The Rich Roll Podcast - Tim Ferriss Is Changing His Mind: Mental Health, Psychedelics, & Transcending Productivity

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

A relentless experimenter and master of productivity, Tim Ferriss is the mega-best-selling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors. He’s also the host of the wildly popular Tim Ferriss Show—where he deconstructs the tools, mindsets, and practices of world-class performers across business, sports, and more. While Tim is known and revered for his wisdom regarding optimization and productivity, it’s his arc as a human that impresses me the most. He’s been through a lot. He’s grown considerably. And he’s shared his personal and professional struggles with a laudable degree of courage and vulnerability. Today’s exchange centers on Tim’s inward journey. How he grapples with anxiety and depression. The ways he learned to face difficult emotions. And the various modalities he has explored from silent meditation and psychotherapy to psychedelics. I hope you find this conversation helpful, and that it reframes how you think about, manage, confront, and heal your own emotional wounds. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Roka: ROKA.com/RICHROLL AG1: DrinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Express VPN: ExpressVPN.com/RICHROLL Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. Once you have some of the success, make some of the money, once you have the relationship you thought you needed, once you have some of those things and you realize, wait a minute, my movie is still the same in my head. Today, I'm very excited to welcome back Tim Ferriss, mega bestselling author of an impressive collection of books. I'm sure many of you have read Tim Ferriss, by the way, two R's, two S's. The king of self-optimization. New York Times bestselling author of three books. So that's three times, number one times, New York Times bestselling author. three books. So that's three times number one times New York Times bestselling author of 12 times. Nonetheless, right now I don't call myself a writer.

Although Tim is widely known and revered for his wisdom and his advice regarding productivity, it's really his arc as a human that interests and impresses me the most. It's an ongoing process, but don't believe everything you think. We discuss mental health, anxiety, depression, as well as the various modalities that Tim himself has explored from meditation and therapy to a rather extended and also grounded discussion about psychedelics. There are circumstances in which these things can have profound therapeutic effects. We also discuss the ways and the whys behind how he is using his very large platform

to help others who may be going through similar struggles. Plus, we talk about and discuss the current state of podcasting and many other topics. And it's all coming up quick, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place

and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage,

location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had

that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level

of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction

yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay. A bit of forewarning before we dive in, however, suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation is a topic that comes up.

So if you find that subject a bit too confronting, perhaps skip this episode. And for anyone who is suffering, who finds themselves right now in the acute grips, I wanna say that help is available. Please don't keep it to yourself. Please reach out. And towards that end,

a list of resources can be found in the show notes to the episode at richroll.com. So check that out. In any event, let's get into it. I have so much respect for Tim, tremendous respect for him. It was an honor to have him back. And I guess because we all struggle, all of us, I think you'll find this conversation

and how you think about, manage, confront, and heal your own emotional wounds to be a conversation both helpful and instructive as well as powerful. Hey, Tim. Hey, Tim. Hey, Rich. Thank you for doing this. I've been looking forward to this for a while.

The first time you did the podcast, which I believe was December, 2017. A lot has happened since then. A lot has happened. I would say that you are in a very different state than you are today. And I think it would be instructive to kind of pick things up where we left off

because when you arrived at my house, if memory serves me, you had just returned from a very intense, silent Vipassana retreat. And it was clear that you were trying to make sense of all of it in real time. You've been on a very interesting mental health journey for yourself, and you've been quite transparent

about that journey on your podcast. And in particular, demonstrated quite a bit, what I would say, courage and vulnerability and kind of sharing your experience with childhood trauma and your path to healing. I'm just curious, I think, for people that are listening or watching who maybe aren't hip to some of the podcasts

that you've done around this, it would be helpful to kind of paint that picture. Yeah, totally. So life, I don't wanna say defined, but characterized in part by major depressive episodes for as long as I can remember. And this is to the best of my knowledge, largely congenital, this is code.

So it's based on my genetics predictable, or at least the inclination is predictable. So if I do any type of analysis, that comes up among other things. Predisposition to depressive disorders, bipolar disorder, et cetera. And that has always been a huge challenge that has led to many of the different modalities,

different types of therapy, et cetera, that I've explored, especially in the last 15 years. The Vipassana retreat that you mentioned, which was a silent meditation retreat, my first extended silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock in Northern California, precipitated more dramatic action on my part in many respects. And I'll try to keep it simple. We can dive into any aspect of it that you would like, but the Cliff Notes version is, I went into this, I think underestimating just how powerful

and challenging such an experience could be. I had a long standing meditation practice, but these are 20 minutes sessions once or twice a day, not whatever it is, six to eight, six to 10 hours a day. And I decided with very poor judgment to try to intensify it as much as humanly possible, because I thought it might be the last time that I could spend time with Jack Kornfield in person

who was leading the event or co-leading the event. So I fasted for six days going into it and did a whole host of other things that led it to be much more high RPMs. Right, because just going into a silent meditation retreat on its own is not intense enough. So let's enhance this with five days of fasting.

And then on top of that. On top of that, I began at the beginning microdosing with psilocybin and then gradually stair-stepping my way to higher doses. Still what we would consider sub-therapeutic dosing, but nonetheless, these are all compounding. I would not recommend anyone do this as a side note. The conclusion is I went into a full tailspin

and that was the experience of having this childhood trauma, which was childhood sexual abuse from two to four at the hands of a babysitter's son replaying 24 seven. And when I say 24 seven, I mean every waking moment. This was a movie on loop. And was that a memory that previously you had not been able to access or that you were aware of, but had repressed on some level?

I only really became very clearly re-aware of this a few years prior, I would say. And I might be mixing up the timeline a little bit, but clearly had been something. And I might be mixing up the timeline a little bit, but clearly had been something. And I do think we want to be careful with the topic of repressed memory because our realities and memory are in the present tense, somewhat constructed. So we can fool ourselves. You have to be very careful with these things. But in my case, there were just, there were details that I could corroborate

and it became patently clear to me that this had happened and that I had locked it away in some supposedly safe compartment to not have it interfere with my life. And I had had this realization, let's say, in other types of therapy, specifically using psychedelic compounds. We can come back to that.

There are many caveats and warnings related to all of those things, but I'd had the realization and I was like, oh, that did happen. That's terrible. And I don't think, if I've made it this long without unpacking that and spending a lot of time in the deep end, I don't think I need to do that now.

And so I was like, yes, I'm aware. And I'm going to leave that to the side. In the meditation retreat, it became clear to me because I was deathly afraid that I wouldn't be able to function after the retreat. And I think without Jack's intervention, I set a time to speak with him because you're not speaking to folks generally, but set a time to speak with him. And I said, Jack, in effect, I was like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to navigate

life after this retreat because this is what's happening right now. And Jack, for those people who don't know, has written a million books, very skilled. It doesn't even really do him justice to say meditation practitioner and teacher. He's also a clinical psychologist, has done a lot of work with veterans, with, say, adolescent cutters, with all sorts of different demographics and psychographics. He has an incredibly powerful and eclectic toolkit. If he had not been there, I really shudder to think what that could have led to. And I decided to put everything on pause. I was like, okay, I don't know what fixing this or addressing it or coming to peace with it even looks like, but right now this is so front of mind that is blocking out everything else.

And I should just do what I do best, which is going whole hog into trying to at least examine this and see what happens. So that led to meeting with many different therapists, trying many different modalities, and also talking about it publicly for the first time. I see it as, like I use the word catalyst previously. It was this catalyst for this journey that you've been on.

And in many ways it's a journey from the head to the heart. Like you're somebody who I think spends a lot of time intellectualizing things, analyzing them, deconstructing them, right? And there is an aspect of that that is applicable and beneficial in the kind of healing journey. But there's another piece that has to do

with letting go of all of that and engaging with a different type of intelligence. I would imagine for you, that was sort of new and kind of confusing maybe. I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but talk a little bit about like- I'll take confusing. I think that's a fair word to use.

I would say one way to think about it would be going from head to heart. Another way to think about it, which might be useful for framing my experience would be from going from thinking to thinking and feeling, if that makes sense. And looking at things in the rear view mirror, I mean, we are doing our best to guess at causality.

It's hard to say that A caused B or A caused all of these things. Although I will say once I began looking at the childhood abuse, clearly the 17 disparate problems that I've been trying to address in my life, in a sense I found relievingly addressable. So it was like, oh,

these are all unrelated independent problems. Most of these are probably related to this big elephant in the room. Right, so give an example of that. Talk a little bit more about that. I would say, well, let me, I will talk about that. Give a simple example. If you've shut off certain types of feeling,

which I had done, if you've learned to view emotion as a liability, and when you feel any inkling of certain emotions, you then have a harsh inner critic to shut those things down. I think for someone like me, who's comfortable operating in spreadsheets and dividing and conquering and deconstructing,

like you said, it's like, okay, well, let's separate these things out. It's not one big amorphous problem. Here are these 17 different problems. And then how am I going to address the first? Let me rank order these and figure out which are the most negative in terms of amplitude of impact in my life.

Okay, but that, that, that, that, that, that. And that's one approach. But if those are symptoms that are presenting from a problem that is underlying all of those things, you're just gonna be playing whack-a-mole. It's not gonna be curative in any way. And so fundamentally, I think my, not just healing journey,

but journey of becoming hopefully more wholly human, experiencing more of what life has to offer, which is good and bad, or it includes the good and the bad, let's just say the positive and the negative, the happy and the sad, is bringing on line sensitivities that I took offline as a kid.

I think that would be one of the preps, crux moves with respect to looking forward instead of just backwards. Like, okay, what I've done up to this point, what got me here has worked on a whole lot of levels. And that's great. So if you want to build a podcast, if you want to write and launch books, If you wanna build a podcast, if you wanna write and launch books, if you want to do any number of things, invest. This toolkit to date worked pretty well.

There are side effects. There's some collateral damage along the way. But realizing, I suppose, a few things. Number one is that, and this might be helpful for folks out there, I don't know. The thinking toolkit, right? So this hyper-analytical thinking toolkit, it's not a bad thing, but it can be a hammer looking for nails.

Furthermore, what I didn't want to do is throw that away or discard it or lose a grasp on that and become a hand wavy hyper woo woo, I feel everything and I'm gonna trauma vomit on you within the first 15 minutes of visiting you. Your worst nightmare. Which is quite a thing down here in SoCal. I gotta tell you, goodness gracious.

But we won't go there. I'll just say, I felt very uncomfortable with putting on that hat as my primary hat. But if instead I looked at it as, all right, I have this very analytical way of approaching things. That's like having a comfortable hoodie or a jacket. I can take it off, put it in the closet. I can always go in and pick it back up and put it back on if I want. But now I'm'm gonna experiment with trying on different jackets and see what that experience is like.

So I would say that has defined a lot of what I've tried to focus on in the last however many years it's been. It feels like a hundred years, honestly, from 2017 to now. I mean, it feels like more time has passed between 2017 and now than when I was a kid in 2017. Yeah.

You look lighter, you look happier, you look more comfortable in your own skin. Thank you. I thought you were gonna say you look a lot older. No, you don't. You don't look older at all. You mentioned that idea of, you know, the 17 problems actually only being one.

