The Tim Ferriss Show - #382: Safi Bahcall — On Hypnosis, Conquering Insomnia, Incentives, and More

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Safi Bahcall (@SafiBahcall) is the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, which debuted #3 on Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list. Loonshots describes what an idea from physics tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better.Safi received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, Safi was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s council of science advisors on the future of national research. In this episode, we talk about many things we haven’t covered before, including hypnosis, conquering insomnia, thoughts on depression, optimizing incentives, and much more. You can also listen to my first interview with Safi at tim.blog/safi.  Please enjoy!This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer: Enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. That's onepeloton.com and enter the code you heard during the Peloton ad of this episode to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase.This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. If you’ve ever hired anyone (or attempted to), you know finding the right people can be difficult. If you don’t have a direct referral from someone you trust, you’re left to use job boards that don’t offer any real-world networking approach.LinkedIn, as the world’s largest professional network, which is used by more than 70 percent of the US workforce, has a built-in ecosystem that allows you to not only search for employees, but also interact with them, their connections, and their former employers and colleagues in a way that closely mimics real-life communication. Visit LinkedIn.com/Tim and receive a $50 credit toward your first job post!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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do. And my guest today is a repeat guest, a very popular guest, Safi Bakal, S-A-F-I, last name B-A-H-C-A-L-L, at Safi Bakal on Twitter and Instagram. He is the author of Loon Shots, subtitle, How to Nurture the Crazy Ide ideas that win wars, cure diseases and transform industries. And he's done at least two of those things himself. So he knows of which he speaks. Loonshots describes when idea from physics, he's a physicist, among other things, tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. The book debuted number three on Wall Street Journal's bestseller list. And you can listen to my first episode with Safi at tim.blog forward

slash Safi. In this episode, we talk about all sorts of things we haven't covered before, including hypnosis. He knows a ton about that. Conquering insomnia, thoughts on depression, optimizing incentives, and much more. But first, just a little bit more on Safi. If you haven't heard the first episode, Safi received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotech company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named Ernst & Young's New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked named Ernst & Young's New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors on the Future of National

Research. He's a heavy, also a great guy. And related to this episode is a documentary, which I believe I mentioned in the conversation itself, but Trip of Compassion. Trip of Compassion is the most impactful documentary I've probably seen in the last five years. And I highly, highly encourage everyone to check it out. It's incredibly important. And the short link that'll take you there, I don't earn a penny from it, is tim.blog forward slash trip. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash trip. I encourage everyone to check it out. So without further ado, here is the incredible Safi Bakal. Safi, welcome back.

Thanks, really glad to be back. And I thought we could start with a chapter of your life and a capability that I know nothing about, and that is hypnosis. Oh, man. Where does hypnosis enter the stage, and why hypnosis? Oh, man. So this is, I don't think I've talked about that anywhere. In fact, I think a lot of people don't know that I studied that. And I'm glad this is just between you and me. So this doesn't get out to like, oh, he's the hypnotizing CEO or something

like that. So nobody will ever use that phrase on me ever. So that's good. No, it began about, well, it started with a Thai food truck. Okay. So about when I was in grad school, maybe 20 years ago, I was at Stanford in the physics. They really didn't have any good food, like anything that was sort of edible around. And kind of across the campus, there was this Thai food truck, which was awesome. It's like my mouth was watering still thinking about it. It was just like great Thai food truck. So I used to trek across, and it was parked like great tai fu truck so i used to trek across and it was parked right outside the psychology building and so on my you know three or four times a week i

would check it one day i saw a sign outside a door that said hypnosis class and i was like what's that like hypnosis is this like fre with, like, you wave something and people go, you know, bark like dogs or something, right? So, why, you know, is Stanford and it's like, so I went in. At some point, I just got curious. I peeked in. And there were all these, like, really tall, big, super athletic-looking people. Not what I expected, peering into, like, a door that said hypnosis. And it turns out it was, like, half the Stanford football football team. So I'm like, now I'm getting curious. Like why is half the Stanford

football team studying hypnosis? So eventually after probably three or four more walks, you know, on Thai food lunches, I go in and I sit down and it's being taught by a physician from the Stanford medical school who had written one of the classic books on hypnosis. And he starts by kind of debunking some of the myths around it, that, oh, this is kind of a freaky thing. And it's actually a very natural state. And there's a very important evolutionary reason we have developed this state to allow ourselves to be hypnotized. And what hypnosis is, as he explained, is in ordinary life, there's something called the magic number seven. As you sit there, or as I sit here, or as anybody sits down in your audience and imagines the world around them,

they can kind of be aware of seven, roughly seven different things around them, plus or minus two. The famous article called The Magic Number Seven, plus or minus two. Hypnosis is really the state of bringing that down to one. You're just focused on one thing. And it turns out everybody, practically everybody, has the ability to go into a hypnotic trance. Why? Why does that exist? There's a very interesting reason evolutionarily why it makes sense. If you are being chased by a tiger and the tiger has clawed a little bit of your leg and it's incredibly painful, you really only want to be focused on one thing, getting away from that damn tiger. You don't want to be focused on, oh, look, there's a nice bird or what did I have for lunch yesterday or what might be dinner tomorrow or, oh, my leg hurts. You just want to be focused on, oh, look, there's a nice bird, or what did I have for lunch yesterday, or what might be dinner tomorrow, or, oh, my leg hurts. You just want to be focused for your survival on that one thing.

And that's what hypnosis is. It's just learning how to focus on one thing. And in the case of, I got interested in it because I had trouble falling asleep. I would just have racing thoughts in my brain all the time and I'd end up thinking about them for a couple hours. For a couple hours? It felt like a couple hours. Decades of the same thing.

I don't know if it was actually a couple hours or it would feel like a couple hours. I would just have these racing thoughts and I was like, well, maybe this is a tool, the self-hypnosis tool. I started getting, well, maybe this is a tool, the self-hypnosis tool. So I started getting curious about it and reading about it and taking this class from this physician. I actually forgot his name now. And why were all these athletes there? Because

that state of incredibly heightened focus is the same thing great athletes do. So if you are a baseball player and you've got your bat in your hand and you're looking at the pitcher, everything is disappearing except that one baseball. And that baseball will seem as large as a big pumpkin to you. That's a state of complete focus. Or if you're listening to music and, I mean, this is why hypnosis and trance induction is so familiar because we all go into this state of very heightened focus. If you're listening to music or you're deep in a book and when someone has to call your name a couple times and then you just sort of shake your head and snap out of it, you are in a trance. You were completely focused on just that one thing. And that magic number seven plus or minus two in the world around you had just narrowed down to one. So what's hypnosis? Hypnosis is helping

someone get into that one. And that's what a good hypnotherapist does, is he induces that trance. And it's not with like a man. So I learned how to do it and then started practicing over a year or two with friends and eventually for myself and discovered it's amazing. Firstly, it's completely real. It's amazing what you can do with hypnosis. It probably changed my life. Firstly, it developed some tricks that allow me to get to sleep in 30 seconds,

some fast tricks. Well, okay. Let's talk about the sleep, and then I'd love to talk about just induction more broadly. Sure. So, you can do trans-induction. There are many different forms of transinduction. And the masters of this are very good at identifying what forms of transinduction work with different types of people. Because the idea is, oh, let's just do X. But that's actually not true. There are different personality types. So in and of itself, it's kind of a fascinating exercise.

And then you do it with yourself. I was most interested in self-hypnosis to actually really just to help me get to sleep. So over the years, I practiced it with friends on hypnotizing others. And I mean, really just for curiosity to see what it could do and how real it was. And it was just, it was clearly very real. And then on myself, it was kind of like experimenting on myself, on my own mind and guiding your own thought patterns and identifying what little tricks work with your own mind. And eventually found a couple tricks that are incredibly effective for the question that I started with, which is how do you go to sleep quickly? So there is the short and easy, which works maybe 60%, 70% of the time, and there's the sort of guaranteed home run,

sort of the big guns. It takes a little bit longer, but it works essentially 100% of the time. So the short and easy is, I've actually shown, told a couple people this trick and it's helped them a lot. And it's kind of like, for those people who have a lot of racing thoughts,

it's almost like a jujitsu move or I studied a lot of Aikido. So it's Aikido is you use your opponent's energy to achieve what you want. So what you do is you close your eyes and whatever comes, whatever visuals you see, you start to really get curious about them. It doesn't matter what pattern you see. You might see the vague images of a chair and you say, well, what does that chair look

like? What's its texture? Is it moving? Is it floating? Is it spinning around? Is there something on it? And because your mind is racing, whatever that object is, it might be a chandelier,

it might be just weird images, they'll start to change in your mind. And you just get curious. What's it going to change into next? And the reason that's sort of like a jiu- or a kinewave is all those racing thoughts, all those firing neurons get redirected to that object because it gets curious. Like, really, what's it going to change? That's so wacky.

Like, what is it going to change into? And then the object starts to go from this like amorphous thing that's very far away to coming clearer and clearer and closer to your mind and sharper and sharper. And the sharper and sharper it becomes in focus, the more you're getting deep in trance, the more you're letting the waking world go by. And you just keep asking, well, what's it going to change into next? I have no idea. Let's follow it. So that works a good fraction of the time. And it just calms you. It just takes all those racing thoughts and redirects them to that one object.

And if you find yourself strained, your mind strained, just redirect, well, where was that object? What's it going to do next? Let's get really curious. And there's so many things to add. What colors are it? Is it sparkling? What's its texture? Is it going to morph into something? Oh my God, there's my father. And just watch it. And the more you watch it, the more it crystallizes, the more you're going deep into trance and you leave the waking world behind. I'm a little more visual. If you're more auditory and you tend to hear kind of a dialogue in the back of your head, there's trick number two.

This is a little bit of a weird, I actually haven't told anybody this trick. Again, so glad it's just between you and me. I ask the audio generator in my brain, which is, you know, whatever audio engineer is popping forth that little audio in our dialogue, to focus on generating a random double-digit number between 1 and 100. So why double-digit? Well, single-digit is not a really difficult enough task. 1, 3, 4, 5.

It doesn't really engage your auditory engineer very much. Double-digit is just enough of an effort that your audio engineer can't play some irritating, keep you awake dialogue and do that other task. It has to pick one or the other. And why random? Well, if you just do 23, 24, 25 sequence, it's kind of boring. And then your audio engineer can go back to that really irritating voice that was keeping you awake. So by asking your audio engineer to do this task of generate a random double digit number and then to keep the audio and the video engineers in your head that are generating this noise busy, you assign them the task of seeing those numbers. So I kind of imagine like a cannon, launching these numbers in the sky and watching them, 22, 76, 57.

I feel like people listening are going to think I'm crazy, but this actually really works. It's like all those sort of inner racing thoughts, you just take them away from their tasks that they were doing, which was keeping you up, and you focus them on tasks that you would rather have them doing, tasks that are actually helping you get to sleep faster. Wow.

I love that. Have you found anything else, actually before we get to anything else that has helped your sleep besides hypnosis, what are some of the more common or more effective induction techniques. So if it's not swinging a pendant in front of someone, which it could be, I'm not saying that isn't an option, but what are some of the different induction techniques that apply to different people? There's so many different induction techniques.

There's a relaxation technique. A lot of it is start by focusing on a part of the body and saying, notice how it's relaxing, and then going up the body slowly, and notice how that's slowly relaxing as we're talking about it. And then I want you to imagine a color. It's sort of green, maybe, and as that color is spreading up your body,

it's just getting more and more relaxed, each part of green maybe. And as that color is spreading up your body, it's just getting more and more relaxed each part of your body. And I want you to, and then you go and walk up their body, especially around the neck muscles or the face muscles. And you need to acknowledge if there's anything going on around them, you acknowledge that and then bring them back to the relaxation technique. Then there's the counting down from 10 to 1 as you're walking down a set of stairs, or as you're floating into a cloud. And then there's the, I want you to imagine, pick some place you're very comfortable. And as I count from 10 to 1, I want you to notice, let's say

you're on the beach, I want you to notice the sand between your toes. I want you to notice what's around you. And you just get them to that place. All of these are different induction techniques. And they're pretty standard induction techniques if you look at any of the good hypnosis books. What I actually found amazing is some people can do it with just shaking your hand. It's actually incredible. Really great master therapist at this. you interrupt a standard pattern, like you go to reach across to shake somebody's hand, they're expecting to reach it, you pull aside at the last second,

and you interrupt them, and you say drop. And they just, like, you shock, you do some unexpected shock to interrupting a natural pattern, and you just sort of drop them into a trance state i can't do that but i've seen that it's just it's incredibly it's kind of mind-boggling to see and it it really works when you've practiced it a lot and you get good at it uh you can help people go into the zone where they're totally focused on the ones like a great athlete is is. And I mean, like I said, that's why athletes studied because it helps them get into that

zone. And when they are there, they're focused on your voice. So the hypnosis part is because at that point you can make suggestions and those suggestions become realized in their body. What are some of the best applications of hypnosis? Because there are, it could be nearly everything. There could be a smaller subset. It just makes me think of, for instance, you have platelet-rich plasma injections, for instance, for various types of soft tissue pathologies. And turns out, doesn't appear to work uniformly well in different joints, even though in the lay person's mind, in my mind, it's like, okay, joint is kind of a joint. It's composed of the same stuff. Turns out, as it relates to outcomes, just not to be the case, right? There are certain types of pathologies that are really well suited to PRP. What are some of the better applications or more effective applications of hypnosis?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there is that common view out there that you can use it to solve problems or address pathologies. And that is the case. I'll talk about that in a minute. I actually found the far more interesting use of it, and I'll give some examples. Actually, a bigger gun technique. I gave you sort of the short, cute, quick trick techniques

for going to sleep quickly if you have a racing mind. But I'll give you the bigger gun one, which has far broader implications. It's essentially about guiding your own thought patterns, being in charge of what's going on in your mind, taking control of what's happening in your mind. And these sort of tools give you the techniques to essentially create. The way I think about it is meditation is like a volume control on a radio. You can dial down stuff.

