The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Tim Ferriss: 4 Science-Backed Tools That Rewired Decades of Childhood Trauma & Depression
Episode Date: November 13, 2025Health Hacker TIM FERRISS reveals how to naturally calm anxiety, lower stress, balance your nervous system, and boost mental health - without medication. Tim Ferriss is an entrepreneur, investor, lif...estyle guru, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show. He is also the author of 5 #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books, such as: ‘The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich’. He explains: ◼️Why stimulating the vagus nerve may hold the key to anxiety relief ◼️How HRV became the #1 biomarker he tracks, and how to improve it fast ◼️His go-to 5-day reset protocol for nervous system healing ◼️What most people get wrong about managing stress, and how to fix it today ◼️The #1 diet mistake that could be fueling your anxiety [00:00] Intro [02:45] My Mission: Simplify Complex Ideas [03:36] Framework for Fast Learning [08:00] Choosing the Right Projects [10:21] Importance of Small Steps for Big Results [12:46] Why Humans Need Purpose [15:45] Tim’s Sexual Abuse Story [25:48] How People Deal With Trauma [31:58] Practical Steps to Prevent Suicide [35:49] Humans Aren’t Programmed to Be Alone [39:18] Accelerated TMS for Depression and Anxiety [42:45] Metabolic Psychiatry [44:08] Psychedelic Treatments for Mental Health [45:38] Vagus Nerve Stimulation [50:11] Ads [53:22] The Future of Health: What’s Coming Next? [57:21] What’s Guiding You Today? [59:30] Dating Apps and the Paradox of Choice [1:02:49] How Would You Spend Your Last Day on Earth? Follow Tim: Instagram - https://bit.ly/49gqgRc TikTok - https://bit.ly/4oHX0ro X - https://bit.ly/4qW09oI You can purchase Tim’s new COYOTE card game, here: https://amzn.to/489NdnV You can purchase Tim’s book, ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’, here: https://amzn.to/3LysDoy Read Tim’s deeply personal reflections on suicide, here: https://bit.ly/4i1NnRS If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out for help. You’re not alone. 📞 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US) 📞116 123 Samaritans (UK) The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: SimpliSafe - https://simplisafe.com/DOAC to save 60% on a SimpliSafe home security system. Bon Charge - http://boncharge.com/diary?rfsn=8189247.228c0cb with code DIARY for 25-30% off Apple: https://www.apple.com/mac/
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Discussion (0)
A couple of weeks ago, we took all of our team here at the Dyer of a CO to
Mioka, thanks to all of you guys, and thanks to the fact that we'd hit 10 billion subscribers.
So we went there to celebrate.
And as we were sat in New Yorker talking about a variety of things, one of my team members referenced
that they had put their house on Airbnb the day they had left to come to Mallorca to make
some extra money.
And as we talked through this, it became abundantly clear to me that this is a huge opportunity
for all of my listeners.
When you go away, when your house is empty, you have the potential to make some extra money
just by listing your house on Airbnb.
And as you probably know, Airbnb are a sponsor of this podcast. And it shocks me that more people
haven't considered this. Hosting your property on Airbnb when you go away is a no-brainer to me,
especially if it's sat there doing nothing. And do you know what? I think that your home,
sat there while you're away, might just be worth more than you think. And if you want to find out
exactly how much it's worth, go to Airbnb.com.ca slash host. And you can find out how much you could be
making while your home is sat empty and you're away on holiday every mental health complication or
diagnosis is increasing and i've worked with different scientists and done a lot of experimentation of
myself having grown up with multiple depressive episodes every year to see if there are root causes
that we can address and so i'll just throw out a few things that have been very very helpful first
there's brain stimulation when i did this i had months of no anxiety then there's something
called vagus nerve stimulation and one of the most heavily cited scientists of the last 30 years
That's seen a wild collection of benefits.
So let's talk about that.
Tim Ferriss has become a performance hacking expert
after speaking with over 800 influential voices on his podcast.
Now he's taking the most valuable frameworks and techniques
to help you optimize productivity, health, and performance.
Tim, the variety of things that you write about, talk about is so wide.
So what is the question that most people should ask you?
How do you break down complicated subjects and accelerate your ability to learn?
because time is one of our most valuable, non-renewable resources.
And so I have a framework that you can apply to any subject matter,
which consists of the 80-20 principle,
which is picking the 20% to focus on that will give you 80% of what you want.
For instance, there's hundreds of thousands of words you could learn in Spanish,
but with the most frequently used 1,500,
you can get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks.
And if you figure that out, you're ahead of 99.9% of the world.
And what do you think is the question most people want to ask you?
So there's a lot of questions around mental health,
and I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people
because I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son
on a weekly basis.
I was this close to killing myself.
And it can have a lot of effects,
but these are things that you can slowly chip away at.
And instead of feeling like you're held captive by them,
feel like you can take the pain and make it part of your medicine.
So...
Just give me 30 seconds of your time.
Two things I wanted to say.
The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show
week after week.
It means the world to all of us,
and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had
and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
And if you enjoy what we do here,
please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.
I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to,
and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
Thank you.
Tim, you're a remarkably interesting individual, in part because
the variety of things that you write about, talk about,
clearly have deep curiosity in, is so wide that you're hard to put into any particular box.
So my first question to you is, how do you think about the work you do
and how do you sort of like self-define, if you do at all,
who you are and what your mission is?
I think of myself as a self-experimentor slash student and teacher in that order.
The purpose, though, ultimately, is to try to find simplicity through complexity or topics that can be complicated and then provide some type of recipe or algorithm that people can test with low risk and hopefully a decent amount of upside.
We're going to talk about a lot of different things today, so probably a good place to start, which is learning how to learn.
And especially in a world that's changing at such speed, there's a lot of people that are being forced into relearning of some sort, whether it's professionally or in other domains.
So meta-learning, I've never heard this term before, what is meta-learning and how do I learn how to learn better?
I would love to because I spend so long, as you do, speaking to really interesting people, and I sometimes worry that some of that information is being wasted.
Yeah. The basic idea is this, that rather than treat different subjects or fields as these silos that need to be figured out independently, how can you develop just a broad framework that you can apply to?
any subject matter.
