's not really a thing that you see as prevalently down there and the idea of like

weeks of integration or whatever that's just not how it worked back in the day I mean, so in an odd sense, depending on how far you want to go into, like, let's call it, and this is the dangerous territory, but like the spiritual side of things, which we didn't really even talk about, but down there, that's certainly a big part of the conversation. If you want someone who's, let's just say, of lineage where they're coming from 100 to 200 years of practice with these plants.

So you could think of them as high-level wilderness, pharmacy. among other things. In some respects, the more experience those people are, the less capable or familiar they will be with trying to treat Westerners with a format that makes sense to them. So it's tricky. It is really tricky.

Yeah, anyway. There's innumerable reasons as to why people might seek out these different experiences. I'm curious, is there a concern? consistent, most reoccurring theme for you of why you've sought those out and with consistency in the past? Is there in an area of life

or psyche that you kept coming? Yeah, I would say and it also explains why it stopped in a sense. And I haven't stopped. This is not like a forever stopping things. I can't imagine my life without psychedelics. Might pick and choose a little more carefully

or like constrain the options a bit. So in the beginning, And I think this is very typical and to be expected and admirable maybe is the word to use, but you're looking for a solution or a path forward based on some issue that you have here. So deep down, you really want to try something new, but it's scary, or you want to start a relationship or a family or end a relationship or a marriage or who does what it is, right? Is this third person speak for Tim Ferriss?

No, it's not their... This is not third person's... Okay, just generally saying. Generally speaking. For me, it was, like, major depressive disorder or chronic anxiety or any number of things. But you have some issue here that everyone in this room would recognize

and you want some type of resolution or help with that. So, you know, you strap yourself to a rocket, you get shot into the 17th dimension, turn into, like, you know, a fractal of rainbow. coming out of like a mastodon's piss or whatever happens. And then you come back and you're like, what was that? And then you journal and hopefully you have someone to hold you accountable

to actually implement some behavioral change and to do the things you say are important to you. And some fantastic things can happen as an outgrowth of that. Now, at some point, at least for me, the indigenous perspective and lens on this became more interesting than the therapeutic. I'm going to travel to this clinic called the 17th dimension and bring something back. In other words, it would be as an analogy as if there's a place called Japan. I love Japan, as we've established.

And people are like, you know what, Japan's so different. It's so weird. I don't really understand a lot of what's going on. But when I go there and I think deeply on my problems, I come back and I have answers. Okay. Great. But then you spend more time in Japan and you're like,

well, there's a lot of stuff going on here. I'd like to understand it more. There seem to be certain constants. And certainly the people who spend all their time in Japan are not thinking about these types of problems all the time. What would it look like to actually, I experience things or try to develop capacities that would reflect what someone might do if they were living in Japan, aka, in this particular example, operating through the cosmovision of someone in one of these groups, right?

And like putting aside, if we can just chill the fuck out for a minute, like, yeah, I'm a white male and I don't have a savior complex and I'm not appropriating. By the way, America's just a whole big melting pot of different cultures. So make of that way you will. But the point is I was actually deeply curious about their lived experience and how they perceive these things. Like, what do you use these for? And when you start then spending time, not just with the whizbang head exploding psychedelics, but kind of diving into the like vegetalism and way that. that some of these groups relate to nature in general

and think about humans as a component of that, then you started going into these spaces for different reasons. So the vast majority of my experiences over the last 10 years have not been to try to fix some problem here. It's been in the hopes of seeing or experiencing or learning something that is valued or that I've been told or taught by someone who has been raised in a culture where this is

just the water that they swim in. That can be risky. There are a lot of, you know, got like coyote, right? Coyote so named because of the trickster mythology associations. Like a lot of, let's just for simplicity call them shamans are kind of rascals, right? Like, and sometimes they will tell you exactly, like, whatever lie they think is going to be most entertaining for them to watch you pursue. Like, this is a real thing, for sure. Like, you're not dealing with a bunch of bodhisattvas walking around. Like, that's not the way to view it.

The way that I would think about it, I'm sure this is going to piss off a bunch of people, but it's like down there, they have technologies, they have tools, they become very adept at using them. But if you've ever seen, like, Dr. Strange, or let me, and I, you know, and I, you know, and I, use that example because most people don't know a lot of surgeons. But like if you, if you had a bunch of really good like orthopedic surgeons or neurosurgeons, whatever, a lot of them have really big egos. Some of them are assholes. But if you have a real problem and it requires high level of expertise, you're like, okay, so be it. But like, do you want to take life advice

from that guy? Maybe not, you know? And or gal, although like matriarchal societies are less common. You know, the Shepibo Kanybo have some element of that, the Mazataks also. So I would just say be careful of this goes for anyone in the U.S., anywhere, not just South America. Be careful of any shaman who sort of positions themselves as enlightened in any way. That is a huge red flag. There's a documentary called Kumare, which I recommend everybody watch. K-U-M-A-R-E, I won't spoil the fun, but basically this documentary filmmaker in in New York, he's looking at gurus in the United States,

and he's like, wow, these people are all full of shit. He's like, maybe I'll have better luck. He's Indian-American that goes to Indian, and he's like, wow, most of these guys are also completely full of shit. And he decides as an experiment to go back to the U.S. after he's in seclusion, grown his hair out, grown this huge beard, gotten really good at yoga, puts on some robes and decides to basically start a cult.

And the story of what happens is remarkably well told. So I'd encourage people to check that out. But anyway, I would, I would just be, you got to be really cautious and know kind of what you're getting yourself into. And I would view people who are really adept at these things. And by adept, I'm in like minimum 20 years experience for me. Like thousands of patients, right? You know, let me do a little PSA real quick.

If you're considering any of this stuff, and I can't recommend it because it is the legal risks, even though people think they have some kind of weird immunity bracelet online. They're advertising like ayahuasca circles on Facebook or whatever. There are legal side effects. So I can't recommend you do any of this stuff. But look, it's like telling kids not to have sex. Like they're going to have sex. Like, give them some condoms. All right.