And that's kind of like a core fundamental thing about really understanding trauma and the way that it operates in terms of behavior over time, right? You think you have, like, I do this and I do that. I have all these problems. It's just one thing. Like if you can get to the core of what that one thing is,

start to understand it and heal that thing, then miraculously all these other patterns don't show up or show up less frequently or with less intensity than they would otherwise. I mean, that's something I learned from Paul Conti that's been super helpful. And then just kind of reflecting on, you know, the little that I know about you

and what this experience has been like. I think you know pretty good about me. Well, what you share publicly, like we haven't spent that much time together off the mic, but hopefully more. But I gather that in certain respects, we're very different people. The facts of our kind of experiences are different.

We live our lives in different ways. And we've kind of explored different modalities in order to kind of make sense of the world in different ways. And we've kind of explored different modalities in order to kind of make sense of the world in different ways. But when I hear you share your internal monologue, or when you kind of relate, you know, the emotional experience of where you were and kind of what you went through and kind of where you're at now, the overlay between like my experience and your experience is it's not exact, but there's a huge overlap. Like I relate to your journey in so many ways,

even though kind of the things that I was doing and do now and whatever may look different. And then here we are together today, we kind of do the same thing in the world a little bit differently. And we get to have this conversation about those experiences and then share them with broad audiences.

And I think that's really a gift. And my sense is that this has kind of enhanced your sense of purpose and given you a deeper meaning in the work that you do. It definitely has given me a second wind in a sense or a forcing focusing function with a lot of what I've done in the last handful of years. It's crazy to think that it's only been five or six years

since then. I'm still stuck on that a bit because it just feels like it's been so long. Not in a negative way. It brings up separate questions we probably don't want to get into about time dilation and our experience of time and things like that.

And you can live longer just by changing your experience of your day-to-day life, which I think is a non-trivial thing. I'm not going to take us too far down that side alley, but if you bring more of your faculties and sensitivities back online, or if you simply develop those things, your perception of time broadens,

which is kind of interesting. It's like, if you're doing a lot of things physically to extend your lifespan, you might wanna think about the experiential side as well. So that's footnote for me to reflect on later. Yes, it's given me a lot of focus. And it's also raised a lot of questions that I have wanted to explore publicly in the sense that my inclination previously with all the various books,

for our work week, for our body, for our chef, whatever it might be. I'm doing years of research, taking years of notes, interviewing dozens of experts, and then come to my conclusions. And I say, here are my conclusions. Here's the index card. Although my index cards tend to be 600 pages long, but putting that aside, here's the index card. and the struggles and some of the confusion and the dead ends so that people not only end up, hopefully with something they can use in the end, but they don't feel as alone in the struggle.

Yeah, sure. And there's something about listening to somebody talk about it in real time. It's a very different relationship to words on a page. They both have their benefits of course, but there's a connectivity like to hear somebody's voice and to be able to emotionally relate to that or connect to it, I think establishes like a bond

with whatever is being shared that can be more meaningful. Right, I think, you know, the emotion comes through, the honesty, the vulnerability is really powerful. And, you know, we had launched just before coming over to do this. And I was talking about having our mutual friend, Peter Atiyah on the podcast and exploring similar terrain with him and, you know,

how powerful that podcast ended up being because of his willingness to talk about uncomfortable things. And we have that fear of being vulnerable as if it's going to kill us, or we're gonna die if we share this certain thing. And it ends up being this really powerful balm to so many people who suffer in silence and feel like they are alone,

or there is no hope, there is no solution and, or they're not, they can't indulge in that sort of solution. And for you, as somebody who kind of tiptoed back from the precipice of suicide and went through what you did to come out the other side and say, here's what worked, here's what I did, here's what didn't work, here's how I feel, With that level of like honesty really opens up a gateway for other people to explore things

that they wouldn't do otherwise. And it's different from a book. You can read a book, but it's not gonna have that kind of punch, you know, that the voice is able to kind of create. What a thing, the voice language, and it can make you feel more connected and less alone in a way that the written word struggles to, I think.

And I would like to mention, and we don't need to spend a lot of time on it, but if people are really having a hard time, two things. The first is, of course, if you're suffering from suicidal ideation, please call a suicide hotline. I also wrote a blog post called Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide about this chapter in my life in college that resonated with a lot of people. So if you just search my name and suicide, chances are that'll be the first result. But if you're in acute need, please call a suicide hotline

and we can put some of that in the show notes. The second is with respect to trauma and sexual abuse specifically, I was initially planning on exploring, perhaps discussing that and that history of mine in a book. And my girlfriend at the time made the point to me over dinner. At one point, she said, you realize by the time you write a book, a lot of people who could benefit will have

either passed away or killed themselves or become unreachable. And that's how I decided to do a podcast episode with Debbie Millman specifically. Debbie, incredible designer, incredible teacher, also has a childhood history of sexual abuse. And she and I had different experiences and approached then trying to address them in effectively completely different ways. And so we had a conversation about this and our respective journeys,

the hope being that people could pick and choose and hear from two people who have made progress using very, very different approaches. Yeah, I would highly recommend everybody who's listening or watching this to please check that out. I'll link it up in the show notes. It's incredibly powerful. And not only for the conversation that you have

and the different perspectives that you bring to this, but also all of the resources that you guys kind of canvas over the course of that conversation. And you've kind of put together this super comprehensive list of links and show notes that you can find on your blog that corresponds with that episode. Yeah, I think it's just tim. links and show notes that you can find on your blog that corresponds with that episode.

Yeah, I think it's just tim.blogs slash trauma. People can search for it. I've done two episodes with Debbie. The first episode, I don't think she'd ever spoken about it publicly. I asked her why in the interviews I'd read, I'd never seen anything about her childhood. And she took this deep breath.

And then we spent the rest of the time talking about her abuse, which I and most people had never heard about. And that is why I then felt funny how karma works or just coincidence. The fact that she had had the courage to do that, then opened the door for me after that Vipassana retreat to reach back out to her to ask for help.

And that's how we ended up having that conversation. I don't know if you remember this, but after you did the podcast at my house, that same night, I believe you did an event where you interviewed Terry Crews. I think that was the same night, right? Who also has an analogous story in the same kind of universe of this terrain, right?

So looking like through the rear view mirror, like this, you do the retreat, you come, we kind of dance around the corners of what was going on when you came to my house and then you go talk to Terry Crews and you've got Debbie Millman, like all these people are showing up and lining up. The message, the consistent message is like,

it's okay to talk about this stuff, it's powerful. It's gonna be okay. I almost canceled that book launch because I came out of this retreat and the book launch was coming up, I don't know, a month later and I just thought to myself, of all the things in the world that I do not wanna do right now,

book launch has gotta be very high on that list. And I made a commitment to myself. I don't know if I've talked about this publicly, which was the only way this is going to be something I feel remotely good about doing is if in every interview, in every op-ed or whatever contact I have with any type of media, I try to emphasize the importance of cultivating self-love in addition to any type of achievement. And so that became my homing beacon

for that entire process. But a lot of time to have a book launch. Yeah, that's wild. Self-love, that's a tough one. As you're talking about that, I'm thinking, the Tim Ferriss of, I don't know, 15 years ago. Would have vomited in his mouth. Exactly. And so this is what's tricky about it, right?

Like I have a hard time with self-love. Like yourself, I'm ambitious and competitive and I know how to compartmentalize my emotions and channel all of those avoidant tendencies into workaholism and perfectionism and, you know, collecting accolades and, you know, receiving external validation and kind of chasing that stuff, right? And so I think there's an epidemic of people out there

who we develop in that kind of internal family systems rhetoric of the pieces that comprise us. We have those pieces that drive us in a certain way out of an interest of protecting us that get us to places where society smiles upon us and we're affirmed in all the ways that we want to be affirmed. And that is why so much of this kind of operates in a pernicious, shadowy netherworld, because although the body is indeed keeping score, it takes a long time for that sort of scoreboard to show up

and for these kind of nascent compartmentalized emotions to really show up, let alone turn into a volcano. So how do you think about communicating to that younger version of yourself or that person who's like, I'm cool. Like, I got it together. I know what I'm doing. I'll take a stab at it.

I would say at first I just want to underscore something you said earlier, which is Paul Conti. I have a very high opinion of Paul as a very skilled therapist and practitioner, also an excellent communicator and writer. So I just wanna encourage people who are perhaps interested in exploring some of these corners to look up Paul. And then to the younger person, maybe not younger,

but person full of piss and vinegar out there competing who thinks they have it all together. I'd say a couple of things. The first is that there's a season for everything and maybe they're just not to that season yet. Would the Tim, meaning myself, would the Tim of 25 benefited from uncorking all of this then? I'm not sure.

I don't know. I think that there are certain practices that probably would have been a good idea to add to the mix. Meditation, not long meditation, but short daily meditation. A few other things, maybe DBT, for instance. Very forward-looking therapy tends not to focus on any narrative about the past, but really focus on like present and moving forward,

behavioral change. That would have, I think, been palatable to a Tim of 25 in a way that a lot of the things we're talking about wouldn't have been. For some people, there will come a point where you realize that you have blind spots. Other people will make that a point where you realize that you have blind spots other people will make that very clear to you and you may also realize once you check some of the boxes once you have

some of the success once you make some of the money whatever once you have the relationship you thought you needed that would make you happy once you have some of those things and you realize, wait a fucking minute, my movie is still the same in my head or very similar. I'm still waking up anxious. I'm still having trouble going to bed. I'm still feeling depressive symptoms, whatever those things might be. And there can be biochemical issues, genetic issues and so on.

But if you think it might be related to your perception of reality and the stories that you tell yourself, I think at that point, you're more open to engaging with these things. Certainly if I reflect on my own experience, I always held out hope. And I believed that once X, once Y,

all this stuff just goes away. Sure. Right? And even when you kind of know it's not, you're still holding out hope because it's always one rung away on the ladder. And hope is no small thing, right? So I wouldn't want to take hope away from someone and not give them an equally powerful substitute.

I think that is risky. So I would say if you're at the point where you're recognizing, okay, the jig is up. I think there's some inner game that I need to work on. Then I'd say, great, you know, stair step your way in and begin to look at some of the tools that have been vetted and listen to people you trust, but get professional opinions also, right?

Don't just rely on YouTube or podcasts or anything else. Like we really need some degree of professional interaction ideally. I would also say that we're talking about the performance side. Let's just say the competitive performance side. I think there's also on the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps a trauma performance side, which is why I tread into these waters

pretty lightly. Because if you go to my hometown of Austin, as an example, you will meet people, I'm not exaggerating this, within five minutes of meeting you, they're telling you all about their awful horrific childhood abuse. And it takes on a performative flair. It's like my trauma can beat up your trauma or my shaman can beat up your shaman. And it's the same as wanting a nicer car than your neighbor, but without the negative judgment maybe that someone would have if they were driving around

like a Lamborghini in Austin. Right, crafting a whole identity around- It's the same ego. A narrative that you've spun about the trauma that becomes a defining characteristic. That had to be a big fear with you in sharing this because you're obviously, you know, that you're someone who would be very averse

to be like sort of aligned with that sensibility. Yeah, and it's, I think it's become a lot worse in the last few years. And I would just say, as a check, I think it's helpful to ask yourself, if I could not tell anyone about this, would I still do it? Would I still take it seriously? This applies to a lot of things, including psychedelics, right? Okay, great. You're going to go to a retreat and fill in the blank location and have this assisted psychedelic

experience. If you could not tell anyone, you couldn't post it on Instagram. You couldn't write a blog post about your neon crocodile epiphany or whatever the fuck. Would you do it? And if the answer is no, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons and you shouldn't do it. And I think that's true for a lot of the therapeutic stuff also.