And the acronym that I generally recommend, folks, DSSS, deconstruction, selection,
sequencing, stakes, there's deconstruction, which is taking a fairly ambiguous goal,
like learn to swim, or learn Japanese.
None of those are actually very descriptive, right?
So deconstructing any one of those is taking, let's just use, learn to swim as an
example and breaking it down into constituent parts. And you can do that very effectively with the
help of an expert. You can try to do it yourself. But for instance, I mean, if you want to find
a silver medalist from the Olympics to Olympics ago, you can probably get on a Zoom call with them
for $100 an hour, maybe $50 an hour. You do have access to world-class talent.
Then they would help you figure out, all these different possible components.
When you get to the next part, which is selection, you're picking the 20%, this is the 80-20 principle, right, Paredo's Law.
So you're picking the 20% that will give you 80% of what you want.
Let's just use language learning in that case.
Well, you can very easily find word frequency lists.
So for any given language, like Spanish, sure, or in English, hundreds of thousands of words you could learn.
But with the most frequently used 1,500, you can get.
get to reasonable conversational fluency in almost any language in 8 to 12 weeks without question
if you approach it methodically. But you need the right material first. And then the next S
is sequencing, putting it in the right order. And I feel like this is the magic sauce that gets
lost a lot, which is what is a logical sequence for learning any given skill? What do you practice
first? So in the case of swimming, for instance, forget about breathing. Like you need to figure out
like fuselage right, fuselage left, and gliding, kicking off a wall in the shallow end of a pool
before you ever think about breathing, and getting comfortable putting your head under water,
et cetera, et cetera. So there's the deconstruction, selection, sequencing,
and then the last S stands for stakes, which means incentives. So how do you ensure that you
will do actually what it is you say you're committing to doing? If more information were the answer,
we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs. So information is clearly,
not sufficient. It's necessary but not sufficient. Incentives drive behavior change. So you need
good intentions are not enough. Even a system is not enough. You need strong incentives. So,
right, you could give 500 bucks to a friend or 100 bucks, whatever. The amount doesn't really
matter. And if you don't do what you say are going to do, they donate it to like your most hated
political candidate in your name, right? That's another one that I've seen work really well.
That's it, that DSSS, deconstruction, selection, sequencing, stakes, and if you just check those boxes moving that order, your ability to learn will hockey stick in a really meaningful way.
And what's also important to realize when you're trying to tackle any new skill, it doesn't matter what it is, it will not be just a linear climb from, you know, bottom, left, upper right.
But if you know in advance that those are coming, then you can have a plan for it and weather the storm.
So that's also very important.
If people expect some kind of like linear incremental progress, it just ain't going to happen.
And so most people quit before they hit any real inflection points.
And how does one know what to pursue?
Like, how do you decide what's worth pursuing?
Is there a framework for knowing what should be on the Sunday shelf and what should be today's work?
I do think about this a lot.
And I've used this for a very, very long time.
and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
I've refined it here and there.
Almost everything I do is a six to 12-month project
with lots of two-to-four-week experiments within that six to 12 months.
I do not have, and I've never had, a long-term career plan, five years, 10 years.
If you have a reliable five-to-10-year plan,
you're going to be playing so safely within the bounds of your capabilities
that I feel like you're selling yourself short.
So for me, it's projects and just going 100% into those projects.
But how do you pick the project?
I pick the projects based on relationships and skills.
So new relationships or deepening important relationships and my learning curve, skills I'm going to learn.
And there's a condition, though.
Those relationships and those skills have to be able to transcend that project.
I'll give you an example.
If I have a project which is working on a startup as an advisor, that startup was StumbleUpon.
Okay, so I'm working on StumbleUpon.
Way back in the day, StumbleUpon was a huge deal
and delivered a lot of web traffic
to various websites.
It's kind of like a Pandora for websites.
The year or two end of that, didn't go anywhere.
But who was it?
I spent all my time with it, StumbleUpon.
It was the founder named Garrett Kemp,
and I became really close friends.
I learned a ton about web traffic.
I was also able to use my own website and blog
as a experimental destination, right?
So there was upside, even if it went to zero for me.
And a few years later,
I get a text from Garrett, we meet up to talk about this new idea, which is solving the taxi problem in San Francisco.
And then shortly thereafter, it was called UberCab LLC, and I became advised for that.
And I could give you 12 more examples like that, where the first project failed, but I became friends with person A or B learned C&D.
And those were applied two projects later to something that was a home run.
And should everybody at every stage in their journey have the same framework?
or you know because if you think about the different things one could acquire from like resources
reputation knowledge skills um network if i'm 18 and broke should i be aiming at the same
things as if i'm tim ferris my instinct is to say yes and the reason i say that is that
lady fortune has a lot to say about what happens there's so many things outside of your
control, that whatever game you choose to play requires a system that allows you to survive
a string of very bad luck.
Everything snowballs overtime and compounds, and it's really hard to lose long term, as long as
you are not over-indexing and betting too much on any one project, say financially.
It's like you need to be able to withstand as a team.
or as an individual, a period of very bad luck in order for the law of big numbers and
statistics to work in your favor with a system that gives you a slight edge.
So that's just my lens on the world in general, at least professional choices.
And I would say you mentioned a couple of other things, right?
So like reputation and so on.
I feel like a lot of those are second order effects.
They happen automatically if you are optimizing for the risk.
relationships and skills.
So this comes back to the sequencing, right?
So it's like which is the lead domino?
So if you have 12 dominoes, you kind of have to decide in which order you're going to stack
them.
So you knock over the small domino, knocked over the bigger domino, then the bigger,
then the bigger, then the bigger, then the bigger.
And over time, if you're thinking about doing two projects a year, let's just say, if they're
six months each, that's going to add up.
It's going to add up.
so you can afford to be long-term greedy instead of short-term greedy.
Is that what people call passion? Are you using the same?
I like energy over passion for a couple of reasons, because you could have passion between the bed sheets,
you could have the passion of the Christ, you had a different type of passion.
I don't like imprecise terms.
Energy for me, very simple.
It's like, are you more awake or are you sleeping?
right? Do you feel like you can do this for another five hours? Do you feel like you want to stop in 15 minutes?