So first order of business, if someone calls himself a shaman, that's like flag number one for me. Okay. Number two, if they don't do a medical intake that is really extensive, that is a disqualifying mistake. Number three, if you ask them how they handle adverse events and the worst adverse events they have seen, if their answer is we've never had any adverse event, we've never had anyone freak out, they're either inexperienced, delusional or they're lying to you. And all of those are really, really bad. It would be like asking someone who's a surgeon. Like, have you ever in your 20 years had a complication?

Of course. And you want someone who can handle the redline cases when something goes wrong. You want to know they have experience with that. So those are just a few recommendations. They don't ask you about psychiatric family history. another disqualifier, right? But I should say at the same time, you go to South America,

typically no one's going to ask you that. If they've just been doing it their whole life within a community, none of that's going to be standard operating procedure. So you kind of have to do a lot of due diligence on your own. Yeah. All right. Ted talk complete. Sorry.

It's just I worry for people, because I've seen so many lives transform for the better, and I've also seen people get way over their skis. and if somebody comes to you and they're pros, I just said I was done, I'm not done. If somebody comes to you and they're like proselytizing, they're like the new Messiah for convincing everyone that should do psychedelics,

if they have had fewer than 50 experiences, don't pay any attention to them. Do not pay any attention. Because that's like someone who's gone skiing once on the bunny slopes and they're like, it's amazing, you never get hurt. It's just all fun. And it was blue skies and it's always blue skies when you ski. my conclusion. It's like, there are a lot of different conditions and there's a lot of really

hard terrain, different skis, avalanches, like shit happens. And so don't take advice from someone. It's very common that someone who does psychedelics for the first, second, or third time just becomes a diehard true believer. And they like take the show on the road to convince the world to follow them as the Pied Piper into the Promise Land. It's like there's a lot of promise, but there's a lot of peril as well. Yeah. Yeah. Important PSA.

Yeah. Don't fire a shaman on Craigslist. Okay. So since we're here and exploring the many different aspects of like psychedelic use, but also the internal drivers for your own healing journey for like why you decided to explore these things. I know that the sensitivity that you felt innately you had as a kid has. been a big, a big aspect of self that is the reason why you are so sharp, hypervigilant at times, pay attention to the nuances and subtleties.

And like you said earlier on, it could be probably perceived as both a gift and a curse in different moments of your life. Most things are. Yeah. I'm curious how you relate to that sense of sensitivity in your life now. How does, do you feel a bit? it's more of a gift or a curse now in these days. And yeah, I'm just curious.

So I would say the conclusion, which makes it sound more formal than it was because I was very, very young, but the subconscious choice to sort of cauterize my sensitivity was not, it wasn't my own volition. So around COVID, I put out the most difficult podcast I've ever put out, and I could talk about the reasons for the timing about childhood sexual abuse that I endured from age two to four. Sounds like a weekly basis or so by this son of a babysitter.

Not great. So very common. That doesn't lessen the impact. Incredibly common for both girls and boys. And just a quick. sidebar on that when I put out the episode, which was a conversation between my friend and Debbie Millman, this amazing graphic designer has this fantastic podcast that started way before mine, so she's an OG design matters. She was terribly abused as a kid. And her approach to

healing herself was very different from mine. And I asked her if she'd be open to a conversation. And I said, look, up front, I'm not sure I'm ever going to publish this. My parents don't know. Family doesn't know. None of my friends know. I mean, it was very difficult for me to decide to publish it. I'm glad I did. But when it came out, I got texts or voice memos or voicemails from, I would say, a quarter to a third of my closest male friends who were either on the verge of crying

or crying telling me the story. they had never told before to anyone, which was them having had a very similar experience. It is so common. And in any case, the reason I bring that up is that I think in response to that, being sensitive is just liability, right? I don't know if,

there's this guiding phrase that I think is helpful, whether it's true or not is another question, but when you're, say, prepping, or at a university and they're prepping people for a psychedelic experience, they say, nothing inside you wants to hurt you. So you're like trusting in that as a basic maxim. And then depending on the school of thought and the facilitator about this sort of inner healer guidance, right?

The idea that you don't need to reach out to external experts all the time, that you actually have this innate intelligence that knows exactly what you need. I think there's something to that. but the reason I bring it up is that my two-year-old self knew that hypersensitivity given what was happening was just effectively like psyche suicide on some level. So that got cauterized and the sensitivity, any type of emotional engagement with the world was just viewed as weakness. I later justified that as it being this irrational distraction from,

like the hyper-efficient human mind that is the pinnacle of all evolution, and we can just run things based on this sort of hyper-rationalist framework. And there's something to be said for that. You can do a lot with that tool. But if it's your only tool, there's collateral damage. And a lot of that collateral damage is in relationships. Because human relationships are not rational, which is why I find efficient market theory and the idea that, like,

all the stock, you know, people in the stock market behave rationally according to self-interest. I'm like, have you seen humans anywhere? What gives you any basis for that? But let me come back from the stock market. I'm just using that example and say that I was not able to bring those emotions back online and it was not even an agenda item. That's not what I was after, right? but after a number of deep psychedelic experiences in 2012, 2013,

I remember I was on a flight, and I was watching a documentary called Pressure Cooker, which is an outstanding documentary, quite emotional, but I just started bawling on the planet. And I don't think at that point I had cried in 20 years. And I was just like, what fuck is happening here? I had a shaved head as I do now.

I probably looked even more like a skinhead, because I think my neck was a lot bigger, like, people are going to freak out? I was just like, oh, my God, what's happening? And I just noticed all of these sensitivities coming back online. And I had mixed feelings about it at the time. I was just like, oh, like, what is this? It's very uncomfortable.

And I don't know what's happening underneath all this. Is this good? Is this bad? Am I about to have a fucking mental breakdown? I don't know. Ultimately, that sensitivity like superpowers are always and I'm not saying it's a super power,

but I do notice things and feel things that other people don't. And I think that's part of what makes me pretty good at language learning. So there are upsides to it, but the reason I ultimately decided to double and triple down on that

is to learn how to work with that hypersensitivity. And also recognizing, and this is true with any type of really intensive therapy, it doesn't have to involve psychedelics, doesn't have to involve any drugs, but a lot of folks are worried they're going to lose their edge. It's true with people considering meditation too, right? Am I going to lose my edge? Am I going to have no motivation? These things that I'm good at that form a lot of my identity,

am I just suddenly going to lose my grasp on these and be lost at sea? Typically, that's not the case. Like, 99 times out of 100, pulling a rabbit out of a hat for a number. That's not the case. And the way that I look at it is as having a wardrobe, you've worn this jacket. It's a great jacket. But it's like, you know, a cigar-smoking leisure jacket's like, well, do you really need to wear that to the beach?

