Tim Ferriss: How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.120 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.080 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.980 | Today, my guest is Tim Ferriss.

00:00:17.420 | Tim Ferriss is an author, a podcaster, an investor,

00:00:21.640 | and is known for having a near supernatural ability

00:00:24.400 | to predict the future,

00:00:25.560 | which has allowed him to obtain success

00:00:27.800 | in a huge number of different endeavors.

00:00:29.480 | For instance, he is a five-time

00:00:31.440 | number one New York Times bestselling author.

00:00:34.240 | But perhaps equally or more important to that,

00:00:37.160 | he's also exceptionally good at teaching people

00:00:39.480 | how to write, the entire process of writing

00:00:41.800 | and marketing a book.

00:00:43.480 | His books, "The 4-Hour Chef" and "The 4-Hour Body"

00:00:46.000 | and "The 4-Hour Workweek,"

00:00:47.360 | not only explain his own exploration

00:00:49.680 | of how to optimize and prioritize his time

00:00:52.040 | and learn particular skills,

00:00:53.680 | but he teaches you those skills as well.

00:00:56.560 | This is really what sets Tim apart.

00:00:58.400 | He is an exceptional learner and an exceptional teacher.

00:01:02.260 | And today you learn why that is

00:01:04.240 | and in a characteristic Tim Ferriss way,

00:01:06.680 | he explains the process in a way that you can apply it.

00:01:09.720 | He lists out, for instance,

00:01:11.920 | the specific questions that you should ask

00:01:14.100 | when approaching any endeavor

00:01:15.880 | in order to get the information that you want

00:01:17.880 | and to make the process of learning

00:01:19.820 | and getting better at something

00:01:21.460 | and achieving great success in something

00:01:23.520 | that much more likely.

00:01:25.200 | That ability that Tim has

00:01:26.760 | to identify the specific questions

00:01:28.560 | that one needs to ask and answer

00:01:30.360 | and the specific action steps to take

00:01:32.500 | in order to achieve success

00:01:34.120 | is really what I believe sets Tim apart

00:01:36.480 | from everyone else on the internet or on the bookshelf

00:01:39.800 | that's giving advice as to how to become good at something.

00:01:44.020 | Tim Ferriss is also dedicated

00:01:45.500 | to various philanthropic efforts,

00:01:47.320 | the most recent of which is the donation

00:01:49.520 | of several millions of his own dollars

00:01:51.660 | to research on psychedelics for the treatment

00:01:54.080 | of otherwise intractable psychiatric challenges

00:01:56.780 | such as major depression, suicidal depression,

00:02:00.220 | eating disorders and addiction.

00:02:01.880 | And he's also brought together other philanthropists

00:02:04.280 | which has really galvanized the whole field

00:02:06.520 | of psychedelic research for the treatment of mental health,

00:02:09.160 | transforming it from what was recently

00:02:11.820 | kind of a fringe area of science

00:02:13.780 | to a mainstay that's actually funded

00:02:15.520 | not only by philanthropy

00:02:17.080 | but by the National Institutes of Health.

00:02:19.080 | So he's really transformed this entire scientific field

00:02:21.600 | into one that now is transforming the laws around psychedelics

00:02:25.860 | and is providing mental health treatment

00:02:27.800 | for people that would otherwise suffer.

00:02:29.840 | Today's discussion was a particularly meaningful one

00:02:32.500 | because not only is Tim a pioneer in the world of podcasting

00:02:37.000 | but it also marked the nine-year anniversary

00:02:39.760 | of his podcast, "The Tim Ferriss Show."

00:02:42.180 | Now, as I mentioned earlier,

00:02:43.200 | Tim is known for being able to see around corners

00:02:46.400 | or predict the future.

00:02:47.280 | He really does seem to be about five if not 10 years ahead

00:02:50.680 | of everybody else in thinking about tools for optimization

00:02:54.840 | in particular domains of life.

00:02:56.800 | And so we were very fortunate that during today's discussion

00:02:59.560 | he shares with us his current creative endeavors

00:03:01.840 | and how he's thinking about and approaching those.

00:03:04.280 | And he also breaks down for us the process

00:03:07.400 | of how to think about and prioritize one's schedule.

00:03:10.640 | Not just on the order of the day,

00:03:12.240 | not just on the order of the week,

00:03:13.740 | but really thinking about one's life as a journey

00:03:16.400 | and how to organize and go about that journey.

00:03:19.760 | So today's discussion will provide with you

00:03:22.240 | tremendous insight into who Tim Ferriss is

00:03:25.240 | and how that incredible mind of his works

00:03:27.460 | in order to do all the amazing things that he's done.

00:03:30.620 | And of course, he teaches you how to do it.

00:03:33.600 | He will tell you the exact questions that you should ask

00:03:36.280 | and that you should answer

00:03:38.400 | and how to step back and think about those questions

00:03:40.720 | and then prioritize so that you can decide

00:03:43.280 | how to best invest your time.

00:03:45.480 | I'm sure many of you are familiar with "The Tim Ferriss Show."

00:03:48.400 | However, if you're not already subscribing

00:03:50.360 | to "The Tim Ferriss Show," I highly recommend you do.

00:03:52.220 | I still go back and listen to early episodes

00:03:54.440 | of "The Tim Ferriss Show,"

00:03:55.580 | and I'm a weekly listener to the new episodes.

00:03:57.640 | We provide a link to "The Tim Ferriss Show"

00:03:59.420 | in the show note captions.

00:04:01.060 | Also in the show note captions,

00:04:02.240 | you'll find links to Tim's many

00:04:04.360 | New York Times bestselling books

00:04:06.280 | and a link to his excellent weekly blog.

00:04:08.780 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:11.240 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:13.740 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:15.800 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:04:17.720 | about science and science-related tools

00:04:19.420 | to the general public.

00:04:20.680 | In keeping with that theme,

00:04:21.700 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:07:40.260 | And now for my discussion with Tim Ferriss.

00:07:43.400 | Tim Ferriss, I am nothing short of thrilled

00:07:48.300 | to have you here.

00:07:49.200 | I've been reading your books, reading your blogs,

00:07:53.700 | listening to your podcasts for a very long time.

00:07:57.060 | And in preparing for today, I was thinking,

00:08:00.660 | who does Tim remind me of?

00:08:02.220 | 'Cause I knew you reminded me of somebody,

00:08:04.060 | but I didn't know who.

00:08:05.180 | And then I realized it.

00:08:06.740 | You remind me of the neurobiologist Ramon Cajal.

00:08:10.740 | You don't look anything like him.

00:08:12.960 | He doesn't look anything like you.

00:08:14.660 | He was a brilliant scientist.

00:08:17.300 | He won the Nobel Prize in 1906

00:08:19.820 | for essentially describing the structure

00:08:21.900 | of the nervous system.

00:08:22.740 | He was the first, along with another guy,

00:08:25.260 | to define synapses, like this fundamental connection

00:08:28.540 | in the nervous system.

00:08:29.540 | But the reason that you remind me of Cajal

00:08:32.860 | is that it's a well-known or not so secret secret

00:08:36.760 | in neuroscience that if you want to pick

00:08:39.620 | a really excellent project to work on,

00:08:42.940 | you simply go and look at what Cajal talked about

00:08:46.420 | or hypothesized, and then you work on that.

00:08:50.260 | You know, he had this almost supernatural ability

00:08:54.840 | to look at fixed stained tissue of the nervous system,

00:08:58.380 | much of it is incredibly beautiful, by the way,

00:09:01.300 | and think about how it worked when it was alive.

00:09:06.180 | And he's considered the greatest neurobiologist

00:09:08.100 | of all time, without question.

00:09:10.360 | And it's really this feature of being able

00:09:13.260 | to see around corners or into the future

00:09:16.300 | that establishes that link for me.

00:09:18.380 | It's absolute truth that if you look back

00:09:21.860 | to what you were doing 10 years ago, 15 years ago,

00:09:24.420 | the kinds of things you were doing,

00:09:25.440 | the kinds of questions you were asking,

00:09:27.380 | that translates to much of what people like myself

00:09:31.260 | and people in the fitness space, tech space,

00:09:33.520 | investor space, mindfulness space, psychedelic space,

00:09:37.240 | all these different arenas, what they're doing now.

00:09:41.260 | So it's not hyperbole to say that you are the Ramon y Cajal

00:09:46.260 | of all those different spaces.

00:09:49.320 | And podcasting, of course, is one of those.

00:09:52.260 | So I owe you a great debt of gratitude

00:09:55.140 | and many others do as well.

00:09:56.460 | So my first question for you is,

00:09:59.900 | what was your mindset around the time

00:10:02.080 | that you wrote "4-Hour Body," "4-Hour Workweek,"

00:10:06.160 | but in particular "4-Hour Body,"

00:10:07.600 | because the protocols in that book are so very useful.

00:10:11.540 | They were at the time it was published.

00:10:13.580 | They still are now.

00:10:14.540 | And so many of the things like ice baths,

00:10:17.980 | the discussion around brown fat thermogenesis,

00:10:21.500 | resistance training in its kind of basic form

00:10:26.020 | of just providing enough progressive overload

00:10:28.340 | to get an adaptation, not excessively long workouts,

00:10:31.420 | weight loss, slow carb diet, and on and on and on.

00:10:35.860 | What were you thinking at that time?

00:10:37.840 | Like if you can think back to then,

00:10:40.020 | like what were you foraging for?

00:10:42.540 | What were you thinking about

00:10:43.380 | when you woke up in the morning?

00:10:44.260 | Think, oh, I'm going to go find all this stuff

00:10:45.580 | that at the time was really esoteric,

00:10:47.940 | because it is all played out very well.

00:10:50.980 | What I'm basically saying is if you want to know

00:10:53.580 | what's going to be happening hot and useful

00:10:56.660 | in five years, 10 years, and onwards,

00:10:58.900 | just look at what Tim's doing at any moment.

00:11:01.380 | So there it is.

00:11:03.380 | - Well, thank you for the very generous comparison

00:11:06.780 | and intro.