Now it's gonna sound hypocritical because here I am with a mic in front of my face talking about this stuff. But I would simply say that there are shadow aspects to the external validation, high performing competitor end of the spectrum and also on the hyper vulnerability trauma side of the spectrum.

So just be aware of those. But I would say to someone who is beginning to feel maybe the tires get a little wobbly on the race car, like you probably wanna start to look at this before they blow off when you're on the Autobahn. Yeah, yeah, pay attention to those little details or the tingling in the back of your mind. I mean, to your point of, you know,

the impenetrable 25 year old Tim Ferriss, I mean, willingness is not something you can foist upon another human being. Like they have to come to that on their own. So, but if you find yourself slightly curious and receptive to these ideas, that might be something to kind of hang on to. The way I would sell it, here's the way I would sell it.

So if you're like your task, should you choose to accept it is to travel back in time and convince 25 year old Tim Ferris to do some prehabs so that he doesn't explode into a million psychic fragments during a Vipassana retreat many years later, I would say, okay, I would position it not inaccurately

as a performance enhancing set of tools. Right, you just shift the language, right? To make it sound like you're, it's some kind of optimization protocol. And it's not a lie. These things are gonna help you with your heart rate variability. These things are gonna help you with your recovery.

These things are gonna help you make better decisions. These things are gonna help you assess business partners. Ding, ding, ding, like my, okay, yes, now I can hear you. Yeah, and all of those things are true, I think. Make more strategic decisions, prioritize more effectively. I do think all of that is true. So that's how I would sell it. I wouldn't bring up a child.

I wouldn't bring up parents. Yeah, you gotta speak the right language, right? And I think it also requires kind of addressing this idea, especially in the case of the kind of hyperachiever, there is an irrational attachment to these patterns or behaviors that you may know probably aren't sustainable or maybe not in your best interest,

but they've been so effective. They are indeed the superpower. Like how dare you ask me to let go of it or tell me that I would be better off without it. That's like annihilation. Even with meditation, I think one of the most common worries and I had this worry, it's like, I'm gonna lose my edge. And I have never seen that to be an issue

with a high performer ever. It's just like, you don't need to be in park, but maybe you should learn to use some gears other than six gear. Right, right. Yeah. It's part of being a good driver. Yeah.

But there's something about like being on that, the highs and the lows and the kind of hedonic cycle of the whole thing that is kind of addictive and it feels very uncomfortable to step off of that and be in a place of kind of ease and acceptance with things because like if I'm not pushing or putting myself into some level of suffering to achieve whatever that I haven't worked on.

Yeah, it's like, this is worthless. This is not, you know, this is of no value. Yeah, so my life is, I think, sort of the choir to that song. Yeah. And- Me too. I have found a lot of what we're talking about

to do nothing negative to that. It allows you to let go a lot of the hyperactivity in service of focusing on the critical few things that actually matter. And that's true personally, not just professionally. I would also maybe share with folks, and this is gonna seem self-evident to a lot of folks, but if you're having a mild allergic reaction

to all the talk of therapists and inner work and this, that, and the other thing, I get it. And if I had to choose all the talk therapy in the world or consistent physical exercise, I would choose consistent physical exercise, like regimented planned physical exercise. That is a critical leg on the stool or the table of my mental health.

And from a physiological standpoint, from a neurochemical standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world. And there are many books on this, many research papers and so on. But I would say that is the one thing I did right when I was younger, because I was competing. Gets harder when you're not competing, at least for me.

And that definitely without my realizing it perhaps was the buoy that kept my head above water. Yeah, I mean, it certainly served that for me as well, but it's not an either or, it's not a binary certainly. It's not, I'm just widening the funnel. Right, so I got you. People are like, doc therapy, not my jam. I'm like, great.

Maybe you should do rowing workouts a few times a week. Right. One of the things that you talked with Debbie about in that podcast was this idea of kind of hope. You mentioned hope a few minutes ago. The idea that like having hope, like a step ahead of shame, right? Like this idea that hope just needs to outpace the shame

by a little bit in order to kind of be in the solution. Can you kind of like elaborate on that idea? Sure, I will couch it in an anecdote that I haven't thought of in a long time. I was having a hike with a close friend of mine, a very successful investor, has a number of kids. And I asked him what advice he would give to a new parent or someone considering becoming a parent. And he gave two or three bits of advice.

But the very first one was, it's not your kid's job to love you. It's your job to love them. You chose to bring them into the world. Second piece of advice was, above all else, teach your kids to be optimistic. Because that is the mother quality of so many other things. And in that conversation with Debbie, we talked about our experiences. We talked about our approaches.

We talked about things that worked and didn't work. And those tools may or may not map to someone else. But if they get to the end of the conversation, they think, thank God, at least I have an example of two people who've made progress. So I feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel. That seems like a prerequisite to taking any kind of meaningful action.

You need to have some belief that there might be light at the end of the tunnel or some degree of relief, maybe not a cure, some degree of relief, particularly when it comes to sexual abuse. It's a head trip. You know, it can do a lot of damage. And I think there can be a lot of shame associated with it. The shame for me is not, this might sound strange,

is not the big issue. A bigger issue I think is the belief that, and many people have this belief, like I am broken and there's no fixing it, which is more hopelessness than a shame. So I think keeping the hope just a step ahead of hopelessness is really important. So seeing someone perhaps with a similar experience, I think keeping the hope just a step ahead of hopelessness is really important.

So seeing someone perhaps with a similar experience, it doesn't have to be the same, but like you were describing earlier, how we have in terms of our inner experience, maybe a lot of similarities, even though we've lived our lives differently, we've had different paths, coming across someone who perhaps has that inner critic who's driving so many of our choices

and seeing that they found a way to work with it, maybe not subjugate it, probably not subjugated, but work with it, maybe witness it, maybe add in an additional voice is really important because without some degree of hope, and I would say that for decades, I mean, hopelessness has been more prevalent than hope for me, for sure.

It's just like, yeah, I'm broken in these following ways. Those are never gonna change. We'll see how it goes. That was the base assumption. I mean, that's so heavy. Cause at the same time, while you're harboring that sense of self, you're still, you know, you're kind of showing up

in the world in this, you know, hyper successful manner that serves as this like mask to the real Tim inside. Like if that's really how you're feeling about yourself for such a long period of time, is that true? I would say I've tried very hard. I think I've been successful. And this is part of why I feel so much freedom in what I do professionally.

I've recognized that we become the mask we wear for too long. And I've had advice from people who really know what they're doing, like Andrew Zimmern and others who would say, be careful what you pretend to be on that first episode of that TV pilot, because if it's successful now, that's who you need to be. And I've seen a lot of YouTubers also paint themselves into corners where suddenly they have

to be the x y or z person so i don't feel like i was ever presenting something that was fake or presenting a mask but my genuine feeling was i think for a very long time. Internally, I'm a broken toy. Inner voice, depression, fill in the blank. These are just flaws that are to be lived with because they cannot be fixed. Therefore, let me focus on some things I can control and having a really high pain tolerance and being really good at extended focus and competing and winning. I'm good at that. So let me just focus on what I'm good at. And there is a half truth in there, which is focus on the things that you can change. Don't focus on the things you have no power over.

But there's a very debilitating assumption in there, which is I cannot change in a meaningful way my interior experience. And I'm very happy to say that that has proven incorrect. There are things you can do. I would also say that no one bullet is a panacea and you're an athlete. I have been an athlete in prior lifetimes.

And you would never say, all right, I did this amazing workout and I'm done. I am fit forever. That's just not how it works. Some things may have more durable effects than others. You may have orthopedic surgery on your knee and you do prehab and rehab. knee and you do prehab and rehab, but if you don't do your rehab or you don't continue to focus on stability and so on, you are going to have related problems again. And that can be a tough pill to swallow. I think, especially with some of the showcasing of mental health, some of the showcasing of mental health where people want to talk about the successes. So either genuinely they believe that they've had a breakthrough

that has fixed everything and will last forever. And they want to proselytize. We run into this a lot. It's especially problematic in psychedelics right now. Or you find someone who simply recognizes that this is like working out. You need to maintain it, it's very hard to sell.

So if I'm going to put something short on TikTok, I'm going to either talk about how terrible things are for sympathy play or I'm gonna talk about how this thing completely changed my life, which will give people false hope. And the takeaway though, from everything that I just spewed out in word salad

is it's been a revelation to realize that you can actually change your interior experience quite reliably if you find a handful of things that help. And those things exist, people are using them. What is the internal monologue now in contrast to the negative prior version? I'm about to give you, Rich and everyone listening, a very dissatisfying answer.

Goes up and down, goes up and down. I would say I have more awareness of my thoughts and emotions now. So I can look at them and to myself say, I noticed that I'm having the thought X as opposed to being X. Does that make sense? Sure.

And there are many ways to approach this. I think the introductory course on the waking up app with Sam Harris, it's very basic. I'm going through the introductory course again. And not that I'm some llama or yogi, but I've done a fair amount of meditating. And still I'm like, you know what?

My foul shots are rusty. I need to just go back to basic, basic, basic, basic. Complexity is super sexy and appealing. I think especially to smart people who are like, this is a problem. I'm good at solving problems. Let me find something really complicated. But sometimes you just need to like step on that line

and shoot shots. My inner monologue is heavily dependent on having a sense of purpose, which over at least the last five years, I've been very fortunate to have with the mental health therapeutics. I think humans need purpose. It could be raking the garden. It does not really matter what that purpose is, but you need to feel like there is a focusing purpose. Need is a focusing purpose. Need is a strong word. Most humans benefit from that. There are days though,

where particularly if there are certain factors at play, I didn't sleep well, it's really overcast. Because I didn't sleep well, I wake up groggy and it takes me a few hours to get going. And then I feel like I'm behind the eight ball. Those days suck. And then sometimes feel like I'm behind the eight ball. Those days suck. And then sometimes I'm like, you know what? It's been a while.

Let me turn myself into a punching bag. Let's play that game. So it still happens. After all this work, after everything I've done. Oh, I know. It's just like- You piece of shit. You can't even deal with a cloudy day. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So, you know this movie. Yeah, very well. So that still happens, but here's maybe the metric that is more concrete. And I didn't track these things, so I'm estimating, but let's just say for my adult life, three to four major depressive episodes a year, which would span weeks or in some cases months.

That was every year without fail. And since 2000, let's call it 13, I would say by and large one every two years. That's the difference between those two is two different people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lot of growth and a lot of work that you've put into that growth

through all these different modalities. And, you know, maybe we can spend a couple minutes on some of the more helpful resources. Like we talked about, they're all on your blog. But there's a quote that kind of recurs

that I've heard you say a couple of times. To me, it almost acts like a talisman or a way into this process. And I believe it's Tara Brock who said it, focusing on like, or thinking about what it is that you're unwilling to feel. Yeah. Right, like as a, that like really kind of like

pulls focus on- Totally. Where to begin. Yeah, the Tara Brach, and I really recommend, I'm actually rereading it right now. Radical acceptance, some of you may find that a bit nauseating in title. And I also was sort of repelled by this very generic title,

but it was recommended to me by a PhD in neuroscience who's not in the Wu camp at all. And I read it many years ago and I found it so helpful and I've been recommending it and recommending it and recommending it and I recommended it so many times. You know what, maybe it's time for me to reread that. So I dug back into it. And I think it is in radical acceptance, Tara Brock, B-R-A-C-H.