Learning to guide the thought patterns in your mind is like creating a new station, your own inner playlist for your mind, for whatever you think is... It's like creating your inner Pandora. So one thing is you just... I think meditation is a very useful tool, but it's just a dial-up, dialed down kind of thing.

The other one is about creating a playlist. So you can use it either to optimize or become more effective. I think the most effective tool is in some ways to create inner peace or inner calm. And I'll come back to that. You asked about something I hear about often, which is how to treat certain pathologies. And I think what people have found, and this is where hypnosis or hypnotherapy kind of morphs with CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy, for certain things like fear of heights or fear of, or certainly for quitting smoking, a really good master hypnotherapist can be incredibly effective for that. Or in some cases, over-eating or

basically bad habits. It just gives you a new set of tools and techniques for going in and quickly reversing a bad habit. For example, creating an association. You always finish a plate of food. Why? And so I actually did this a few times back then. Why? Well, it turns out you, really good hypnotherapists can go in there, find out what association do you, when you see a plate, what's the trigger? What happens? Well, it turns out when I was a kid, my mom always told me to finish a plate. So I always finish a plate. Well, let's twist that trigger around. Now when you see a plate, I want you to imagine it half your brain and just change a trigger. So for those kinds of relatively quick fixes, hypnotherapy is very effective. It's not effective for serious biochemical disorders like depression or schizophrenia. That, it won't work. But for sort of more common sort of ingrained habits or bad habits or things that are very difficult to change and can be very effective.

The other one which I found even more fascinating is for achieving some level of inner peace. And I'll give you an example. I was just fascinated the first few years. It's been a long time since I thought about it. Let's start with a going to sleep example. If those quick tricks don't work for you, this kind of approach gives you, this sort of bigger gun approach will give you a sense of what I mean by taking control of your brain.

So if those tricks don't work, here's what you do. You personify each of the thought patterns that are racing through your head. And here's what I mean. You have something about family that you are stewing about? So that's Mr. Family. Do you have something about finances?

Oh, should I have made this investment? Oh, should I have not made this investment? Oh, I'm running low on this in my bank account. Or what am I going to do about this check that's coming up? Or is it something about work? Oh, my boss said this to me today. Let's do about that for 49 minutes. Or my significant other said that is he or she really thinking this or really think let's do about that for another 57 minutes and

replay that video tape for 57 minutes. Or my parents this or my kids that. Let's worry about that problem and then cycle back to the finances and cycle back And you give each of them a character Give each of them a character Whatever you want to name them Now you put them around a table And you are the chairman of that board And you say You start by assuming positive intent

The character that's stewing about the work, you thank them for their thoughts and you say, thank you for raising those things because that may be helping me and you may be playing that videotape because you want me to learn a lesson. So let's talk about, and before I start, how many minutes do you think you need? I hear you that the reason you're replaying this video in my head is that something happened today, and you're replaying that video on over. There's a very good reason that you're doing that,

and I appreciate that, because you're watching out for me. You want me to learn the lesson from that video. So let's do this. This is the inner conversation you have with that one character, and then you're going to repeat. How many minutes do you need to explain the lesson? Do you you think you need 30 minutes well not really 30 about one well one is not enough so then you end up with like let's take two minutes and we're just going to listen to it you analyze the video oh here's what you're trying to tell me it's this lesson i said this

stupid thing to my boss i really shouldn't do that. In this situation, here's what I should do. And then you ask that engineer or that character who's playing that video, work video over and over and over where you said some dumb thing. Did I get the lesson right? Yes. Was that good? Yes. Do you want to keep going or was that enough for tonight? Do you think we should get some rest? No, we're done. Boom. Sits down. Then you go to the the next the one that's doing about what you happen with your significant other or spouse or whatever let's you and you were playing some stupid video of some stupid thing that you did and shouldn't have done let's go through that how many minutes do you need you converge and agree and you go how many minutes you give that character your full attention you think and you start by thanking it for watching out for you

assume positive intent Instead of making enemies with your thoughts and trying to suppress them, you become partners with them, friends with them. And now you walk through one by one, each of the three or four or five characters that were playing videos or sounds or audio about stuff that happened that day that you are stewing about, and you just walk around the table. And as soon as you're done, as soon as the last person says, okay, I'm done,

you feel this incredible calm. And then you just go to sleep. Because these guys are done. These are the guys who are playing video or audio in your head, and they are done. And then at the end of that, when you've gone around the table, you say,

is there anybody else that feels like they have something they want? And you actually, strangely enough, when you, oh, well, you know what? There was the email that I got

and there's Mr. Email Guy about shit that I need to do tomorrow that's like replaying. Oh, don't forget this. Don't forget this. And then you negotiate. Okay, let's hear you. Let's hear you out. How many minutes do you want? Well, two. And actually

I'd really like you to write this freaking thing down so you don't forget it. Like, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take my little notepad here and get an open. I'm going to write this thing down. Does that address your concern? Yes, it does. Do you need to raise it again? No, I'm done. Do you need to raise it again?

No, I'm done. You can go to sleep now. And that's it. Then everybody in your head, all those little, and of course we're creating these characters, but it's incredibly empowering to create those characters because then you can address them

and instead of being in battle with your thoughts, you become in partnership with them because they are there for a reason. They are doing you good. They're trying to watch it. The only reason they're replaying those videos in your head or those audios, they're trying to improve you. They're trying to say, hey, idiot, learn the freaking lesson from this damn thing that happened today. And the reason they're replaying it, you haven't heard them. And then they're just going to repeat until they get acknowledged. Once they get acknowledged, whoosh, you watch them sit down, shut up, they're done. And it's amazing. The first few times you do that, it's like magic. It's like,

wait a minute, that video is not appearing in my head anymore. Oh, that's why he was doing it. He just wanted me to get the freaking lesson and be acknowledged. Now that I got the lesson, it just completely dissipates. Anyway, I call that the chairman of the board or the chairman of the mind routine. That takes a little bit longer. It works 100% of the time. This I love. And I want to ask you to dig in a little bit because this... I didn't dig in enough there?

You did dig in. Okay. But I want to get your opinion as we experience the background melody of fire sirens and so on in Austin, Texas, nonetheless. The power of making friends with your thoughts and bifurcating or trifurcating or identifying different characters or creating different characters that represent this

psyche that you're contending with, whether it's during insomnia or because you are suffering with some type of debilitating conflict within your own mental experience of life, right? And I'm bringing this up because versions of this have been one of the most valuable things I have incorporated into my own life in the last few years. I have not worked with this particular format, but whether it's Jack Kornfield, who's been very, very instrumental in helping me to recontextualize anger, for instance, which was a default of mine for a very long time, there are exercises that he prescribed are visualizations that are kind of close cousins of this. But the common ingredient is viewing these different characters, validating them, thanking them, and that very often ends, or at least temporarily interrupts the pattern, right? And I'm curious

what you as a very well-trained scientist, what you, the answer doesn't need to be scientific, but what does that say about the mind? Like, what does that say about the ego and the mind that sort of splitting it up into these different characters has such tremendous power like why is it so effective well i think our mind is a tool to for survival and all of those that stuff that's going on in your head is about survival. It's about enhancing the propagation of the collection of genes that's your body. And so the thoughts that are going on in your mind are about learning lessons from stuff that's happened so that you can improve in the future and improve your probability of surviving. What's happened that's different in the last hundred years is the world has gotten more complex. There wasn't email and work job and spouse difficulties and, you know,

Oprah and, you know, Letterman and Leno and Tim Ferriss, you know, all these things to let, what's happened in the last hundred years that we have not evolved to is just the flood of inputs. So our brain is fine if all you have to think about is like running along the Sahara and finding a gazelle or whatever to eat. Let's learn the lesson from yesterday's hunt and apply it to tomorrow's hunt. And so you have the videos of yesterday's hunt in your brain and you're like, okay, I got that. I'm going to apply that to tomorrow's hunt. And so you have the videos of yesterday's hunt in your brain and you're like, okay, I got that. I'm going to apply that to tomorrow's hunt. Fast forward to now and we've got 10,000 different inputs during the day and our brain just hasn't evolved. And so this is sort of a technique to keep pace with how to keep calm and how to keep centered and how to keep sane when you have such a flood of inputs. It's like, all right, you, the brain, is trying to improve survival, which is a great,

thank you for that, but we're flooded with inputs, so you're just flooding with outputs because there's just so many, and that creates confusion. And the reason it's suboptimal is just because our brain has not kept pace with the evolution of our body and the evolution of our brain has not kept pace with the rapid evolution of technology. So the technology has outstripped us. We have far more input that we are capable of handling. So this is just a technique for trying to keep it under control. Anger is a great example. So here's what I do. With anger, I think of Michael Jordan. I think of anger as a gift. Why? I reframe it as a gift. Why? I think of a Michael Jordan example. Every time I get angry, Michael Jordan in the

later stages of his career, I remember reading an interview or a quote with him, someone said, you know, how do you think about being kind of an older player? He was in his, I don't know if he was in it, he was in his mid-30s, I think. And, you know, surrounded by all these younger players, how do you like get up the energy? And he says, when I'm sitting on the bench before the game, I just think, they say you are too old. They say you are too old. They say you are too old. They say you are too old. And he has that sound. He created that soundtrack.

See, he's doing the same thing. He's tuning his brain. He's creating anger. And then by the time the bell rings and he leaps off the bench, he is so fucking pissed off, he goes and he crushes the opponents at age 35, and they're all 10 years younger than him. Anger is a gift. You use it as fuel. So when publishers told me, this you know when you know some agents or

whatever like like wouldn't even bother returning my phone call when i talked about oh this makes physics and business and history and i and you know they kept doing this really irritating thing of like scheduling something and then like an hour before yeah can we do that two weeks from now and then an hour before can we do that a week from now? Fuck you. That really pissed me off. Like if you're not interested, just say you're not interested. Don't keep like, I'm still angry. But you know what? I use it.

Anger is fuel. And I sit down in the morning. I think about that. Fuck you. I'm going to make this the best goddamn book ever because of you. Fuck you. I'm getting a little careful. That's how anger is a gift.

I think of the Michael Jordan example. Whether it's real or not, and I'm not really infinitely upset about that, maybe just a little, but you use it as fuel, and then it's a gift. And you know what? I thank all the people who rejected me

because they fueled me to make a better story and work harder. So when I was training every evening, essentially training, it's like shooting three-point shots endlessly or shooting free throws endlessly. It's fuel. You imagine they say you are too old.

Fuck you. I'm going to do 100 goddamn free throws. So I'm going to read every sentence of Nabokov and deconstruct everything. What are those little tricks or tips, whether it's him or the other, because fuck you. And so anger, when someone screws you over,

it's a gift. And your job, your trick, is to figure out how is it a gift. What are they helping you become better at? How are they providing you with fuel? They've just given you fuel. How are you going to use that fuel? That's your job.

It reminds me of also Alexis Ohanian, who's one of the co-founders of Reddit. And in the early days of Reddit, they had some meeting with an executive at Yahoo. And I think it was, I'm speculating here, but probably a phishing expedition on the part of Yahoo to figure out like, how can we clone these guys if they're doing something interesting? But it was couched in some type of strategic kind of highfalutin language of import. And so they meet with this guy. I assume it was a guy. And at some point, he says,

after looking at their numbers, he goes, oh, wow, you guys are a rounding error. And so Alexis and his team made a huge sign in the office that said, you are a rounding error and put it on the wall so they would see it every day. But my question to you, and I do want to ask you about depression in a minute because it seemed like hypnosis might not be the best tool for that. So we'll come to that later. That's why I'm just planting the seed. But I have used anger as fuel. So I have done that, but it became my default.

So I looked for reasons to get angry to create the fuel to do things. How do you not slip into becoming the vessel full of acid that hurts itself more than anything it's put upon. Right. So I don't. So I use that whenever I feel a little incipient bud of anger, and then it just dials down the anger. So there are two ways to get fuel. One is that anger, as you say, but that in some ways, I think that's only useful when you're already angry or you're feeling the incipient. Really, it's a trick for not being consumed by the anger. It's for whenever you feel an incipient bud, you turn it into an opportunity. My real motivation is, I have a phrase that I keep in mind when I started.

I got connected to an author named Richard Preston who wrote The Hot Zone, which was this huge bestseller, and then a number of other great books as a New Yorker writer. And we were talking. I was really beginning. And he just said, you know, Safi, just make something beautiful. Don't worry about anything else. Really simple. It's great advice. And I just like, whenever random stuff comes up, hey, could you do this thing? Or could you write that byline? Or could you do this interview? Or could you do blah, blah, blah? Or all these distracting things? Or is this marketing thing going well? Or is that? I'm like, you know what, just, my job is just to make something

beautiful, not worry about anything else. And really, the whole time I was writing, I was, I kind of had that phrase, just make something beautiful. Don't worry about trying to please anybody. Don't worry about how this might go. And I didn't. I just was like, let's make something beautiful that I could be proud of at the end. And so what motivated me was this kind of, um, kind of that phrase, just make something beautiful. And that,

that's what kept me going. Yeah. The search for, uh, the, the search for, or the recognition of beauty, uh,

for a lot of reasons in the last handful of years has become a much higher priority. It seems to not necessarily be a solve-all, but it covers a lot of bases. And it's difficult for me to put into words why that's the case, but you're talking about plausible evolutionary explanations for why the ability to fall into a trance state seems to be nearly universal. And similarly, it's like, okay, why,

why, why is the recognition of beauty or even the concept of beauty, something that seems to be universal? We don't have to get into that. That's getting pretty, pretty highfalutin, but that, to that. That's getting pretty highfalutin. But that desire to create or recognize beauty has become much more of a driver for me in the last five years, I'd say, in particular. And it seems

to check off a lot of other boxes. So rather than trying to check off 20 different things that I need or solve 20 different problems if I have a compass that is pointing towards creating something of beauty. But however you end up recognizing that yourself, it seems to really solve a lot for me. Let's talk about an experience of not being able to see beauty. Mentioned depression earlier. How do you think about depression? What do people get right or wrong about it? I don't know if you've suffered from it yourself. And in all of your exposure to various types of treatments and methodologies

and pharmaceuticals, what's out there that actually seems promising? That's a great question. I learned a lot about depression in the last few years that I knew nothing about. I'm very fortunate to not have had either depression in the family or experienced clinical depression myself. But what happened the last few years is I got to know somebody closely with depression

and realized a lot of wrong things to do. In fact, no matter how much I thought I either was self-aware or there are just so many traps. In fact, one big trap that's incredibly common to people like, let's say, you and me, who are really looking to improve how we go about our life in the world. Let's find the things that you can do that will improve. Let's look on the bright side. Let's do this little cognitive change. And that, as it turns out, is exactly the wrong thing to do with depression.