00:11:07.620 | I'm thrilled to be here.

00:11:08.460 | So thanks for having me.

00:11:09.960 | And "4-Hour Body" represented an opportunity

00:11:14.120 | for me to do a few things.

00:11:15.100 | The first was to diversify my identity

00:11:18.020 | from outside of the realm of the, say, business category.

00:11:21.580 | So it was a deliberate move

00:11:22.980 | since the success of the first book bought me permission

00:11:26.900 | to do something else

00:11:27.740 | that publishers would still want to gamble on.

00:11:30.260 | I wanted to see if I could maybe like a Michael Lewis

00:11:33.420 | take my audience with me to other topics.

00:11:35.740 | So that was a lateral move that was very deliberate

00:11:38.140 | from a career optionality standpoint.

00:11:41.100 | And then I was doing, I think,

00:11:43.180 | what I've done for a very long time and what I enjoy doing,

00:11:45.740 | which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs

00:11:51.540 | and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field.

00:11:54.140 | Could be anything.

00:11:56.340 | If anyone says always, never, should,

00:11:59.500 | I pay attention and take note of that.

00:12:01.820 | They may very well be right.

00:12:03.420 | But if anything is said in absolutes,

00:12:06.320 | I like to stress test.

00:12:08.100 | And in the case of, say, physical performance

00:12:10.820 | or physical manipulation, tracking,

00:12:14.460 | 2008, 2009 was a very interesting time

00:12:18.200 | because a number of different technologies

00:12:21.220 | were coming online, meaning being adopted by small groups.

00:12:25.540 | You had very early stages of, say, accelerometers

00:12:28.700 | as wearables.

00:12:30.320 | You had a number of different innovations

00:12:33.300 | and means of tracking that had never been available before.

00:12:37.560 | You had, for instance,

00:12:39.720 | and this took a bit of ferreting on my side.

00:12:41.540 | It wasn't immediately on the roadmap for our body,

00:12:43.820 | but continuous glucose monitors.

00:12:46.780 | At the time, that was, I want to say, exclusively limited

00:12:51.780 | to type 1 diabetics, or maybe type 2 diabetics,

00:12:54.820 | but largely type 1 diabetics.

00:12:56.580 | And what captured my interest,

00:12:58.940 | and I can't recall how I came across it,

00:13:00.700 | but it was probably through the very earliest iterations

00:13:04.620 | of what later became the Quantified Self Movement.

00:13:07.380 | And I remember attending the very first gathering

00:13:09.460 | at Kevin Kelly's house in Pacifica, California.

00:13:12.860 | This was around 2009, 12 people, 13 people,

00:13:17.860 | to discuss quantifying health.

00:13:20.140 | But the example of a professional race car driver,

00:13:25.140 | I can't remember the form factor,

00:13:26.780 | whether it was F1 or NASCAR or other,

00:13:29.060 | who was using this continual glucose monitor

00:13:31.860 | for paying attention to glucose levels while driving.

00:13:36.860 | And I thought to myself,

00:13:39.760 | would that not be useful for healthy normals?

00:13:43.460 | Would that not have other applications?

00:13:45.500 | If this is being used by a high performer

00:13:47.140 | in this type of context,

00:13:48.740 | might it have other types of applications,

00:13:51.020 | which then led me to use the very early versions of Dexcom,

00:13:55.700 | which were really painful to implant, no longer the case.

00:13:58.380 | Of course, that's changed a lot.

00:14:00.140 | And I wanted to see how I might be able to find a handful

00:14:05.140 | of different categories of things.

00:14:07.260 | There's the new, like the genuinely new, like CGM,

00:14:10.280 | at that point was genuinely new.

00:14:12.500 | The very old that might have some room

00:14:17.500 | for scientific investigation.

00:14:20.540 | And I would say, when I say scientific,

00:14:22.340 | I don't necessarily mean randomized control trials

00:14:25.580 | at a university.

00:14:26.480 | I do think as an N of one,

00:14:29.520 | if you think about study design and you can even blind,

00:14:33.040 | you could even placebo control.

00:14:34.380 | And I knew people in the small subculture of quantified self

00:14:37.840 | who did this.

00:14:39.020 | You can, I think, approach things in a methodical way

00:14:43.240 | where you can make a lot of progress

00:14:44.900 | in trying to determine causality or lack thereof.

00:14:48.420 | Looking at very old things, looking at orphaned things.

00:14:51.060 | So for instance, there are many examples

00:14:54.500 | in the world of doping, where you have, say,

00:14:58.660 | Balco back in the day,

00:15:00.540 | where famously Barry Bonds and others

00:15:03.380 | purportedly used things like the cream and the clear.

00:15:07.180 | And these were based on antibiotics that were sourced

00:15:11.020 | from Soviet literature or older literature

00:15:13.900 | from the '50s and '60s that might not be on the radar

00:15:17.580 | of, say, the anti-doping groups

00:15:20.180 | that would administer the testing.

00:15:21.860 | So all of these different buckets were of interest to me.

00:15:26.060 | And I begin where I usually do, which is interviewing folks.

00:15:29.000 | So I would interview one or two people in a given field.

00:15:32.060 | And I might ask them any number of questions.

00:15:36.100 | So one is, what are the nerds doing

00:15:38.840 | on the weekends or at night?

00:15:39.900 | This is also really good for investing.

00:15:41.400 | It's like, all right, what are the really technical

00:15:43.660 | nerds doing at night or on the weekends

00:15:46.980 | after they've put in a really long workday or workweek?

00:15:50.660 | Let's take a really close look at that.

00:15:52.900 | Another one is, and I'll create a flow for this,

00:15:56.380 | but what are rich people doing now?

00:15:59.780 | That everyone or tens or hundreds of millions of people

00:16:03.500 | might be doing 10 years from now?

00:16:06.940 | And an example of that would be, let's just say,

00:16:09.220 | full-time assistant, virtual assistant, AI, right?

00:16:13.520 | So we've seen the needs and wants being addressed

00:16:17.860 | by different technology, but it's an iteration

00:16:19.860 | of the same thing on some level,

00:16:22.300 | in the case of, say, using ChatGPT tied into Zapier

00:16:25.320 | for various functions.

00:16:27.100 | And then, where are people cobbling together awkward solutions?

00:16:30.740 | So where are people piecing together awkward solutions,

00:16:35.740 | and is there room for some type of innovation there?

00:16:38.780 | These are a few of the questions that I would

00:16:40.940 | not only ask myself, but ask experts in different areas.

00:16:43.620 | So if I end up spending time, say,

00:16:45.400 | this was a few years prior to writing The 4-Hour Body,

00:16:50.400 | I spent time at NASA Ames and was interacting

00:16:53.740 | with a number of scientists, some people who were working

00:16:55.620 | on all sorts of biological tests and looking at genomics,

00:16:59.820 | and had a very frank discussion about where they thought,

00:17:04.180 | if they had to push, right, so I'll ask questions like,

00:17:07.640 | push a little bit into the realm of science fiction

00:17:10.220 | and speculation, because I'm sure you can't support

00:17:13.820 | any type of projection like that with the literature,

00:17:16.500 | with scientific literature, but what do you think

00:17:18.900 | some of the risks are of, say, publishing your genome?

00:17:22.060 | Because at the time, a number of high-profile folks

00:17:23.860 | had just made their full genomes available,

00:17:26.180 | and they're like, well, I think in the near future,

00:17:28.180 | it'd be possible to reconstruct someone's face

00:17:32.240 | based on their genetic data, and they're like,

00:17:35.780 | high degree of confidence, like zero to 100%, how confident?

00:17:38.020 | They're like, yeah, 80, 90%.

00:17:39.340 | I'm like, okay, I should pay attention to that,

00:17:41.400 | because if you're making your data available, let's just say,

00:17:44.060 | and it's anonymized per se, you still might be identifiable.

00:17:47.260 | So it's like, okay, that raises some interesting questions.

00:17:49.100 | Like, okay, well then, how might you get around that?

00:17:52.340 | How might you put in safeguards so that you are the one

00:17:55.980 | and only keeper of your data, so to speak?

00:17:58.320 | Brought up all sorts of targeted weaponry,

00:18:02.860 | by sort of bio-weapons possibilities

00:18:05.220 | that I was interested in, and then I would ask that person,

00:18:07.920 | who's clearly willing to step outside of the box

00:18:11.820 | of whatever he's working on day to day,

00:18:13.820 | who are two of your close friends,

00:18:16.500 | or two thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to,

00:18:19.140 | or kind of at the bleeding edge of something,

00:18:20.820 | and unorthodox, and then I would just continue

00:18:23.820 | to have these conversations over and over again.

00:18:25.780 | And the stream of development

00:18:29.820 | that I paid a lot of attention to,

00:18:30.980 | is something along the lines of the following.

00:18:33.100 | So the very beginnings are usually

00:18:37.260 | in some type of extreme case, and I think the extremes,

00:18:41.820 | and this goes for product design as well,

00:18:43.240 | but the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa.

00:18:45.900 | So you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases.

00:18:48.580 | So racehorses, for instance.

00:18:51.420 | You'll often see things start with, say, racehorses,

00:18:54.780 | or people with wasting diseases, for instance,

00:18:57.640 | or any type of chronic or terminal illness

00:19:01.460 | who are willing to try

00:19:03.420 | some more experimental interventions.

00:19:06.060 | Then let's just take one step further, bodybuilding.

00:19:09.540 | See a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding,

00:19:11.920 | and high-level athletes, then billionaires,

00:19:13.620 | then rich people, then the rest of us, right?

00:19:15.900 | So my assumption is, and was for the 4-Hour Body,

00:19:19.260 | that along the lines of William Gibson's quote,

00:19:22.740 | the future is already here,

00:19:23.700 | it's just not evenly distributed.

00:19:25.540 | So I'm never predicting the future,

00:19:27.260 | I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating

00:19:30.140 | that I think are gonna bloom

00:19:31.740 | and end up spreading really, really widely.