Do you really need to wear that to Christmas? Like, there's a time and a place for it. it's just not all the time. So you take that off, you put it in your wardrobe, right? Psychologically speaking, it's always there. So what I've learned is that I can work with the sensitivities, and they've been invaluable in trying to become more socially intelligent with just conflict resolution and de-escalation and intimate relationships,

becoming a better friend. I mean, I feel like I've always been a very good friend, very loyal, but being a more empathic friend, right? because if you're, if you have armor up, you're keeping a lot out, but you're keeping a lot in as well. Right. And there's a barrier.

So for me, learning how to work with it, if I need to put blinders on and just be, you know, racehorse, I can do that. I go into the wardrobe, I take that jacket down and, like, throw it on, and I'm good. Like, I can go into that mode.

So I think the fear of losing that often prevents people from exploring richer terrain that they can explore and expanded capacities that they can use for a richer life. And look, I don't have all the answers. I don't want to make it sound like I'm preaching off the mount. It's not that at all. I mean, I'm fumbling around. Everybody's making it up as they go.

But that is, I would say, that embracing, that sort of uncorking and then embracing of the sensitivity has been fundamental, not just to me feeling better in the world, but feeling intact as who I am, right? Because I had disavowed that entire part of myself for so long. It's fascinating to think about the intelligence of us as little ones and what it does keep in and what it keeps out, right? If I may so procure a prop, which I never really did.

But I was just thinking, and I've also been in my unrelation. I really hope it's a magic wand like Hogwarts. Something close. It's actually an image from that episode, which I was really impacted by, which is you. Oh, wow. Which, if I may pass along. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, brutal. Yeah. Poor kid. So go for it. Lead me along. Yeah. Well, you were describing a bit what it's like to be inside his world. And I'm just curious, how connected do you feel to that little one that lives inside you like it does all of us? Yeah, I feel very connected. I've spent a lot of time on that. And I have spent time with certain modalities, again, not looking for a silver bullet, but like things that help more than hurt. And I do find I have found things like internal family systems, IFS, helpful. I've done live sessions. where Dick has worked on me, the founder, that people can listen to if they want.

But I do feel connected. And I think there's also a fine line between feeling resolved enough and intact enough to move forward and dwelling and wallowing in a very traumatic past or just an unpleasant past. and I think the pendulum may have swung a little far towards like performative trauma reenactment in a sense I think there have been many decades and many generations where people just didn't talk about any of this stuff

at least on any scale there's a lot of unnecessary suffering as a result I don't think everyone should just dive headlong into their deepest capital T trauma without professional help. I think that can be risky, right? So it comes back to kind of the social cohesion and working with professionals

who can help you along the way. But I think there's a time for looking in the rearview mirror and it's become, I think, somewhat trendy to spend a little too long looking in the rear view mirror. and depending on, for instance, the therapist you work with, a lot of modern psychotherapy is only focused on the rear of your mirror. That's it. And it's not their fault.

And there's an application, but the training they've received, say, psychoanalysis or whatever, it's like, oh, yeah, let's talk about your parents forever. Let's talk about your trauma forever. And therapists are also human, and humans, are driven by incentives. And if they're trying to make a living and they feel, they're not necessarily trying to fool anyone,

but they feel good about what they're doing and you have made progress, they're probably incentivized to keep the sessions continuing. And this doesn't mean, you know, have a breakup talk with your therapist. It just means that for me, there came a point where I was like,

all right, I've had this, I've disclosed this, experience. I've already traveled this road for quite a long time. And I feel like the path forward for me for healing, but I think we need to be careful with overusing that word also. Because just like, just as if with problem solving, if you've been rewarded for fixing problems, you start to scan for problems. If you're constantly using the framing of I need to heal, I want to heal, here's my path for It implies that you are damaged or injured in some way.

And I think the dose makes the poison, but there is a tipping point at which that is not helpful. And I think keeps you actually very attached to your trauma as part of your identity. And therefore, in my case, I had this experience. Keep in mind, I'd already been traveling this road and then got this tidal wave of friends reaching out and so on, which I made time for. I have a lot of capacity for that. But there's also a point where I was like, you know what? A lot of this, a lot of life is about establishing boundaries. And for me, it's like I will, I created the podcast and I created the blog post associated with it, which had that photo. And I'll just mention it to people.

Tim.com. Blog slash trauma. There's nothing for sale. But it gives all the resources that I, or a lot of the resources that I mentioned, as well as those that Debbie mentioned. She use no psychedelics, no nothing. Very different approach. I was like, I've said my piece, and I don't want to be engaged with this forever. So I've had to draw some hard lines also, right? Because I find a very gratifying to help. I find a very gratifying to help people, but you can become very easily enmeshed. And by constantly wading into the waters of that type of thing, You can sort of repeatedly rip the scab off of this healed wound that is inside yourself. I think you need to be careful with that.

You know, I'm not a professional psychiatrist. Don't play one on the internet. But that's been my experience. Now, on the flip side, there are people who are just like, past the past, never want to touch it. I'm just marching forward. And that can work, but there are side effects there. So I feel like trying to find.

the Goldilocks, which by the way, sometimes means you're not traveling that perfect middle path. You're like, oh, too far that way. Nope, too far that way. And it's more like you're in a swim lane where you have these guide rails and you're just trying your best to stay in the middle, but you're never exactly in the middle. So that's how I think about it at this point. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I just, when I listened to the episode, I just, I could feel both in your voice and how you explained it, the immense courage that it would take to share. that's such a vulnerable aspect for your life and can only imagine the amount of individuals and outside of the friends that have outreach to you like the wider community that like you said is so undershared especially from the male side of things with additional shame that maybe is coupled there with but uh it is it is an interesting gift to what be what was once a shadow and trauma and pain like that the sharing of that and how it allows us to connect with people and be a sense of resonance

and shared humanity. So just thank you for the courage of sharing all that. Yeah, I appreciate that. I had a facilitator at one point, say to me, very, very experienced. Probably 34 years of experience. And very dry sense of humor, which I kind of appreciate, right? Because sometimes you don't want to be cuddled. You don't want to be pitied.