And I remember, I think I heard, I think it might have been Tony Robbins on your show, talk about, well, here are these, you know, techniques that I use to help motivate people and do these great things, which work phenomenal in that situation. You know, with these people who are depressed, we should just do the same stuff. Some variant of learn to look at the glasses half full, look on the brights, et cetera, et cetera, and just change your mind to focus on the good stuff. And that's what I thought maybe a couple years ago.

That is a disaster when you're dealing with someone with depression. Why? It has, depression is a disaster when you're dealing with someone with depression. Why? Depression is a biochemical. It's essentially a diseased or broken organ. It's no different than you sprain your ankle or you have trouble with your liver. You're having trouble with your brain. It's a biochemical trouble with your liver. You're having trouble with your brain. It's a biochemical trouble with your brain. And little quick fixes not only don't help, they make it worse. Why? When you suggest to somebody with serious clinical depression, hey, there's a glass.

Let's talk about where it's full. Let's talk about the water. Why do you just keep looking and talking about where it's empty everywhere around? Because I look and I can take the exact same glass and talk about the water rather than the air. So when you say that to someone who is suffering real clinical depression, A, it invalidates their depression. It says, what you're telling me is not valid because it's a real quick fix. And I should have known this quick fix, which takes 15 seconds, and I've been fucking around for however long, whether it's years or months or weeks. So it invalidates them. It tells them that they're weak in character. It's not a biochemical problem. It's not like you sprained your elbow or you have a liver problem.

You just have a weak personality. That's your problem. See, I have a strong personality because I know how to look at the glasses at full. And your problem is you have a weak personality. You're kind of inferior. It's just the worst possible thing you could say. And third, they're unable to do that. It's like telling someone who is, an example I was told recently,

it's like telling someone who is infertile, you know what, just think positive and you'll have a baby. How frustrating and irritating is that to hear? Just think positive. You have a physical biochemical problem that has nothing to do with how you're thinking about the world and is not a quick fix. It's incredibly irritating for all of those reasons. And it just makes you feel worse. Like not only can you not do these things, you've just been invalidated and told you have this

inferior weak personality. The person that you're talking to totally doesn't understand you. They are on a different planet planet they think it's a simple quick fix and they just don't get that you are stuck in a deep brown soup and cannot there's nothing you can do to get out it's like a disease that takes over your brain and it it just takes over it's the depression you see this stuff or you say this stuff, it's the depression talking. It's not you. And it is really no different than having any other damaged organ. It's like with PTSD. I did get to spend some time with people with PTSD. It's a damaged organ. And that's okay.

Everybody gets wounds. That's totally fine. It's totally normal. And what you could do for someone with depression is listen and accept and recognize. But don't say, hey, let's look on the bright side. That's literally the worst thing you can do. So that's among the things that I've learned. So what can you do in that case? I mean, I certainly, as someone who has suffered from very severe depression, I mean, almost off myself in college, so I mean, I certainly, as someone who has suffered from very severe depression,

I mean, almost off myself in college, so I have some firsthand thoughts as well. But what have you seen to help in those cases? Oh, definitely professional help. The last thing you want is your buddies or your friends saying, you know, here's some quick fix stuff. Just professional help. Because, I mean, there are people who spend their entire lives researching whether they're therapists or psychiatrists.

And for many, it is amazing how effective pharmaceuticals are. I'm in the drug discovery, drug development industry. I don't take a lot of drugs because they may have... I just don't. There are a lot of things like, oh, you know what? Something aches, I'll get over it. No big deal. I don't really want to put stuff in my body.

But I've just seen first-hand, and I know for many people with depression, even small doses of the right med literally will transform. Because you really do have a bio, it's a biochemical imbalance. It's like, you know, your shoulder, what do you call it when the shoulder falls out of the socket? Shoulder dislocation or subluxation.

Right. That's what happens with your brain in depression. It's just no amount of talking about, hey, just think positive and it'll go back in the socket. No. You just need somebody to go and you need somebody to put it back in the socket. And that's kind of what the med does.

It's a little bit busted. And in some cases, the right med and the right time and the right dose and the right combination will just pop that shoulder right back. And people will be like, holy cow. All of a sudden, the brown is is dissipated and I see light everywhere. So there are many techniques and they're more in development and there's more coming. But meds, fortunately there's, as you probably know,

there's a handful of different therapeutic categories. And so a really experienced and very good um medical doctor uh who specializes in this will figure out and different ones will work for different people and we don't know why yeah we don't want to know why class a works for this person in class but not for that person but class b works great for so they're the different drug categories. So you really have to have someone who knows what they're doing and is willing to... And there's just very...

It's not even very little. There's no way to know which one is going to work for you, but the odds that one of them will work is pretty good or maybe even a combination. And then, yeah, there is some cognitive behavioral stuff that you can do, often in combination with the meds. And the clinical studies have shown that in combination with the meds, that can really improve the response rate compared to just baseline meds alone. Yeah, I would also reinforce a few things you've said and then add some color as someone who's spent a lot of time, boots on the ground with this, both in the undesirable sense of having suffered from it.

And people in my family have been sort of paralyzed by depression, but also having looked at different tools that are available, I would say it is true that you have genetic markers and you can have different software with different output and that there certainly seem to be genetic factors that predispose you to, say, bipolar depression. And when I sequenced my whole genome, that was one of two things that was highlighted for me. They're like, we don't have much to say. There are only a few things. And one is you seem to be from 1 to 10 scale and 11 in predisposition to depression,

and then Alzheimer's, same, same. And I was like, okay, well, looks like I have some research to do. And that having been said, to draw an analogy, if you have flat feet, as I do, for instance, the flat feet, lack of arches can cause a lot of pain. I've had pain since I was a kid, much like I've had bouts of depression since I was a kid. But there are, without necessarily changing the flat foot directly, you could use orthotics. And so I think that there are certainly pharmacological interventions that work for a lot of people. I know people who've

had their lives changed using SSRIs, for instance, as one class, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I know other people for whom SSRIs have had no effect whatsoever. And as an adjunct, just for people who are wondering what you might add to it, and I do think it's, in a sense, more helpful to have this self-directed than someone who is well lecturing you, like you said. But Stoic philosophy, for instance, sounds very dry. It's thousands of years old. But there are some very practical tools within that that have helped me, much like you trained yourself to become a better writer, to train myself to

view the world differently. And that's true of, say, art classes, where suddenly you realize that you perceive concepts. And when you try to draw a tree, you're drawing what you think a tree is rather than what you actually see. And I think that Stoicism can teach you to look at things differently, not saying it's sufficient in and of itself. And there are other tools, CBT also, which is in effect heavily influenced by Stoic philosophy. And then there are, and feel free to call Biasami at any point, but there are also tools out there more recently explored, say, like ketamine as an example. And, you know, one of the theories out there currently is that possibly the reason why ketamine can be so immediately effective with, say, intravenous administration for someone suffering from acute suicidal ideation,

very often done in a sequence of five or six infusions, sometimes intramuscular. I would discourage anyone who looks into ketamine. I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. But nonetheless, it does have an interesting capture profile from an addictiveness perspective. So people can get hooked on ketamine, which is why I wouldn't say take lozenges home. But one of the theories is that part of the reason SSRIs take a few weeks to produce an effect for some people is that they're ultimately having an effect on, say, NMDA,

where ketamine acts on it more directly. Ketamine is also interesting to me, along with some other therapies like psilocybin, for instance, which is being studied at Hopkins for treatment-resistant depression and elsewhere, which might go through phase three trials for that or uh prospectively alcoholism uh what i find fascinating about these compounds and for anybody listening uh don't try to diy this i mean psilocybin found in say psilocybin mushrooms is is schedule one so it's in the same class as cocaine and heroin so the legal side effects can be substantial, and those are beyond debate. But the prospect that you could have, say, a five or six infusion sequence of ketamine, or two to three sessions with psilocybin and have a duration of effect that is months long

is really interesting, right? Because the half-life of these compounds is, let's call it, well, in some cases, it's going to be 30 minutes, depending on the route of administration with, say, ketamine, and then let's just call it four to six hours or less with psilocybin. But nonetheless, the durability of effect can be on the range of months. So I don't want people to, and the reason I'm saying all this, understanding that I'm not a clinical psychologist, MD, or researcher, is that having struggled with depression for so long, there can be a hopelessness beyond the depression. And so I think it's at least what I want to do is impart some hope to people who are listening as someone who has struggled with very severe depression for decades, but not experienced any major depressive episodes in the last four or five years. That there are tools available that can help you to sort of put

orthotics on your flat feet. And that it doesn't have to be a sort of self-reinforcing pattern where you're depressed and then you're depressed, you're depressed and assume you're a broken toy that can never be fixed. And therefore, what's the point? There's this slippery, sort of logically compelling with faulty assumptions process that is really scary that people can end up in. So for those people listening, I would just say that there are tools out there. You should see a professional if you're suffering from major depression, which I have done in a somewhat unorthodox way, but I have. And also to explore the tools that will supplement any type of pharmacological intervention or prescription that you would use, uh, because there are resources that can help. And, uh, yeah, so, so I'm, I'm talking a lot, but I just want to make two recommendations.

The one is to, uh, take a look at a William Irvine book, uh, which is on stoic joy, which for many people seems like an oxymoron. So William Irvine and his book on Stoic Joy, I think is worth taking a look at. There's also a book with a very clear but somewhat cheesy sounding title, which is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie, which I've also found to be very helpful. And it's not going to change necessarily, well, I suppose it could in some fashion, sort of the composition of your, it's not going to change your genetics, but it might change how you respond to your predispositions so that it's not genetic determinism. You're not doomed to the same response.

You're just starting with, say, different attachment points on your hamstrings and Achilles tendon. So you're not going to be Usain Bolt, but you can get faster and you can train with subpar attributes to develop capabilities that no one would expect given where you started with your raw materials. So, in any case. I think it's very hopeful that you, and thank you for sharing all that, I think it's incredibly hopeful that you suffered from severe depression

but have been free of a major episode. I mean, just that fact alone. So I'm curious to what would you, if you had to point to one or two things that made a big, that may have been responsible for turning the corner there, what would you point to? Yeah, I would point to a few things and not all of which are things you can go get it righted or prescribed by your physician. The short answer is, well, I'll give you a few. These aren't necessarily rank ordered

once we get past pole position, but pole position is sufficient supervised administration, in my case, right, receipt of psychedelics to, and this is one theory, sort of down-regulate activity in the default mode network, which is related to rumination

and self-reference. So I, I, I, me, me, me also seems to be, activity in the DMN appears to correspond to, let's call it time travel. So what happens in the future, anxiety, what happened in the past, depression. And when that's subdued in some fashion, what many people experience, and this is one theory for why, say, psilocybin can have the effect it does on depression or end-of-life

anxiety, is that it acts as a pattern interrupt where people can gain an observer perspective on their behavior without being stuck on the edge of the vinyl record that's spinning around at high velocity. When you have that perspective, it's difficult. As you said, when someone's like, just look at the glass half full. And when you're in the middle of like, I'm broken, I'm never going to be better. I'm depressed. No matter what happens, I see the glass is half full and I still think life is shitty. What's the point? Right? People can see it. They can see the same thing. And they can say, look, I know you are right. And yet I can't fucking see it. And that's the problem. When that audio engineer, as you put it, it just has that one track of

self-loathing on repeat or that one track of acute anxiety related to the what if, you're not going to hear anything else. But you can zoom out to 30 000 feet see the bigger picture it is very common that people come out somewhat reformatted it's not guaranteed and i know i'm talking about things that are not readily available which is part of the reason why i'm spending so much time and money supporting research related to this, because the underground doesn't scale. That would be one tool. Another would be trying to identify coping mechanisms that actually exacerbate the condition you're trying to avoid. In other words, like what are the, if you can't fix depression, which is a big mountain to try to climb at once, and I don't think it's very productive to say, I want to defeat my depression.

You can look at the antecedents of depression or the ingredients, right? And potential triggers. So like, when do you tend to get depressed? Is it when you're tired? Is it when you go to consuming too many stimulants, too much caffeine, which leads to the sleep and so on, and then try to compensate for that by consuming more stimulants? Does it correlate to social isolation? Is it inversely correlated to exercise? And this is another thing where people who are depressed are going to say, yeah, no fucking shit, Sherlock. Like, I know these things. I just can't deal with them. The time to deal with them is in practice when you don't need the safety net.