00:19:35.480 | So that's generally where I start,

00:19:38.780 | and I assume the practitioners

00:19:39.940 | are gonna be ahead of the papers.

00:19:41.900 | So studying, say, the coaches whose jobs are on the line,

00:19:46.180 | who are getting paid based on athlete performance,

00:19:49.080 | and assuming that a lot of that will eventually,

00:19:52.000 | if it holds up, make its way into, say,

00:19:54.400 | the peer-reviewed exercise science papers,

00:19:56.420 | but it's gonna have a lag time of three to five years.

00:19:58.820 | - At least.

00:19:59.660 | - At least, at least.

00:20:00.860 | Takes a long time.

00:20:01.700 | - Yeah, science is often very slow to catch up.

00:20:04.600 | You've mentioned many things I have questions about.

00:20:09.360 | You mentioned paying attention to the new,

00:20:12.200 | the very old, or the orphaned.

00:20:14.520 | So interesting, and I just thought I'd tell you

00:20:18.580 | that when you sit down with a graduate student

00:20:20.840 | or a postdoc and they're trying to come up with a project,

00:20:24.200 | rarely do you say, "What do you wanna work on?"

00:20:27.240 | And they fire back a really interesting question.

00:20:30.760 | Sometimes they do, but that's the rare person.

00:20:33.640 | More often than not, you'll send them to the literature

00:20:37.000 | and they'll come back with like,

00:20:37.900 | "Okay, there's this new technique that we can use

00:20:39.800 | "to answer a set of questions better than ever before."

00:20:44.460 | Or, "There's a very old theory I wanna revisit."

00:20:47.000 | Or, "There's this theory that no one pays attention to."

00:20:49.560 | In fact, we had one guest on here, Oded Rashavi,

00:20:51.640 | who is studying essentially inheritance of traits,

00:20:55.000 | transgenerational inheritance of traits.

00:20:56.580 | It's a little bit, although different,

00:20:58.200 | from Lamarckian evolution,

00:21:01.800 | but it's a lot like that in some ways.

00:21:04.560 | And these orphan theories that everyone assumed were wrong

00:21:07.200 | and that there is a basis for them.

00:21:08.500 | So I think there's real genius in that analysis.

00:21:12.640 | It also struck me as you were listing off

00:21:16.380 | some of your process,

00:21:17.420 | circa the writing of the four-hour body,

00:21:20.680 | that I and many other people are probably curious

00:21:23.800 | about what the operations around all that looked like.

00:21:27.340 | So are you, or were you at the time,

00:21:29.780 | like waking up in the morning and going,

00:21:30.940 | "Okay, I'm gonna take a walk and think about the new,

00:21:33.760 | "the old, and the orphaned."

00:21:35.000 | Or, "I'm gonna take a walk or sit in a chair

00:21:39.860 | "and think about like, what are the nerds doing right now?

00:21:41.960 | "What are rich people doing right now?"

00:21:43.400 | Or cobbling together awkward solutions.

00:21:45.540 | Was that exploration a structured practice for you?

00:21:49.560 | Or is this just something that was the consequence

00:21:52.840 | of being Tim Ferriss, waking up in the morning

00:21:54.700 | and just like leaning into that?

00:21:56.480 | Because I've experienced both, right?

00:21:59.100 | But I think a lot of us are curious.

00:22:02.160 | I mean, there's a lot of mystique around you.

00:22:05.360 | - I'll do my best to dispel it.

00:22:07.080 | - Whether you like it or not, it's there.

00:22:11.520 | And we're not trying to pry, but--

00:22:14.780 | - Pry away.

00:22:15.620 | - Is the establishment of structure for you

00:22:19.240 | something that's the consequence of structure

00:22:22.780 | in the first place?

00:22:23.620 | It's like, "Okay, now it's time to think."

00:22:25.440 | Or do you just allow things to geyser up to the surface?

00:22:28.480 | - I do both.

00:22:30.320 | And I would say that in the case of the four-hour body,

00:22:32.400 | it's a bit of an anomaly compared to my later books

00:22:36.320 | because I had recorded effectively every workout

00:22:39.560 | I had done since age 16 as a competitive athlete.

00:22:41.720 | I had a lot of records and I kept copious notes

00:22:45.640 | on supplement use and everything imaginable.

00:22:49.360 | So I have what you might call hypergraphia.

00:22:52.280 | I just capture almost everything in writing.

00:22:56.240 | And that was very useful because at various points in time,

00:22:59.380 | let's just say I looked at a photograph of myself

00:23:01.120 | from making this up, but 2004 and I think,

00:23:05.240 | "I would like to look and feel like that again.

00:23:06.880 | "Okay, let me revisit my workout logs.

00:23:08.920 | "Let me just replicate the preceding three to six months

00:23:13.300 | "of workouts and look at my intake and my diet at the time."

00:23:17.500 | And lo and behold, more or less,

00:23:19.020 | I could replicate the same type of look

00:23:21.300 | and feel and performance.

00:23:22.980 | So I had a lot already logged that I thought

00:23:26.120 | was worth examining and putting under scrutiny,

00:23:29.080 | trying to replicate with other people.

00:23:30.640 | I do think replication is really important.

00:23:32.800 | And then when it came time to commit to writing the book,

00:23:36.640 | I thought about what types of mini books

00:23:41.040 | would be of great interest to me personally.

00:23:43.560 | And that book, like many of my other books,

00:23:46.860 | was written in such a fashion that it could be

00:23:49.720 | a choose your own adventure book.

00:23:51.380 | Did not need to be read.

00:23:52.560 | In fact, in many ways, it shouldn't be read linearly

00:23:55.200 | from page one to the end.

00:23:57.060 | You get to pick and choose which chapters are of interest

00:23:59.200 | based on breath hold, vertical jump, endurance,

00:24:03.000 | hypertrophy, cold exposure for fat loss,

00:24:06.040 | whatever it might be.

00:24:07.080 | And then I began talking to people.

00:24:09.620 | And at the very outer bounds of self-experimentation,

00:24:14.620 | at least in the Bay Area, it's a pretty small community.

00:24:19.180 | So you're one or two lily pads from just about everyone.

00:24:22.440 | And it's not accidental that I put myself

00:24:24.840 | in that environment in San Francisco,

00:24:26.480 | specifically and more generally in the Bay Area,

00:24:31.200 | Silicon Valley, because there's just a high surface area

00:24:34.440 | for luck to stick to because you have

00:24:36.880 | so many serendipitous encounters.

00:24:39.040 | You have so many people focusing on different disciplines.

00:24:42.320 | That I think was the fertilizer and the fertile ground

00:24:47.320 | for everything else was actually the choosing the where

00:24:52.240 | of writing, physically being located in San Francisco.

00:24:56.160 | And then when I'm structuring things,

00:24:58.220 | maybe I'll get into some of the nitty gritty,

00:25:01.240 | but I was using at the time,

00:25:03.680 | and I still like to use a program called Scrivener,

00:25:05.820 | which is actually designed predominantly for screenwriting.

00:25:09.520 | It's used for many things now, novels and so on.

00:25:11.720 | It's expanded its reach quite a bit,

00:25:13.480 | but it allows you to gather research

00:25:16.440 | and all of your documents and drafts

00:25:18.840 | so that you can move them around in very novel ways

00:25:22.400 | so that you can view say a split pane of your research

00:25:25.780 | and what you're working on simultaneously

00:25:28.240 | without having to toggle between a lot of different windows.

00:25:31.020 | And I was very promiscuous in my gathering of data.

00:25:34.520 | So I would gather from say the web using a web clipper

00:25:39.300 | from Evernote, which I was involved with as a company.

00:25:42.120 | And basically without bias capture as much as possible,

00:25:46.240 | put three asterisks next to anything that I thought

00:25:49.600 | I really might want to revisit

00:25:51.040 | after I had read something a second time,

00:25:52.720 | which I would always do.

00:25:53.920 | Then I could control F to find just three asterisks

00:25:57.720 | because they don't occur much in normal writing,

00:26:00.580 | just like people, authors, writers will use TK,

00:26:05.240 | meaning find such and such a date.

00:26:07.600 | Data needs to be inserted later,

00:26:09.040 | but I don't interrupt the flow of writing.

00:26:10.560 | Let me put in TK

00:26:11.400 | because it doesn't really appear in natural English much.

00:26:14.520 | In terms of structured thinking,

00:26:16.100 | the way I approached it was

00:26:18.520 | during that period of time in my life,

00:26:20.840 | it was interviews, tracking people down,

00:26:24.720 | conversations, emails, reading.

00:26:28.700 | So ingestion, let's just say for the workday,

00:26:32.660 | then a break for training

00:26:34.240 | and actually using myself as the human guinea pig

00:26:38.480 | for various things that had surfaced

00:26:40.240 | that might be on the docket.

00:26:41.960 | - Where were you training at that time?

00:26:43.640 | San Francisco is not famous for amazing gyms.

00:26:46.760 | - It's not famous for amazing gyms.

00:26:48.460 | At the time, I was training mostly at a climbing gym

00:26:52.300 | called Mission Cliffs.

00:26:53.140 | They didn't have much, but they had barbells

00:26:54.780 | and they had kettlebells.

00:26:57.040 | I also had in the walkway leading from the front door

00:27:01.240 | of the apartment I was renting, it was more of a house,

00:27:04.000 | the front door all the way to the first set of stairs,

00:27:06.500 | there were 30 kettlebells of various types.

00:27:09.460 | And I was training for certification

00:27:11.380 | 'cause I wanted to put myself on some type of deadline

00:27:13.560 | with accountability for that type of training

00:27:16.360 | to get a better understanding of it.

00:27:18.000 | So I trained for a few hours.

00:27:19.460 | I also had developed a friendship with Kelly Starrett,

00:27:23.100 | so San Francisco CrossFit,

00:27:24.500 | who I have tremendous amount of respect for.

00:27:26.420 | - Likewise.

00:27:27.260 | - On multiple levels. - He's terrific.

00:27:28.460 | And his new book.