I think it is in that book, maybe at the head of one of the chapters where she says, a wise sage once said, there is only one question that really matters. What is it that you are unwilling to feel? And that is a very focusing question. So that is a good place to start. I'm a journaling junkie.

I really find that it is difficult to think clearly or to even learn what you think without trapping it on paper so you can examine the thoughts. They're very difficult to capture or cross-examine without putting them on paper. Morning pages I find very, very helpful for this. So in terms of tools, and feel free to direct me in any way that you'd like, but in terms of just a handful of tools, there are ongoing tools and then there are inputs in the form of books.

I'd say there are a few that have really impacted me. I've already mentioned Radical Acceptance, so I would put that pretty high on the list. Another book which is shorter and easier to complete, but that many people find super abrasive is a book called Awareness by Anthony de Mello. It's a short book. It's mostly a cleaned up transcript of public lectures that he gave Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who has since passed,

he has a very no BS approach to things, which some people find very offensive. I like that kind of tough love coach type vibe. So it works for me. The waking up app introductory course, I think for people who have never meditated, who have the opinion, which I did for a very long time, it just ain't for me. Sitting still, hummina, hummina, hummina, whatever you do, I don't think I can do that. My mind's all over the place. The waking up app

introductory course presents a logical sequence of skill development. That is what makes it, I think, unique and very appealing. It's 10 minutes each morning and do it for a month. Your life, I think, will change. Your awareness of the scripts that are running your life will become more acute. And then I would say focusing on sleep first and foremost, and I've had a number of chats with Matt Walker of UCSF

on my podcast, really focusing on sleep since I've had lifelong issues with insomnia, onset insomnia specifically. Tim on consistent good sleep for even three days and Tim on mediocre sleep for three days, those are two different Tims. So really making the compromises necessary, taking the actions necessary, for instance, like zone two or higher level aerobic training, which historically I hate. I hate it with a

passion. I would much rather go into the gym and do sets of five with heavier weights. I hate aerobic exercise generally. However, I found a few that seem to A, dramatically improve my mood and really help me sleep for whatever set of reasons. And then we can talk about perhaps the one that I've been not so definitely, maybe super obviously navigating around, which is psychedelic assisted therapy. That is the amplifier.

That is the tool that has allowed me most consistently to take an observer seat where I can look at the beliefs and behaviors that I take for granted, that are automatic, that I think are unavoidable, or that I don't think about at all, that are dictating the quality of my life or the self punishment that I'm inflicting. So let's get into that.

I'm super curious about this world. It's actually kind of at the core of the work that you do now. You have this foundation, you've funded science, you've been doing that for many years, you had your own personal experiences with this. And I come into this as somebody who had a lot of opinions and many of those opinions have changed.

Like I really have changed my mind about this world and the efficacy of these powerful compounds in terms of helping people with a variety of conditions from PTSD to depression, addiction, et cetera. I'm somebody who has not done it myself, so I can't speak from any position of experience. And I also come into it indoctrinated in kind of 12 step. And that's sort of my, that's my kind of language and modality that helped kind of save my life and keeps me sober. And that of course then colors my receptivity to the possible benefits available

through this. And like I said, I've really, I've kind of opened my awareness to what's going on and you've been kind of at the forefront of all of this. So walk me through how you got interested in this, how they have benefited you personally and what you're seeing in the emerging science and kind of the purpose and functionality

of the nonprofit. I'm happy to cover all of that. That's a lot. That's a whole podcast. I can cover it. I can cover it. And I would like to start with a few disclaimers. So the first is not a doctor, not a psychiatrist.

I play neither on the internet. So please do your own homework and talk to professionals. The second is that these are, and there are many different types, many different classes. So when someone says psychedelics, it's used very broadly in a sense it's become almost meaningless in a colloquial use because it's applied to many things that I wouldn't characterize as psychedelic.

But suffice to say that there are many different types of psychedelic compounds and there are some that are adjacent let's just say MDMA which I would consider more of an intact a gym and that has particular applications in in a clinical setting now to complex PTSD and the results are truly astonishing in terms of what can be accomplished in two or three sessions with the appropriate therapeutic wrapper. There are many different classes and they are useful and dangerous or benign in different ways.

So I just want people to know it's hard to speak about psychedelics very broadly. I will say that from a scientific and also anecdotal perspective, just because the science has pretty much been on ice, largely on ice since the Nixon administration, since these compounds, let's just say psilocybin as found in what are usually termed magic mushrooms,

psilocybin mushrooms or LSD and mescaline and so on. These are schedule one compounds. They are very difficult to work with in a university setting for research purposes. However, in places like Northern California and many others, there are facilitators who've worked with these things for decades and had thousands and tens of thousands of sessions. And I take that experience quite seriously. So what I'm going to say is, yes, I think supported by a good amount of the research that has been done at places like Imperial College London,

where I've funded quite a bit and was one of the founding funders of the first dedicated research facility there. And then also Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. If you think about, and this is a layman's description, of course, but if you think about, let's just say the sort of river of the psyche and you can swim in this river and you're swimming downstream

and on one side, on one shore, you have hyper rigidity. And that would, at least if we're using the DSM, which has its own issues, but diagnostic manual for different psychiatric disorders and so on, that might include things like OCD. It might include things like chronic depression, where you have a certain loop that you play or can't seem to escape chronic anxiety, same situation. Eating disorders like anorexia nervosa,

where in some fashion and I'm generalizing, but people are exerting some type of control often because they experienced what felt like a loss of control or something uncontrollable earlier. And it could just be genetic predisposition. Maybe it's not associated with the trauma, but there's this hyper rigidity.

Certain psychedelics seem to be very helpful for hyper rigidity. If psychedelics seem to be very helpful for hyper rigidity. If you go to the other side, to the shore where you find, let's just call it hyper chaotic, or maybe that sounds too negative, but let's just say hyper chaotic. And you might have conditions like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, those people would be excluded from consideration for studies with psychedelics as it stands today. And I think generally it's a very good idea to stay away from these compounds

if you have a family history of anything like that. So I just wanted to put that on the table first. In terms of my interest, you might not even know this. I don't know if I've talked about the way, way back story. My interest in psychedelics goes way back into the 90s. So I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family. So we have Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and so on,

a real motley selection of lovely things. And dying at this point, and certainly even then, I mean, dying is a question mark of all sorts, but dying didn't scare me as much as the descent towards death and having witnessed severe cognitive decline, let's just say in my grandmother, that horrified me. And not wanting that from my parents and trying to find a way to avoid it

was also way at the top of my priority list. So when I first went to college, I was a neuroscience major. And I intended to focus on all things neuroscience to try to figure out a way to stave off these conditions. In the process of taking classes with some amazing professors, this is at Princeton, Bart Hobel at the time. I mean, some real groundbreaking scientists.

And then also becoming fascinated by this researcher, I think recently passed sadly, Barry Jacobs. I became exposed to some of the research around psychedelics, such as it was at the time, or at least a scientific interest, which was very rare. And Barry had an interest, Professor Jacobs, I guess, if I'm being more respectful. And around the same time,

I had my first recreational experiences with mushrooms specifically in completely uncontrolled, you can imagine, college settings. Like Grateful Dead concert vibe? Not so much Grateful Dead. It would be a small gathering of friends for a birthday or something like that. And I observed a few things, my personal experience,

while I'm simultaneously becoming very interested in the effects these compounds have on the brain. One, they were just the most bizarre experiences I'd ever had in my life. Words failed to describe how bizarre these experiences were. And secondly, I had this afterglow of three to six months where I would not get depressed. And for that reason, I, for a period of a few years

used mushrooms once a year. And then I had a horrifying and very dangerous experience where because we had no facilitators or any type of adult supervision, I took mushrooms with two of my friends and they left to go on a walk somewhere. And it was like the middle of the night. So I'm left in this house by myself.

I start looping, which can happen on these things. Start believing that maybe my friends are imaginary, not a great feeling. And I go outside to like figure out my life to walk around in the dark. And this is in a very rural spot on the East Coast. And to cut to the end, as I'm coming out of this experience,

I come out of it because headlights are coming at me and I'm standing in the middle of a street on a country road and almost get hit by a car. And I managed to get to the side, but that scared the shit out of me so badly as it should that I just concluded, no more, no mas, I'm done with these. And so I didn't use them at all until around 2012, when I saw a girlfriend at the time completely transformed by, in this particular case, a multiple day trip to South America where she consumed ayahuasca on two

consecutive nights, which is a big gun and I think pretty high risk for a lot of people. I just want to mention that up front. But she knew me very, very well. We'd been together a long time and she came back. I was going through a very strenuous period in my life. This was around the four hour chef. And I had very imprudently, but this shouldn't shock anyone based on what we've been talking about,

decided that it would be a great idea to cram, you know, three to four year project into like a year, maybe a year, three months. Of course. And I can do this at all. If the writing weren't enough, let's make this my first four color book. And I'm gonna do all the photography

just to learn how to do photography or something like half the photography. Right. Turns out not to. And to do it like outside of traditional publishing. And to do it outside of traditional publishing and to get boycotted by everyone because it was the first major title

out of Amazon publishing. And this entire situation led to using stimulants, nothing illicit, but just taking like pre-workout supplements and tons of coffee and so on to stay up, stay up, really poor sleep and just letting that compound over months and months and months and months. I was in bad shape psychologically and emotionally, just very ragged. or sleep and just letting that compound over months and months and months and months.

I was in bad shape psychologically and emotionally, just very ragged. And my girlfriend came back and I was hitting a breaking point. I recognized that. It was probably past the breaking point. Who am I kidding? And two things came out of that.

A friend of mine said, you should try TM. And the more I read about it, the more I was like, absolutely not. This sounds ridiculous if you read the history, but Transcendental Meditation, he said, look, you're a fucking mess. What do you have to lose? You can afford the training, like stop it, just go do it.

I was like, okay. And then she sold her experience to me because I saw a durable change in her as 15 years of therapy in two nights. And I was like, right sales pitch for the right guy. She knows who she's talking to. And I decided to not jump in with both feet. I think that's a huge mistake,

but to actually tiptoe in, re-familiarize myself with the science, if there were any new science or newer science compared to what I tried to dig up way back in the day as an undergrad. And to look at options for facilitated experiences with mushrooms then and only then if pass go safely with proper guardrails

to consider ayahuasca. And so that was my re-entry into considering these things, which I did in a very systematic methodical way. And I was able to prove to myself with the help of very experienced facilitators that you can, with the proper medical intake, with the proper screening, with the proper lead in and lead out,

with the proper therapy in place as a safety net in case something goes sideways, which most people neglect to think about, there are circumstances in which these things can have profound therapeutic effects. And they're generally very well tolerated physiologically. If we're talking about, say psilocybin and magic mushrooms, generally, I would say anti-addictive,

physiologically well tolerated and incredibly versatile for a number of conditions. And if you remember from earlier, the river I described on the hyper rigid side, there are a whole lot of conditions that might be treated separately conventionally that I lumped together. Earlier, the river I described on the hyper rigid side, there are a whole lot of conditions that might be treated separately conventionally that I lumped together.