These are almost biological questions. Like biological state questions. So it's pretty intuitive for people to get to a yes or no.
One of the subjects I've been thinking a lot about recently, why have I been thinking about this more recently?
I don't know. Just a series of conversations I've had on the show which make, have kind of pushed me closer to trying to answer this question, is about
about meaning and purpose and, I guess, religion.
Because actually it's only in recent history
that we've had so many answers
to some of these bloody questions.
Like the solar eclipse, we now know what's going on there.
It's not God testing us,
so the Vikings are throwing their spears at it.
We know what it is now.
So not believing atheism, agnosticism,
is that a fairly new construct?
And are we not meant to know so much?
Well, I think that humans need
certainty. They need
something to believe.
And if your belief is
that non-belief is the way,
well, guess what? I mean, that's a belief.
Okay. Okay. So I would
say that my experience
is if you want to experience
self-transcendence, which I think is critical for
mental health, you don't need
religion per se.
You can have, I think, a very
wonderful life without religion.
I don't think it's possible to have a wonderful life
without awe and wonder.
And those are things you can architect.
Those are things you can very much architect
and engineer and schedule in your life.
Why have veganism and CrossFit done so well?
They're religions.
I mean, effectively.
They may not have a god per se.
Yeah.
But certainly they have.
thought leaders the glass men before his fall from grace and so on various athletes and so on but
it's like clear roles community self-enforcing and describing life sports yeah I mean it's like
this is religion just goes by another name it's a lot of the behaviors collective behaviors
and tenets of religion just lacking the R word what you worship I knew that was coming
I think the risk for me is that I feel like I have a moral obligation to help people,
which can turn into a bit of a savior complex because of a lot of the pain that I've suffered in the past.
I feel like I am not necessarily uniquely suited,
but I have the experience and the perspective that allows me to be credible
when talking to people who are experiencing certain types of pain.
and that can become a huge, unhelpful, self-imposed burden where I feel a moral obligation
to do things at the expense of my own mental health or physical health.
So I would say that's something that I have very clearly on my radar as of a few years ago.
When did the first domino fall in that regard?
In terms of, you mean, just general challenges personally?
well I was might as well dig into it so I was sexually abused by a babysitter's son from
two to four on a weekly basis I would say very clear memories of all of it and that will
shape you I mean that will definitely shape you and it can have a lot of effects it can
rob you of agency. It can certainly
make you or contribute to me
being hypervigilant. I'm very
slow to trust and
so on and so forth, right? Like that is a
formative experience at a formative time.
And
then later
had, I think, number one,
a genetic predisposition, if you just look at my family,
to major depressive disorder.
And
that showed up as
let's call it, on average, starting in early adolescence, like three to four multi-week or multi-month
depressive episodes per year. That is half of your lived time. And for people who may have
experienced something like this, I will say that there are tools at work. So now, never thought
it would be possible, but I would say now I have one depressive episode of a few weeks at most
every two to three years. Now, the juxtaposition between those two people is hard to
overstate. Those are two fundamentally different experiences of being human. And a lot of it
ties back to some of the levers I was talking about, right? Metabolic psychiatry, psychedelic
cystic therapy, bioelectric medicine, including accelerated TMS.
These things for certain people really work and can be durable.
They're not one and done.
Very few things are, but these are things that you can slowly chip away at and become familiar
with.
And instead of feeling like you're held captive by them, feel like you can mold the experience,
into something that is at least not disabling.
Sometimes you can make it enabling.
I remember a very good psychotherapist said to me,
maybe five years ago, six years ago,
take the pain and make it part of your medicine.
And it was basically like, all that stuff is horrible.
Nothing can excuse it.
Take that pain and make it part of what you offer the world.
And there was, I would say, the combination of that stage,
and also COVID, during which my girlfriend at the time, because she knew about my history,
very few, at that time, there were maybe two people in the world who knew about it.
Two long-term ex-girlfriends I'd been with for like five to six years each.
Parents didn't know.
Parents didn't know.
Really?
Yeah.
And I was sitting with her during COVID, just as it was getting fully ramped.
and I had always planned on writing a book about it
or like my healing journey after my parents passed away
because I didn't want them to blame themselves.
And my girlfriend at the time over a meal said something
that had a huge impact, which was,
have you ever thought about how many people are going to pass away
from natural causes or from COVID or anything else
before you ever have a chance to write this book?
Because you're probably not going to write that book
for 10, 15 years.
Think of all the people you could have helped that you didn't help.
And I was like, okay, maybe I should workshop it on a podcast, but keep in mind, none of my family knew.
And so I was very fortunate to have a very close friend who's based here in New York City,
Debbie Millman, Design Matters podcast, one of the longest running podcasts in the world,
wonderful human.
And she disclosed to me a number of years back for the first time in full fidelity.
extended childhood sexual abuse
and we talked about it
and I came clean with her
after that conversation with my girlfriend
and I asked her if she would be open
to having a conversation with me
that we could record
but as a conversation
because I knew I couldn't do it as a monologue
I just knew I couldn't do it
and I told her in advance
I said I have no idea if I'm ever going to share this
but I feel
compelled to at least record it
And so we did and ended up publishing that, I want to say, in September 2020, something like that.
And holy shit, I would say the most shocking thing about that to me.
I knew the statistics, right, but statistics are very impersonal.
Like these types of abuse, this type of sexual abuse is incredibly prevalent, not just involving young girls, but also involving a lot of young boys.
boys. I probably had a quarter to a third of my close, close friends reach out to me for the first time to talk to anyone and confess that they had had some type of similar experience. I mean, the percentages were staggering. That was really hard. I was willing to absorb it. I have a lot of capacity for absorbing that type of thing, but it was hard because I would get these tearful voice memos from guys who had never.
never told anyone, giving me graphic details of everything to happen. It's just gut-wrenching.
I remember walking up and down my driveway, just like tears running down my face. And like,
I don't cry much. That's not really a thing for me, but just the brutality of it. And then,
in retrospect, seeing so many things coalesce where I'm like, oh, that explains all of these
unanswered questions I had about that friend. And also for me,
looking back, again, hindsight being 2020, for a long time I had, let's just call it, to pick
a number out of thin air, it's like, okay, I have seven mental health, psycho-emotional challenges
I need to address.