And she just has a very funny manner about her. Sometimes she'll say shit, and you're like, is the therapist supposed to say that? but it's actually very refreshing, you know. It's more like having some very unrefined old friend who says some shit at a group dinner, and you're just like, oh, God, like, it's true, but oh, my God. Anyway, but she said to me at one point, you know, take the pain and make it part of your medicine. Like, that's how you give it meaning.

Take your pain, make a part of your medicine. So that's what I've tried to do. And I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I did it. And I would say to people who maybe are listening or watching who've had some of these experiences could be a different shape, right? But something significant that left the lasting mark can take a million different forms, right? It could be like somebody passing away when you're young, somebody getting divorced when you're young.

I mean, it could take a million different forms. And by the way, I wouldn't trivialize, but I also wouldn't deliberately exaggerate your trauma, right? because you can have many documented cases of this. Two people in the same foxhole in a war, one person's incredibly traumatized with PTSD and all manner of issues afterwards. The other person's fine. They're literally standing right next to each other

instead of a hole or squatting down. So depending on your sensitivity, littler things can have a big impact. But just make sure it's not performative. Make sure you're not using it in any kind of theatrical performance. way to make an impact on other people. It's very seductive because that does get rewarded in today's landscape. But the most important message I would say is if you've had any of that stuff,

number one, you're clearly not alone, which I also felt was important just to drive home with the podcast and everything else that I did around it. Secondly, like you can, there are tools out there. There are frameworks out there. There are forms of support. they can make a huge difference. So if we look at, say, my life 2013 and prior, I was probably having, I don't know what the number is, but it's like three to five, let's say, major depressive episodes a year.

And each one would last anywhere from a few weeks to like two months. So it's like a lot of the year was spent grappling with these incredibly debilitating depressive episodes, but I would compartmentalize, and I could still kind of drive through very high pain tolerance and do stuff. But then

look at me now, and I have maybe let's call it one or two depressive episodes on the order of two or three weeks every two years, maybe. Those are two completely different human experiences.

And that's as a result of doing these various things. It's like there are tools. And no one tool works for everybody, but if you look at the portfolio of, let's just say, half a dozen or a dozen different options, it's like some combination or maybe one in isolation

might work and can have a tremendous impact. So, like, it's not hopeless, in other words. I could say it's very far from hopeless. Yeah, I just appreciate how important and the reflecting, like, the balances because it is both like a, an addressing of what's in the rearview mirror, but then also the rebuilding of things and what's to come that, like, living a life that is meaningful and going after things that, like, light us up so much. which hopefully isn't too much of a right turn in the conversation, but I am curious as somebody who spent so much time thinking about what to think about, thinking about what to spend time on,

you know, like what is going to be meaningful, what to choose your spend your life and time and energy going after. As individuals, myself included, everybody that's listening, want to live a life and so to speak, squeeze the juice out of life in the most meaningful way we can. and be able to look back in the rear of your mirror when we're 80, 90, 100, and say that was a life worth living. What are, if there is a predominant question or two that allows us to, like, reflect on and has allowed you to really choose what's worth spending your time on in life?

I'd be really curious to hear. Yeah, my answer to that certainly have changed over the years, but if I look back at the best of it, Let's say I look at like the last decade of past year reviews, right? Because I have those pretty sweet. What do you think about it? That's cool. And then I look at some of the patterns that I spot that I can then turn into the rules I can test, right? A few things come to mind.

So one is for each project, so I don't have any long term career plan, never have. don't have a five-year plan, don't have a 10-year plan. What I do have is generally, let's call it, six to 12-month projects where I'm optimizing for two things. One is learning as much as possible. The second is developing or deepening relationships. So either relationships with new, interesting people, often these are tied together,

or deepening relationships with people I already know. and what that has is a natural consequence is when you when you have a project let's just say it's six to 12 month project that could be anything right could be a book could be a freelancing gig could be experimenting with a new way of doing speaking engagements which i don't do a whole lot of but you get the idea could be anything and this is also something you can do if you have a full-time job this could be like a moonlighting thing you do evenings weekends whatever right it doesn't It doesn't require that you have complete freedom, as we talked about. If that project fails by external metrics, right?

It doesn't sell. People don't like it. For whatever reason, it ends up not coming to fruition. Whatever. If you're investing in learning as much as possible and new and deepened relationships, that transcends that project. Like, those things persist after that project. And then you have another project.

And these snowball, they start to accumulate, and it's very, very, very hard to fail long term. So if you select projects that way, which I've done for, I would say, at least since 2008, man, it's really hard to fail. You just can't be short-term greedy. Or you can't be excessively short-term greedy.

You can be a long-term, really ambitious. but that would be the cliff notes. Now, the newer edition in the last handful of years, and I think as you get older, this becomes more obvious, is choosing, in a sense, I'll paraphrase a friend of mine, Derek Sivers. So Derek Sivers, people can look him up.

He's amazing. Sort of like philosopher king programmer, used to be the ringleaderous traveling circus. I'm not making this out. Incredible musician, bizarre, awesome guy. A really incredible at authoring a unique life for himself

and for enabling that in his family. And these sort of pithy one-liners do not apply all the time. But one of his is like, choose the option that gives you the most options. Right? Okay. Like as an exercise, you could say,

well, what if I tried to live that for two weeks or something like that? What I have realized is the way you might think of that initially is, well, say, from a business perspective, how do I choose the thing that allows me to do the most eclectic mix of different things afterwards? But I don't think that's the right question, at least not for me. The right question is, which thing can I do? And it doesn't necessarily have to be isolated. I have multiple projects running all the time. And that's how I like to do things.

not the only way, but we could talk about, like, what do I have running in parallel right now? We could talk about, I don't think I've ever really talked about

that kind of thing, but what is the thing that you can do that will give you the most energy? And this isn't like a hand-wavy thing. Energy is just, you feel charged by it, and it gives you a greater

ability to fill your battery so that you can apply to everything else. That's it. And that has become a really critical component of me choosing things or saying yes or no to breakfasts or dinners or frankly like this conversation, right? You've asked me before we started recording, like how do you choose what to do? I'm like, do I feel like this is going to be energy in or energy out? And then if this is energy in, it's like, all right, I'm going to a dinner after this.