And in part that's because those conditions, many of them seem to respond well to say psilocybin treatment. And it raises a lot of questions because it upends some of our assumptions about how psychiatry or mental health treatment should work. But that is how I got back in and began doing what I do best, which is researching, researching, researching, interviewing, interviewing, interviewing. And that led me then a few years later to conclude, after I saw changes in myself,

including the frequency of major depressive disorders, this, and I'm borrowing from Stan Groff, who's a famous psychotherapist, but psychedelics have the potential to do for the mind what say the microscope did for biology and what the telescope did for astronomy. I think- Super bold statement. It think- Super bold statement.

It's a super bold statement. And I am at a point where I feel that is absolutely true. And there are some very significant risks. But as soon as I had, so people may not know, but my other career, because I lived in the Bay Area for 17 years, was angel investing. And I invested in a lot of tech and had a couple of lucky hits. And right before my biggest lucky hit struck, I called the number of people to ask about uncrowded bets in science, early stage science related to psychedelics, because there was a stigma attached. This is around 2015 probably.

And there was effectively no funding. There were individual philanthropists here and there. Most people were worried about blowback, some type of problem reputationally. So there was effectively no funding. MAPS didn't exist at that time. MAPS did exist. And MAPS had been pounding the pavement,

mostly for MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for complex PTSD. And I helped raise about in total about $30 million for their phase three trials, which have turned out very, very well thus far. But for earlier stage, say pilot studies at Hopkins, which was one of my first studies I helped fund with psilocybin assisted psychotherapy effectively as a treatment for, or intervention for treatment resistant

major depressive disorder. Okay, so you have major depressive disorder that has failed a number of interventions already. There was next to no money for that type of thing. And I called a few people knowledgeable in the space to say, all right, where are the high leverage uncrowded bets? Because I'm about to have a decent amount of money for the first time. And this is where I want to focus my efforts.

So that's how it started. And we could talk about the projects that SciSafe Foundation have funded, but a lot of firsts. That was super helpful, thank you. You characterize this sort of diagnostic approach as being on the shores of two sides of a river. And I sort of think approach as being, you know, on the shores of, you know, two sides of a river. And I sort of think of this, and please, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. On the one hand, there is the application of these compounds

to, you know, address a certain piece of mental health gone awry in a certain way that is perhaps treatment resistant in other ways. And then on the other hand, there is just the notion of kind of consciousness liberation, right? That isn't necessarily tethered to anything wrong, just the kind of prison of our minds, right? You hear Sam Harris talk about this

and the transformative experience that he had with MDMA early on in his life that kind of shifted how he sees the world and his place in it. Like that's a different kind of like way to, you know, kind of approach these things. So I think people come to these with an either or, either they're looking to solve a problem or they're looking for some kind of expanded,

you know, peak experience, right? Yep. And so with that, I like, and I appreciate how conscious you are about the importance of guardrails and protocols and intentionality and the prehab and the rehab and the follow-up and the accountability that goes into all of this,

because I do have this concern around the mainstreaming of all of this in the sense that no matter how much you give your kind of preface about what you advise and what you advise against, all people hear is, I got 15 years of therapy done in two nights.

That's what I want. Sign me up. Where do I go, Tim? Right? And it doesn't matter because that's the way human beings are. And I'm no different. I'm like, wow, that sounds amazing, right?

We don't wanna do all the other stuff that you did. We wanna, you know, we wanna four hour it, right? In some certain way. And we see this kind of as something that's already happened with micro dosing, and I'm sure you have a perspective on that, and even marijuana with the legalization of marijuana and the kind of Apple storification of dispensaries and this kind of narrative

that pot should be part of your daily wellness routine without any appreciation or responsibility for the potency and kind of negative power that some of these compounds hold, right? So, I am always quick to like kind of hit the brakes and sound a little bit of a cautionary alarm around this, because I do think that we have a predisposition to try to find the end run around,

the thing that ails us so that we can do it with the least amount of kind of effort, toil and time. Hear, hear, you're preaching to the choir and we were chatting before we started recording, actually it was at lunch. And I was saying that one of my exes would be at, say, a group dinner with me frequently when someone would bring up psychedelics and want to talk about it. And the first response that she would have was, oh, God, here we go again, right?

Just to hear this conversation for the 500th time. The second thing that she always found amusing was that generally folks expect me to proselytize. And if they've made a decision to fly to some God forsaken place in the middle of nowhere to take some mystical brew that I'm gonna be very supportive. And I talk way more people out of using psychedelics than I talk into using psychedelics,

which folks might find surprising, but I would take a step back. I agree with everything that you just said, and I would revise the 15 years of therapy in two nights. I wouldn't actually use the 15 years of therapy. I would say there is this really high risk, but potentially high reward neurosurgery that requires two nights and a lot of prep

and a lot of rehab afterwards. In some people, they say it has the effect of 15 years of therapy. People think about it very differently if it were phrased that way. Right, there's an appreciation of risk there that- Yeah, as one scientist put it, I don't know if he's put it publicly, but he might have,

I don't wanna name his name just in case, but you are working with nuclear power when you're using these compounds. And my position would be you're creating, and this is dramatically simplified. So I'm not using these terms in the way that certain scientists would, but I'll try to keep it simple.

You're inducing a window of plasticity within which you can reshape in some cases, your stories, beliefs, worldview, and that can turn out well, but you can also heat up the Play-Doh and fumble it and drop it on a floor that has dog hair all over it. And then you have a real situation on your hands. And people do not always turn out better.

And there are adverse events. There are significant adverse events. There are people who have tried to stop their meds, their other say psychiatric meds, cold turkey, in order to go to some retreat and then throw themselves off a balcony. I mean, these things happen. They just don't get much airplay

because that is not the zeitgeist at the moment. The majority of reporting is positive, which is fine. I mean, part of the reason that I have a fellowship with UC Berkeley that I helped fund for journalism fellows is to get a broader scope of coverage in long form pieces, which I think is extremely important. And 99% of the people who claim any competence with these compounds are either delusional or lying.

I hate to put it that way, but it's true. I mean, you can't throw a rock in LA, New York City, or any number of other cities without hitting someone who calls themselves a shaman, right? And rule number one- What is the solution to that? Is there space for responsible kind of like regulatory oversight?

And what would that look like? There has to be. I am not someone who believes it's a good idea to have nuclear power available at the local 7-Eleven. I think that's a terrible idea. I think it is a terrible idea to have really strong THC available, THC containing products available to a lot of people.

I mean, and look, I'm going to get a bunch of grief for this because cannabis users love their cannabis. And I'm a fan also for a lot of reasons in a lot of settings, but you take someone who steers, let's just say congenitally towards the chaotic side of the river and you give them the type of weed or products that are available now, which are incredibly or can be mercilessly strong, there are psychotic breaks. And people develop extended paranoid experiences. I mean, these are well-documented. Yeah, I've seen it.

I've seen it firsthand. And you can disrupt your sleep architecture, right? This is well-established. So that is not to say that I am by any means an anti-drug crusader. The fact that I'm here talking about this and funding all the science that I'm funding, which is a significant percentage of my total net worth that I've put into all this,

is because I believe in the potential of these compounds. And I think in order for, let's just say, even tens of thousands, but let's push it a little, hundreds of thousands of people to be treated responsibly with these compounds in a way that doesn't lead to all sorts of terrible outcomes. You need regulation. I'm sorry, guys.

You need to have vetting. You can't just have every person who's done a yoga retreat and watch some YouTube videos available for dispensing really powerful drugs. There's a reason we have the FDA. Like if anyone listening wants to go back to like the wild west to buy snake oil out of the back of some wagon from a traveling salesman,

you're welcome to try to revert to that. But I think it's a bad idea. And these agencies have their challenges and their issues, I get it. But there are very good reasons why we have drug regulation. And I'm not saying these things should be treated exactly the same, but I do think for these things to reach,

let's just call a small fraction of the people affected by treatment resistant depression I do think for these things to reach, let's just call a small fraction of the people affected by treatment resistant depression or substance use disorders, which is one of the primary indications, right? So NYU has done a lot of good work looking at alcohol use disorder, otherwise known as alcoholism, but the names change every year, it seems.

So it's hard to keep track. I think there, and this is speculation, but I think there is absolutely an application to opioid use disorder to even scratch the surface in terms of the total addressable market with any of these compounds, you need regulatory oversight, especially when you're dealing with people who are using other compounds,

whether those are over-the-counter, say mood stabilizers and SSRIs and different types of treatments along those lines, or people who are using illicitly or using synthetic opioids, but abusing them, you really, I think, need professional oversight. Right, and the professional oversight and the regulatory landscape is gonna be dictated

by the quality of science that's coming out, that's telling us what's what. It's gonna be dictated by the quality of science that's coming out. That's telling us what's what. It's gonna be dictated by the quality of the science. So this has been my mission for the last handful of years. I mean, there are a few problems that I've used is very important. And I also have to separate out the problems that I can have a meaningful impact on

versus those that I, within which I can't be effective. Right, so I wanted to get the flywheel moving to the extent that I could with funding early stage pilot studies so that hopefully end initiatives like the popular project at Harvard Law, which is focused on law and regulation specifically. So that was the first of its kind

that I helped to co-fund the journalism, et cetera. There's the science. There's also a, there are many issues, right? Insurance reimbursement, et cetera. But to even get to some of the, let's just call it downstream issues that need resolving, you as a country also need a sufficient pipeline of trained facilitators. So one of the initiatives, for instance, that SciSafe Foundation has funded is a project across Yale, Johns Hopkins, and NYU looking at how to develop a set of curricula that can be plugged into current psychiatry programs

such that people who are already opting into psychiatry can develop the skills necessary if and when these things are rescheduled or made available on a statewide basis that they can be ready to catch the ball. Right, like a subspecialty. A subspecialty, yeah. And that's really important because as it stands right now,

it's a chicken and the egg issue with respect to say federal funding. So there's very little federal funding. There have been a few grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. I think I'm getting the name right. I always wonder if it's institutes or institute, but NIDA has for instance,

made grants to Matt Johnson at Johns Hopkins for tobacco slash nicotine addiction. And there are a handful of others, but the funding tends to be pretty small. In order to get more funding, what these government agencies want to see is that there is a plan and a reasonable plan for rolling these therapies out at scale.

But how do you do that without therapists? And then how do you get the therapists without the scientific funding so people are willing to bet part of their careers on it? It's very, very tricky. So I would say, yes, science, which is why I focused there and then secondarily or right alongside it.

And there are other issues, plenty of other issues, but would be therapist training. Like how do you credential? How do you assure quality control? What is the necessary level of training? This is not a small question, right? Do they need to be as good as these people have been doing it for 20 years?

If so, game over, it's not gonna work. Or is it enough if they already have say good training with things like CBT or DBT and or something like IFS, if they already have that, can we pull from that subpopulation of clinicians and they do say a three day course, in my opinion, and I know this is not practical to do in the US right now, but ideally I think each prescriber

should have their own experience on these compounds, which is very controversial, but I think it's irresponsible to prescribe these things if you haven't had your own experience. They are categorically very different from most psychiatric meds. So I know this is gonna sound a little wackadoodle to a lot of people listening,

but it's very challenging with credibility to talk to someone about an experience like this, if you have never experienced anything close to it. And it doesn't matter how much you read, doesn't matter how many documentaries you watch. It's one of those experiences where I think the outcomes will be better if therapists have some, at least passing familiarity with the phenomenology, right?