00:27:29.960 | - Yeah, Built to Move.

00:27:31.060 | - His great book, he's so good.

00:27:33.460 | - Yeah, he really not only talks the talk,

00:27:36.200 | but walks the walk and exemplifies

00:27:39.060 | many of the capabilities that he teaches,

00:27:42.160 | which I take seriously.

00:27:43.380 | I like practitioners,

00:27:45.500 | not just the people with pretty theories,

00:27:48.280 | although the theories are important,

00:27:49.680 | I prefer to see someone who can actually

00:27:51.120 | put them into practice.

00:27:52.240 | So Kelly served that function, certainly,

00:27:55.440 | and we're still very close friends.

00:27:57.760 | And then after that, all right, shake off the cobwebs,

00:28:01.540 | get the body moving, get the brain moving, also eat,

00:28:06.440 | and then I would actually focus on synthesis.

00:28:08.740 | So I would write generally from, let's call it 9 p.m.

00:28:13.800 | or 10 p.m. through to 4 or 5 a.m.

00:28:17.140 | And I would ride the wave if I happened to be in the zone.

00:28:20.820 | If I weren't in the zone, I wouldn't force it,

00:28:22.800 | and I would try to get more sleep.

00:28:24.340 | But I have always performed best with my writing

00:28:29.340 | in those witching hours of, let's call it, 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.

00:28:33.520 | And my experience is that the writers I've interviewed,

00:28:38.520 | the writer friends I've become close with,

00:28:43.320 | if you look at when they made themselves,

00:28:46.580 | not necessarily what they do now, right,

00:28:48.260 | but what they did that eventually got them

00:28:50.160 | to escape velocity, they're almost always doing

00:28:54.280 | most of their writing very late at night

00:28:56.400 | or very early in the morning when the rest of the world

00:28:59.120 | or their social group is inactive.

00:29:01.320 | - Wow. - Yeah.

00:29:02.540 | - And I say wow because, of course,

00:29:04.760 | all of this was prior to the publication

00:29:07.200 | of Matt Walker's seminal book, "Why We Sleep,"

00:29:10.440 | which I really see as the book that shifted a lot of people,

00:29:14.700 | fortunately, from the "I'll sleep when I'm dead" mindset

00:29:18.240 | to really paying attention to it.

00:29:20.600 | And I don't think Matt gets enough credit.

00:29:23.360 | I mean, there's been a revision of a few points

00:29:26.320 | within that book, but the majority of it is just spot on

00:29:29.280 | and hyperlegitimate, so good.

00:29:31.620 | And yet what you're describing is a schedule

00:29:34.860 | that starting to write at 9 p.m.

00:29:37.200 | and finishing up around 4 a.m.,

00:29:38.540 | but you talked about research earlier that day

00:29:40.080 | and training and eating, so were there naps in there?

00:29:42.480 | - I would sleep from, say, four to maybe 11 or 12,

00:29:47.480 | so I would be getting up later.

00:29:49.800 | And I've had conversations with Matt about this,

00:29:52.980 | and there are night owls and morning larks,

00:29:57.980 | and there are certainly differences in the code,

00:30:01.720 | meaning the genetics, but that worked very, very well for me

00:30:05.240 | for a very long time.

00:30:06.840 | It is, however, a very challenging social schedule.

00:30:11.680 | So once you have a significant other,

00:30:13.840 | and every girlfriend I've ever had is a morning person,

00:30:17.880 | if you wanna spend time together,

00:30:19.280 | that schedule just does not work.

00:30:21.040 | So I made compromises later for the social side of things.

00:30:25.400 | But if you put a gun to my head and said,

00:30:27.480 | "You need to write the best book humanly possible,

00:30:29.740 | "that is your only priority outside of some exercise

00:30:32.440 | "and fuel," I would follow the same schedule.

00:30:35.400 | - I know several very successful podcasters,

00:30:38.200 | Lex Friedman in particular,

00:30:39.840 | who I think he's trying to follow a more normal schedule now

00:30:42.640 | but he's pseudo-nocturnal, at least by my read.

00:30:47.080 | And there are a couple other online content creators,

00:30:51.920 | Derek from More Plates, More Dates,

00:30:53.440 | who's hyper-productive in his domain

00:30:56.040 | and is mostly nocturnal.

00:30:58.800 | And then as you're describing your writing routine

00:31:02.120 | and your overall routine,

00:31:02.980 | I was thinking that the great skateboarder,

00:31:05.120 | everyone knows Tony Hawk,

00:31:06.080 | who is obviously a great skateboarder, no doubt about that.

00:31:09.380 | But Rodney Mullen, who invented the ollie on street,

00:31:12.440 | the kickflip, the ollie.

00:31:13.720 | Rodney is basically nocturnal and has been for a long time

00:31:17.200 | and would skateboard up and down the boardwalk

00:31:19.040 | in Santa Monica in the middle of the night

00:31:20.420 | because lack of distraction, as it really was.

00:31:22.960 | And he's been doing that since his teens.

00:31:24.800 | I don't know what he's doing these days,

00:31:26.000 | but I think a lot of creators just need space.

00:31:29.920 | And I always wonder if that's because when they,

00:31:33.240 | at least the ones that are not socially dysfunctional,

00:31:37.280 | like yourself, who, when they are around people,

00:31:39.980 | there's this almost hopefully a desire to interact.

00:31:43.200 | So you almost have to remove the stimulus completely.

00:31:46.620 | - Yeah, it removes the plausible deniability,

00:31:50.520 | which might not be the perfect use of that phrase,

00:31:52.600 | but in the sense that it's harder to fool yourself

00:31:55.400 | into thinking you're doing something important

00:31:57.120 | when you're checking your messages or social media

00:32:00.920 | at two in the morning.

00:32:02.200 | Who are we kidding, folks?

00:32:03.400 | You should be writing in this case, right?

00:32:05.800 | And writers will do anything to avoid writing.

00:32:08.320 | I remember Ayn Rand wrote a book about writing,

00:32:12.000 | which is actually fantastic.

00:32:13.220 | I can't remember the exact title.

00:32:14.320 | It might just be on nonfiction writing, something like that.

00:32:16.760 | And she talked about polishing the sneakers or the shoes

00:32:19.600 | before writing.

00:32:20.440 | Like I really just need to do this one thing,

00:32:22.160 | which is to just clean up that shoe

00:32:23.560 | because somebody should really clean it up.

00:32:25.240 | And at some point I should clean it up and therefore,

00:32:27.040 | why don't I just do, there's no time like the present.

00:32:28.560 | I'll just do that and it's all to avoid writing,

00:32:31.480 | which is the harder thing.

00:32:32.980 | And in my conversations with Matt also,

00:32:35.400 | I should say that as someone who has self-described

00:32:40.400 | as a person who struggles with onset insomnia,

00:32:44.620 | Matt made the point, and sometimes we need

00:32:46.540 | to relearn things.

00:32:47.960 | Maybe you should just go to bed later.

00:32:49.720 | - Mm-hmm, sure.

00:32:51.520 | - And that might address some of this onset insomnia.

00:32:55.000 | And I don't know the causes for that,

00:32:56.680 | but I do get a second wind very late.

00:32:59.480 | Could be related to some cortisol release abnormality

00:33:03.120 | or just different scripting in my system, who knows.

00:33:06.640 | - I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge

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00:33:25.300 | and the reason I still take Athletic Greens

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00:34:21.480 | - I'll mention one other maybe sure-istic that I use

00:34:25.840 | for trying to peek around corners,

00:34:28.180 | which is if I find an example of an outlier,

00:34:33.180 | trying to find two or three, right?

00:34:35.520 | Because one is an exception, two is interesting,

00:34:38.400 | three is worth investigating.

00:34:39.840 | That's sort of how I think about it.

00:34:41.640 | And I recognize the plural of anecdote does not equal data.

00:34:45.760 | However, a lot of interesting discoveries begin

00:34:49.340 | as case studies or case histories.

00:34:52.260 | And so there are some things we could talk about

00:34:54.820 | that I've paid attention to over the last few years

00:34:56.980 | that are not in the four-hour body

00:34:58.540 | that I think are quite interesting

00:35:00.860 | and raise very, very exciting questions, but-

00:35:05.020 | - I'd love to hear about those.

00:35:06.820 | And along the lines of what I call anecdata,

00:35:09.620 | I mean, most of what we know about human memory

00:35:12.060 | stems from one patient, HM, who had his hippocampi

00:35:16.180 | removed for epilepsy.

00:35:18.120 | And of course, there've been millions probably,

00:35:20.740 | close to millions of studies in animals and humans

00:35:23.380 | focusing on the hippocampi,

00:35:24.740 | but most of what we know about human memory is from one guy.

00:35:28.220 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:35:29.620 | So there's a lot to be examined.

00:35:33.820 | Not all of it will get funding for RCTs.

00:35:36.580 | Let's be realistic.

00:35:37.540 | This is especially true if you're hoping

00:35:39.980 | for any type of directive data.

00:35:42.280 | I notice I'm not saying conclusive,

00:35:43.820 | but if you are a human who's going to be making decisions

00:35:46.380 | about diet, health, exercise,

00:35:49.580 | if you want any consensus, you're doomed.

00:35:51.540 | You'll be, you're not going to get any answers

00:35:53.620 | before you die.

00:35:54.460 | - Can you say that twice so that the internet

00:35:56.060 | can hear it extra loud and clear?

00:35:57.940 | For those of you that are arguing about nutrition

00:36:00.220 | on Twitter, like it might actually be life-wasted.

00:36:04.660 | - Yeah.

00:36:05.500 | - I mean, I'm not being judgmental.

00:36:06.600 | I mean, I think that there's validity

00:36:08.320 | in lots of those pockets.

00:36:09.760 | There's stuff that's wrong in lots of those pockets.

00:36:12.900 | There are diets that work extremely well,

00:36:14.940 | like, you know, four hour diet, or it's slow carb.