I'll be fully tapped up for that dinner. And then maybe that'll drag into tomorrow and I'll still have extra best. battery, that's pretty sweet. And that is the fundamental currency and fuel that you need to execute on anything else. So it's learning as much as possible relationships on a project by project basis, those snowball over time. And then to keep that snowball moving, you need energy. And as someone who's had Lyme disease twice, I grew up on Long Island, it is a motherfucker of an issue. And people in my family have, you know, the alpha-gal syndrome or the can't eat mammalian meat, like ticks are a real problem. But the point is, I had undiagnosed Lyme, and I only realized that when I got it the second

time. I'm like, you have a long-term antibodies. So I have battled fatigue, and not to be confused with the, anyway, I'll just call it chronic fatigue for simplicity for most of my life, for one reason or another. Depression also certainly can lead to a kind of lethargy. So this question of energy has always been top of mind. And there are things you can do from a life. It's all perspective diet intermittent fasting stabilizing your gluux metabolism blah blah blah and you can do all the cold plunges in the world that you want but if you're choosing the wrong projects you're just going to have battery leak all day long so those would be a few ways that i pick projects what is if you can just give the quick high level overview of all those parallels that you're simultaneously running in your

life and then why coyote is an addition what was that you know yeah why coyote uh yeah why coyote uh Yeah, why coyote? All right, so the things I have running in parallel, I mean, just to give you a sample, right? I have, because like the four-hour work week, just to be clear, right? Because I can see where people are going to jump on this is about maximizing your per-hour output. It's up to you how many hours you work. It's not about, like, working on drop shipping for four hours a week and then just watching paint dry for the rest of your life.

That's not what it's about. So in my case, right now, the things that I enjoy doing and that I spend time on are a lot of startup investing and early stage investing. A lot of it goes into science right now. It's like on the car ride here for this, I was looking at a video recorded by a scientist overseas explaining a graph for software that might be possible or might be effective.

And I think it is actually based on the clinical data in my own experience for improving eyesight. Or vision, I should say specific, but it's not fixing anything in the eye. So I was looking at that on the way here. I find that really interesting. Like, I'm seeing what's coming five, ten years from now in a lot of cases. So there's the startup stuff.

There's an 800-page draft of a book that I have, which I've tabled for now to focus on Coyote, which we'll come back to. But that is in a serviceable rough draft condition. It needs to be substantially shortened. But that's an entire book on saying no, the power of saying no, how to do it, real templates, actual exchanges where you show how it gets messy because it does. So there's the book draft. and I have a private community established

that's been helping me with proofreading. Then I have, there's a bunch of personal stuff, right? And so I'm like organizing, helping to organize the events that are planned for the Day of the Dead, week with friends, Japan trip,

that's going to be two weeks, and I happen to know a lot about it. So, you know, we're trying to decide on the way here also. I was trying to decide on the seating arrangement at the sumo event that we want to attend in Japan. And it's like for certain rows, I've never been to one live.

It's like, are you allowed to have more than eight fingers? That's a yakuza joke if anybody gets it. But it's like, what's the protocol? How do we get these tickets? So it's like figuring that kind of stuff. There's a lot of that type of thing right now

because why? Because that's fun. And part of the reason of doing these events, by the way, it's not the week that you spend. It's creating a WhatsApp group for the people going. And you have two months of

payoff leading up to it and then like two months afterwards it's like a five month you know four to five month payoff for a week long trip it's incredible anyway so spend a much time on that i and then have three relatives right now with advancing alzheimer's or different forms of dementia i'm taking care of two of them and there's a lot of medical and i'm very very happy that i took the time over decades to develop a certain degree of literacy with medicine and science. So that has been an incredible and also very sad but rewarding journey to take care of two of these relatives. And it's very intensive. And I have access to some incredible people. So figuring out what to do there, that was probably an hour and a half of my day today. It'll be another hour after this

as I'm driving to dinner. Then we've got future creative projects, so brainstorming what that might look like, possible. I always wanted to make a feature film. I have a script that's like 70% done that I did like 15 years ago.

Then I'm thinking of dusting off now that the AI tools are good enough that I could actually screw around just using AI with prompts because I do feel like questions and prompts or something, I'm pretty good at. So this would be a few. I mean, if I looked at my calendar, I could probably give you four or five more.

And then the question is, like, how do you actually work with all that without having your head explode? And sometimes your head just explodes. There's no way around it. But I break up my week as a weekly architecture. So Tuesday, for instance, is all team calls, admin, lawyers, accountants, et cetera. It's all the stuff that I find somewhat draining. I batch it into one day, so I'm able to rip off the mandate.

Recordings on, oh yeah, I totally forgot about this thing called the podcast that has whatever. One point something billion downloads now. Yeah, so I record the podcast on Monday and Fridays, typically, 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. my time. So everything is very tightly bracketed in that way. And then in this particular week, you know, things are all spec down. And then I've got, you know, my elbow surgery and my low back and, like, physical. components and so on. But that gives you an idea.

You can do that. You can do all that stuff without being excessively stressed out. It is imminently possible. And then Coyote, this. How is that giving you energy? Well, Coyote, this is the first thing I've ever done where the implicit goal of this is social fun. Right?

It's a card game. Yeah. So Coyote is a card game. And I spent two years devised. developing this with a company called Exploding Kittens, which made Exploding Kittens. They've made dozens of amazing games. And I got to meet someone named Alan Lee. He was a genius.

He worked on the original Xbox, helped to develop Halo as lead game designer, created effectively augmented reality. And here you have it. So simple deck of cards. And before I get to, well, I'll explain now what the game is. And then I'll explain like the Genesis story. So the game, there are a lot of Easter eggs on the cardbacks. I will let people dig into that if they want. You can find it everywhere.