So for me, I began to put in place, and this is in combination, I should say, with meditation. And the most effective, specific meditation tool that I would recommend to people, and I have no stake in this, even though I gave him a nice quote, because I think he deserves it, is Sam Harris's app, Waking Up. And the reason I recommend that specifically is there is a progression, and there is a skill acquisition. It isn't just the guided meditation du jour that someone pulls out of a hat at the last minute because they think it might be popular and get shared on social media. It's a progression of skill development. And the reason I say this, that people should use that app or something like it concurrently with trying to interrupt these antecedents or facilitate the inversely correlated, the things

that help, in other words, I'm being fancy, is that if you don't have the awareness of your state in the moment, it's very hard to catch yourself. Whereas if you train yourself to think of consciousness as the light that shines upon everything else that you are aware of. And this is getting a little abstract. In the training, this becomes very, very understandable as a matter of direct experience. And you begin to separate yourself from the emotion, right? If I am conscious and I can observe that I am hot, well, it's in fact, the observer is separate from the condition. So, like, I am experiencing heat is a way you can reframe that. I am angry. Well, let's reframe that and rephrase it since, I mean, sort of the,

our words are the limitations of our world, right? Like Wittgenstein paraphrase. The words, the phrasing is very important. So you would then get to the point where you can say, I'm experiencing anger rather than I am angry or I am an angry person. And if you feel then the lethargy and so on, you can recognize that that's leading you to a place that in the past would be a double espresso, triple espresso at 6 p.m., which is going to end up keeping you up. Okay, I'm getting a little all over the place. Can I inject a thought about a trick that I found that is super useful for that? Yeah. I have this weird thing I do. I haven't experienced like those that I know,

the severe clinical depression. But especially late at night, I will find myself wallowing in a deep brown stew of thoughts. And I recognize that, as one friend of mine said, that's what our life is like 24-7. It may exist in a few moments for you, but that's what I... What I do is I have a weird trick, which I think was like the mental hashtag,

where a thought bubbles up, and let's say it's self-criticism. I just do hashtag self-criticism. I'm like, oh. And as soon as I put the mental hashtag, I do the little hashtag, I'm like, oh yeah, that's what it is. And then the power of it dissipates yeah or hashtag anxiety like I'm anxious about something coming up I just

do hashtag and oh that's what it is and then the power of it dissipates and when I'm stuck maybe in that kind of rumination loop where I'm being critical either of myself or something going around me. And I realized, why am I doing it? I'm just like feeling mental. I do hashtag F-T-F-F, filling time by finding fault. I tell you, I don't remember anything unless there's an acronym. And I just, I get like some critical thought, I'm like I'm getting angry, like this thing didn't work out, or that person did this.

And then I do hashtag F-T-F-F, oh, that's what I'm getting angry like this thing didn't work out or that person did this. And then I do hashtag FDFF. Oh, that's what I'm doing. I'm just filling empty time because I haven't taken charge of my inner audio engineer or my inner video. And they're just playing this loop over and over. And the way I visualize it, and this comes from a book that probably influenced me more than any other on many of these aspects. And I'll tell you what that, it's called Joyful Wisdom. And I've probably given that book to more people than I can count. And it essentially captures the idea of making friends with your thoughts rather than trying to suppress them, making understanding. And the example that's used there,

the way I think about it is, I am on a boat going down a river, and the thoughts are like the little trees that I'm watching. Oh, there's an interesting thought. Let's hashtag it. Boom, hashtag this thing. And then there's another one. Oh, let's hashtag that one. Let's hashtag it. Boom, hashtag this thing. And then there's another one.

Oh, let's hashtag that one. And I find that personally very calming because it does what you're saying in a very, because I'm pretty visual, and so it just does that in a very visual way that the thoughts are separate from what you're feeling. So one of the ways that helps me just stay calm as the world is going nuts is

I'm on that boat and like, oh, there's that thought going. Let me see what lesson I can take. There's something useful I need to act on. If not, it just disappears behind my head as I move along the river. The wonderful example that's used in the beginning of that book, it's by a Buddhist monk. I think it was, I can't pronounce the name because the last, it's something Rosh. Ming pok you blu blu blu blu. Yeah.

Ming blu blu blu blu blu. The suffix Rosh. Yeah. And it's a Buddhist monk who I think got labeled like the happiest man on the planet or something. But he opens with a story uh there's also a very helpful lesson on death that i found um which we can get to later if you want but he opens with a story of uh villagers who are going between their village need to do an annual trip

between their village and some distant neighboring village and they have to go through a forest each time and every time they've been doing they've been doing it for years they get attacked by these bandits and it's like this horrible thing they get robbed and so forth and they go to the village and then coming back they get attacked by you know a different group of bandits and and you know they're fighting and the bandits you know get you know injured or lose some lives. And then one day, one of the villagers says, as the bandits come and approach, the villager walks out and he says, hang on, I got a suggestion for you.

Instead of us fighting each time, why don't we come to an arrangement? We'll give you 10% of everything we have, or whatever the number is. And you protect us as we make this journey. And all of a sudden, they achieve the journey in peace. It's better for the bandits. It's better for the villagers. The bandits don't have to lose any lives. They don't have to take any risk. They get a steady income. And so that's the metaphor for your thoughts. Instead of fighting them and trying to suppress them, how can you just turn that perspective around and say, oh,

thank you for being here. Let's see how what you're doing is really helpful. And let's work together. You're trying to have a better, if it's something that says, don't do this, thank you for being there. You're trying to protect me. If it's something that says Don't do this Thank you for being there You're trying to protect me Let's say you have two thoughts racing You know one side is the You know Mr. Red And the other side is the Mr. Green Rest Red is

Don't do that It's very risky Mr. Green is like Go for it No risk No pain No gain And they're kind of at war

Sit them down around the table Let's hear you out Let's hear Can you guys Let's come to an agreement. You're absolutely right. You're trying to protect me. You're right, and you are trying to say,

listen, if you don't stretch a little bit, you'll never grow. Both are great points. Let's talk this through, and let's come to an agreement. And you know what? By doing that, having that kind of inner dialogue, validating, starting, assuming positive intent,

thanking them for what they're trying to do for you. You may come up with some brilliant, let's say it's Mr. Red and Mr. Green about making some, let's say it's personal life, going ahead with this significant other. Mr. Red says, no, no, no, no, I don't want to open up and be vulnerable. Mr. Green is like, absolutely, that's the only way forward.

And then you just don't know what to do. You're being pulled to two sides. Let's sit down. Is there, you might come up with some staged approach. Listen, where both sides agree. And then guess what happens? Inner peace. You're calm. So that's the benefit of this kind of joyful wisdom approach or this inner dialogue or personifying these characters. Why? It helps you achieve an inner peace. I can often see that on people's faces. So when I see somebody where their face is sort of very tense and they're saying one thing, but their facial expression is indicating something else, do you know what

I'm talking about? And there's clearly an anxiety there that's not resolved they have a mr red and a mr green or a mrs red and mr inside and they haven't sat them down and talked about it so while they're talking to you mr red is saying one thing and that's coming out the mouth and mr green is saying something else and that's on the face or the other way around and you're just getting two different messages and that's why they have all this inner anxiety and stress. And so people who look calm, who project calm, tend to be the ones that have already made peace between the two. They tend to go inside and look at what are their motivating forces? What are those characters of personality? What are their positive int, what are those characters, what are

their positive intents. They're both trying to get to the same goal, which is a better life for you. Better, more safe, secure, happier life for you. Ultimately, it's the same goal, the same positive intent, two different paths. And once you sit down, you just have a simple negotiation. You're valid, you're valid. Let's see if we can find a great compromise. And what happens when it's done?

Inner peace. Yeah, this also reminds me of a few tools people can look into. The joyful wisdom seems to be, or at least have a component of this that's very similar. There's something called IFS, I was introduced to by Michael and Annie Mithoffer, who are involved with many different things, experienced therapists. And Michael's also an MD, used to work in the ER, among other places, but is involved with phase three studies involving MDMA for PTSD. And it is MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. And the two are important to keep in mind together, right? Because you might find a magic bullet out there, but very often it's the context that is wrapped around that that is critical to the

outcomes that you see, which can be really remarkable. And one of the tools, IFS, which I believe is Internal Family Systems, it's a bit of a confusing name, but the gist of it, which people can look into, is that you are examining and interacting with and making peace with, through validating and thanking and many other things, the different components of your psyche and viewing many of them as protectors, right? So the label is protectors. And it is incredible what you can see when someone and i'll personalize it when i took that approach with say anger because i would get angry and then i would get angry at the fact that i was angry or i would be depressed and i think for a lot of people who are depressed and i can speak for myself it's it's not the feeling shitty and seeing darkness everywhere or highlighting the negative, that is the scary part.

Like, you know, Eeyore was Eeyore, but Eeyore kind of made it through. It's the fear that it will never change. No matter how good things get, no matter which partner you're with, no matter how much money you have, you're always going to simply look at the negative and that this is something that you cannot escape and i would just say that to reiterate something i mentioned earlier for people wondering is that i had that belief i was just like all right this is how it works i'm not hardwired to be happy but maybe i can be really good at competition and like feel worthy by creating some type of value and achieving a lot of things. That's just the hand I've been dealt. So I'll play the hand to the best of my abilities,

but I'm not hardwired for this thing that other people refer to as happiness, contentedness. Sadly, just didn't get it. And if you look at my family, you see other examples of the same. That proved to be incorrect. You can change. and you mentioned a few things. IFS, I want to mention two more, and I know we're giving people a lot of books, and what I would recommend is just download them all on Kindle, read the first two chapters of each one, and then whichever one grabs you, just kind of roll with that. But two others I want to mention. One is Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach, which, as the title might indicate, is cut from the same cloth as a lot of what we're talking about. It's very well written. And Tara has been on the podcast, and we've spoken about some of the content of the

book. Radical Acceptance was recommended to me, again, it might come off as a really cheesy title, fantastic book, recommended to me by a PhD in neuroscience, who is one of the most skeptical women. And I say that as a compliment I've ever met, right? I mean, she is allergic to anything remotely hand wavy or squishy. And this book had a huge impact on her. And that is how it found its way to me. The other is a book called Awareness, which came to me not too long ago, because yet another guest on the podcast, Peter Malouk, who's involved in finance, mentioned it in passing and said, this book generally gives me at least two weeks of deep felt inner peace, something along those lines. And then we moved on to other topics. And I made a note of it because it seems so odd as a passing comment. And Awareness is written by Anthony

DeMello, D-E-M-E-L-L-O. And the subtitle differs whether it's paperback or Kindle, which is very confusing, but the one I like is something along the lines of the perils and opportunities of reality, which I love as a subtitle. And that book also helps you to separate your responses and emotions, which are often the same thing, to external factors from your identity. And it's been truly stunning to see the before and after on some people who are highly anxious or prone to depression after reading this book, Awareness. Does that include you? That does include me. Yeah, I read this book. This is one of the few books.

It goes so far beyond pathologies. Like if you want, if you think you're a high functioning normal, i.e. probably neurotic, like a high functioning neurotic or normal, and you want to get to super high functioning, I would also recommend this book, Awareness. I think it's a huge competitive slash unfair slash worthwhile advantage, even if the only person you're competing against is the lesser version of yourself. Do you feel like you experience joy now? Yes. And that wasn't the case a few years ago?

I did not have access. There were moments of joy. I don't want to make it seem like I was just this dull gray, you know, pain of like muddy glass at all times. That's not the case. And also I should say now I still have hard days, but everyone has hard days. I feel like my hard days are closer to normal hard days than like, you know what? I wonder what it would be like to like jump off this balcony right now. Like, would that be easier? I'm not kidding. Like people have these thoughts and it's like, you know what? Like here I am, it's a beautiful day, dah, dah, dah, dah. Like, and nonetheless, I'm seeing the negative. What's the point,

right? Like these are the types of questions I asked myself for decades. Just didn't act on any of them. Came very close in college, like I mentioned, but didn't actually get to the finish line with that. Now my default calibration is much higher. Like the baseline of contentedness is much higher. I do think the where of happiness is another ingredient that I didn't mention. But like the people think of the how and the why, what should I do? Who should I spend time with? The where of peace or contentedness is an important one.

What do you mean by where? The where meaning the environmental factors, right? So we're sitting here right now in Austin, and it is a beautiful sunny day. Turns out it's sunny here most of the time. I was in the Bay Area for 18 years prior to that, the East Coast, New England, where you get a lot of gray and a lot of rain and a lot of darkness. That was not helpful for me. And there are many ways that I could try to contort myself or go through months of mental gymnastics, which I did and can to increase my baseline, or I can just spend more time somewhere it's sunny. And exercise is another thing that has become much more consistent. I always did my exercise

at night typically, or in the evening. I have since completely inverted that and I tend to do my exercise first thing in the morning. And I won't bore people with the many, many different effects and the cascade of effects that exercise can have on the brain, which is not limited to aerobic exercise, although there's a book called Spark that looks at brain-derived neurotrophic factor and all sorts of things that are related to exercise. Weightlifting, resistance exercise can provoke very similar beneficial responses and actually adaptations over time. But yes, so my default is much higher now. If people want to see IFS in action, although it's in Hebrew and not in English, there is a movie that I just helped put out, which is a documentary. I don't make a cent. I'm doing it for free because I think it needs to be

seen. It was just sitting on a shelf after being broadcast once on television overseas, which is called Trip of Compassion. So if people want to take a look at how therapists work with someone, in this case, under the influence of MDMA, but it can still be powerful by itself at interacting with the various pieces of themselves, maybe the emotions they haven't had access to as well, then Trip of Compassion, if you just go to tim.blog.com, you can take a look at that, or at least watch the trailer. I will warn you in advance, it's very intense. I mean, you're seeing actual session footage of people who have suffered extreme trauma.

But I think the payoff is worth it. But yeah, I never in a million years, Safi, thought I would be where I am now. I mean, that in and of itself is incredibly hopeful. Yeah. In and of itself, it's just, I think anyone suffering from severe depression, just knowing that is incredibly helpful.

And also realizing, and I know we're doing what we do best, which is digressing all over the place, but also realizing that just as genetics are inherited, so are patterns of thought and behavior. I think this is really important. And I mean, like you run into people who say like,

oh yeah, my whole family is big boned and fat. It's like, well, why are your pets fat then? Right? It's like there are behaviors and there are thought patterns. And it's not to in any way invalidate the software predisposition that you can come out of the box with. That exists.