00:36:18.220 | I always call it the four hour diet,

00:36:19.300 | but the slow carb diet,

00:36:20.940 | it works extremely well.

00:36:21.920 | Anytime I've followed it, you know,

00:36:23.300 | I get much leaner and stronger and all that stuff

00:36:26.020 | that it's purported to do, it works.

00:36:29.980 | But yeah, maybe you could just explain

00:36:33.220 | what you mean by that,

00:36:34.040 | because I think there are some argument/friction spaces

00:36:38.380 | that are truly an energy sink.

00:36:41.140 | - Yeah.

00:36:42.100 | I would just say, focus on what works

00:36:44.060 | for you and your family or your team.

00:36:46.240 | And if you're arguing on the internet,

00:36:48.740 | recognize that you're just doing it

00:36:50.100 | because you like arguing on the internet.

00:36:51.500 | You're not gonna convince anyone of anything,

00:36:53.900 | and you're just gonna make yourself more frustrated

00:36:58.900 | if you plan on changing any opinions.

00:37:03.620 | So for me, it's live and let live.

00:37:06.260 | And the more people who engage in that type of behavior,

00:37:11.260 | the more competitive advantage you have if you don't.

00:37:14.580 | So for me, I'm like, okay,

00:37:16.340 | if you wanna spend this vital non-renewable resource

00:37:20.700 | of yours called time on that,

00:37:22.900 | if I ever compete against you, I'm gonna win.

00:37:24.440 | So great, I'll also not even try to convince you

00:37:27.700 | to stop doing that unless you see the logic in it,

00:37:30.460 | which I have, which is why I also don't have,

00:37:33.140 | at least for two years,

00:37:34.140 | have mostly had no social apps installed on my phone.

00:37:37.180 | And we could talk about that because I think recognizing

00:37:41.060 | that these things have been engineered

00:37:42.260 | to overcome any type of self-discipline

00:37:45.680 | with billions of dollars (laughs)

00:37:48.440 | at stake should lead you to believe

00:37:50.520 | that you're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

00:37:52.440 | So I just don't have the apps on my phone to begin with.

00:37:55.500 | And I find it much more gratifying

00:37:58.060 | to see disproportionate change from small inputs.

00:38:03.060 | So that's what I'm looking for.

00:38:07.060 | And I'm also looking for changes that are easy to make

00:38:12.340 | that can have high adherence, that have very limited downside

00:38:15.840 | which is very different from proving something.

00:38:18.720 | For instance, in the "For Our Body" took a look

00:38:21.800 | at the potential effect of cell phones

00:38:26.160 | or the proximity of cell phones

00:38:27.760 | to say, gonadal function and reproductive health.

00:38:30.760 | And the literature that was available at the time

00:38:34.880 | was very limited, had some animal studies,

00:38:39.680 | mice, rats, et cetera.

00:38:40.920 | I recognize humans are not just large mice,

00:38:44.060 | so they don't always translate.

00:38:45.600 | But I looked at it and I said, okay,

00:38:48.020 | looking at this simplistically,

00:38:49.780 | is it plausible that there could be similar effects

00:38:53.040 | on humans seems to be the case also based on conversations

00:38:57.120 | with people who are specialists

00:38:58.980 | but would never go on record.

00:39:00.600 | Therefore, if your phone is in your pocket,

00:39:03.200 | just have it on airplane mode.

00:39:04.620 | I mean, it does not have a high cost.

00:39:08.120 | And then pending any revision, we can see,

00:39:13.120 | but while the jury is still out,

00:39:15.640 | I'm going to risk mitigate by taking this step.

00:39:18.960 | - Well, and I just want to say thank you there too.

00:39:21.360 | I read that recommendation.

00:39:23.200 | I followed the recommendation of not keeping the phone

00:39:26.280 | on in my front pocket or back pocket.

00:39:28.900 | And that's anecdotal data.

00:39:31.160 | My sperm analysis isn't relevant to this conversation,

00:39:35.980 | but worked out, but you could say, well,

00:39:38.620 | that's not necessarily because you had the phone off,

00:39:40.420 | but I did a very long detailed episode

00:39:43.460 | on male and female fertility.

00:39:45.180 | There is now what I view as a really quality meta analysis.

00:39:49.800 | And it's pretty clear that there are effects

00:39:52.620 | of the smartphone on proximity of the smartphone

00:39:56.460 | when it's turned on that are not good for sperm,

00:40:00.340 | isn't necessarily going to render somebody sterile,

00:40:02.280 | but on sperm that can be separated out

00:40:06.240 | from the heat effects.

00:40:07.720 | And so essentially this is another instance

00:40:09.500 | in which you were right.

00:40:12.160 | And I think more data will come out

00:40:14.380 | and am I a EMF conspiracy theorists?

00:40:17.840 | No.

00:40:18.960 | Do I wear tinfoil underwear?

00:40:20.200 | No, but I think it's interesting.

00:40:24.200 | I think it's important.

00:40:25.280 | And thanks to you, cued my attention to it.

00:40:29.600 | In fact, I teach about that in a course

00:40:33.080 | on neural circuits and biology and health and disease.

00:40:35.880 | - Amazing.

00:40:36.920 | And I don't expect to get everything right at all.

00:40:41.280 | That would be crazy.

00:40:42.960 | I'd like to think I'm not totally crazy.

00:40:45.120 | And it's very important

00:40:47.200 | if you are going to do self experimentation

00:40:49.640 | or experimentation in small groups,

00:40:51.440 | which the quantified self community did quite well.

00:40:55.200 | And I think still does quite well.

00:40:57.840 | You should really make every effort to not fool yourself,

00:41:02.840 | which is hard.

00:41:04.800 | It's challenging at times,

00:41:06.500 | but read books like "Bad Science."

00:41:08.920 | Read books like "How to Lie with Statistics."

00:41:11.360 | Ensure that you are able to read studies well.

00:41:15.140 | You don't have to be the best in the world,

00:41:16.820 | but that you can on some level identify the strengths

00:41:20.880 | and weaknesses of studies.

00:41:22.120 | This doesn't take a long time.

00:41:23.720 | Certainly our friend Peter Attia,

00:41:25.840 | Dr. Peter Attia has "Studying the Studies,"

00:41:27.840 | which is a multiple part blog series dedicated to this.

00:41:31.960 | There are other ways to approach it.

00:41:33.280 | I took one of his podcasts,

00:41:34.480 | republished it on "The Tim Ferriss Show,"

00:41:36.200 | because it talked about how to examine studies,

00:41:38.760 | what powering refers to, things like this.

00:41:41.800 | In the span of one or two weeks,

00:41:43.120 | you could really become literate

00:41:44.740 | with the building blocks of scientific literacy

00:41:49.040 | with respect to reading studies.

00:41:51.800 | And that gives you such an enormous life advantage.

00:41:56.800 | It's hard to overstate.

00:41:58.360 | - Yeah, I agree.

00:41:59.200 | And I also think that there are a lot of things

00:42:00.520 | that just simply will not ever be explored

00:42:03.280 | in a randomized control trial.

00:42:04.800 | One of the things that Peter and I have talked about before

00:42:07.580 | is he texted me, "What are your thoughts on BPC-157?"

00:42:10.980 | This is a gastric peptide that's now been synthesized,

00:42:13.720 | so people will inject it into a tissue

00:42:15.560 | that they're trying to heal or improve.

00:42:17.980 | Lots and lots of anecdotal data on BPC-157,

00:42:22.460 | making injuries heal faster, et cetera.

00:42:24.900 | Again, anecdotal data.

00:42:25.900 | I've used it.

00:42:26.740 | I took an injection of it yesterday, in fact.

00:42:29.180 | Peter basically is not a believer

00:42:35.540 | because there is a lack of published data on this,

00:42:37.980 | which is perfectly fine.

00:42:38.980 | Or I should say he's skeptical.

00:42:41.900 | And so there's always that possibility of a placebo effect.

00:42:45.020 | But I don't think there will ever be

00:42:46.940 | a really nice controlled trial on BPC-157

00:42:50.940 | because the financial incentives aren't there

00:42:53.060 | and no smart graduate student

00:42:55.020 | is going to go do a thesis on this.

00:42:56.940 | So that's the reality.

00:42:57.820 | I mean, maybe one will do it now

00:42:59.220 | that we're having this conversation,

00:43:00.460 | but it just doesn't, the payout isn't there.

00:43:04.060 | - And that last one you mentioned

00:43:05.180 | is one that people miss a lot.

00:43:07.180 | People doing these studies are people with careers

00:43:09.340 | who are planning their careers.

00:43:11.060 | And so they choose what they're going to invest time in

00:43:13.960 | very carefully.

00:43:15.100 | So that's another limiter on what will end up

00:43:18.060 | in an RCT or not, right?

00:43:20.980 | So I think that's good for people to hear.

00:43:24.500 | And as you get more involved with science,

00:43:27.860 | and in my case, through a foundation,

00:43:29.700 | the Sci-Safe Foundation funding

00:43:31.100 | a lot of early-stage science,

00:43:32.140 | you realize how expensive it is and how long it takes.

00:43:35.980 | It is a long-term investment.

00:43:38.500 | And if you are looking to make behavioral changes

00:43:42.420 | or modify aspects of yourself,

00:43:46.020 | cognitive, physical, psycho-emotional, or otherwise,

00:43:48.580 | identifying interventions or options

00:43:52.780 | that seem to have some plausible upside,

00:43:55.620 | like there is a mechanism that might make sense in humans.

00:44:00.620 | If you feel fairly certain there's very limited downside,

00:44:04.780 | which should include talking to people

00:44:06.820 | who are presenting their results as anecdotal,

00:44:11.100 | then maybe you consider using X if you can cap your downside.

00:44:16.100 | And I recall, for instance, looking at trans-resveratrol,

00:44:20.420 | specifically not for longevity,

00:44:21.940 | but in potentially increasing endurance for our body.

00:44:26.020 | And I ended up testing it,

00:44:30.400 | and there's a funny story associated with that.

00:44:32.940 | Didn't quite work out as planned,

00:44:34.300 | and I don't use it any longer.