And I was viewing those independent problems to address.
But when I was willing to reopen the door and look at the childhood abuse, everything
was tied to that.
And sometimes you just have to, you know, put on your gas mask and go into the cellar and
contend with that. And there's no one right way to do it. Psychiatry is still in the dark ages. It's
where surgery was 300 years ago. But still, there's certain things at work, often without knowing
the mechanism, seem to help a lot of people. So there are tools. I think internal family
systems created by Dick Schwartz is very interesting. The MDMA assisted psychotherapy, certainly for
PTSD, very interesting and generally well tolerated. Not right for everybody.
and then a number of the other things that I mentioned.
Family Constellation Therapy, also quite helpful for a lot of people.
But it's not insurmountable.
What I would not say is that some people, and I think that I would love to be able to do this,
but I just can't get there, who would say, like, I don't regret it, I'm glad it happened
because here's the silver lining, no.
Like if I could control Z and remove that stuff, 100% I would.
I mean, I did a lot of damage, but it gives me a credible voice when I am talking to people
who have had these experiences, and that is valuable.
Can you explain to me what you've learned about how you were two years old at the time?
Yeah.
Between the age of two and four, you said.
What is, I'm kind of asking about the mechanism here, what is happening in a two-to-four-year-old
child's brain that causes the damage?
presumably at two years old you don't understand what's happening you don't understand what this
individual this person who's older than you is doing and the context of it yeah so i'm i'm trying to
understand how what the mechanism of harm is to a to an innocent child who doesn't understand
understand the context of what's going on here yeah i i don't think anyone can really answer that
particularly well with high conviction but what what i'll say is that uh
I am blessed and cursed with a near photographic memory for some things.
So you have the original injury, the original insult.
But if you have, as I do, which is weird, but I can draw the floor plan of almost any
building, any restaurant I've ever been in, even once.
I don't know why that is, but I can do that.
Now, there are upsides to that.
There are a lot of downsides, too, in the case of abuse.
and as you have greater and greater ability to navigate the world and realize what has happened,
what is happening, what might happen, and you can re-contextualize high-fidelity memories,
well, then you realize that that thing that was very weird at the time was a lot more than just weird, right?
It was just straight exploitation and abuse.
So that's the best answer I think I can give to that question.
It's similar to what Dr. Lisa Feldman told me.
She was a neuroscientist who said,
she told me this story.
It's obviously an anecdote, so it's an end of one.
So obviously taken with caution.
But she told me the story of a young woman who was abused by her uncle.
and lived in normal life, everything was fine, slept well, then watched Oprah.
And Oprah had on there an array of women that were abused when they were younger,
and she re-contextualized what happened to her.
And from that day onwards, she had all the symptoms of someone who was abused.
She was at sleep disruption, health disruption, all these things.
Because she had suddenly, as you used that term, reconceptualized actually what had happened there.
Yeah.
It's made, you know, it's...
Yeah, I mean, look, I think people who have been...
abused are those who survive and do well afterwards in some way are become very good by force
by necessity at compartmentalizing and if you look at some of the very very top tier military
special forces units and so on the percentages of the percentages of
those guys who have been abused, very high. Now, why would that be an asset? Well, if you're in battle,
if you're in a chaotic environment where people are dying or a risk of dying, and you need to
act effectively and calmly in the most disruptive, unpredictable environment imaginable,
compartmentalizing is a superpower, right? Where you can basically
detach and take this observer status almost as if you're watching yourself doing, you
know, kill and capture raids or whatever it might be.
But when some of those folks come back to civilian life, the compartmentalization is a severe
handicap and disruptor in family life, right?
So that superpower becomes a super weakness.
And I think that that is true outside of the military for.
people who survive abuse. They may bury it completely, put it under lock and key subconsciously,
so they don't even have explicit recall of the event until perhaps there's some triggering catalyst
that brings it back up. They might just say, hey, look, that happened. It's terrible. No need to dwell
in the past. I want to move forward, which I think, frankly, is a viable strategy. I don't think everyone
needs to go, you know, put on their hazmat suit and unearth everything bad that has ever
happened to them. I don't think that is automatically productive or helpful can make people
really despondent because you can't fix the past, right? So I would say that in my case,
that compartmentalization was on some levels very enabling, right? Like I could outlast, out
endure a lot of people in sports, in work.
My pain tolerance was incredibly high, but there is a price to be paid when you cauterize
certain aspects of yourself and disallow certain types of emotions.
Like there are prices to be paid.
And I will say that I think the potential and promises of psychedelics by and large are
overstated. But in terms of bringing emotions back online, that was almost entirely due to
psychedelic experiences for me. Bringing emotions back online. Yeah. So I had cried in like 20 years.
Couldn't remember the last time I cried. And then I'd be like on a plan watching a really
compelling kind of heart-wrenching documentary and just start crying on the planet. I'm like,
what the fuck is going on here? What the fuck? And certain emotions just came back online.
And I think that once those were online, that is in part what then pulled along with it,
this revisiting of these high fidelity memories.
And then had a very rough period because of that and ultimately decided,
you know what, like this is the lead domino that has already been tipped over that has affected so many things.
I can continue to do patchwork
like remediation with band-aid solutions for various things
but I'm just
I'm plugging holes in the side of the boat
not asking why it's filling with water in the first place
and I just decided you know what I'm just going to take six months
and I know psychiatry is pretty messy
but priority number one
is to try to find some resolution with this
and that's what I did I canceled everything
because I was having basically like a nervous breakdown
and wasn't sure I would be able to sort of function
in a business capacity anyway.
So, yeah, quite the adventure, quite the misadventure.
But, you know, you play your hand the best you can.
So having a podcast, having the books, having a blog
has actually been incredibly therapeutic for me
in finding some way to extract value from those experiences.
And let me just mention this because I don't make anything from it.
If people are going through any experience like this
or if they've had a history of trauma,
you can just go to tim.blog slash trauma
and it's got the conversation with Debbie.
It's a hard conversation.