The first person experience of taking some of these things, which is easier to do with something like MDMA, which is much easier to navigate, much easier to prescribe. It's a lot easier to manage than something that can get as strange as say psilocybin. And to your point of clinical application because of pathology versus let's just call it human flourishing or peak experiences.

I mean, I think sometimes it's like come for the trauma, stay for the mysticism. I do think people end up in many cases getting a two for one. I don't necessarily object. I don't object to healthy normals using these compounds. I mean, this is true in every indigenous population that I'm aware of that uses any psychedelic compound.

They are not used exclusively for pathology in my experience, but the psychedelic world and feel free to reel this in, but I'll just say one thing. I made a rant for one second. One of the biggest issues with the psychedelic community, which we can't really call a community because of the amount of infighting, it is comically bad how much infighting there is.

So if you think these things automatically result in world peace, just look at the psychedelic world right now. Oh my God, it's terrible. But I would say that it's not possible to boil the ocean at once. So a lot of the people in the psychedelic world kind of make me think of the cars you would see in like Berkeley, California,

where it's like on the back of the car, it's like, save Tibet, save the whales, coexist, no oil for such and such. And they have 50 causes, which means they have no cause effectively. And there's a lot of, I think distraction, which is not to minimize the issues or the objectives that any of these subgroups have,

but it's really important to sequence them in a way that makes sense. And it makes sense to focus on, for instance, veterans in the US who have complex PTSD, which is poorly treated currently, which results in veteran suicides and extremely high costs of healthcare for said veterans. Right.

Which is a bipartisan issue. And staggering levels of opioid addiction. Opioid addiction, and I mean, I don't know what the latest numbers are, but I want to say, someone can fact check this, but it's only like 20 to 30 veteran suicides a day. I mean, we lose more veterans to suicide and veterans are important

because they have political immunity. No one can get up and say, screw the veterans. So as far as acting as the tip of the spear, not just in combat, but also in the sphere of mental health, they are incredibly, incredibly important. So that is a good place to start. Starting with healthy normals, doomed to fail. That can come later potentially,

but I would start with healthy normals. One more thing I'll say just on the, if you don't mind, on the addiction front and on the 12 step front, there is a trend right now of using ketamine in place of alcohol. And I know quite a few people, this is very common in LA, it's very common in the coastal cities. It's probably common elsewhere who are switching from alcohol use to ketamine use

and chronic ketamine use has severe risks, definitely has addiction potential. And it is a dissociative anesthetic. Thank you. Guess what? Thank you. Alcohol, frontier medicine, same, same. Sure.

And I do drink occasionally. I think for me, there's a place for it, but I would not view ketamine as a healthy substitute for alcohol. And I did a very comprehensive, it is the most comprehensive podcast episode ever on ketamine with Dr. John Crystal, who's- You weren't on ketamine.

I was not on ketamine, yes. Thank you for the clarification. We were not on ketamine. I was not on ketamine, yes. Thank you for the clarification. We were not on ketamine. That would be very hard to listen to. Dr. John Crystal of Yale, who has been the principal investigator on a lot of the foundational human research with respect to ketamine and its antidepressant properties.

And we did an everything you could possibly want to know about ketamine episode that I think is three or four hours long and it covers a lot of this, but TLDR, chronic use of ketamine is not good for you. And it makes you more prone to depression. Yeah, I appreciate that kind of addendum. I went to a treatment with a guy who jumped off his roof on ketamine, you know, it's like,

these are really powerful compounds that need to be taken seriously. And also, you know, to your point of the community sort of being fractured, it's also a case in which they're all lumped together, like the psychedelics, but like there's massive differences between all of these and they all have their place in different ways.

As somebody who has been in this world for such a long time, like it does, there's a very palpable sense that society and culture is catching up, right? This is, this does seem to be happening and progressing, maybe not as quickly as you would like, but I do feel like this is moving. To me, it feels like it's moving too fast. I would actually say, because I've tried to play a role with the podcast

and other interviews I've done for mainstream magazines, like Fortune and others, have tried to change the national conversation around these compounds, mostly to destigmatize funding so that more funders from initially individual and then later larger foundations would come into the funding circle. So I have made that a very deliberate chess move on my part

and other people have certainly done amazing work. I think it is moving very quickly. In some respects, the saturation is moving a little faster than I would like because the demand has so far outstripped qualified suppliers, supervision, and it's gonna be a bumpy ride. I mean, we're going from the bunny slopes

into the mogul field and that's to be expected. And when any compounds reach a certain scale of use, you run into lots of issues. It really doesn't matter what we're talking about. And these compounds generally, generally, there are psychedelics that can kill you. So there are certain designer psychedelics that can kill you absolutely in excess.

And you need to be very careful. There are also plenty of drugs masquerading as other drugs. So there are a lot of risks. However, if we're talking about the most researched, and let's just focus on what I would consider some of the classical psychedelics like psilocybin, incredibly well physically tolerated. So I'm not aware of a known LD50 for this, which would mean lethal dose 50. So a dose that would hypothetically kill 50% of participants. Let's just say of a thousand people pulled from the population at random, what dose should kill 500 of those people?

For many compounds that's really well established with psilocybin, I'm not aware of any known LD50. So it's very hard to have a physiologically fatal response, but there are people who have had such a difficult emotional experience that they've had heart attacks. I don't think this has happened in any trials, but it's certainly happened on the underground.

And the aftercare is really critical with these things. And which is why I really recommend people to do a lot of pre-work. And if you're not, because if you're not willing to do that pre-work, if you're not willing, for instance, Sam Harris introductory course, awareness, these things all layer in together.

If you're not willing to do those two things, if you're not willing to engage with the therapist to develop a rapport with someone so that they can act as a safety net, if and when you decide to use one of these compounds with someone else who should be qualified as a facilitator, you are not going to have the wherewithal nor have you demonstrated the will

to do the rehab afterwards. And if you're not willing to do the rehab afterwards, you're asking for problems, really significant problems, I think. I wanna move on to a different subject, but before we kind of close this chapter, what is the most exciting or interesting science or research that's coming out right now

that has you kind of fired up? I'm excited by a lot of it. I mean, the basic science and looking at imaging and how these compounds affect the brain is fascinating. I'm very interested in the new molecules that are being created. Very excited to see more group therapy because actually I would wager.

So my hypothesis would be that for a number of conditions and for a number of compounds, when used in combination that the outcomes are actually better, not just less expensive per person, that would certainly be true, but more effective with greater durability

when you have group integration, maybe group training too. And that's very exciting. It's also, I think, going to be a critical consideration if we want these types of treatments to be widely available with any degree of access from a cost perspective. I would say there are certain molecules

that are very bizarre that say produce auditory distortion, but that haven't been modeled well in animal studies and raise all sorts of interesting questions about consciousness. I do find some of those bigger questions very, very interesting. If people wanna get a decent idea of the things I find interesting,

I'd suggest, so SAISEI, it's just S-A-I-S-E-I, SAISEIFoundation.org. And you can look at the projects page and there's quite a bit there. There's science and then also on the other hand, we didn't get into this, we don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but quite a bit of work with conservation and preserving. Yeah, the indigenous traditions, et cetera.

Preserving indigenous knowledge, protecting those groups against biopiracy, things like this. I view that as a moral obligation. So I do that as well. Yeah, that's cool. What does say say mean? Say say means a few things in Japanese,

but it means rebirth. So say say, say is like to repeat. That's the onyomi, that's the Chinese reading. A bit complicated to get into all the language stuff, but sai is like again. And se is to live or life. So it's the same character. If someone goes to Japan and they're like,

namabiru, namabiru, like from the draft. Nama is like raw or alive. It's the same character. Sensei, like teacher, which literally means born before is like raw or alive. It's the same character sensei like teacher, which literally means born before like, born before you say is the same character. So it means rebirth. And that is not an overstatement for a lot of people

who fit the bill as good candidates for this, who take it seriously with qualified supervision. And you are the sensei of Saisei. That's the title of the podcast. Yeah, I'm the tour bus driver of Saisei Foundation. Shifting gears a little bit here. I'm curious as somebody who's been kind of a public figure on the internet for such a long period of time, OG blogger,

somebody who was compiling an email list before that was a thing, like you've been doing this for a long time. And along the way, of course, the books and the podcast, et cetera, but the internet is very different place today than it was when you were coming up and I was coming up. So I'm curious about how you think about that.

Like what is the state of influence, the business of influence today compared to the earlier days? And does that color or change how you think about how you show up publicly? Like how does that all work for you? Well, I might turn that around and ask you the same thing. So I'll allow you to go back your time here.

I never think about influence unless it's very, very specifically defined. I explore and have written about and talk about things that are very personal for me, whether they're goals, whether they are interests, whether they are interests, whether they are curiosities, whether they're pain points. That's it, because at least when I do that, I know I have a guaranteed market of one

and that the process of doing the research or interviewing someone will be valuable to me. That is the only reliable ingredient that I've found for sustained excitement and just sufficient endurance to do what I've been doing. Yeah, it has to be that way. It has to be a function and an authentic outgrowth of your curiosity and what is getting you excited. Otherwise, there's no way that you're going gonna have any kind of long-term viability. You'll get bored, you'll burn out, you'll lose interest. And then the task before you becomes impossible

as opposed to what you might do anyway, right? So trying to live outside of those external pressures or those incentives that are increasingly becoming more and more about audience capture, audience growth, maximizing attention, all of that, and trying to find a way to create from a place of purity and remember what got you excited about it

in the first place, for me, is the only way to be able to do it. Like as somebody who's been podcasting over 10 years now, and you've, I don't know what year you started blogging or sharing online, 2008, seven, six? 2006. Yeah. Yeah, so blogging 2006, thousand plus posts.

And then the podcast will be 10 years next April, 1.4 episodes on average per week for 10 years, which is wild to think about. I would say that I am very, very happy. When I'm investing, I wanna be at the cutting edge. When I am considering where to place my personal time and exploration, I like being on the dull edge. I didn't do any experiments with even say TikTok until a year ago.

And I wanted to bide my time because I felt like the platform was problematic on a number of levels. Talk about bringing senses back online, right? When I experimented with TikTok on someone else's phone, because I don't have it on my phone, that's a whole separate conversation. But my sort of head, heart, gut response

was not green light, green light, green light, right? Like paying attention to what people far smarter than me have called the whole body yes. A conscious leadership group talks quite a bit about this, but the full body yes, that was not a full body yes. And so I pause these days when I don't get a full body yes, whether it's with a guest, a format, an experiment, an event, it doesn't matter. If I don't get a full body yes, whether it's with a guest, a format, an experiment, an event, it doesn't matter. If I don't get a full body yes,

I at least wanna pause and sit with that. So I say yes very slowly to new platforms. Does that mean I compromise audience growth? Probably, but the subsequent question is, so what? I think for most creators, and I don't view myself as that. I think it's a hazardly nebulous term, creator. I view myself as a podcaster right now. That's what I do.

Helps to keep me focused. Do you consider yourself a writer? I am writing fiction right now, which is a whole separate thing. And nonetheless, right now I don't call myself a writer. I was out- You guys written multiple New York, number one New York Times bestselling books.