00:44:35.540 | But what I experienced prior to actually finding this

00:44:40.220 | on forums was joint pain, elbow pain.

00:44:43.700 | The one most consistent side effect

00:44:45.940 | was what felt like tendinosis in the elbows.

00:44:48.820 | And then I went online, and I'd already done this,

00:44:51.700 | but I hadn't come across, I think it was the 500 group.

00:44:53.940 | People had been using 500 milligrams

00:44:55.780 | of trans-resveratrol daily for long periods of time.

00:44:58.740 | And one of the most common reported side effects

00:45:02.900 | was joint pain.

00:45:03.740 | And I was like, okay, I'm not willing to make that trade-off.

00:45:06.780 | - Yeah, makes sense to me.

00:45:09.980 | - Yeah.

00:45:11.220 | - I think it would be fun if ever you were willing

00:45:15.140 | that we could do a hybrid podcast on supplement fails.

00:45:19.880 | [laughing]

00:45:21.060 | - I have some spectacular failures.

00:45:22.740 | - As do I.

00:45:23.800 | And I'm thinking about a few of them.

00:45:25.740 | I mean, some that were really, like took me off course,

00:45:29.240 | like there's one supplement called Bulbine Natalensis.

00:45:33.140 | This is another one of these shrubs.

00:45:35.340 | - Sounds like an infection.

00:45:36.820 | - I mean, this thing will really spike your testosterone

00:45:40.220 | and free testosterone.

00:45:41.100 | I'm talking back acne, like huge strain gains, aggression.

00:45:44.240 | It's really wild.

00:45:45.340 | And then after about seven to 10 days,

00:45:48.340 | it all crashes and you go below baseline.

00:45:52.300 | - Oh, sounds terrible.

00:45:53.140 | - Yeah, even testicular pain.

00:45:54.220 | So it was unclear.

00:45:55.060 | So if you're a smart person, you halt use, right?

00:45:58.300 | So I can understand why people are skeptical

00:46:00.260 | of certain things.

00:46:01.080 | And then of course there are supplements

00:46:02.240 | that I'm a big fan of and that you're a big fan of.

00:46:04.180 | We talked about those things elsewhere,

00:46:05.580 | but it might be fun to do a supplement fails podcast.

00:46:09.140 | If ever you're willing, that would be--

00:46:09.980 | - Oh, I could do just experimental fails.

00:46:12.540 | - Oh, yeah.

00:46:13.380 | - Yeah, end of one experimental fails,

00:46:14.980 | which include things that people might not think about.

00:46:17.100 | For instance, "For Our Body" had quite a bit

00:46:20.680 | of real estate dedicated to looking at things like PRP,

00:46:25.220 | so platelet-rich plasma.

00:46:26.460 | I think there's a role for it.

00:46:28.460 | It's not useful for everything,

00:46:29.900 | but for certain types of injury or repair,

00:46:32.600 | I think it's very interesting.

00:46:34.940 | But every time you get injected,

00:46:39.460 | this is where you have to be careful

00:46:40.500 | because there are very few free lunches out there.

00:46:43.660 | There's usually some type of feedback loop.

00:46:46.180 | Your system is very smart at auto-regulating things.

00:46:49.980 | This is outside of that, a consideration that I hadn't made,

00:46:53.180 | which is every time you have an injection,

00:46:55.100 | there's a chance of an infection,

00:46:57.540 | particularly if the site, in my case, was the elbow,

00:47:01.180 | and the injection was made for the PRP,

00:47:05.420 | not quite where it should have been,

00:47:07.160 | slightly to the rear of the elbow

00:47:09.300 | where the skin is very thick.

00:47:11.740 | And so it pushed staph bacteria

00:47:16.740 | from a mid-layer of the skin into the joint capsule.

00:47:19.660 | - Not good.

00:47:20.500 | - And that really could have ended very poorly.

00:47:22.620 | I ended up having to go to the ER

00:47:24.100 | and get it all removed and so on,

00:47:26.460 | but that could have ended up

00:47:28.340 | in a much, much more severe situation.

00:47:33.260 | So you do have to be careful with this stuff.

00:47:35.380 | I've become a little more conservative

00:47:37.420 | with some of what I do, including injections.

00:47:40.440 | I'm like, all right, let me think twice

00:47:43.540 | about the injections.

00:47:44.940 | If I'm gonna swallow something,

00:47:45.980 | let me make sure I'm really looking

00:47:47.400 | at the implications for the liver.

00:47:49.760 | - Yeah, smart, very smart.

00:47:52.340 | I'm curious about some of the things

00:47:54.020 | that you talked about in the four-hour body

00:47:56.700 | and that you've mentioned today,

00:47:57.900 | things like accelerometers, continuous glucose monitors,

00:48:02.400 | deliberate cold exposure.

00:48:04.780 | How many of those things are you still doing

00:48:06.500 | on a regular basis?

00:48:07.980 | And how many do you use a couple of times a week

00:48:11.500 | or a couple of times a month

00:48:12.460 | or go through phases of using and not using?

00:48:15.500 | - Cold exposure I use as consistently as is practical.

00:48:19.240 | So if I'm traveling, it's a little harder,

00:48:21.020 | but we're in LA right now.

00:48:22.920 | One of the first things I did was find a few options

00:48:25.260 | for contrast therapy, one of the first things I did.

00:48:28.560 | And by contrast, I do not mean infrared sauna

00:48:33.560 | and cold plunge, I'd much rather have hot and cold water,

00:48:36.880 | just in terms of sort of speed of heating.

00:48:39.100 | - The Japanese approach.

00:48:40.500 | - Right, for just speed of vasodilation,

00:48:43.960 | particularly for injury recovery,

00:48:46.780 | I think it's incredibly helpful.

00:48:48.260 | For mood regulation, certainly that's the case.

00:48:50.340 | And cold water for mood regulation

00:48:53.020 | or the treatment of, say, depression

00:48:55.980 | or as a preemptive intervention to avoid

00:48:59.760 | or mitigate depression is old.

00:49:03.140 | Used to be prescribed for melancholy.

00:49:06.340 | And people like the Van Goghs of the world

00:49:08.620 | would be prescribed cold baths.

00:49:10.860 | So that was something I was like,

00:49:11.700 | well, let's take a look at some of the old history,

00:49:14.820 | read about that, and then look into PubMed and so on

00:49:17.300 | to see what might be supported.

00:49:19.100 | So the cold, I'm still using.

00:49:21.780 | I've become increasingly interested,

00:49:23.220 | this was not in the four-hour body,

00:49:24.460 | but whole body hyperthermia,

00:49:27.580 | often excluding the head for depression,

00:49:31.580 | which I know there's some research.

00:49:34.000 | - Yeah, at UCSF right now.

00:49:36.060 | Yeah, really interesting studies, too early to report.

00:49:38.740 | I'm not involved in these,

00:49:39.700 | but I think these are really important studies

00:49:42.760 | because for all the people saying,

00:49:44.620 | oh, well, it's ice bath stuff, metabolism this,

00:49:48.580 | metabolism that, one thing that's very clear

00:49:50.740 | is long-lasting, very significant increase

00:49:53.780 | in the catecholamines, dopamine epinephrine, norepinephrine.

00:49:56.940 | Not a replacement perhaps for antidepressant medication,

00:49:59.700 | but as you said, to move the needle

00:50:01.260 | toward antidepressant states, that's the cocktail.

00:50:04.860 | And heat as well.

00:50:07.180 | - Yeah, yeah, and the hyperthermia,

00:50:09.340 | especially the way it is formatted right now

00:50:10.980 | with some of the research is very early stages.

00:50:13.580 | There's going to be less adherence.

00:50:15.340 | It's not as readily available,

00:50:16.580 | say a cold shower or cold bath.

00:50:18.140 | So I do think about the practical implications of that,

00:50:19.980 | but right now it's very interesting.

00:50:22.020 | Slow carb diet, still use it all the time.

00:50:24.000 | It is not my default 24/7 as it used to be.

00:50:27.660 | So maybe I'm just getting older and more self-indulgent,

00:50:30.640 | but if I find myself going off the rails a bit

00:50:33.380 | and I'm like, okay, I'm getting closer to muffin top here,

00:50:36.820 | let's stage an intervention,

00:50:38.560 | then I will go immediately back to slow carb diet.

00:50:41.100 | And within a matter of weeks, it's pretty easily corrected.

00:50:46.100 | - Just a cue for people.

00:50:47.220 | I know that slow carb diet achieved great prominence.

00:50:51.740 | In fact, wasn't it featured on or mentioned

00:50:54.100 | in an episode of Orange is the New Black?

00:50:56.420 | - I think it might've been.

00:50:57.700 | It's made appearances on a handful of shows.

00:51:00.740 | - Great, I realize that I've been referring

00:51:02.640 | to the slow carb diet several times

00:51:04.620 | throughout this discussion.

00:51:05.960 | So for those that aren't familiar with the slow carb diet,

00:51:07.900 | I know they can go look up what that is,

00:51:10.300 | but so that we can keep them here

00:51:12.200 | for the rest of this discussion

00:51:13.400 | and not have to send them out and back just yet.

00:51:16.680 | Could you give us just a brief top contour

00:51:19.360 | of what the slow carb diet is?

00:51:20.800 | - Sure, the slow carb diet is intended

00:51:24.180 | to be a simple, easy to adhere to diet

00:51:28.140 | for people who have perhaps failed other diets

00:51:30.780 | that allows you to recompose your body.

00:51:34.160 | So improve muscle mass, decrease, body fat percentage,

00:51:38.660 | and the rules are really simple.

00:51:40.680 | And that's part of what makes it work.

00:51:43.060 | It's not ideal for every sport and every circumstance,

00:51:46.300 | but broadly speaking, it works for a lot of people

00:51:48.660 | who've had trouble with dieting in the past.

00:51:51.340 | So rule number one, don't drink calories.

00:51:54.460 | That's it, very simple.