But it also has a list of resources
because what I used as a tool,
toolkit and what Debbie used are completely different. So you get two very different perspectives
on things. And I would say if I had to pick one other blog post in this case that I am
was the hardest to put out and also that I think I'm proudest of, it would be some practical
thoughts on suicide, as a post called some practical thoughts on suicide. And I know that has,
I know directly that has saved a few hundred lives, and it details my personal experience of
almost killing myself in college, coming very close. I had a date on the calendar. And the only
reason it didn't happen is because I lucked out. This is luck. So at the time, I was taking a year
off of college to work in a few different jobs and ended up being very isolated. Because
My whole class was graduating.
My roommates at the time had full-time jobs,
so I was just kind of stuck at home working on my senior thesis.
Not a good recipe for mental health.
And I reserved a book from the Princeton University Library about assisted suicide.
And the book was out, popular book, it would seem.
And back in the day, the way the system worked is they would mail you a physical postcard to your address that was at the
registrar's office. I had not updated my address to my off-campus apartment. So the card
that said, good news, your book on a suicide has arrived at Firestone Library, got mailed to my
parents. And that's what snapped me out of it, was realizing, oh, this isn't just about me. Now I
don't have the plausible deniability. I was going to make it look like an accident. It's like,
now I don't have it. That's been taken away. Retrospect, thank God. And so it didn't happen. But the reason
I wrote that post is because I was at an event. It's actually being interviewed by Jason Calcanus
on stage at this live this week in Startups event. A few hundred people in the audience and stuck
around afterwards and a bunch of people came up and wanted books signed and things like that.
And there was one really nice guy, well dressed, had himself put together, who asked me to sign
two books, one for himself, and then he asked me to sign a book for his brother. And I said,
what would you like me to say to your brother?
And he just kind of froze.
And I was like, huh, okay, well, I don't want this guy to feel stressed out.
I was like, I'll tell you what, we can figure it out or you can just leave it to me.
There's no rush.
Like, we can do this after the event.
All right, so took care of everybody else.
And then the guy walked me to the elevator and he explained.
He said, yeah, sorry about that.
I froze because my brother committed suicide.
And we kept his room exactly how it was.
And he was a huge fan of your writing.
and so I wanted to get a book signed by you
and put it in his room.
And he said,
have you ever thought about talking about mental health
because you could really help a lot of people?
A lot of people listen to you.
And unbeknownst to him,
I had all the history with coming this close
to killing myself.
And I sat with that and I was like, yeah, he's right.
He's really right.
I have a responsibility to write about it.
it. And that blog post took me
at least a month
to write and rewrite
and rewrite and have proofread
consider deleting.
Because that was also something that my family didn't
know about. I mean, they knew about the
book, but they didn't realize how
close it was. So
that was also another
wonderful
call with family to be like, so
there's this thing about to come out.
Should probably give you a heads
so you don't hear about it from everybody in the extended family.
But...
When your parents receive that thing in the post,
a slip, the library slip.
Yep.
Did they call you?
My mom called me with this very shaky voice being like,
what is, what is this?
Why did you reserve this book?
And I lied.
You know, I said, oh, well, I have a friend at Rutgers
and he was trying to get this book for a research project
and they didn't have it at their library,
so he asked me to get one through Firestone.
But I was just lying.
But I knew the jig was.
up right and that was that was the turnaround point and that was also because this was in 1999
where I just decided to go 100% into physical training and there's a lot of backstory behind it
people can read about it if they want on that post some practical thoughts about suicide but
this is not it is so fucking common it's very disturbing like when you realize it's disturbing
and reassuring. It's disturbing because you realize how prevalent it is and how close so many people have
come. It's reassuring because you realize also very quickly that you are not alone. You're not uniquely
flawed. This doesn't need to be personal and permanent. People have solved for this. Looking at my
audience over the last 10 years, every mental health complication or diagnosis that I can think of
is up into the right, just hockey stick. So chronic anxiety, treatment-resistant depression,
you name it, right? Obesity, loneliness, which can take many different forms, usually self-imposed.
and when I see a constellation of issues like that I try to identify if I can not just the symptoms
because then you end up putting band-aids on things that are interrelated but treating them
as silos but looking underneath it to see if there are root causes that we can address
so let me speak to that first so on the mental health side I'll just throw out a few things
that have been very, very helpful.
There are the behavioral questions,
and I would agree that at its simplest level,
you can just look at what we're evolved for.
Just take a close look at evolutionary biology.
Independence, Lone Wolf, is not in our programming.
It just is not.
So I would say when in doubt,
revert on some level to what people were doing
a few hundred years ago at the most recent.
right and that would be sort of assumption number one then i would say two people who are
suffering right now the social interaction analog human interaction i would just say is the is the
one target when hit that solves a multitude of other problems that otherwise you'll be playing
whack-a-mole with. But if there are then remaining problems with, say, chronic anxiety,
OCD, when we get into some slightly trickier terrain, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder,
et cetera, there are a few things that I have found in the course of doing a lot of work with
different scientists and also a lot of experimentation of myself, having grown up with
multiple long-duration depressive episodes every year and those are a short list of different types
of brain stimulation specifically something called accelerated TMS the before and afters that I've
seen with that are beyond incredible and equal or surpass in some cases the amplitude of effect
and the durability of effect of psychedelic assisted therapies accelerated TMS so transcranial
magnetic stimulation. And Nolan Williams, Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford is a good person to
look up for more on that. What exactly is that? Is that putting something on your head
and... There are different ways to do it depending on the hardware that you're using. But in effect,
accelerated TMS refers to a new protocol with better hardware and software of a technology, TMS that
has existed probably for 40 years, if not more, on some level. And
you will, instead of doing two or three sessions a week for many months, you do 10 sessions a day
for five days straight. So you are getting stimulated on the hour, every hour for about
eight minutes, and you do that for 10 hours straight. And then you compound that over five
days. And you see, for instance, to give one example, a friend's child, very terrifying story,
but he was a cutter, this 14-year-old. Self-harm me. Yeah. And the parents were just waiting
for the call that their child had committed suicide. And this went on for two or three years,
I want to say, and then within three days of accelerated TMS treatment, it was like
reversion back to old self.
And then with boosters every, say, three to six months, that has been durable.