I was at a dinner just a few days ago and a friend of mine was there, Neil Strauss, amazing writer, very consistent. And somebody asked me what I did and I was like, well, you know, former writer, but now I do A, B and C. And he's like, former writer. And I texted Neil the other day and I said, what should I ask Tim?

He's coming in. He's like, he's calling himself a former writer. Oh, that's hilarious. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I say that just because, look, I'm not himself a former writer. Oh, that's hilarious. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I say that just because, look, I'm not attached to former writer. Sure, I can say writer, that's fine. I'm okay with it.

But it's kind of like if last time I went surfing was 20 years ago and I was really stoked about it for five years, but then I stopped, should I call myself a surfer? I don't know, maybe not. So I find- There's just a finality to that word. There's a finality.

I'm very careful with the labels I apply to myself. I think very carefully about the labels I apply. Once you apply a label, you start to use confirmation bias or warp your perception in ways that are even a hard to track. So I'm very careful with the labels I apply. But to come back to your question,

if you were to talk to most creators these days, and I get tons of questions online and meet a lot of them in person. And if you were to just drill in on their, let's say strategies they're using for audience growth and say, and why, and why, and why, or for what, for what, so that what will happen. If you get three layers deep, very often there aren't very good answers. There are some very impressive people who execute super well and they have coherent strategies.

And because they use, let's just say different ad models, or they have sponsorship deals or native advertising even though I hate native advertising. Cause to me that means hidden advertising which I think is disgusting and unethical. We don't have to spend a lot of time on that. Most people are creating because the algorithms and the data scientists and teams behind them

have figured out how to make you feel like you're sitting at the slots in the airport in Vegas, and you're getting a little drip of dopamine every time you get a hit every 15 minutes, even though you're getting bled of chips. And those chips are getting bled of your coin, your money. In this case, it's your time, it's your attention. Because the reason you don't pay for these platforms

is because you're the product. Yes. You are the product being sold. And I, for that reason, up until very recently, had no social apps. I've not had any social apps on my phone for about either two or three years. And then began experimenting with a handful of things because I launched this art project

to raise money for the foundation. And Twitter required me to install the app to really use Twitter spaces effectively. And I was like, oh, you rat bastards, you got me. Okay, fine. Just uninstalled that. But generally I simply recognize, I know I've shifted to the consumer seat,

but you are bringing a knife to a gunfight if you think you can use self-control to use these apps in any way that is not distracting you from your main focus. So from the creator standpoint, I also think I've gotten to a point if I go through the for what, for what, for what exercise myself,

the only reason that I could defend with metrics is probably ultimately financial. If I have more downloads, I can charge more for sponsorship. I do have reasons for the email list, but that's separate. We could talk about that actually. That's very old school. Talk about old fashioned. Yeah.

It's so old, it's new. It's so old, it's new. Funny how that works. And the financial argument for me is it's new. So old, it's new. Funny how that works. And the financial argument for me it's compelling on some levels, right? It would give me more funding for the foundation, but I have not in a really compelling way found that more money helps me achieve any of my current goals

or solve any of my current problems any faster. It's kind of a goal I need to smirk at if I'm using that. I'm like, I don't even believe what I'm saying right now. Right, like 25 year old Tim. Yeah, and that's, as someone might point out, it's very easy for someone to say if you're sitting in a financial position that's very comfortable, which is totally fair.

But certainly past a point, like collecting more marbles and buying more Skittles just doesn't do much. You can use it for things in the world. Yes, but so for that reason, I've really tried to keep track of, I sound like such an old bastard, but it's like, how do I feel when I wake up?

How easily am I falling asleep? What's my quality of sleep? And if the answer is not so great for a couple of days, looking at the activities, the people I'm interacting with, the things I said yes to that I should have said no to, and God damn it, when I looked at that email, I knew it was gonna be a no, but I couldn't say it cause I felt some social obligation or pressure or whatever.

I'm afraid of somebody smack talking me to their brother-in-law, who the hell knows, something stupid, keeping track of that. And when I keep track of that stuff, generally I come to the conclusion that I really enjoy long form audio. I love the freedom of having a recording studio in my backpack.

And I probably shouldn't spend a lot of time on video as one example. Even though the rewards are there, I understand what those rewards could be, but it's antithetical to some of the aspects of the whole podcasting game that made it so appealing in the beginning. Right. From the beginning, you had this whole thing about making sure that it remained facile so that it would be an easy lift for you and being very mindful about not overcomplicating it, even in the equipment for you and being very mindful about not over complicating it,

even in the equipment that you bought, like each new piece of equipment being a multiplier as a point of failure, like all of that was kind of built in to your operating system from the get go. And you even said recently, like I'm so glad I started a podcast when you didn't have to produce a television show,

because that's really what it is. And we've taken different paths with this. Well, let me first just say, just to kind of button up the discussion around influence, like I appreciated what you had to share. And I think the conversation has become too much about, attention and followers and growth and not enough attention on value

and how you're contributing and how you've made that not only meaningful for yourself, but meaningful for the audience that you've built, right? And what is that audience? And are you uplifting them? Are you educating them? Like, what is it that you are providing them with? And is that kind of a net positive for the world?

Like maybe we should be talking more about that, right? And I think we both approach the podcast with our own versions of that perspective and longevity is built out of making sure that, curiosity is always at the root and the choices around guests come from a genuine place of wanting to learn from that person and continue to expand our own respective horizons.

And in turn, like deliver that to an audience in a way that can be beneficial to them. But to the point of the way in which we're doing our podcasts, like, okay, we've made a different decision. We've invested in this studio and we are producing a television show. It's like, it's a whole thing, right?

That's nice. And you were sharing at lunch, like, yeah, there's times where I wish, you know, maybe I should have like done, you know, gotten in on it. And then I would, if I'm being honest, I would say, well, I wish there were times where I was, it was just me, just me in a suitcase and like, everything is a lot simpler, you know?

I wouldn't trade the way that I'm doing it to go back there, but they have their pluses and their minuses. And I think when we kind of welcomed this type of creation into what we do here, it does make it, it makes it more interesting and it's fun. And I love sharing the videos and being able to provide that for the guests and to kind of amplify them in that way. But it takes a lot more people and it's an investment

and you have to manage those people and you're not as nimble and you can't, you know, kind of pivot in the way that you're able to. And so I think you're doing it exactly the way that you should be doing it for yourself. Thank you. If you're true to those, that original value should be doing it for yourself. Thank you. If you're true to those, that original value set. Yeah, the podcasting Peter Pan, I like it.

But it is like podcasting has changed a lot, right? Now it's just like when we started, like I never thought it would be a business at all, let alone like the business that it has become for myself and for others. And I'm super aware and grateful that I've benefited from the fact that like I was early on when it wasn't competitive

because launching a show today, no matter who you are, it's incredibly difficult to differentiate yourself. Yeah, so I'd say just a few things before I forget. The first is that we entered the game at a very particular point. We also laid groundwork in the form of books and other things. And we ended up with the ability to interview people

on a very wide range of subjects. For somebody starting, if you wanted to begin in podcasting, I think you probably, I would probably recommend you do what I did in the blogging world, which is you start very, very, like if you wanna go wide eventually,

start very niche now. And if you want to be very big later, start very slow in a sense with your deliberate choices now, right? Like the slow is smooth and smooth is fast kind of approach. If you're playing the long game right now, you might be saying, I'm not playing the long game.

I wanna sprint for three to five years and then have my YouTube channel bought by someone for seven figures. Okay, that's a fair game. It's also a very binary game. And if it doesn't work out, you may think you're gonna be able to let go of it. But if you've got all these great sponsor deals

and suddenly you're the, I don't know. I bounce on a trampoline while playing in the latest pop song on harmonica, if that's your thing, you may get sick of doing that at some point. So, but I would say starting niche early is oftentimes smart. So you kind of get a foot in the door and then over time, and Matt Cutts, formerly of Google called this the Katamari.

I think it's the Katamari, it's referenced to this Japanese video game approach where you've sort of roll up this tiny ball and the ball gets bigger and bigger over the time. So in the beginning, you're picking up like paperclips and so on, that's the really narrow focus. Let's just say for me, it's like, all right, four hour workweek stuff, email management, productivity.

And then as it gets slightly wider, it's like, all right, we're now really talking about is optimization. And so we can hop over to physical performance. And then we go from optimization to like, well, wait a second, what the hell are we optimizing for? Okay, now it broadens and invites more questions. And in the case of the podcast, more guests.

But I do think that, and this will tie into your influence comment, never has the Kevin Kelly piece on true fans been more relevant. So just search Kevin Kelly true fans on kk.org and look that up. And when thinking of influence, I think it is very helpful to first ask yourself, what do you want to influence? Before you start trying to influence or becoming an influencer. Come on, Tim. What do you want to change? Don't rain on to influence or becoming an influencer. Come on, Tim. What do you wanna change?

Don't rain on my parade. I just wanna be an influencer. What do you wanna change? So in my case, the type of questions I have been asking myself for a long time, but especially let's just say six, seven years ago, to give a concrete example.

I start really researching the ecosystem with respect to psychedelics, trying to identify, and this is very critical, the uncrowded high leverage areas where I am uniquely suited to make a difference, where other people cannot do the same thing easily. Then I started asking myself, all right, let's say there are four of those. Let me put those four in rank order. Like which one of these makes the others easier or irrelevant? Okay, Trent, Like which one of these makes the others easier or irrelevant? Okay, Trent, which one of these naturally leads to the next? Great, let me try to put these in some semblance of order.

And then I just ask, if I had a room full of a thousand people and I wanted to make these changes happen or to facilitate these types of things, who are those thousand people? And then I can start to think strategically about what type of guests I wanna have on, what types of questions I want to ask on social, who I want to follow on Twitter.

And let's just say they're involved in some aspect of government, favorite and retweet something. So hopefully their staffer takes notice and only then maybe a few weeks later publish something that I hope will get the attention of someone in that office. And then only a month after that, reach out to someone to have a conversation

or perhaps they get mentioned in a podcast episode, right? These are not accidental things generally. Right, that's like inception level intentionality. Because I think there should be a what and furthermore, there should be a really important why when it comes to influence. And I recognize that depending on where you are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

the why might be, I wanna be able to leave my soul crushing job and pay for my rent and cover my kid's school without having a panic attack every evening. Great, that's super legitimate. I think that it's simply worth examining the what and the why so that you're clear because even if you're just being purely mercenary about things,

let's just say you're not trying to make, making the world a better place is too big. It's for a little bit later. You have other goals you wanna check off first because you feel like you need to do those things for your individual life or your family life before you can even consider those bigger aspirations. It still makes sense to go through and ask these questions.

Yeah, because even if that is the case and you are on that level of the hierarchy of needs, there still needs to be a lot of intentionality brought into the value proposition of what you're kind of putting out there, right? And objectively, you know, examining the worth of that before you even get out of the gate. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. What is the process by which you select guests? Is it like, do you have a whole like sort of checklist strategy in terms of like who you invite on the show? It could be coming at me from any number of vectors. I'd say if a friend I respect who seldom makes recommendations

puts their social capital on the line, like puts their reputation at risk to say, 10 out of 10, I recommend you consider this person as a guest. I don't have to have any interest in the subject matter at all. If someone is willing to kind of put their neck on the line, I take it seriously.