But for many of us, certainly I'll speak for myself, the thoughts that I have in my head are not necessarily my thoughts, right? Like the scripts that I'm running, the audio engineers playlist that has been in, I'll speak to the listener, in your head for years or decades, maybe the playlist that your mom gave you, your dad gave you, your uncle gave you, your teachers gave you, your friends gave you, and you have the ability to edit that script. I think that's the most important thing you thought

is who's in charge of your mind. Yeah. You know what, if it's, you know, as you say, if that inner audio engineer playing that tape or the or the you know video engineer showing that movie is showing the movie because they're doing it for one of two reasons if you're not in charge they're doing it of one of two reasons one as you say you got it from your mom or your dad or your friend or whatever and you just didn't realize that that's a wake-up call it's like oh that inner energy engineer is just following my mom's orders

well let's see who's actually in charge of my brain i am how about i switch to a different station or i create my own pandora playlist how about No problem. Yeah. You know why they're playing that video or that tape? Because you didn't give them anything better to do. It's really easy to give them something better to do.

You know, a simple trick to start with that is let's say you're, you know, we're playing some video. Just close your eyes and watch that video

and switch it to black and white. Yeah. You're like, whoa, I didn't know I could do that. But guess what the emotional power is? Much less. And then take that video and switch it to black and white. You're like, whoa, I didn't know I could do that. But guess what the emotional power is? Much less. And then take that video, if it's right here in front of your face, and zoom it back like it's on a TV set that's getting farther and farther away. Play the same video. Guess what? Much less emotional impact. You're like, I didn't know

I could do that. But guess what? You can. You know why? Who's in charge of your brain? You. Those audio engineers, those video engineers, they all report to you. You know why they're showing that movie? It's because you didn't tell them anything to do. They're like, well, it's like 1130. I got 40 minutes to kill until lunch. Let me just replay the same movie for 40 minutes where I barfed on my boss. I'm just going to replay that over and over and over. Why? Because you didn't give that video engineer any other task.

You're in charge of your brain. Take control of the audio, the video. And then maybe, as we said, they're different characters, and they're each, you know, thank them. They're just idling until you start to take control and realize that you're in charge, and you can play some movie any way you want. You can turn it upside down. You can make it black or white.

You can make it color. I personally found very powerful is to take something and just move it behind my head. Then I'm like, oh, okay, it's gone. Yeah, I like that I haven't I haven't tried that And it's very You know here's

A fascinating thing I used to do this exercise All the time Is you interview You ask people Who are on time Just a funny Punctual

Punctual Who are on time Punctual Why don't you close your eyes And imagine your calendar Close your eyes And just take your hands And kind of move

In an empty space Like where do you roughly see your calendar for the day? And the people who are really punctual tends to be their calendars like happens to be like right in front of their head. Now, you ask the same question for your friends or people who tend to be late. Oh, where's your calendar for the day? Oh, it's over here far on the left. What's over here in front of your face? Well, oh, you know, what I need to do, you know, in my grocery list or this other thing or my cat or whatever, but my calendar is farther on the left. And they're just not really,

the people who are pulling the calendar is right there in front of them. And in a weird way, optimistic people, well, tell me how you see the next day. Well, it's on a slope going up. And a week from now, well, it's up over there. Depressed people, more like, oh, it's down. It's going to the ground. It's very fascinating how, where you put things visually, especially if you're a visual person, in effect. People who live on the past, you have some,

what's in front of their face? Oh, well, what I did last year. We're always talking about their past. What's in front of their face? It's well, what I did last year. We're always talking about their past. What's in front of their face? It's sort of like last year, last month, whatever. People who are very, I remember asking my dad one time when I got into this. He grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, right? And nothing, none of us would ever hear a peep about growing up in the South.

We grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. And I was educated, a very kind of elite scholar at the Institute for Grand Study in Princeton. And Shreveport, like, never came up. And I asked him, oh, Deb, where do you think about, when I, close your eyes, it was down at his feet. Very often people, like for me,

pass this sort of to the left, center, and what I need to do today and tomorrow and over the next year, kind of in the middle, and future is sort of off there up to the right. But for him, so it's who's putting it there? As you say, it's the default thought pattern. Do you have to do the default thought pattern? No.

You're in charge. If you're always late, just try experimenting with putting the calendar right directly in front of your eyes when you close. That's training like riding a bike. You have to do it a bunch of times until it becomes ingrained and cemented and automatic. But those are the kinds of things that happen when you realize that nobody else is in control of your brain. With the caveat that there are certain biochemical things that that doesn't help. But the things that you can control, those are the things whether you're in your audio engineer etc

yeah the uh the biochemical stuff and and feel free to slap me down actually i'll come to the biochemical in a second i have a a theory that i'd love to allow you the opportunity to shoot down related to that but but first I wanted to say the note another tool that really helped me, that has made a very significant difference. And actually it does come from Tony Robbins, which is related to how you change your thinking. So you recognize you're in charge of your thing. How do you change your thinking. So you recognize you're in charge of your thing. How do you change your thinking? And one of the approaches that I and many of my friends have found really, really effective is from Tony, and it's identifying your default question, like your

primary question that you ask yourself. And for depressed people, anxious people, it is often something very disabling. And it's a leading question, like, what's wrong with you? Right, exactly. That assumes something is wrong with you. Exactly. And if that's your search function for your brain, your brain is going to come up with answers. Exactly. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? That was my primary question for decades. How could you not end up depressed? If that's your default question. I mean, on some level, I'm not saying there isn't a biochemical component, but it is certainly going to grease the wheels for negative thought patterns. That's what your inner audio engineer is playing over and over. That's right. If that's your,

you yell across the room to your audio engineer, you're like, hey, what's wrong with me? He'll be like, all right, come in right up. And then like, there goes the playlist. And becoming aware and thinking about your primary question, your default question that you ask, and then deciding on a replacement.

And you do this, think naturally maybe you you came to use it more through these various books and resources but the when you're angry right like what can i use this as fuel for and so a replacement default question that you could use something like what, what can I learn from this? Which also depersonalizes the situation. It doesn't assume that you are the primary actor creating all of the problems, which is not at odds with recognizing that you're in charge of your thoughts. Yeah, that's a great, great example. I would say there are two different kinds of anger.

Like when you get rejected, whether it's you lose in a sport or someone's telling you you're too old and you can't play. That's an interesting fuel you can use if you choose to use that. I actually, for a long, long time, I think since I was a teenager, because of one specific anecdote, have used i had never thought about in this language but anger to trigger a question that immediately diffused the anger and i'll give you the example so i was with a friend of mine who we grew up playing competitive tennis and in the juniors and my friend uh we were a few years older than probably you know a decade older and we were sitting around and she was talking about

and she had been a star she'd been we were both ranked and she but she was you know she'd done really really well and had really stopped and it just had just not done any exercise, and it clearly, you can sort of see that. And I remember we were sitting around catching up, and she was telling me with growing anger about her cousins who would get in a car to drive two blocks to mail a letter. They were so lazy.

And it just really drove her angry. And she was like beside herself. Of course, she was like lying sprawled out on the couch and like was getting help to just like reach over for a box of chocolates or whatever to put it. And I thought, okay, now if I had cousins that would get in their car to drive two blocks to mail a letter rather than walk the two blocks, would it make me, would it be curious? Sure. But would it make me angry? No. And I kind of started to realize that a different trigger to anger is

what does this anger say about me? How does this anger identify? Maybe something in me that's kind of an unresolved issue. And so probably since then, since I was a teenager, every time I would start to get angry in this way, something that didn't seem rational, it pissed me off somebody, always I would say immediately, what is it in them that's triggering

something about me that I'm not comfortable with? And it doesn't mean to be something that you're doing now. I'll give you an example. When a friend of mine, we were sitting in a bar and he saw somebody going, a mutual friend of ours who had said he was going to quit smoking, go outside to have a cigarette. And he said that, you know, and this was, my friend had tried and had actually given up smoking.

And he said, that's so pisses me off that this guy said he quit and he broke it and he went back. And it just, I can't, what a, you know, what a pussy. It really, just pisses.

And I had the exact same reaction. Okay, he tried to quit and he failed and now he's breaking his commitment. But I'm not angry about that. Why is, why are you angry? I didn't ask him. It's more inner. Yeah. Why is he angry?

And what I started to realize is not only an interesting trigger question that completely diffused the anger instantly for me but it's also a really interesting mirror whoever you're talking to if they seem to be getting almost irrationally angry about something in somebody else i is set that completely aside and say what does that tell me about this person? What is it about their own inner struggles? So I saw that in myself. I remember when I was a grad student and there was some guy who was being accused or another grad student of sucking up to the professors too much. And whenever I would see him,

it just would really piss me off. And then I had that same figure. Why is that bothering me? Because that wouldn't bother Joe Schmo, but why is it so bothering me? And I'm like, oh, am I worried that I'm speaking, because I was very friendly with a couple of really senior professors

who are a generation or two older than me. Am I worried that I'm like acting different to them than I am to my friends? Because I wouldn't like that. And immediately all of my anger towards that other fellow grad student just completely dissipated. And people often ask me, like, you don't seem to get angry about anything. Firstly, that's not true. Like, when the Xerox machine breaks, I get freaking angry.

Someone cuts me. So, aside from the Xerox machine and the printer breaking at the last minute, I really don't get angry, and that's entirely attributed to this trigger question. I feel the bud of anger. I'm like, oh, there's something about me here that it's a mirror, and I may have solved the problem or not solved the problem, or I solved like, oh, there's something about me here that it's a mirror. And I may have solved

the problem or not solved the problem, or I solved it years ago, like the quitting smoking thing, the guy who did versus, but let me, and then all of my anger dissipates. You should, I'm going to pick up Joyful Wisdom. I would love to hear your thoughts on this book, Awareness. I actually am writing these down. Yeah, it's great. The Awareness really helped me with exactly the type of reframing that you're talking about. It's slightly different, though. A little more conceptual.

I think the trigger question is more actionable. But as a background, sort of conceptual framework that is really helpful. It's probably a very fancy way to put it, but in brief, in awareness, one of the discussions is, it centers on, and it's really a transcription, edited transcription of a number of short lectures. It's very easy to read, very fun. Actually, the guy's really hilarious and focuses a lot on cognitive biases and confirmation bias, although it's not called anything super fancy.

And a lot of looking at acute responses like anger to situations come to entitlement. Like, what do you feel? This is another angle, right? It's not exactly the same, but it's like, what do you feel entitled to receive right now? Or like, what do you expect? Like, how should the other person behave? And is that completely unreasonable? Right. Because you can't control other people's responses. And it's a way to kind of pick apart the weaknesses in the scaffolding that is holding up whatever emotion is about to drive you crazy. That comes straight to the happiness equation. The ultimate happiness.

It's a very simple mathematical. Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Yeah. So if you're very frustrated with somebody, is it because of the reality? Or is it because of the expectations? Yeah. And if you lower your expectations,

you can turn that into a positive. So I'm going to give us a 90-degree turn here. Before, can I? Yes. Just before you, because it was so cool and so interesting, the MDMA stuff. In many ways, MDMA is a loon shot. It's something that people have dismissed as nutty or crazy, that it could actually help therapy. But actually may turn out to be incredibly important.

Can I tell you another loon shot for depression? Yes, please. That I'm kind of interested in, that I've seen some remark. Now, it might be in a similar stage where there's a lot of very good, very interesting patient data. Actually, in this particular case, it has been through phase three trials in a certain form. So this is something called RTMS, which is transcranial magnetic stimulation. And what it has in common is that it has this kind of vibe to it

that sounds kooky or sounds nutty or Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Right? Yeah. But, so it's kind of a loon shot as well, especially One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest loon shot. But it is actually based on a very, very interesting observation. As it turns out, it has been through phase three trials, and it is approved.

And I spent actually quite a while learning about it for no reason other than I just found it a fascinating story of a loon shot and a completely neglected idea. And in this case, I actually ended up talking to a bunch of my psychiatrist friends, and there's a center in Boston where I live that's actually one of the world's centers for it. And so I ended up creating some collaborations there with a group that I had met that was doing a really novel twist on it in California. But the bottom line is this. In psychiatry today, there's this focus on what you might call, if you're a physicist, you would call it position space. So I'll explain what I mean, and I'll explain why this different approach is what something in physics we call duality,

which is two very different ways of looking at the same problem. One way helps you solve it, one way doesn't. And so in psychiatry, in TMS, well, first I'll start with what people do today. People do today MRIs to diagnose brain problems. And MRIs are trying to find magnetic resonance imaging where in the brain certain activities seem to be concentrated. So that is what you might call position space, where in the position inside your brain are certain activities concentrated but that's not what we did that's a relative relatively new in the sense of you know a couple decades but if you fast if you go back even more to let's say the 19 late 1930s 1940s uh there was a field of study with EEGs, looking at the frequency, the frequencies that

are issued by the brain. So in physics, you have position space and you have frequency space, and there are two different ways of looking at the same problem. They're equivalent. One lets you solve problems easier, certain problems easier, the other doesn't, and then for different problems, it reverses. So EEGs, it turns out it was discovered the brain has a blinking rate. It's roughly the average in the population in the US is roughly 10 hertz, so 10 times a second. That became a very interesting field of study for about 10 or 20 years. And then it kind of dropped off. It was, it's a very inexpensive tool.