It's the before and after is impossible to overstayed.
It's pretty wild.
What are they doing to the brain?
Is it electrodes or is it music or is it?
It's magnets.
Magnets.
Yeah.
And what it feels like is someone kind of like flicking the side of your head.
head is sort of the sensation it is from a safety profile perspective really compelling like the
downside risk is very very minimal and me with the most recent sessions that I've done myself
I had probably four to five months of no anxiety like all of that stuff vanished as if by
magic wand and I felt like I'd been meditating twice a day for a year I mean it was it was
incomprehensible. It was really, really remarkable. And there's good clinical evidence for this. It's
not just end of one anecdote. So that's one is the kind of neurostim piece. And there's a lot more
that's going to happen in that space. But bioelectric medicine, that would be one big lever that I think
is worth investigating if people are suffering with any number of different conditions. Then you have
metabolic psychiatry, primarily that would be dietary intervention. Chris Palmer at Harvard is
someone who's popularized this in the last handful of years. Metabolic psychiatry, specifically
putting people on a ketogenic diet, you have folks who have been treated with 15 different
medications for schizophrenia for a decade who get off all of their medications within three to six
months and stay off simply by stabilizing a handful of things in the brain.
including adding a very beautiful, clean energy source, which is ketones.
There are also a lot of possible applications of the ketogenic diet
or modified ketogenic diets, exogenous ketones, meaning supplemental ketones,
for neurodegenerative disease.
So I have three relatives right now who have Alzheimer's,
and genetically I'm very predisposed.
So I'm thinking a lot about this also from a preventative perspective.
So can I potentially bolster mitochondrial health, cellular cleanup, reduction of plaque buildup, et cetera, by doing strict ketosis for a month a year, fasting for a week, perhaps, once a year, water only?
I think there's actually pretty compelling evidence that those are all worthwhile interventions to consider if you're very highly predisposed as I am.
And then I would say the last one I'll mention now, the psychedelic-assisted therapies for various conditions.
I do think that psychedelics, and this is to quote, a very famous psychotherapist named Stanislav Groff, Stan Groff,
what the telescope did for astronomy, what the microscope did for biology, psychedelics will do for the mind.
I don't think that's an overstatement.
Because a lot of the clinical outcomes that we're seeing with treatment-resistant PTSD, people who've had an average diagnosis duration,
of like 14 to 17 years.
Nothing succeeded.
They do two to three sessions, and then you see like a 50-plus percent complete remission
of PTSD.
What is going on there?
I think in a very productive way, leading us to question some of the very fundamental
assumptions that are made in the world of psychiatry, particularly with pharmaceutical
interactions or pharmaceutical prescriptions.
And that's really exciting to me, because I think there is an argument to me made that
you can address certain root causes.
And there are different explanations for this.
Gould Dolan, who's now at UC Berkeley, she was at Johns Hopkins, talks about the
reopening of critical periods for development.
So you could potentially use psychedelics for stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor
control.
So I would say that those are broadly kind of the three pillars.
There's one other than I'm digging into that I think could end up being very, very
very interesting overall. This is one that is sort of TBD personally. I am experimenting with
it, but vagus nerve stimulation, there is a sea of bullshit floating around related to
Vegas nerve stimulation. The vast majority of what you'll bump into is pseudoscientific nonsense.
So if I'd never heard about Vegas nerve stimulation before, how would you...
Yeah, I can explain it. All right, so the Vegas nerve is a bit of a misnomer. Because there are
actually two bundles of nerves that travel down from around your brainstem down either side.
of the neck, kind of where you would feel your pulse. It's right alongside the carotid artery.
And you can think of them as almost transatlantic cables. So you don't have, you have two
primary Vegas nerves, but there are about 100,000 fibers in each of them. And we only know
what a tiny fraction of those do. They then travel down and they innervate and touch pretty
much everything you can imagine, including your gut. And there's some very, very interesting.
interesting communication between the gut microbiome and the brain vis-a-vis the vagus nerve.
It's wild.
And the most credible voice that I've found in the world of Vegas nerve stimulation or VNS, for short,
science is a guy named Dr. Brian Tracy, T-R-A-C-E-Y.
He wrote a book called The Great Nerve, which is a very good introductory read on all this.
one of the most heavily cited scientists
of the last 30 years. He's incredibly incredible.
And he co-founded a company, I want to say at least 10 years ago or 11 years ago.
It was involved at least as a primary scientific advisor for an implant.
The implant is about the size of an omega-3 official capsule.
Gets implanted right in the neck.
So surgical procedure, but pretty minor.
And that has just been approved.
It was the cover of the New York Times
was a few weeks ago
for rheumatoid arthritis.
And the before and after
that you see in some of these conditions,
again, is something straight out of science fiction.
You see someone who's been
mostly bedridden, chronic fatigue,
can't hold a job,
struggling to interact with their kids,
has this procedure,
and then like two weeks later
they're running up a flight of stairs
to catch a train on a trip to Europe
and have the problem of too much energy.
It seems to have broad
potential application to autoimmune conditions. So you might think of, say, a Crohn's disease or
IBS. It seems to have applications to significantly enhancing HRV, heart rate variability.
So I have a friend who, for the longest time, he's former Tier 1 operator, military. He's got a lot
of sympathetic overdrive, so he had trouble sleeping. And he tried all sorts of sophisticated
breathing programs, which can help. He tried cold exposure, which can help. But those were all
incremental gains on his HRV, maybe improved 10 to 15 percent, lots of meditation twice a day,
10 to 15 percent. Used Vegas nerve stimulation for somewhere between two and four weeks,
tripled his HRV. What? Yeah, tripled. How did he stimulate his Vegas nerve?
This is where we get into some controversial territory. All right. So the device,
he used is
it is a device
it's called gamma core
it's by prescription it is
applied to the neck it
provides
electrical stimulation
for
two minutes at a time I believe it's very
very minimal
two minutes twice a day I want to say
maybe it's five minutes twice a day
and that seems to have
just a downstream
collection of benefits or
potential benefits, most of the research for Gamacore is for, I believe, migraines and
or cluster headaches in terms of published literature. Or option B, which has a lot more in
terms of published studies, would be auricular, so ear stimulation. And that's stimulating something
called the Simba Conscia right here, this very particular location. And so you apply
stimulation to the ear. I'm experimenting with both the ear and also the neck. I would say
vagus nerve stimulation has top of mind access right now for me in terms of interest.