Since my friends generally take that type of thing as seriously as I do, they don't come very often that way. But when they do, I pay attention. If I have any type of strain I'm looking to remove from my life or pleasure slash fun I'm looking to inject in my life, goal I'm looking to achieve, fair game. That's gonna be, podcast is gonna be one of the tools

that I bring to bear on that. Let's see, certainly for policy change and things like that, it's the way that I have discussed psychedelics on the podcast over many years now, and since 2000, probably 14, 15 is not haphazard. So they could be trying to correct a narrative or add perhaps an understated risk to the conversation as would be the case with ketamine, for instance.

Because there are plenty of people who will not listen to me, but they will listen to someone like Dr. John Crystal. And in turn, maybe you listen and you don't use ketamine, but you know five friends who do. And without making it too on the nose, I think you have a problem. You should listen to this.

You'd be like, hey, this is really interesting. You should listen to it. And just as a Trojan horse, they all get exposed to it. So I do think about from a public service or ultimate long-term objective within the ecosystem of say science, regulation, law, policy, et cetera. I do think about it.

That's not a primary driving factor. I have stepped back from engaging with most of the psychedelic world because there are just so many clowns. It is so, and this is where I need more DBT, but it is so upsetting to me. I'm just like, God. Fight it out.

My God, you could not ask for a more clown like composition. There are great people also, but there are just so many yahoos. And so I tend to be very surgical in how I approach it. And it could be someone also, if I'm doing a lot of heavy lifting and a bunch of serious interviews

or things I'm taking seriously. It could just be something for fun. Like have a friend on, I'm gonna do a random show with Kevin Rose soon, which I do every once in a while. That's why it's called the random show. Close friend, he's great at conversation and it is our excuse to catch up.

He's busier than hell. I make myself busy with who the hell knows what half the time. And we just get a time on the calendar. Yeah, it's fun. You guys fuck around. And I think it's important to have that kind of light touch with it too and to not take it too seriously

and to not be afraid to mix it up with the formats and the approach to it. And you did that with the cock punch thing and all of that, you got to like, sow some wild oats and have fun. And I think that's important in terms of longevity as well. The other thing you've done a pretty good job of is really making sure that the conversations are evergreen

and kind of stepping outside of this flywheel that many people may not even realize exists in the podcast world where, you know, it's all about like the book of the week, right? Like there's always, I'm sure you're on the same email list that I am. And you're, you know, you're getting pitched these guests all the time.

And there's kind of an incentive structure set up to host these types of conversations. And the publishing companies have figured out that podcasts sell books. So they have a deep incentive to try to book their authors on all these shows. I've tried pretty hard to kind of begin to, I was like sort of a big participant in that for a while.

And I've really like endeavored to get out of that game because it's exhausting. And the guests that you host ends up being on the podcast on the same day. And so as I've sort of, but I'll make exceptions for friends for books that I think are really, you know, like worthy of, you know, of having a conversation with people that I admire,

because sometimes it gives you access to somebody who you wouldn't ordinarily get to sit down with, like Matthew McConaughey or, you know, Rick Rubin or what have you. Those are the occasions where our shows will overlap. And you my friend are a goddamn ninja because no matter what your episode always comes out first. So you're practicing some kind of art of war bullshit

to make sure that no matter what, knowing that this author is gonna be going on a bunch of shows that you're coming out first. So you win, congratulations. The dark arts. I hope you feel good about yourself. I just had to call you out on that because we're like over here,

I'm gonna like, God damn it, he did it again. Yeah, you know, there are all this fair and loving podcasting, but I have really tried to step back. It's tough because there are people I would like to have on and everybody and their grandma's coming out with a book these days. It makes me so uncomfortable when it's friends.

Yeah, it's uncomfortable. And I have found it largely unproductive, I would say, to have on people who are on like six podcasts in the same week. It's a level of saturation that I think in some cases leads listeners to opt out. And I understand the incentive structures. I mean, podcasts are the new radio effectively.

And the incentives are also on the podcaster side. If they have a big guest, they know it's gonna get views or downloads. There are aligned incentives from that perspective, but in my ideal world, and it's not always Tim's ideal world, but in my ideal world, I would be having novel conversations

that bring something to my audience they wouldn't have found otherwise. Yeah, and that's what feels the best too. When you find that person who's amazing, who isn't necessarily promoting anything, they just have something wise about them and something that you resonate with that you know your audience will.

And just the feeling of being able to like, check this out and have people respond to that is like, that's the juice. Yeah, and that's also where the psychedelic ecosystem with respect to scientists has actually been a godsend of sorts because I get to have those conversations. And I think that scientific literacy, just having a basic fundamental ability to say,

read headlines and the news with an ability to sort fact from fiction, or at least know which questions to ask so that you can interrogate these sensational stories is crucial survival training for the information age that we live in. It's going to get so bad with AI. I mean, the disinformation, misinformation is gonna get so shockingly bad that taking it upon yourself, it doesn't take very long. It's like take a week or two and just decide I'm going to become functionally literate in how to understand 20 terms in science, that's it.

And Peter Tia, who's been mentioned earlier has a great series called studying the studies. I think it is, it's a bit technical. One of his podcasts is quite good. There's a book called bad science, which has some excellent chapters in it, which helps you to start to parse, see through the veil. It doesn't have to be that intimidating.

So in any case, these are things I care about. The scientific literacy is really important to me. Yeah, things are getting crazier faster than ever. Oh yeah. And we haven't even begun. Yeah, things are getting messy, which is another reason why I don't want my brain exposed to that shit all day long on different social platforms.

And if I engage with it, I will be exposed. I really try to treat social as junk food. It's like, look, every once in a while, you wanna have cheat meal, great. But it's like, if every day, if you're just like hammering pixie sticks, like maybe that's not the best for you. What is the most unoptimized area of your life

that you're like embarrassed to admit? I am now a connoisseur of unoptimizing or de unoptimized area of your life that you're like embarrassed to admit? I am now a connoisseur of unoptimizing or de-optimizing. I have come to really appreciate poetry. That sounds so ridiculous. I mean, the younger me would really just be throwing fits hearing this, but reading really good poetry that has been thoughtfully in most cases translated. So there's a book it's very thin, it's called Gold.

It's new translations of Rumi by this woman. Her last name is Hala Liza Gafori, G-A-F-O-R-A. And they're just spectacularly beautiful. In some cases, hilarious poems you can really chew on. And that would be one area. Social time, I've realized from my mental health, group dinners are just a layup every time. If I have one or two group dinners with friends per week,

more than one person, two or three people. I'm generally great. If I do that exercise, I'm pretty good. Even if I- That could be characterized as optimizing your emotional health. Well, maybe. I mean, I think optimizing it, have more constraints around it.

But like these tend to go for a long time. And if it's like somebody's birthday and they're like, hey, let's have a drink. And I'm like, oh, I really don't want to drink because sleep is number one. Like, dah, dah, dah. Like I'll make compromises here and there. So I'm adding the mental health piece more as an afternote, if that makes sense.

It's the driver is trying to embrace unrushed enjoyment, which has been de-prioritized for most of my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like unrushed,, which has been deprioritized for most of my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like unrushed, the hell are you talking about? Enjoyment, save that for later. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Your reward is you perform well.

That's your reward. Yeah. Do your job. I mean, listen, and you're walking it because we talked about having lunch beforehand, maybe going on a hike and you're like, I got time. Like, you're not like rushing out of here because you got some other appointments.

So clearly you're like doing that. You're showing up for that in your life. Yeah, I decided for this set of a few weeks when I'm in LA that it was social over solo and there are compromises. Like in terms of productivity, it's fallen through the floor. Like however I might measure productivity.

I mean, it's just plummeted. And what I've realized for myself, and maybe this applies to people might help folks think about say the mental health stuff, which is if you're far on one end, let's just say productivity efficiency. I don't read fiction because it's a waste of time. If I wanted to make up stories, I can do it myself like that kind of person, which I was forever. You may need to experiment with doing the opposite, which is some form of this total immersion stuff

that I'm doing right now before, right? It's like thesis, antithesis, synthesis, before you can end up in the middle with some medley that you can sustain for a long time. You might have to explore the end ranges. So for me right now, that's social. Yeah, so today totally unrushed. It's great.

Yeah, well, the final one is the low hanging fruit, most obvious one, which is what would you put on a billboard and maybe how you answer that is a reflection on how you've changed or grown since the last time I saw you. So last time I saw you, my answer probably would have been you're the average of the five people

you associate with most, something like that. Pick your social circle very wisely. That includes virtual or parasocial relationships, by the way, like the people you follow on YouTube or podcasts, choose carefully. The answer I would give now, I'm gonna crib directly from a former guest of mine, Dr. BJ Miller, who's helped a thousand plus,

probably 2000 plus people to transition to death and hospice care. A fascinating guy. And I think he got it from a bumper sticker, but it's great. And I think it sort of wraps everything nicely for me right now, which is don't believe everything you think. Don't believe everything you think.

Really take a second to interrogate those things. Look for counter evidence. And there's so many stories, so many beliefs, right? Which are thoughts we take to be true that we've repeated for so long that they've become the subconscious 10 commandments through which we live our lives. And it's an ongoing process,

but don't believe everything you think. There's a lot of depth to that and a lot of layers. Yeah, I love it. This is great, man. Thank you. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. It's a privilege to kind of witness your arc and your growth

and like I said at the outset, your transparency and your courage and your vulnerability around sharing it. I really do think it's a salve and to so many people and helpful and there's a true commitment to service that's behind it that I think is really laudable and worthy of note. So thank you for doing that and I'm at your service, my friend.

Anything I can do to help advance the things that you're interested in, hope you consider me a resource. Thanks man. And may I- Of course, plug all your stuff. Come on, dude. What are we doing here?

What are we doing here? All right, finally, I can pitch my shit. Thank you for that, I appreciate it. And I mean, I'm here for a while. Be nice to actually spend a couple hours together, go for a hike. So a few things I would say first is if people are interested in learning what the coolest,

most interesting things are that I'm coming across, and there are a lot of them, I have a newsletter. It's one of the biggest single author newsletters out there. It's free. Five Bullet Friday, tim.blog slash Friday. You can find that. I love doing that. It's actually really fun to go back and look at them because it's kind of the only thing I have that's close to a diary. So I get to go back like three years ago and see, oh, that's what was happening that week. And that's why I got that thing because I broke my toe on this and that. And oh yeah, I forgot about that documentary. So Five Bullet Friday for people who might be interested,

a couple million people subscribe, it's a lot of fun. And then the podcast, of course, Tim Ferriss Show, you can find that. And I think a good place to start, if you want somebody you probably haven't been exposed to, this is an old one. You can find all the big names and all that, but BJ Miller, that was, it feels like a hundred years ago.

That was probably 2015. That to this day is one of those episodes that I think about all the time. So if people are looking for a name they might not recognize, you can check that one out. Cool, man. We'll link that up also in the show notes. So, all right, man.

Well, hopefully to be continued. Yeah, to be continued, man. It's great to see you. Thanks, you too as well. Cheers. Peace. You're continued man, it's great to see you. Thanks, you too as well, cheers, peace. That's it for today, thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests,

including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show

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Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis, as well as Dan Drake. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, as well as Dan Drake.

Thank you, Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

Namaste. Thank you.