Amazon, Target, Walmart. It's an 8,000 retail locations right now. And has like close to 400 million social views of gameplay, which is insane. I saw some of those viral. Yeah. So we've tested the hell out of this. The reason I wanted to make this, I grew up with Dungeons and Dragons. And that was a huge part of my life.

It taught me teamwork. It was my escape from bullying. I was very, very small. So it was just me and a handful of nerds. Storytelling. Things that ultimately really helped me in life, not just professionally, but personally. And when I look at what I'm observing in my friends,

in couples who have kids, in their kids, in my audience, this will not be a surprise to anyone, but the trend lines for chronic anxiety, depression, addiction, everything appears to be hockey sticking up into the right. And the answer to that is not more productivity. The answer to that is not more physical training,

although that is helpful, exercise, and so on, of course. I think the missing component, as far as I can tell, it's my best guess, is social interaction. And if an overdose, of digital is the disease, then some degree of analog, I think, is sort of the antidote, right, the offset. But how do I get people to do that? So for the 10th anniversary of the podcast, I used River, which is this amazing platform for in-person gatherings, and we had this huge celebration, 150 plus cities around the world with people gathering. And those people have stayed in

touch. That was the point. The point was not to celebrate the podcast. That's fun. And I popped into a bunch of Zoom rooms and stuff, but it was to get like-minded people together so they would actually spend time off of screens. And D&D is an amazing game, but it is a full commit. Like, it is very, very involved. And so I started to ask myself, like, what could I do to possibly help offset some of these really disturbing trend lines? And I was like, I love games. I want to play more games in my life. I want to spend more time with my friends. Sure, I have like a week blocked up once a quarter. that's like a macro dose. Like, how do you microdose playing with your friends?

Well, there are a lot of different ways to do it. I saw some musical instruments here. That's a great way to do it. And this is an easy way to do it. It's a light lift. So I wanted to create a casual fast game. You can learn in a few minutes. Each game is about 10 minutes long.

That is highly, highly, highly social. Trojan horses, I think it's also very good for your brain. I don't want to make too many claims about that, but I think it's pretty interesting. So Coyote is, after trying dozens of different games and prototyping and everything, it's, I would describe it as rock paper, scissors, with like 20 different gestures on steroids where you can sabotage other players. And you have to keep a beat and do these various gestures and say certain things.

As you go around in a circle, each player has three lives, last person standing wins. That's it. shocking how hard and involved it is to make a game that is simple to play. Like it's 66 cards. Exactly. Why is it not 57 or 72? Like there's a reason. But we don't have to get into the process.

We can. But fundamentally, Exploding Kittens, their thesis. And they make a lot of great games like poetry for Neanderthals and many, many, many others that are bestsellers. The premise is we don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the play. players entertaining. This is a really, it's fun to sit with that because you could actually apply that to what you do on a podcast, right?

You could apply it to what I do in a book where you're actually looking at the actions that the people might take as opposed to the content in and of itself, right? But long story short, that is, that's Coyote. And Coyote is so named because of the trickster mythology in many different cultures and you play these gestures and each person gets to pull off three cards and then play a card. And that could be a coyote card. It could be an attack card where you're sabotaging people. And then you have blank cards.

So every family, every group of friends gets to make their own set of different house rules, so to speak. So it's been a huge hit. It's actually gone super, super well. and it is a it is a wedge in the door for people to just have an easy way after dinner when everybody's going to split in an hour to do something fun that bonds people there's it's hilarious there's there's a lot of laughter i mean i can give some examples of some funny cards that people have made um i'll give you one so uh i was hanging out with a bunch of my friends a couple of like Akra yogis and a couple of folks in Austin, which is like high density, just like L.A. for that kind of thing. And they may or may not have been a little high, which does not make you better at the game, but it makes it a lot of fun for me to watch.

I'm sure. And this one woman got a blank card, and she's like, all right, I'm going to make a blank card. And so her blank card is whoever landed on that card had to go, I like, and give everyone the finger and say, I like, Borat. And I don't think it was just the weed fucking hilarious. It's a good one. It's really good.

And I've seen other families like kids slay this game because their reaction speeds really fast, which is awesome because it's a game that adults can play with kids where the adults don't have to try to lose. Like the kids are very likely to beat you. So it's been a blast. It's been a blast. And this is an example of a project where you choose the project,

I'm getting to learn a ton about game design, mass retail, distribution, all these things I know nothing about. Games and TikTok. I do not really use TikTok. So this is a whole new education on a lot of subtleties around that platform. And I'm getting a lot of time with this incredible team, like one of the absolute best independent game developers for tabletop stuff. Alon Lee, who's incredible. You should have him on the show. He's just such a polymath.

This is the CEO who worked on like the Xbox and has done all this stuff. Also a very intimidating hacker on a couple of different levels. Fascinating guy. So I get to hang out with him. I was hanging out with him yesterday. And if this game never even got published, it's a win. Huge win. Absolutely a huge win.

It did get published and we tested it with at least 100 plus families beforehand where they videotaped gameplay and we tweaked all this stuff. So we know. it works. I play with my friends. I brought a pack in a rubber band on the trip to Montana. Like, you can play it on the ground. You can just like smack your legs. So that's coyote in a nutshell. Definitely going to clip you speaking like Borat, flipping everyone off. I like. Clip it. I like. And it's been a blast. It's been a blast. And it's an example of something I would call So Coyote is an example of identity of diversification.

This is something I think about a lot. I've heard you speak to this a bunch. Yeah. For me, it's important. Because if you have a single startup, a single project, a single relationship where you expect too much of your partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, right? And you expect them to be all things in all ways. That type of concentration is really risky.