MRI was a fancier, more expensive tool. And because if you want a big grant and want to be a big professor at a big Ivy League school, you want to use the latest, most expensive one that generates these fancy color images that other people can't do unless they have big grams like you. EEGs, everybody can do. That's why I find it sort of, sort of, it's a little bit like MDMA because it's got this sort of reputation. So as it turns out, with depression, if you measure people's brains, their blinking rate may be a little bit off. And what TMS does, there's really interesting physics about it,

which is actually one of the reasons I got interested in how it works. Essentially, it's an oscillating magnetic field. There's no surgery. There's no nothing. It's like a shower, what do you call it, the shower head that they put next to your skull, and it just has an oscillating magnetic field

that kind of locks in the rate and sort of nudges it. If your default blinking rate is 10 hertz, is supposed to be 10 hertz, and you're blinking at 9.5 hertz in some parts, it just sort of nudges you back closer to 10 hertz. So as it turns out, that was approved. That was through phase three trials and got approved by the FDA about five or 10 years ago, I don't remember. In a certain format and technique, it actually turns out to work roughly about the same as meds. Not a much better response rate, not a much worse response rate. Depending on the study and the population, roughly 30% response rate in both. Different side effects, you know,

you don't have the side effects of taking a drug systemically, but the side effects of TMS, you're not doing any surgery, you're not taking a drug. Essentially, it's like a refrigerator that's a little broken. You're sort of kicking the refrigerator and getting it, kicking it back into gear. And the side effects are, well, you can read about them,

but they're much, much less. And it was approved. And it's kind of fascinating, but the younger psychiatrists who are trained to do this recognize that this is a very effective tool. What's nice is that when you treat any therapy, you want a tool belt. You want a lot of different tools

because you never know what will work with a different person. So this one has shown some efficacy in drug-resistant depression. So that makes it a very useful tool to have on the tool belt. Younger psychiatr are really understand the data and understand that it's effects safe and effective and approved by the fda and this technique that was approved protocol that was approved older psychiatrists much more resistant but both of them are not using it as much as it could be because of the jack nicholson effect you just say oh i'm zapping your brain and they think of like a tongue's going to be hanging out.

You're going to be drooling. And your eyeball's going to be rolling. Right? And so it's a little hard to get over. But they recognize that it's as effective or more. And then recently, what's so fascinating is there is a group or a few groups that have recognized,

although the response rate is pretty good, in some cases it works phenomenally well. You do the TMS session, you sort of kick the refrigerator and oh, the refrigerator all of a sudden starts working. Guy was blinking at 9.5, should have been at 10. You nudge him a little bit and boom, now he's at 10 and he's walking off happy. In some cases you get that and in some cases you get nothing. Kind of like the drugs. But then what one group realized is it put measured probes in different parts of the brain

and realized what's fascinating is you can tease out that there's an average blinking rate in the brain, but it's not the same for everybody. So your blinking rate, my average default blinking rate that you were born with might be 11.2 hertz

and mine might be 8.7 hertz and the next guy might be 9.3 hertz. It is true when you take the population mean, it is roughly 10. Here's the weird thing. The FDA protocol that was approved in phase three is treat everybody at 10. That's weird.

If you're at 11.2 and I'm blinking at 8.7, I'm a little, why should I zap you at 10? Why should I be nudging you to 10? Wouldn't that be the case that it would probably have no effect on you? And it would only really have effect on the small people? So there's a group that's realized that and is now doing what's called individualized alpha frequency tms and is seeing some really pretty spectacular

results and even more than that they start to look at different regions of the brain and they see oh wait a minute it's not like your whole brain is bringing just your front left so if i take put 11 you know Let's say 15 probes Around your head You know 12 of them Are right at Let's say You know

Tim Your default blinking rate Is 11.2 Then 12 out of the 15 Are at 11.2 And these 3 here Are just They're blinking at 8.7

So what we do Is we take the shower head And we stick it only there And we nudge it back up to 11 Now they're all in alignment The interesting thing is When you take a patient, and some of these groups have been able to do that, and just do the probe in different regions of the brain,

without even talking to the patient, some of these physicians have been able to say, well, I think this person is depressed because he's a little too low in the frontal cortex. Or I think this person's problem is mania because it actually turns out to be a little too high. Or manic depressive because it's high here and low there. So let's zap here and zap there.

And some of those groups have seen remarkable results, for example, with PTSD. Because PTSD is a lot like manic depression. And when PTSD patients come in, it's like all over the map. They've suffered some brain trauma. And this region's low, this region's high. Yeah, they're out of control. Somebody drops, as one guy I know described it,

somebody drops a milk carton. He's shopping for groceries. Someone drops a milk carton. And he's ready to fight and pulling out a gun because he's still mentally on the battlefield. And he's like ready to fight and like pulling out a gun because he's like still mentally on the battlefield. And he's like, that's the main, and then other times he can't get out of bed, he's so depressed. Sometimes don't sleep. And I remember talking to one guy who hadn't been able to sleep for more than three hours at a stretch for maybe seven years. His family had left him and he had written a suicide date

on a calendar. And he him and he would written a suicide date on a calendar and he went and this was being a clinical trial in san diego one of the vas in the san diego area and naval base in the base there and he was like a last resort case and went in and got to this treatment this individualized tms treatment, family moved back in, suit and tie. Literally, when you got back from the first, it sounds like one of these magic bullet things, but it's really when you talk to these,

it is in clinical trials. The one protocol has already been proved. We're really talking about a variant protocol. It is kind of amazing when you talk to these people and their lives were like literally i had a date on the calendar marked for suicide and now i have it and my family had left me a long time ago i hadn't slept more than three hours in seven years since i returned from iraq and i got back home from the first session i slept 11 hours. It's just amazing.

It's wild. So what we're talking about is loon shots. Yeah. Loon shots of the future. Are they proven? Not quite yet. Are they in clinical trials? Absolutely.

Should we wait until the clinical trial is out? That'll be definitive. Again, I'm talking for a variant of an established protocol, for an established therapy. So if you're interested in TMS, you speak with a psychiatrist, preferably the younger ones are all over. Actually, there was a meta-study surveying acceptance or interest in TMS as a therapy among psychiatrists, and that study identified an age difference,

that the older ones were less into it and the younger ones were all over it um so if if you are intrigued by this um there are these uh tms treatment centers kind of major cities all over identify a psychiatrist speak with your psychiatrist about it talk you learn about the pros and cons see if it's something for you. It's just another tool in the toolkit. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. You could also add, maybe, I'm trying to think, if the protocol for the individualized studies are published. Yeah, they are in clinical trials,

kind of phase, I don't think that he had in phase three. I think there's a bunch of phase. And it's interesting who's sponsoring them. Firstly, the Army. There are statements by a number of sort of medical, that I've seen by medical leaders in the Army that it's an incredibly important potential therapy for them.

So they're sponsoring clinical trials. But also, I have heard about insurance companies because, for example, the one, I talked to a couple of vets who had done this therapy, and they were on so many meds, they went completely after the therapy, you do maybe a couple sessions a week for four or six weeks, eight weeks, and maybe there's follow-up. They went completely off meds, completely off opiates,

and it's very tough to get off those. Oh, for sure. And that's why the insurance companies are sponsoring it because it's relatively low cost and can get you off meds and off hospitalization. Yeah. So more to come on this. I'm kind of excited about that.

More to come, clinical studies in the next couple years. I'm super excited about TMS. TDCS, also pretty interesting for other applications. But do you know which team is doing the research on the individualized? We could put it in the show notes and figure it out also. Yeah, I'll send you an email after and we'll get that out there. We'll put it in the show notes and figure it out also. Yeah, I'll send you an email after and we'll get that up there. We'll put it in the show notes for people.

So there are tools. There are these. There are tools being researched. It's another reason to be, in addition to Tim Ferriss sitting here living proof that experience joy and turn your life around. And that's one cause for hope.

And the second one is there's a growing toolkit of things that can help. And if the first one, the great thing about that is it's different tools in that toolkit that will work for different people. And the bigger that toolkit, the more likely it is that something will work for you. And it's just that toolkit is just being added to and added to and added to as we sit here.

And since I alluded to it earlier, and I'm going to do the right-hand turn after I mention this, but I said I was going to give you the shot to shoot something down. But this is not based on any type of literature review whatsoever, but my theory that I have, uh, and I'm sure there are other people with a similar view, but is that there may be bidirectional causality with, uh, biochemical imbalance associated or, yeah, let's call it biochemical imbalance

associated or pathological sort of neurotomical activity and the thinking that is assumed to be a byproduct of that. And to put it maybe more cleanly, and again, this is not open-sh shut case, but almost everyone knows at least a handful of people who are on antidepressants and still depressed. That could be because they developed tolerance. It could be for many, many different reasons. But if I were to be tasked as a sadistic experimenter to create some type of biochemical change in the brain, let's just say high levels of cortisol, that would then affect sleep, that would then affect maybe other hormones that would create a measurable pathology in biomarkers, I think that could be done.

Like you could impose stresses on people that might simulate some of the environments in, say, warfare, right? Like whistling of bombs and mortars and so on, that would potentially create a state of depression or anxiety or feeling tired and wired, which is when people try to go to sleep, but instead of getting a spike of cortisol in the morning, which would sort of liberate glycogen and increase blood glucose, they get it at night. And you can measure that with all sorts of devices if you're interested. So the reason I'm bringing this up is that when I've observed myself and also family members who have used pharmaceuticals,

different types of drugs to address the manifestations of the depression, that I tend to think that not only can the imbalances help produce the thoughts and just make it easier but that the thoughts can also in some way affect the uh the biochemistry itself and so i i just i curious if you if you have any thoughts on sort of the plausibility of it being bidirectional because it just it seems i feel I feel like if I were to, like, Tim, we're going to give you $10 million if you can manufacture measurable imbalances, but do it by, like, forcing someone to visualize

a past traumatic event or what could happen to their kids or fill in the blank. I feel like that, I would take that offer. No, I think it's been demonstrated. So the idea is that biochemistry can influence thought patterns, but also the other way around. Thought patterns can influence biochemistry.

And I think that's been proven. You read about, for example, these, now Monk, I actually forgot the guy's name. I think he actually started as a physicist who suffered from some depression and had medical problems and psychological issues, psychological disorders, but eventually trained his mind

through a bunch of the meditation and some of the techniques that are used. And they actually did a whole series of studies. There's actually a whole literature now of studying the properties, the mental properties of these Buddhist monks who have practiced deep meditation. And you see clear biochemical changes. So it clearly goes both ways.

And we know that from so many systems in the body, it's almost never one way. It very often, almost every system in the body, there's a feedback loop. So thought patterns influence biochemistry, influence thought patterns. And so absolutely, I agree that there is something there. And I think very similar, we were talking about how there are sort of nudges or you get stuck. And the reason it makes so much sense from a physics perspective, and I actually mentioned duality,

looking at the world from two different... So in physics, it's very common to look at the simplest duality as position space and frequency space. There are a lot of problems you can solve by looking at position. Hey, where's some electrochemical potential in space, and how do you find the minimum of that, and that's where you find your particle is located. I think that this is sort of simplifying a lot.

You solve that problem in position space. But you can look at it in frequency space, and it's exactly the same problem there's a simple mathematical transformation you don't even need to know what those details are all you need to know is that it's just looking through a blue lens or a red lens at the same world the world is exactly the same but you can just see different things there's no way to understand the properties of a metal why metals conduct electricity in position space. And I'll get to exactly what this means about the brain.

No way to understand a metal. It turns out when you make the transformation frequency, it's almost easy to solve. The brain. fMRI is position space. Where is something broken in the brain? EEGs are frequency space. What are the frequencies that my brain are firing at? And I think one in the brain? EEGs are frequency space. What are the frequencies

that my brain are firing at? And I think one of the things that's being missed or often not talked about enough in even academic psychiatry is why are we so focused on fMRI and position space? Let's go back. I know EEG is an old technology, but maybe let's see if we can at least look at the problem, and maybe there's something there. Maybe these frequencies are a little bit off, and maybe there's something to looking at the same problem in both ways. And when you look in frequency space, in physics, it is very common that when you have something that's called a complex system, which means there's just a lot of interactions, especially

as you just said, that go both ways, where people end up, there's something called an egg crate model. And if you imagine where you end up as you're like a little ball, that's where you are. You might be stuck in one well of that egg crate, but you really want to be in this. This is kind of the healthy well, and you're just stuck there. And that's what you see in frequency space.

When you have complex oscillators, complex frequencies that are connected, you get these sort of egg crate models. And if you are in an unwell state, you may just be stuck in a local minimum, but which is not the global minimum. You really want to be in this other well of the egg crate. And that's what something like TMS does. I gave sort of jokingly the analogy of like bumping a refrigerator that's stuck, but that really is kind of what happens with a complex system. You're trapped in this local minimum and you need to get to the global minimum, but you have a little hill or a barrier. And the TMS just sort of shocks you a little bit and whoosh, you go over the barrier.

So when I think of it, the mental model I have is let's say some of these patients with severe PTSD, they're stuck in this local minimum and they're getting help because they just by themselves or even therapeutics can't get them over that little barrier to the kind of somewhat more well state. So to answer your question, yes, I think it makes a lot of sense that it goes both ways. The brain is what's called a complex system

where there are many interactions back and forth. I think it would be an incredibly rare exception if it didn't go both ways. Thank you for answering that. And you also brought up something I'm going to use as a segue because I did promise people that we were going to talk about in episode one, I promised towards the end that we would talk about bringing a gun to a knife fight and incentives and possibly what a chief incentive officer might be. And we are going to talk about that. And what I'm going to use as my segue

is something you pointed out, which is that the EEG is an older tool and that fMRI is this fancy, expensive tool and there may be incentives in the scientific world, whether it's related to grants, whether it's related to publication bias with newer tools, who knows, that affect the science,

aside from the validity of the tools themselves. I just have to pause and say, that's like a brilliant segue. I had no idea how you would possibly segue our discussion of hypnosis and depression and brain science to like, let's talk about teams and companies and incentives. Like, there is no, how the hell is this guy going to get from A to B?

And you just came up with this segue like on the fly. Like, good job, man. Thanks. That's a really good segue. Totally not forced. Yeah. Totally natural. This is my job, I guess.