00:51:56.820 | So black coffee, unsweetened tea, great.

00:51:59.420 | Juice, out.

00:52:00.880 | Anything with calories, out.

00:52:03.020 | You could add a little bit of heavy cream to your coffee,

00:52:05.500 | let's say, but that's also bending the rules

00:52:09.180 | in a way that I don't like.

00:52:10.180 | So in the beginning, it's like follow the rules

00:52:11.940 | so you can break them later.

00:52:12.860 | So in the beginning, let's just say

00:52:14.300 | you can't drink calories.

00:52:15.900 | Number two, don't eat anything white.

00:52:18.620 | Sounds pretty basic, right?

00:52:19.620 | Just don't eat anything that is the color of white

00:52:21.500 | or that could be white.

00:52:22.740 | Basically that means you're gonna be avoiding starches

00:52:25.780 | and things that are similar to starches.

00:52:29.140 | - That includes things like oatmeal.

00:52:30.860 | - That includes things like oatmeal.

00:52:32.300 | So roughly speaking, just avoiding things that are white

00:52:36.340 | or that could be white will get you pretty far.

00:52:39.300 | And yes, there are exceptions, like cauliflower, fine.

00:52:41.640 | You can have cauliflower.

00:52:42.780 | But again, don't get fancy, right?

00:52:44.560 | It's very easy to outsmart yourself

00:52:46.540 | when it comes to behavioral change.

00:52:48.200 | Keep it simple.

00:52:49.700 | So for at least two weeks, forget about the exceptions.

00:52:53.160 | Don't drink calories.

00:52:56.920 | Don't eat anything white.

00:52:58.940 | And then eat 30 grams of protein

00:53:01.740 | within 30 minutes of waking up.

00:53:04.300 | Okay, we got that.

00:53:05.980 | And then there are a few buckets you can choose from, right?

00:53:09.620 | So you have vegetables, beans and lentils,

00:53:14.360 | and then some type of protein.

00:53:16.480 | So you're going to come up with meals

00:53:18.400 | that you can follow without deviating

00:53:21.840 | for a period of one or two weeks.

00:53:23.220 | Just come up with the same meals.

00:53:25.760 | And that's gonna sound boring, yes, but guess what?

00:53:27.960 | You do it already.

00:53:29.020 | You just might not realize it.

00:53:30.940 | And the lentils and the beans specifically as a prereq,

00:53:35.940 | we can get into some of the reasons,

00:53:37.760 | but add a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite, right?

00:53:42.180 | So that's actually a very important component

00:53:44.240 | of these meals.

00:53:45.080 | And there may be a handful of other rules,

00:53:47.480 | but those are the basics.

00:53:48.680 | And then the redemption is take one day off per week

00:53:53.680 | and just go fucking crazy.

00:53:56.360 | That's cheat day.

00:53:57.820 | There are some epic cheat days out there.

00:53:59.580 | Some I've captured for myself and anything goes.

00:54:02.880 | When I say anything, I do mean anything.

00:54:05.060 | So if you want to consume multiple pizzas,

00:54:07.900 | pints of ice cream, whatever, indulge.

00:54:11.260 | Ah, I left one out.

00:54:13.000 | No fruit during the week.

00:54:14.380 | So avoid fruit, avoid fructose.

00:54:16.640 | So agave nectar, anything that is sort of hidden sugar,

00:54:21.320 | avoid all that.

00:54:22.320 | So no added sweeteners, obviously,

00:54:25.300 | but avoid fruit and fructose.

00:54:27.800 | And again, it's not gonna kill you.

00:54:30.360 | Guess what?

00:54:31.200 | If you're from a European ancestry,

00:54:33.800 | your ancestors did not have like blueberries

00:54:36.880 | in the middle of winter, generally speaking, right?

00:54:38.680 | So you'll be fine for a few weeks.

00:54:41.100 | And then there's that cheat day.

00:54:43.460 | And cheat day anything goes.

00:54:45.060 | The amount of damage you can do on cheat day

00:54:46.540 | is pretty limited.

00:54:47.420 | And there are ways you can mitigate that.

00:54:50.180 | There's a whole chapter called damage control

00:54:52.180 | in Before Our Body.

00:54:53.140 | But focusing just on that diet and having one day off

00:54:57.740 | where you know you can do anything

00:54:59.220 | means when you're controlling yourself

00:55:01.500 | for those six days of the week,

00:55:03.580 | you're not giving up your favorite foods forever.

00:55:06.580 | You can even keep a list of all the things

00:55:08.220 | you wanna eat on cheat day.

00:55:09.700 | And then you have free license to eat on cheat day.

00:55:12.020 | And that provides you with a release valve

00:55:16.120 | so that you can build in the cheating

00:55:19.020 | as opposed to having it occur as a failure point.

00:55:21.520 | And there are a handful of other things there.

00:55:23.980 | If you have domino foods in the house, for instance,

00:55:27.440 | if you eat a lot of almonds or mixed nuts

00:55:30.200 | and you're just gonna sit there compulsively eating them

00:55:32.680 | while you're sitting at your laptop,

00:55:34.400 | don't have what I call domino foods in the house,

00:55:36.780 | which are going to really create

00:55:38.820 | some portion control issues.

00:55:39.880 | But broadly speaking, don't drink calories.

00:55:42.100 | Don't eat things that are white.

00:55:44.220 | Take from three categories and build your meals out.

00:55:46.460 | And those are the meals that you follow.

00:55:48.580 | Do not eat fruit or fructose and then cheat one day a week.

00:55:53.580 | And Saturday's a nice day for cheat day for most folks.

00:55:57.100 | And just to answer some questions people are gonna have,

00:55:59.820 | no, that doesn't mean 24 hours

00:56:01.360 | that you can spread out over two days.

00:56:03.180 | That will actually set you back.

00:56:04.720 | But the amount of fat that you can store

00:56:09.260 | in a handful of sittings over 24 hours,

00:56:12.180 | which legitimately is more like 12 to 18 hours,

00:56:16.320 | pretty limited.

00:56:17.160 | So that's Slow Carb Diet.

00:56:19.520 | - Great, thank you for that.

00:56:21.620 | I also wanna ask, is it okay to take the day

00:56:26.620 | after cheat day and fast or do one meal that day?

00:56:30.940 | When I followed the Slow Carb Diet,

00:56:32.320 | I benefited from it tremendously.

00:56:34.460 | Lost fat, gained muscle, tons of energy, sleeping great,

00:56:38.340 | required less caffeine, all sorts of wonderful things.

00:56:41.220 | Stable blood sugar, I felt so, so good.

00:56:43.920 | Really enjoyed the cheat days.

00:56:45.440 | I really, really enjoyed the cheat days.

00:56:47.320 | So much fun.

00:56:48.440 | At some point, there's some gastric distress

00:56:50.300 | that comes from not regulating intake,

00:56:53.440 | which led me to not want to eat the next day.

00:56:57.880 | So I tended to do the cheat days on Sunday in my case.

00:57:01.720 | And then I would fast most of Monday,

00:57:04.600 | just water, black coffee, tea,

00:57:06.340 | and then I might have a small meal in the evening.

00:57:08.720 | And then by Tuesday, I was back on the Slow Carb Diet.

00:57:11.440 | Does that seem like a sort of a detrimental deviation

00:57:16.400 | from the plan?

00:57:18.540 | - I think that if that is what works for you,

00:57:21.040 | then that is what works for you.

00:57:22.860 | So the Slow Carb Diet template for me is a starting point.

00:57:27.080 | And generally I'll say, I think this is from Picasso, right?

00:57:30.560 | It's like, learn the rules as an amateur

00:57:32.940 | so you can break them as a professional.

00:57:34.680 | But it's like, I recommend most people

00:57:36.540 | kind of stick with the format for a handful of weeks

00:57:41.540 | and measure the results, right?

00:57:43.720 | So there are guidelines for how to measure.

00:57:46.600 | The scale is a bit of a blunt instrument,

00:57:49.120 | so there are other ways.

00:57:50.240 | But if you're extremely overweight,

00:57:51.620 | you can just use the scale.

00:57:53.440 | And fasting, I think, is fine.

00:57:56.000 | Or just ratcheting back

00:57:57.480 | your caloric consumption significantly.

00:58:00.340 | And what happens over time for most people also

00:58:04.020 | is for the first, say, four weeks on cheat day,

00:58:06.880 | you're gonna go completely insane.

00:58:09.320 | And I remember I was doing something much stricter

00:58:13.120 | called the cyclical ketogenic diet,

00:58:14.960 | which is a whole separate thing.

00:58:17.320 | It's much more limiting in terms of what you can eat.

00:58:20.920 | But I was training for, ultimately,

00:58:22.880 | the nationals in Chinese kickboxing.

00:58:24.640 | This was happening in '99.

00:58:26.840 | So I was training super hard.

00:58:28.520 | I was following a cyclical ketogenic diet,

00:58:30.740 | which meant I could eat very few things.

00:58:32.880 | But I did have this one cheat day.

00:58:34.980 | And I would do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand,

00:58:37.940 | which is one of the things you can do

00:58:39.020 | to limit the damage on cheat day.

00:58:41.100 | Do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand,

00:58:43.080 | and then I would just go crazy.

00:58:45.700 | I mean, I would drive to like Krispy Kreme,

00:58:48.280 | buy 12 donuts, and they would be gone

00:58:50.060 | by the time I got home.

00:58:51.020 | And it wasn't an hour away.

00:58:52.040 | It was like a 10-minute drive.

00:58:53.780 | Donuts would be gone, right?

00:58:54.720 | I would go to Safeway,

00:58:56.500 | and I would buy a bag of those fun-sized Snickers,

00:58:59.860 | and that would be just a tiny portion of my calories.

00:59:03.240 | - Sweet stuff for you, huh?

00:59:04.520 | - A lot of sweet stuff.

00:59:05.800 | I also did the savory stuff.

00:59:07.200 | I mean, I had my favorites.

00:59:08.340 | - Nothing was safe. - Pizza.