And it is true with what you commit to yourself to professionally also. where there's so many elements outside of your control with anything, right, like China tariffs on a game like that or any physical game in the United States, for instance, where the outcome is not guaranteed, right? Like YouTube and every social platform suddenly decide to throttle organic reach and make you pay for boosts, I mean, that could change your business model, right? But if you have a couple of irons in the fire, which is part of the reason I do things in parallel, Right? So I have, or let's just say, you've got your 9 to 5 job, you've got maybe like intramural sports or some kind of competition with friends. It doesn't need to be super intense. But it's a thing where there are score points, you know, where there are points on the scoreboard. Maybe you have like a gym or rock climbing where you have more metrics. You don't always need metrics, but it's helpful. And then you've got a few other things that you're playing around with. If one is doing really poorly.

it doesn't mean that your entire self-identity and self-worth crater, which is a big risk. I've been in that position. A lot of people are because there are payoffs for being focused. But if it's 100% all of your eggs in one basket from an identity perspective, I've just seen too many people implode. And again, there's a survivorship bias. You hear about the people who made it work.

But, man, is there just a battlefield full of bodies that didn't quite make it? psychologically. So that's why also I wanted to try something completely out of left field, because if this even partially works, well, then I could potentially close the doors on the podcast tomorrow. I don't plan on it. And like, okay, I'm going to be a full-time game designer for a year or two. Yeah. See what that looks like, because this is enough, you know, hopefully if it does super well to like cover the bare minimum of expenses or whatever. Although, frankly, I mean, we priced it so that it would be really kind of a no-brainer at like $9.99. So I wouldn't. make your retirement plan making really

inexpensive card games. But you get the idea. Yeah. And that's been important for me psychologically to feel like I have kind of multiple doors out of the room. And that's another reason. But much like financial portfolio,

you put all your eggs in one basket into one stock and doge coin. Yeah, you got to be careful. Like, it could work out. Yeah. And if it works, that person is going to be on the message boards and social media telling you Well, it worked.

I mean, we're here to taste the rainbow. We've got to diversify and experience the different aspects. Yeah. It takes very little to diversify. I mean, honestly, it's like if you're just doing zone tune tracking your heart rate, and your heart rate goes slightly down over the course of two weeks at the same wattage or something. And so you feel really good about that.

But holy shit, something terrible happens in your business for reasons outside of your control, or maybe you just made a really bad mistake. it's it like that tiny difference is often enough safety net to prevent you from spiraling into someplace really dark yeah amazing man I feel like we could continue talking for three hours about so many avenues we've yet to touch but I thought it might be nice to just have a bit of a rapid fire and we'll see if we can titrate these to yeah this is the guy you guys 800 page draft I'll try to keep my answer short yeah sure fire away all right let's go for it Given that a lot of these questions,

we could probably dive in so much further on. As somebody who's, like, this podcasting gig job is so unique where you get to craft your own bespoke university degree about the areas and topics of life you're most uniquely passionate about. So anytime we get to talk to somebody who's been doing it for so long, I, there's a lot of questions that come up. I'm just curious how your definition of what it means to be an extraordinary human has evolved

because you've met people that are high performers, world-class performers, athletes, and so many different arenas. But what is it about the quality of somebody and maybe how well-balanced they are or whatever, whatever you feel most called that you've, like, come to admire most now in this day and age? I think there are two things to come to mind. One is they feel pretty good about what they're doing. That sounds so simplistic. But even people who are sometimes the very best at what they do have all sorts of

misgivings and insecurities and second guesses about what they're up to. Not always, not always. But they may have also made certain interpersonal sacrifices that make it a parake victory, right? Which is why you have to be very careful with modeling successful people, which usually means there's some component of financial reward. But if they're on their third or fourth divorce, not on speaking terms with their kids, I would be very careful about copying and pasting that blueprint.

Yeah. Right. And that then leads to the second thing, which is just the quality of their relationships. That's it. Like if I meet somebody and I have a lot of friends, I feel very fortunate in this category who have great relationships with their kids

and like, yeah, okay, they're teenage girls bust their balls a bunch and that's part of their job, so that's fine. But fundamentally, it's like they spend a lot of quality time with family and friends. that rarely happens by accident. And I've come to admire the art and craft of doing that as much as sometimes the science and engineering

of creating a billion-dollar startup. Because that startup can do a lot of good in some cases and that money will solve your money problems. It's not going to solve all your problems. So the interpersonal relationships, the quality of relationships, people who are really adept at that. I've come to admire just how conscious they are about making sure that's the case, for sure.

What's one recent, most significant change of mind you've had recently? Most significant change of mind. I really revised my thinking on intermittent fasting. I was very skeptical of intermittent fasting as compared to more extended fasting. I have done a lot of more extended fasting, three to 10 days, water only, possibly adding some electrolytes or supplemental fats, which would be called dirty fasting by some people, but the benefits seem pretty undeniable on a number of levels. Intermittent fasting, I was always skeptical of because I knew a few people,

people who owned Dexa scanning clinics, and they had told me based on thousands of scans that most people they saw who were trying intermittent fasting lost a lot of muscle mass. But sadly felt good about it because they were simply watching the scale most of the time, and their weight was dropping, and their goal was weight loss. But I have since revised that after a few months of experimenting with it and really ensuring that I'm doing proper weight training and consuming enough protein and doing basics. But even within an eight-hour window, I've been shocked at what you can accomplish in terms of physical recomposition and in terms of producing biomarker changes that are frankly pretty

hard to believe. I mean, my doctor's just like, what are you doing? And these are very, very good doctors. That's one place where I'm happy to overspend. is doctors and they're like, huh, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, it's been life-changing for me, for sure. So that's, that's, I'd say one. Another would be, and I've always leaned towards the adult's ability to adapt in ways that

might be perceived by a lot of people as fixed. But since I'm in my late 40s and a lot of people start to experience. presbyopia. So stiffening of the lens of the eye and they have trouble reading, so they're holding your iPhone out like this. And that is just kind of viewed as inevitable. Get glasses, you get greater magnification, and then so it goes. And sometimes you can use eye drops and things like that. But looking at this new software that I was mentioning earlier from this startup that's commercializing some clinical research, it's shocking how you can train your brain to compensate for this lack of accommodation of the lens.

And I went from not being able to read a menu in a dim restaurant to being totally fine. Oh. To the extent that friends were like, what are you doing? Because they all have readers. Like once they did, it might be 40, might be 45. Like everybody's got reading. Is there a quick resource for people if they want to explore them more? I can't do it yet.