But it actually works because you're absolutely right. Yeah. There are all sorts of incentives and i'd love for you to just riff and you start wherever you like because i think of incentives all the time all the time and when we were talking earlier i'll use another tie-in about depression and what helped okay so let's see you identify the things that you should be doing or shouldn't be doing that act as precursors to well states or precursors to depression. Okay. Knowing is one thing. How do you stop drinking so much coffee? And in my case, what I ended up doing was not just deciding and making a resolution, but creating incentives, whether those are rewards or punishments. So maybe that is a betting pool with a friend about who can go the longest

without drinking caffeine. Or it could be some type of reward. If I do X for Y period of time, then I receive, you know, reward Z, whatever that might be. And there are all sorts of different ways to set up incentives. And there are things you have to be cognizant of, like, I think that Andy Grove used to do this. But for every incentive they created to hopefully shape a behavior they wanted, they looked for the inadvertent kind of perverse incentive that was paired with it. So I'm fascinated by incentives and would love to hear you riff on any aspect of incentives. We can kind of come into it any direction. It's something I think about all the time because I view my job in part through the podcast or other things as examining what works for behavioral change that that's really the crux of all of it so let's talk about all right so this is a a great example of um how you come across an idea in science because we're in another segue which is we're

talking about these little things that you see that don't seem to quite fit or that other people may be overlooking and you really want to focus on those, teasing out a bigger idea. So let me mention a couple of what seems like odd paradoxes. Individually, 10 people all love some crazy new idea. You bring them together, they reject it. Why? That seems kind of odd. Number two, odd paradox. We have this sort of myth of, oh, the big corporate guys are kind of risk averse. If you're an entrepreneur, this is what you often get to. And when I was an early entrepreneur, first starting, first time CEO, first couple of years, you got with your friends for drinks, you're all young entrepreneurs, couple of years, you go out with your friends for drinks, you're all young entrepreneurs, emerging new company, and you pat yourself on the back and

you say, oh, all the great ideas come from folks like us because we're the risk takers. We're the really entrepreneurial types. And none of the good ideas come out of big companies because they're risk aaverse corporate types. And then as you grow up or as you mature as an entrepreneur, you realize you have to start working with them. You do partnerships with them or whatever. And you start getting to know them as people. And then you go out for drinks with them or have a meal with them. And you realize, hey, they're actually exactly the same as me.

They're really not. They want the next new gadget or the next new idea or the next new drug. They want to go home and tell their spouse or their kids or their loved ones or their families or friends that they worked on something big. And in fact, eventually sometimes you hire them and then all of a sudden the tie comes off, the jacket comes off and they're pounding the table just like you. They are you. So why this myth? So that's weird paradox number two. And weird sort of seeming paradox number three is all this emphasis and articles and books and management stuff that you and I have, and almost everyone has read about culture. And you see these interviews and these glossy magazines and these cover stories of these

great, you know, legendary CEOs and the interview as, you know, to what attribute do you attribute your success? Well, it was, you know, it was to our culture. We built a great, meaning I built up a great culture, usually is what they're trying to say. And then two weeks later, the same company's in the toilet. Well, what happened? Like, culture couldn't change overnight. So what happened? Why does the same company with the same people suddenly transform? Weird puzzle number three. And that's usually the clue when you're doing science.

You see sort of unexplained things that don't quite fit conventional stories. And so underlying all of those is incentives and a new way to think about incentives and teams and companies and groups that can help explain all three of those. And that's ultimately what actually Loonshots is about. And so let me explain what I mean. Whenever you put people together into a group, you create two forms of incentives. One is what we often think of, oh, the stake in the outcome. So let's take a biotech company.

It might be a 10-person company. Your stake in outcome is, well, 10%. Let's see if everything's divided just for simplicity. And now you double that. Well, now you're 20%. Now it's 5%. It's kind of getting smaller. As it grows, your stake and outcome is getting smaller and smaller. So your incentives for stake and outcome

and rolling up your sleeves and fighting hard to, you know, help that loonshot or crazy idea succeed. It's very high when you're a small company, but it's getting smaller and smaller as you get larger. What's changing? There's a second incentive that you create whenever, no matter what happens, whenever you organize people into a group with a mission, and a reward system taught you that mission, you create a second incentive, and that is perks of rank. Two forms of incentive. A simple way to think of it is equity and cash. Equity and base salary.

But let's think about it even more broadly. Stake and outcome and perks of rank. What does that mean? Well, are you the team captain or a team member? Are you the CEO or a VP? When you're a 10-person company, perks of rank is irrelevant compared to those stakes. Because if you're the team captain or the team member, it might be a few thousand dollars difference. But if your project works or not, it's a few billion dollars or a few million dollars or whatever. But of course, as it grows, it flips.

All of a sudden, perks of rank become more important. So when I am talking about bringing a gun to a knife fight or a chief incentives officer, what I'm talking about is people spend so much time focused on culture and psychology and empowering and group dynamics. There are literally thousands or tens of thousands of books and articles about it. We spend so much less time on structure. What are the incentives? How are we motivating the behavior that we want to see? And so, for example, here's how it can help us think about that last one. Why do

groups suddenly change? Well, as they grow big, all of a sudden, the balance between those two incentives, the balance between them shifts. And as you grow bigger and bigger and bigger, stake and outcome get smaller and smaller, and perks of rank matter more and more and more. And at some point, they cross. Boom. And that's when people rank matter more and more and more. And at some point they cross, boom. And that's when people start caring more about politics and promotion and less about the success of their crazy idea. And when you care about politics and promotion, what do you do? You try to shoot down other people's ideas. And that's when good ideas die. That's when the wisdom of crowd turns into the tyranny of crowds. Underlying that is what you asked, incentives.

So understanding that is very important to understanding, for example, that weird paradox of why companies suddenly turn. When you really understand that and you start to tease that out, you can actually work out what are the control parameters of that transition so in science in physics you talk about a phase transition that's exactly whenever you have two competing forces boom you will trigger a transition but more interesting than just knowing that is what are the parameters because so you can work that out mathematically what are the parameters there's

temperature in water but if you add salt you lower the freezing temperature so there's a degree of salt on water well there's the binding energy between them all if you lower that you can also lower the freezing temperature so you can keep something liquid much longer if you understand those forces so the reason that it's important to understand incentives better, for example, to have a chief incentives officer, is that it can help you control the transition between innovation and rigidity when you embrace wild new ideas and you reject them. It sounds like I'm speaking in a metaphorical sense, but actually you can sort of translate that the way a scientist or a physicist would into a sort of a straightforward mathematical model

with two terms of cash and equity and then calculate where is that transition? At what size company does it happen? And you get a number. It happens at this number. And that number is a function of four parameters. And here are those four parameters. So as I dial those parameters,

I can dial that number up. Oh, that's cool. I just created four things I can adjust to create more innovative teams, the larger teams that still embrace new ideas rather than reject them. That answer kind of helps us understand one of those paradoxes, but also helps us understand the one that I mentioned about the myth of the big corporate risk-averse guy. What happens when I take a drop of, when I take a molecule of water and I drop it into a glass of water? Well, it slushes around with all the other molecules. What happens when I take a molecule of water and I drop it onto a block of ice? Well, it freezes. But it's the same molecule. And that's

sort of the same thing with the group dynamics. It's if you take the same guy, but you give him the incentives of a startup, hey, pretty innovative. You take the same guy and give him the incentives where it's all about politics and promotion, he's going to be shooting down new ideas. So underlying that paradox as well is incentives. So, it helps us are more about who's going to be the team captain, they're probably going to spend their time shooting down what gets me promoted. For example, in a large company, you have the same new idea. Let's say a new idea, a new drug for a promising

new cancer drug gets rid. A whole small biotech company is super excited about it, and they're all united about it, and it stumbles, and everybody rolls up their sleeve and save it. Then it stumbles again, and they roll up their sleeves again. Imagine you're at Pfizer, you're at a committee meeting, same drug, same person. Well, you could pound the table after its first stumble and say, no, no, I think it's good, so there's something good here, let's all fight.

Or, you know, odds of success are low and the stake in Atcom is not very high because how much is it going to help your career if it works 10 years down the road? Not very much. Or you can make sort of smart aleck comments that are maybe funny about, I think the science says this, and in the latest meta-analysis, we see this, and, you know, I went to this keynote speaker, Nobel laureate, and he's thinking that, and I really think the industry is headed here. And by coincidence, that's what your boss thinks. And that's what your boss's boss, who also happens to be sitting at the table, thinks. And they're nodding along. And you know what they're saying? A young fellow's got a smart head on his shoulders. And if you keep doing that and playing politics and sounding smart at meetings and kind of

shooting down by pointing out all the words and playing it safe, like the next thing, the next incremental idea. Let's say you had the statin drug. Let's make the words and playing it safe. Like the next thing, the next incremental idea. Let's say you had the statin drug. Let's make the 49th statin drug. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think that's a good idea. Everybody thinks that's a good idea. We all think that's a good idea.

Good job, young man. You might get promoted. What happens if you get promoted? You get a bump up of 30% in salary. So what do you want to do? Wait seven years and maybe move the needle of your company by 1%? Or do you want to make smart aleck comments and get promoted and maybe next year for 30%? Incentives. So that is how it helps you think about all three paradoxes, why people individually who might like an idea, when you put them in a group, you create the second incentive of perks of rank that can outweigh. So what do I mean by chief incentives officer? Companies today have a, for example, chief technology officer.

What's the job of the chief technology officer? To make sure that everybody's got the latest gadgets and systems. Well, that's pretty good. But how important is it to have motivated employees? Is that maybe at least as important as everybody has the latest apps and smartphones and software? I would argue that it is as important or more important. How aligned are your incentives with individual goals? The job of a chief technology officer is to take a, is strategic. You get very highly

paid experts. They're given a certain budget. Your budget is X. With that budget, I want you to optimize the quality of our tools. Same thing with a chief revenue officer. You're going to get a fixed marketing budget. Your marketing budget, your sales budget is X. With that, I want you to maximize our revenue. Why not have a chief incentives officer? I'm going to give you a certain compensation budget. Your compensation budget, equity and cash is X. I want you to take that compensation budget and maximize the motivation of our employees. Some motivation is financial and some is not financial. That's part of your job. What are the non-financial things that are motivating people? They're very different. Some people are, in fact, you know, financial considerations are very important.

Some people, intrinsic stuff like, am I growing? Am I developing? Am I contributing to a bigger cause? Am I getting recognized by my peers? Individual managers who are putting out fires and trying to do strategy and trying to get things done on time, on budget, on spec, don't really have the bandwidth to sit around and say, of the 11 people reporting to me, what are the different incentives? How can I design something to maximize the return on investment we're giving for those incentives, it's much better handled if there is someone who that it's their first priority than if it's someone who is their 97th priority. What happens today at the vast majority of companies, including big corporate companies for incentives? It's a good year, everybody gets 10%. Bad year, everybody

gets zero. How motivating is that if you're even a thousand person company? And we'll come back to small companies, but if you're a thousand person company and you're like four or 10,000 person company and you're five levels down from CEO, you're working on your project, your design, how much do you influence

if it's a company's good year or bad year? Not much. So how motivating is it for you to work harder on your design to know that if it was a good year? Not very. That's called a wasteful resource. In economics, that's called a free rider problem. You might as well, it's the same thing with stock options. The vast, you know, the many companies you say, well, let's just give everybody stock options. Okay. You know, maybe Just say Well let's Everybody stock options Okay You know

Maybe that's great If you're a five person company Or a ten person company Or a fifty person company And your project Is the one project And if you help it Then the value

But suppose You're a ten thousand person company Or even a thousand There are fifty different projects And your project Might move the needle By one percent Yeah

Even in a smaller company, a hundred person startup and you're not deciding the strategic direction of the company. If you're a higher number, 100, exactly. Most likely. So what are your incentives?

It's, it's a free rider problem because you actually do better off. If you can spend your time convincing your boss that you're incredibly valuable. Meanwhile, just twiddle your thumbs. And if the company has a good year, bang, your options go up. And if a bad year, whatever. Spend your time looking for another job.

I'd love to get into maybe some specific examples of, or any examples of common incentives or incentives that you see that are problematic. And I'll just riff on a few problems I've observed. I don't know exactly how to fix them, but just as a reflection of how much I think about this, which is not indicative of having all the solutions by any stretch. But for instance, firsthand experience of working on, say, books or television projects when there is a regime change. New leader comes in, says, if this goes well, I'll get none of the credit with this catalog of stuff that my predecessor approved. And if any of it goes wrong, I'll get all the blame. Therefore,

it's all going in the vault or whatever, or getting deprioritized. It's super, super common because, well, for the reason I just mentioned. For the incentives. And then having more recently spent time in science and looking at where there might be weaknesses, there might be funding deficits correlated to weaknesses, or funding pressure to perform science in certain ways, you see a positive publication bias, right?