I bought this Bond Charge face mask, this light panel for my girlfriend for Christmas. And this was
my first introduction into Bond Charge. And since then, I've used their products so often. So when they
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it was just an idea. And it started with me, a cheap plug-in microphone, and
my Mac right here. And I have to say, when I first had the idea for the Diary of a CEO, my thinking was
that the world might want to see into the diaries of some of the most interesting, successful,
people really in high places that were doing interesting things. So, and after recording that
first episode under my duvet, I sat on my Mac, which is from our sponsor, Apple, and spent
hours editing, and eventually uploaded it. And honestly, I thought that would probably be it.
But a couple of my friends said they enjoyed it, so I kept on recording. And over time,
the microphone has changed and we now have this incredible setup here.
But the thing that has stayed the same is I'm still using the Mac.
Even today, my entire team across our studio still uses the Mac.
Our first few episodes maybe had tens of people listening,
but now tens of millions of people tune in all over the world,
which is still absolutely crazy to me.
So if there is an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder,
this is your sign to start.
Your great ideas start on Mac.
And you can find out more at Apple.com slash Mac.
because of what you do and because of the way that you are
in terms of your broad curiosity
and the way that you think and the way that you learn,
I have to ask you the question.
What is it that you see coming down the pipe,
like coming down the line in terms of macro trends?
It's probably makes sense for a statistic with health for a second.
You've talked about Vegas.
Is there anything else that you think 10 years from now
everybody's going to be doing,
but they're not currently doing or thinking about?
One of them are throughout there
is something I've been thinking about as air quality.
I think I see a rise in people's concern about CO2 levels and also outside air quality.
So I imagine I'll be wearing some kind of device when my iPhone will be telling me about the air quality in the room or outside.
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me.
I think bioelectric medicine is a big category.
So whether it's accelerated TMS or focused ultrasound, where you might take something that looks like a hockey puck and put it over your liver, for instance, or spleen.
to affect various things, using microchips over pills, I think, is going to be a huge growth area
and that we'll realize more and more how much is dependent on the immune reflex
and different types of communication mediated by electricity that can be affected by external
or internal devices like an implant.
So, for instance, I'll give you a wild factoid, which is people may have heard the story, which is based on real science, where you transplant the microbiome from, say, obese mice into lean mice, and those lean mice then become obese.
Just by transplanting the gut microbiome, if you sever the vagus nerve before you do the transplant, that doesn't happen.
They don't become obese.
so what's happening there it would seem that the microbiome is communicating with the brain vis-a-vis the vagus nerve
and when you sever something experimentally in that way or ablated or whatever oftentimes this might
seem paradoxical but you can achieve similar effects with stimulation that you can with severing
And I think many of the assumptions that we have currently, which form the bedrock of our quote-unquote understanding of mental illness and so on, are just going to be completely false.
They're going to be completely untenable within 10 years.
A lot of that, I think, is going to be driven by a better understanding of the body electric.
It will be driven by better understanding of how features.
utilization and the brain drives many different psychiatric conditions that can be mitigated
or completely addressed by, say, providing an alternate fuel source instead of glucose ketones,
right?
That would be just kind of a simple example, but there's a huge compliance issue with the ketogenic
diet, right?
People don't want to do it for a lot of good reasons.
So how do you get people to stick with it?
Well, maybe there are other options for achieving ketogenic-like effects
such as systemic anti-inflammation
with the use of electricity
instead of diet, right?
I think that's possible
and I've invested in a few companies
that are aiming to do that,
which is very exciting
because it means that you might have
options for affecting brain function
that do not require you to take molecules
that get into your brain directly.
That's really exciting.
So, bioelectric medicine, I think,
is going to be a very exciting space
to watch. And there are a lot of researchers doing some wild stuff with bioelectric medicine.
So we'll see where it goes. Where are you today in terms of your what's guiding you at the
moment in this season of your life? What are your big goals? Are you aspiring towards anything
in particular? It's relationships. It's looking forward to the next big chapter for me,
which would almost certainly, not almost,
certainly be partner, family, all of that.
I mean, another startup's not going to make any difference to my life.
You know, another podcast.
I love all of those things.
I love startups.
I love the podcast.
I love the books.
But we're at the squeezing out of marginal gains at this point.
Are you married?
I'm not married.
Don't have any kids that I'm aware of.
But dating a lovely woman right now, very excited about it.
Do you think it's quite strange that a lot of podcasters don't seem to be, like, I'm not married.
Yeah.
And I don't have any kids yet.
Yeah.
I've just turned 33.
But so many of the big podcasters don't seem to have kids or be married other than really Rogan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Someone tweeted about the other day.
I was like, oh, fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I think that I'm not pointing fingers at you, but I know quite a few of these.
guys, if we're talking about guys, I mean, I know a bunch of female podcasters as well, quite a few of
which are married. But on the male side, I will say, you know, if you're a good looking guy
and you're putting videos on YouTube, your DM inbound and your plethora of temptation that
you need to resist is going to make remaining single very attractive. And that's true.
for a lot of these guys.
So I don't think there's a mystery to be solved.
In other words, it's like if they go on the dating apps,
it's just like shooting fish in a barrel.
And I don't think ultimately that the dating apps,
despite what they might say,
are designed to be deleted.
I do not believe that.
They're casinos intended to keep you in the casino.
Yeah.
It's just follow the money.
Follow the subscription plans.
Well, you talk about the paradox of choice.
Yeah.
And so there are times, and I think this is probably misplaced envy, where I'm like, you know, maybe there was something to arrange marriages, you know?
And this whole idea of like soulmate, romantic love driving everything is a relatively new invention on the scale of human history.
Now, would I want someone deciding who I marry and have kids with?