To come. It'll be coming soon. Excited for that. Can't wait to see that. It's very exciting. It's just another example. of where science is always a placeholder. And I do think the scientific method is the best framework we have for not

fooling ourselves currently. But it's always a placeholder. So whenever someone says, well, this is fixed, you have a fixed number of X and then they degenerate and you're done. Or there's this inevitable structural change. There's nothing you can do about it. I always have questions about that. It's wild to see that in an example where you're,

literally viewing the world through a degenerated lens, and you can train things upstream to compensate for that. It's pretty mind-blowing. So that's another one. Strange one, but I'm just curious. If you had to have dinner with three fictional characters, would it be? Fictional characters. Zorba the Greek, from the book Zorba the Greek,

everyone should read that book. It is outstanding. Zorba of the Greek, just for comedic effect, probably be pretty disruptive. So, Zorba the Greek. Then, fictional character. One of the women

who is a master of the tarot deck from a book called Little Big by John Crowley, which is one of the most confusing fever dream books anyone can ever read. I hesitate to recommend it. Yeah, yeah.

Like, two out of ten people will read it and be like, that absolutely blew my mind and made me feel like I was in a psychedelic experience for two weeks. And eight out of ten will be like, Tim, that was the worst book you could have written. But the family in this book and the web of women in this book is really fascinating to me.

So maybe one of those. I'm trying to think also of the group dynamics. Yeah, yeah, look at you go. And then probably one of these archetypal young men who become an amazing leader like Apollo Trades, but he would be such a sour puss at a dinner. So I don't think I'd take polytides. I think I would probably choose someone along those lines, though. But I would need someone playful.

If you got a tarot card slash sort of six cents person, and then you have Zorba the Greek, you're going to need someone who can kind of roll with that. I'm going to break the rules. I'm going to actually pull in a real person. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist. I think those three would get along. That would be a fun conversation.

That would be a fun dinner. And there would definitely be plenty of booze. All right. If you had a message on a billboard, what would it be? I'd have two. I'd have one on either side. So one would be, and I'm borrowing from a podcast guest, hospice care physician and BJ Miller

who helped thousands of people to die. Don't believe everything you think. Then on the other side, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting the attribution right, but I would have a quote from room me, and who knows if it's translated properly, but be suspicious of what you want. Be suspicious of what you want. Those would be the two.

It's a fire duo. It's a good one-to-punch. You can solve a lot of problems by starting with one of those. All right, I'm just going to throw some Tim Ferriss questions at you as kind of like Glass Rapid Fire. Purchase of $100 or less that's most impactful, been impactful for you the past year or two. probably different types of exogenous ketones. There are some, there's new technology on the horizon, new molecules.

I feel like you're always bubbling with all these like to come innovative. Well, they're coming soon. I'd say within the next few months, but there are examples out there. There's some very clever concoctions. One is ketone Q-I-T-O-N-E. There's a mono-ester and others that folks have made like Delta G. is one company. Those would be two that I experiment

with. I mean, I took one, ten minutes before this conversation. Plus MCT oil, the combination of those two gives you a more extended release and can help in a number of different ways. I think that there are more interesting molecules coming,

but they can be a little pricey. But for a hundred bucks, you could get probably five, 20 doses. And for verbal acuity and just general speed of cognitive turnover, pretty interesting. So I would give that answer because you can apply that to so many things. If you're going to

use them, be close to a bathroom. The first few times, high risk of disaster pants. So consider yourself warned, especially if you're taking caffeine at the same time. Most high leverage advice you'd give to your younger self. Probably sign up for a transcendental meditation course. And I would give that advice versus the broader advice of start meditating because I would have needed the specifics and the accountability. And ultimately I did. That is the key catalyzing moment that led me into more regular meditation. And there's a million different ways to do it. But I would say, and there are things that I find kind of silly about TM, but man, is it simple?

you're just you're given a sound you repeat that sound you do it twice a day the twice a day is important 20 minutes a day and the reason i say sign up for a course is because you will have an instructor who holds you accountable you meditate with them not every day but then they will be holding you accountable like a sponsor and alcoholics anonymous to do your meditating and you don't want to look like an asshole so you'll actually do it and you're paying for it on top of that the right son cost. So I would probably say sign up for a TM course. And then once you have some degree of momentum and you've done it consistently for a few months, yeah, sure. Feel free to use the apps like right now and I'm involved with it. It's a full disclosure, but I use the Way app by Henry

Shookman. I think it's absolutely top class for like logical sequence of developing skills that you can then apply in other places. But I would start with someone holding you accountable. Tim, there are many more questions to come and we'll have more conversations, I'm sure, in the future. But I just wanted to say, as you know, getting to do this podcast thing, as you grow and you gain access to more individuals to sit down with and have conversations

who can't believe you just did that. I see? The ghost in the shell. I knew it was coming. Right, as I was about to share. No. Oh, so good. That was good.

That was good. You're excited. You gotta keep that. Someone just hit a high scene now on a piano across the room. But as you know, it's like, and I'm sure you experienced this countless times where you get to see that you have a parisocial relationship with somebody online and they've been impactful for your journey, a point of inspiration for what's possible in the podcast space, nonetheless of like all the other areas that you share.

And so it's just, it's really cool for me to be able to do this, to meet you, to connect, have this conversation and hopefully create a space that is conducive and gives you energy and all the things. So it's just, I live for this kind of stuff. So thank you. Thanks, man. Yeah. That's a very kind of you to say. And I'm excited to see what you do. You've got a lot of, you know, obviously fingers crossed. Who knows with the world out there? But runway to do very interesting things. And you've got a lot of momentum early. So I'm excited to see where you go and experiment with the identity diversification. And make sure you have, I would say,

just a couple of irons in the fire because the landscape can change really quickly. Yeah. But, man, you're doing a great job. Thank you. So thanks for having me. Thank you, man. Appreciate you.

We'll leave links down where everyone can stay connected with you. Your work, Coyote, which is available at Amazon, Walmart Target, all over. Yeah. Coyote game. Just look for the orange and green. Yeah. Or put my name in there. Congrats, man.

That's exciting. Appreciate you. we did it until next time be well guys boom thanks everybody you