So you could have a really well-designed experiment, intervention, let's just say, in one case shows no effect, that's still potentially a valuable study, but there's a, appears to be sort of a publication bias for positive effects with intervention. So it's like, okay, well, how does that factor into a whole slew of different decisions that scientists make or that funders make? But whether it's in science, whether it's in for-profit companies, what are some common sort of default

and or default compensation structures or offers that you think are problematic? All right, I'll give you one example. It might be close to home, Uber. Yeah. And we'll talk about it. All right. Because it'll be interesting because that'll be an interesting discussion.ber yeah and we'll talk about it because it'll be interesting

because uh that'll be an interesting discussion and i just so we don't lose the thread what does it mean bring a gun to a night what do i mean by that that is if everybody is doing one thing kind of a 20th century like a 50 like hey just reward bonuses they're creating a free rider problem. They are not optimizing their use of incentives. They are weak. If you want to get a competitive advantage as a company, why don't you bring a gun to knife? Appoint a chief incentives officer whose job is to be more strategic. Where those companies are taking X amount of dollars, translate the equity into dollars, they're taking X amount of cash and equity and wasting it, why don't you be strategic? Why don't you take that X, get rid of the free rider problem, figure out what will better

motivate and better incentivize and essentially better align incentives and value created for the company. Individual managers don't have the time or expertise or training. You don't ask every individual manager to say, I'd like you to come up with the best, identify the best software tools and the best smartphone apps and the best hardware and the best middleware for your team? And could you get that done by a week from now in addition to all your other? No, you appoint a chief technology officer. That's his job. Same thing with incentives. So bring a gun to a knife fight. If all your competitors are doing this weak thing, why don't you just turn that into a competitive advantage? Do it better. Use your resources more strategically to align incentives

with value created better than your competitors. And you know what? You'll create a more motivated force. That doesn't mean that the cultural stuff doesn't matter. It's as a complement, culture and structure. So let's talk about Uber for a second. this will be kind of interesting since you were such an early investor and uh so uh one uh uh good friend of mine there senior who has been around a lot of tech companies uh we don't need to mention any names in this conversation talked about the culture in the engineering group there pre-ceo transition, before the transition with Travis, as everyone wanted to be captain of their own speedboat. And it was problematic

in the sense that whenever you grow very fast, you accumulate a technology debit. There are liabilities and assets. And when you grow, this is actually Bob Sutton at Stanford did a great study on this on Uber. And he and I have been talking about it. And this is the way he described it, which I thought was very interesting. When you grow really rapidly, you accumulate a debit, which is all the little technology stuff that you sort of fast forwarded past and really needs to go back and get cleaned up if you want to scale. At Uber, what appeared to be the culture on the surface was that everyone wanted to be captain of their own speed, but they wanted to work on the next Uber thing,

Uber Eats or Uber delivery from hospitals of meds or Uber this or Uber flower or whatever, rather than go back and fix the technology debit, all the stuff from growing hyperfast that needed to go back. And that led to a lot of problems. So that sounds like a cultural problem, doesn't it?

Everyone wants to be their own speedboat, but let's go one level beneath that. What was the incentive system? So the incentive system at Uber at the time, and you can correct me if you have firsthand knowledge, I just happen to... Everybody has a base salary.

Let's just for sake of argument call it 100. And let's say you have a bonus target 30. Just for sake of argument. It could be a very different number. But let's say that's the multiple. And there is a multiple of bonus that you get based on how your year went. And at most tech companies in Silicon Valley, anything less than 0.5, you're fired.

50% you might be fired. That's actually pretty normal. 70% was not a great year. 80% better. 100% is you hit most of your stuff. And maybe 150 at a great year. At Uber, it was 800 it was it was a huge multiple so what did that structure encourage encourage everybody to go find their

one project push everybody else away because that's what they were being compensated on because if you could demonstrate that you found some little niche and you grew it, you could get some huge multiple. So that led to the captain of the speedboat problem. CEO transition. It sounds like, oh, it was just a culture change. Actually, they changed underlying incentives as well. The captain of the speedboat problem faded and people started playing together better. They started going back and fixing the technology debits that they'd accumulated from the hypergrowth phase.

So, lesson, sometimes things that look like culture may actually be structure Sometimes structure drives culture And that's why having a chief incentives officer Is bringing a gun to a knife fight It can give you a competitive advantage If you're really busy hyper-growing a company Do you have time to think about the perverse incentives

Of your stuff? If you're a CEO or you've got a board of directors, you've got all these fires to put out, you've got strategy, you've got execution. You don't have time to think about, but if you appointed a chief incentives officer and that's his or her job, they can catch some of these traps. They can optimize the use of that resources more effectively. So that's what I mean by chief incentives officer. Now, Uber, what is your experience? I do not have the ground level firsthand exposure

to their compensation structure, so I can't speak to that. I think it's a very valid example. It's a micro example of a macro phenomenon, in the sense that, at the very least, incentives are a large part of culture. In so much as if we think of culture, just to separate it from the for-profit work world or business world for a moment, if you think of culture, whether it's Japanese culture or American culture or fill-in-the-blank culture, what does that really mean? Like the word gets used a lot, but what does that mean? Like culture? And in my mind, it's a shared set of beliefs and behavior. I mean, to a large extent, it's like, okay, well, putting the beliefs to one side,

like what dictates behavior? Certainly to a large extent, it's incentives. What are you rewarded for and what are you punished for? And what you're saying is in a minute, just that structure can drive, I think of culture as patterns of behavior. And I think structure, they're not mutually exclusive circles. They overlap and they interact

because structure can drive culture. Certain incentives can drive patterns of behavior. And by saying that structure can matter, it doesn't mean that you're saying culture isn't important. So, for example, having regular employee beatings is probably a bad idea. I'm just putting that out there. Not that kind of culture where you flog people at 11 a.m. in the town hall. That's probably not going to do great for you.

Empowering your employees, celebrating victories, that's probably good. Those are patterns of behavior. So, all right, here's a wacky analogy, but we talked about nature versus nurture, genetic predispositions versus thing you. This is a great segue. Genetic versus nature versus genetic predispositions versus things that you pick up from the environment and i think that's a good example they're genetic predispositions to diabetes on the other hand if you drink two

gallons of coke every day you're probably going to accelerate diabetes they're genetic predispositions to lung cancer on the other hand if you smoke two packs a day you're probably going to accelerate diabetes. They're genetic predispositions to lung cancer. On the other hand, if you smoke two packs a day you're probably going to accelerate. Both genes and lifestyle matter. And same with structure and culture. In a company, both structure and culture matter. And I think one issue is that

there's been so much focus on number two and not enough focus on number one. I 100% agree. So much focus on culture, culture, culture, culture, culture, culture, culture, culture. When I first started as a CEO, and you probably the same thing, you know, I consumed those books as I wanted to learn how to be a better leader. And after like the 100th book, you know, that said more or less the same thing, like, okay, I get it already, but, you know, is there any more? Yeah.

And then there were all these kind of funny little paradoxes that that couldn't really explain. So it's not that those ideas and principles, that there isn't stuff there that's useful, evidence they get repeated over and over. But people have not paid enough attention to structure. And that's why if you do it well, chief incentives officer,

it's bringing gun to knife. You create a competitive advantage. I think it's also an example of bringing a scientific mindset to something that has a lot of fuzzy logic and is full of paradoxes, as you noted, because it's like, okay, well, if the culture is the variable that is determining the success or failure

of this company that's being put on magazine covers and then a month later, it's a complete U-turn how does one explain that and on the incentive side also you have very discrete pieces that allow you to run experiments very effectively whereas i think the culture discussion can get very nebulous very quickly it's like okay you want to improve culture. First, let's define culture. What are you talking about exactly? Hard to get anyone to, not anyone, but it's often talked about for 200 pages in a book without ever defining it properly. Problem number one. Problem number two, okay, you want to impact culture. How are you going

to measure improving culture? Is it in top line revenue growth? Is it in any number of other key performance indicators? It's not as cleanly examinable or testable as incentives in a lot of respects. And that's why for me, I'll give you an anecdote. And this, for people listening are like, I don't run a big company. This applies to you. This applies to, for me, the culture would be like, just think more positive, right? Culture is like, go lose weight because you'll be happier. It's like, okay, well, the fact of the matter is I haven't been losing weight for the last five years. I've had that as my New Year's resolution. Maybe it's time to shift

and look at the structure. And I remember talking to somebody at one point, they were watching phobias being cured on stage, and there's some type of mentalist or someone who's doing work. And at one point, this woman gets on stage, and's afraid of heights and there's a ladder that's put up and she talks to the mentalist who cures her of her phobia doing A, B, and C, and then she walks all the way up to the top of the ladder and comes down and he goes, how do you feel? And she goes, I feel great. My husband said he would give me a hundred dollars if I climbed to the top of the ladder. It's like- Structure drives behavior.

Right. Incentives, people. It's like it's the incentives, stupid. Like sometimes it's like follow the money. It's the economy, stupid. Yeah, well, with human behavior, it's like it's the incentives, stupid. Like really, really pay attention to that. And you can rig the game so that it is more likely you'll get the outcomes you want

if you think about that structure, right? If you think about the incentives. Yeah, and you touched on the thing. It it is more likely you'll get the outcomes you want if you think about that structure right if you think about the incentives yeah you know you touched on anything it's a more scientific approach so it gives you actionable ideas that are sort of surprising or starting points for discussion or different ways i'll give you two examples so you can work out the mathematics of when you get this transition and you get these control parameters that are parameters of organizational design. And so here's one thing it tells you that you can do if you want to build more innovative teams and companies, which is get managers out of the decision of bonuses or promotion.

Just take them out of the decision loop. That sounds kind of weird. You're a manager. Shouldn't you be deciding? I'll give you company A and company B that do it the different ways and I'll be pretty clear why. So imagine there is a,

let's call it some kind of client service, consulting company, it could be a design company, architecture company, any kind of consulting here in Austin, and there is the local office. It's a global company, and there's a local office here, and there are three vice presidents, and there are 30 associates in the Austin office. And a spot opens up for a fourth VP. Now, in most companies, the local office is going to decide on which of those 30

candidates is going to make that, you know, get that promotion and become the fourth VP. And so what's going to happen? Those 30 associates are going to be sucking up to those three VPs and politicking and stabbing each other in the back all year long because they all want to get that promotion. Now imagine a different company, and this is actually done in many ways at Google and was done at McKinsey

and maybe at some other companies, but not very many. Local office, three VPs, 30 associates. Spot opens up for a promotion. Three VPs don't decide. They fly in somebody from Denmark, specifically chosen because he or she doesn't know. Let's make it a she.

Let's call her Eleanor from Denmark. Flies in because she doesn't know the 3B feeds, doesn't know any of the associates, maybe from a totally different industry or field, but same group. And her job is to spend a week, two weeks, three weeks interviewing broadly. Might interview 10, 15, 20 people. We'll certainly interview the three VPs. We'll interview many of the peers of the

candidates of the 30th. We'll interview their customers, interview their internal customers, their external customers, up, down, and see, make a decision or make a recommendation to an independent committee that will make the decision. Now what happens? In the second situation, what are those 30 associates going to do? Are they going to be sucking up to the VPs all year round? No, because the VPs aren't making that decision. Are they going to be stabbing each other in the back?

Not really, because the other associates are going to be interviewed on this decision. So what do you have? Everyone's kind of going to focus on their job and doing good client work, because they're going to be interviewing the clients and going to be interviewing the internal people. So everyone is kind of cooperating. What did we just do? We took the manager out of the decision. So where does this come from?

Well, if you work out in kind of the mathematical economic model, you can calculate something called return on politics. What's the incremental value, incremental probability that you increase your promotion likelihood versus the incremental hour you spend on politics? When that variable or parameter, return on politics, is high as it was with the first company, you really hurt innovation. When that variable is low, as it was with the second company, you really improve innovation.

So that just falls out. So you mentioned scientific. That just actually falls out of the sort of a straightforward model of the incentives and these two variables. Return on politics. And so it gives you a way of quantifying something that's sort of fuzzy. So if I tell you, or we're sitting around, we're talking and a friend of ours says, you know, this company, you know, I just joined this new company. It's very political. It sounds like a cultural thing, but actually there's a way to quantify. It just

means my return on, my expected value of return on politics is higher here than in my old company, and that sucks. Every manager is different. Everyone is more or less susceptible to politics, but there's some average, and that's what you mean. Right, and everyone's susceptible to incentives. And everyone's susceptible to incentives. So that's just kind of one example

of how you can think a little bit more scientifically of incentives. Are my incentives around politics and promotion, in which case it's not going to be a great place for innovation? Or are my incentives pretty well aligned around the success of my idea or my project or my team's project. Not just innovation, but am I going to be in an environment where I feel supported by my peers, or is it going to be like the Hunger Games? Right. I mean, which certainly innovation is one thing that suffers. There are a lot of things that suffer. Right, and so designing incentives, it's a complicated problem. It's not like I'm saying, oh, there's an easy shot. I'm saying that the

return on investment of spending more time and more energy, making it at least as equal a function as your chief technology officer or your chief revenue officer is worth it. Chief revenues officer is to motivate customers to buy your product as best as you can with a fixed budget. Well, don't you want to motivate your employees to work as hard as you can on the best projects for you? Yeah. That's what the chief incentives officer should do. Isn't that just as important as motivating your customers, motivating your people? Yeah. So why don't we do that? Why don't we make it at least as good? This, I should say, I think certainly also applies to very small companies, even one-person shops,

because whether or not you've designed them, you are responding to incentives. Absolutely. So it makes a lot of sense to sit down and to figure out what you're responding to, what you're most motivated by, positively and negatively. Safi Bakal, loonshots.com.

That's right. At Safi, S-A-F-I, Bakal, B-A-H-C-A-L-L on Twitter. If anybody wants to wave hello, the book is Loonshots.

It's a really fun read. And for someone like me who really learns best by example and story to deduce the principle or the lesson, it is just chocked full of stories that I would have expected to have heard at some point in all of my reading and all of my adventuring in the business and scientific worlds, and yet the vast majority I'd never come across, which made it not just an actionable read, but a very, very fun read.

So thank you for that. Thanks for saying that. It means a lot. I really appreciate it. And do you have any parting comments before we wrap up? Yeah, don't think we've we've spent enough time together and talked about enough ideas so i you know i think we we got another 72 hours worth of material because we just we've been so superficial that's true you know

not more than a you know a few seconds on each side, no, it's super fun to be here, of course. And I hope, you know, my hope with this book is that it, the thing that's been most, it's made me feel the most satisfied, and you probably experienced this with stuff you do as well, is that a lot of people, especially younger people, have come to me and said

they just find it inspiring and uplifting. And my hope with this is that it's an especially exciting thing for me that if it can inspire people who have a crazy idea or people who are being told that their idea is crazy, to just keep going a little while because there is some gold out there. If you just persist through the stumbles, and that's not just the exceptional idea, it's almost every single important idea.

So if you hit a bunch of rough patches, it may be because you're onto something really, really important. Dig it. Safi, thank you again for all the time. It is time for us to go grab some food. And for everybody listening, you can find links to everything we have talked about in the show notes,

as per usual at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And you can search loonshots, Safi. Safi is probably the best bet. S-A-F-I. If you just search his name, all of the links will pop up in the show notes. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

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