Not particularly, but there is a certain simplicity to it that I find.
enviable when you end up in the modern digital casinos of dating apps where yes that person
was an eight out of ten but man that nine or ten is just right around the corner I know it's
just a few thousand swipes away and and you get the variable reward at least if you're like a
healthy sexually vigorous male I'm sure for women as well I just think that men tend to think
with their smaller head a lot more often,
you're going to get these incredible dopamine hits
of variable reward.
It's just like dog training,
but you're training yourself with the dating app
to continue using the dating app
by getting these Scooby snacks
in terms of, you know,
fill in the blank with your imagination.
I don't meet all.
I have not met a single person
who is like, I love dating apps.
No one.
I have not met a single person.
And yet,
Right? What does the crack addict want? More crack. And they might say I just need one more hit. That's not how it works.
So there is, I think, a lot to be said for applying positive constraints, right?
I'm scared to be single again. I just the way I look out at the current mechanism of finding someone these dating apps and I just think. And also, I do understand it would be a significant distraction from whatever I'm doing here.
Oh, for sure. Can you imagine me being in New York City tonight single and like, uh,
and having the evening off
and what would go through my head
and then you'd have to go on a date with someone
you've got to do all the small talk stuff
I got out the game before the game
like began. Yeah. Like seven years ago
I saw this tweet
from this I think it was a
Vietnamese woman who said
I wonder if it wasn't Gen X
it was like I wonder if
X, Y and Z people
of this generation are looking at dating
apps and thinking wow we got the last
chopper out of NAM
literally and oh my god that's not far from the truth uh paradox choice is a real problem
people think it's a quality problem of abundance i'm not convinced that that's true way it's not
i have so many clothes my friends that struggle with dating the most date the most yeah sure
i've got two or three friends that i can think of i won't name them but two of them are women and
one of them's a guy they do 50 between 50 and 100 dates a year yeah and they're just convinced that
it's through lack of, lack of option. And I just, it's impossible. But, you know. Yeah, I'm
very happy to be off of the dating apps. I was on the dating apps for two or three years.
It is a part-time slash full-time job. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last
guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And you're,
you know, the person who wrote your question sat there, I kid you not for 30 minutes in total silence
thinking about these
eight words
they sat there for thought
I've never seen anything like it
and the eight words that they wrote
oh man
I know right
that's nine words
what is your favorite color today
can you imagine
yeah
what's your favorite sandwich
no I'm joking
how would you spend
your final day on earth
with my closest friends and family
no doubt
it wouldn't be pizza it wouldn't be i mean maybe it involves pizza but it would be telling the people
i love that i love them and spending time with them doesn't need to be anything fancy you could be
sitting on a porch on a rocking chair and that might seem like a trite answer but i am putting that
into practice every year with periods of time that are blocked out for this so i'm not waiting until
my last day but last day certainly wouldn't be dating apps
wouldn't be an opium bender, it would be time with my absolute closest friends and family.
And I'll add an elaboration on the past year review when I'm looking at relationships.
Before investing in new relationships, I look at my top, say, five to ten relationships and ask myself,
did I spend the amount of time I would want to spend with these people last year?
And if the answer is no, I always reinvest.
in those people and only the overflow gets allocated to new relationships. I really focus on
the tried and true, proven relationships with deep levels of trust over long periods of time.
In terms of systems, have you put a system in place to make sure that life doesn't get in the
way of those people coming together? Yeah. I mean, for 25 plus years, I've had a annual
reunion around my birthday every year in the summer where all of my, or those who can make it,
but incredibly old friends show up. They know it's on the calendar. It's roughly the same date
every year. And they fly in from all over the country, all over the world. And it has nothing to do
with my birthday. It's just a reunion of friends. Tim, thank you. Thank you for several reasons.
I think the first reason is you're one of the, I said to you before, one of the founding fathers of what
we do here. And if it wasn't for people like yourself and Joe, there is a zero percent chance,
I think, that people like me would be doing what we do now. And that's given us so much. There's
really, really like a very extremely low chance that if people like you hadn't taken the risk
and created a blueprint and shown that it was like an effective medium and the long form was
interesting and everything that you guys proved, there's no chance that people like with me would
exist. And so whenever I meet people like you that I consider to be standing on the shoulders of,
on or have stolen a blueprint on,
I feel like I am obliged to say thank you.
Thanks for saying that.
But it's true, it's true.
And I was inspired also by people who preceded me, right,
when I did the launch for the 4-Hour Chef in 2012
with going on Joe Rogan and Mark Marin and nerdist and so on.
Like those guys also showed me that something interesting was afoot.
So you're 33, you said?
33.
Yeah, you got a lot of runway, man.
You're in a good position.
Let's see what happens.
I'll add one last thing that I neglected to mention earlier, but in terms of productivity, and we're talking about weekly architecture, I think everyone should put as a challenge for themselves, particularly if they're an entrepreneur, a four-week mini retirement once a year, or you are unavailable. You are off the grid. No laptop, no phone outside of maybe Uber and Google Maps.
an open table, where you are literally completely unavailable.
And the reason I recommend that, there are a few.
Number one, it's going to allow you to play the long game at high intensity,
having that deloading phase.
The second is it will force you to improve all of your policies, rules,
guidelines for autonomous decision-making by employees, et cetera, et cetera.
It will force you to clarify all of that on a regular basis.
So when you come back, all of those systems improvements will endure beyond the mini-retirement, but it's a forcing function.
It also forces you to take a very close look at the non-business interests that you have either maintained or cultivated or let atrophy in complete disuse.
And if you end up having a slight panic attack because you don't know what to do with your time, that's a great wake-up call.
you need some other things to offset
the type A maniacal focus
on chasing that rabbit around the greyhound track.
Amen.
Thank you, Tim.
Thanks, man.
Thank you so much.
If there's anything we need, it is connection,
especially in the world we're living in today.
And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards.
Because on this show, when I sit here with my guest
and have those deep, intimate conversations,
this remarkable thing happens time and time again.
We feel deeply connected to each other.
At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing
leaves a question for the next guest,
and we've turned them into these conversation cards.
And we've added these twist cards
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And there are so many more twists along the way
with the conversation cards.
This is the brand new edition.
And for the first time ever,
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But I'm only putting the gold cards in,
the first run of conversation cards.
So get yours now before the limited edition
gold cards are all gone.
Head to the link in the description below.
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