00:59:09.700 | - Nothing was safe. - Nothing was safe.

00:59:10.840 | - Nothing was safe.

00:59:12.420 | My paws got into everything.

00:59:14.900 | And then over time, because the next day

00:59:16.520 | you're gonna feel like you got hit

00:59:17.580 | by a diabetic dump truck,

00:59:19.720 | you start ratcheting back.

00:59:22.500 | And you're like, okay, maybe I don't need to do that.

00:59:25.020 | Maybe cheat day will just be two meals.

00:59:27.020 | Or maybe cheat day will just be like the pastries

00:59:28.900 | in the morning with the coffee.

00:59:31.100 | And you start to regulate a bit, generally.

00:59:34.700 | You don't have to, but over time you generally will.

00:59:38.940 | And I think after you've followed it to the T,

00:59:41.880 | just follow the commandments for, say, four to eight weeks,

00:59:46.140 | then you can certainly deviate.

00:59:47.300 | And I'm not saying if you're not hungry, don't eat.

00:59:49.380 | However, in many cases, people have,

00:59:53.340 | they have acclimated to not eating in the morning,

00:59:57.660 | and then they end up overeating later in the day.

01:00:00.500 | If you have that habit, right,

01:00:01.900 | if you're consuming 50% of your calories or more at dinner,

01:00:05.140 | and you want to lose body fat,

01:00:09.260 | I would say get some cottage cheese or something

01:00:13.340 | that will give you 30 grams easily in the morning.

01:00:16.440 | Worst case scenario, use a protein of some type.

01:00:19.460 | Just don't make it hyperchloric.

01:00:21.260 | - You mean powdered protein?

01:00:22.660 | - It could be powdered whey protein.

01:00:25.100 | Whole food is gonna do a lot more.

01:00:26.800 | - And no calorie counting, correct?

01:00:29.660 | - No calorie counting.

01:00:31.140 | It tends to be self-limiting.

01:00:32.540 | When you're eating this much fiber and this much protein,

01:00:36.100 | it tends to be very self-limiting,

01:00:37.740 | what you'll want to consume and what you can consume.

01:00:40.660 | - Once again, I had great experiences with slow carb diet,

01:00:44.660 | and I'm gonna go back on.

01:00:46.200 | - Yeah, and nobody needs to buy anything to figure it out.

01:00:50.040 | If you just search on tim.blog, slow carb diet,

01:00:53.800 | you'll get everything that you need to get started.

01:00:57.520 | No purchase necessary.

01:00:59.160 | - Well, it works very, very well, I'll say that.

01:01:01.320 | And it's very straightforward to follow,

01:01:03.000 | and it does include the notorious cheat day,

01:01:06.480 | or infamous cheat day.

01:01:07.880 | And it can be done on a very reasonable budget.

01:01:14.000 | And so if people want to learn more about that,

01:01:16.200 | they should go to Tim's blog on 4-Hour Body

01:01:19.600 | and Slow Carb Diet, we'll provide a link.

01:01:22.000 | But I think it's worth highlighting again,

01:01:24.360 | just how effective that is.

01:01:26.400 | As you pointed out, thousands and thousands of people

01:01:29.560 | using it to great success, some of whom were quite obese.

01:01:34.200 | And yeah, any updates on those folks?

01:01:36.500 | Are they still keeping the weight off?

01:01:37.720 | - I would like to do a follow-up.

01:01:40.060 | I think with diets in general,

01:01:43.420 | there's a lot of reversion to the mean,

01:01:46.760 | regression to the mean.

01:01:47.600 | So I would expect that some have kept it off

01:01:50.040 | and some have not.

01:01:50.880 | That would be true of, I think, every possible diet,

01:01:53.440 | especially for people who are overcoming behavioral inertia

01:01:56.640 | of having gained hundreds of pounds.

01:01:58.980 | But I'd like to do some follow-up.

01:02:00.880 | What was fun about the post I put together

01:02:02.800 | called How to Lose 100 Pounds on the Slow Carb Diet,

01:02:06.000 | we had, we profiled, say, four or five people,

01:02:09.300 | but there were dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens,

01:02:12.500 | and this was a very long time ago.

01:02:14.880 | So I would say that a long-term follow-up

01:02:19.640 | would be super interesting.

01:02:20.800 | And we did, at one point, track several thousand people

01:02:24.580 | through a platform at the time, I think it was coach.me,

01:02:27.680 | as they followed the Slow Carb Diet

01:02:29.960 | for the first four to 12 weeks.

01:02:32.400 | And that was fascinating, 'cause I want the data.

01:02:34.680 | And I'm happy to be proven incorrect

01:02:37.080 | with any of my assumptions.

01:02:38.140 | I mean, I don't view that as a failure.

01:02:39.680 | I mean, I view that as a huge net gain.

01:02:43.760 | And it has a very high adherence rate.

01:02:47.640 | So I pay attention to not just is something effective,

01:02:51.460 | does it get you the outcome you want?

01:02:53.520 | Not only is it efficient

01:02:55.280 | from a time and resource perspective,

01:02:57.340 | but how high is the adherence rate?

01:02:59.960 | If you take a random sampling of 1,000 people from the US

01:03:03.600 | across socioeconomic classes, et cetera,

01:03:05.920 | how many people, practically speaking,

01:03:08.880 | will be able to or willing to follow this

01:03:11.040 | for say an eight week period of time or four week period

01:03:14.160 | of time?

01:03:15.000 | And I try to optimize for the widest adherence,

01:03:18.540 | because I know the Slow Carb Diet, people come on,

01:03:20.280 | they're like, what about intermittent fasting?

01:03:22.080 | What about this?

01:03:22.920 | And what about endurance athletes?

01:03:23.760 | I'm like, this is not for everybody in all cases.

01:03:26.400 | It just happens to be a good default diet

01:03:29.040 | with a high adherence rate.

01:03:30.720 | And like you said, it's very inexpensive.

01:03:32.560 | It can be followed very, very inexpensively.

01:03:35.400 | - Sorry to interrupt you.

01:03:36.240 | One thing that I really like about it is that

01:03:38.880 | many variants on caloric restriction,

01:03:42.720 | which is 'cause laws of thermodynamics definitely apply.

01:03:46.840 | We're not trying to say they don't.

01:03:49.320 | But one of the issues with a lot of things,

01:03:51.540 | including intermittent fasting,

01:03:52.920 | which I sort of do some variant of,

01:03:54.280 | 'cause I'm not really hungry to eat until about 11.

01:03:56.680 | I like to train in the morning if I can, et cetera,

01:03:59.480 | is that they can sometimes prevent best performance

01:04:03.500 | in terms of, especially resistance training,

01:04:05.380 | high intensity resistance training.

01:04:06.600 | So very low carb diets, I've tried them.

01:04:09.680 | Even if you're paying attention to other ways

01:04:12.120 | to restock glycogen, performance drops off.

01:04:15.000 | Whereas a slow carb diet, I feel like I can think,

01:04:17.720 | I can work, I can exercise, I can sleep.

01:04:20.560 | Everything just works well.

01:04:21.760 | But there's one thing in it that I wanted to raise

01:04:23.520 | that when I heard this, I thought,

01:04:24.920 | there's no way this is true,

01:04:26.360 | which was making sure that you get 30 or so grams of protein

01:04:30.780 | within 30 minutes of waking.

01:04:32.720 | And I thought, how can that be?

01:04:34.280 | How can adding protein early in the day

01:04:36.180 | actually make a difference?

01:04:37.020 | And it really did work.

01:04:38.240 | I still track my numbers.

01:04:39.520 | So in terms of dropping body fat percentage,

01:04:41.960 | increasing muscle, it really does work.

01:04:44.080 | Now, whether or not that's simply

01:04:45.000 | because it's offsetting food intake

01:04:46.820 | that I would have, food that I would have taken in

01:04:49.920 | later in the day, I don't know.

01:04:52.180 | I'm not going to make myself my own control experiment

01:04:53.940 | to the point that I drive myself crazy,

01:04:56.120 | but it really does work quite well

01:04:59.360 | to get past sticking points,

01:05:00.920 | to just get that 30 grams of protein early.

01:05:02.720 | So sort of violate the time-restricted feeding component

01:05:06.440 | deliberately with some protein in the morning,

01:05:08.820 | then still train and do all the other things

01:05:10.740 | and carry on as usual.

01:05:12.700 | And it seems so peculiar,

01:05:14.460 | like eating more and losing body fat, but it works.

01:05:18.520 | - Yeah, it's counterintuitive.

01:05:20.140 | And a lot of approaches can work

01:05:23.080 | for a lot of different people, right?

01:05:25.020 | To state the obvious.

01:05:26.280 | But this particular aspect of this low carb diet

01:05:30.220 | is helpful for, let's just say,

01:05:32.740 | the majority of the people in that 1,000-person sample

01:05:36.260 | I was talking about, the hypothetical pull

01:05:38.180 | from different parts of, say, the US or anywhere,

01:05:40.820 | because it seems to help with a few things.

01:05:44.960 | First, there's just the thermic effect of food,

01:05:47.560 | and for protein, there's a greater thermic effect.

01:05:50.920 | You also have, and I think there's decent,

01:05:53.220 | at the time there was decent literature to support this,

01:05:55.120 | so I don't know if it's changed,

01:05:57.280 | that the protein intake along those lines

01:06:01.360 | has an appetite-suppressing effect.

01:06:04.360 | So the net daily calories consumed tends to be less

01:06:08.820 | when someone has a higher protein meal earlier in the day.

01:06:12.300 | And last but not least, I will say one of the risks,

01:06:16.380 | and there are many people who execute well on this,

01:06:18.480 | but you have to be very meticulous,

01:06:19.940 | which is true of the ketogenic diet as well.

01:06:22.600 | You can get yourself into a lot of trouble

01:06:23.960 | if you do it 60% right or 70% right.

01:06:26.680 | You really, yeah, you can get yourself in there.

01:06:28.720 | - In there, massive psoriasis.

01:06:30.560 | I mean, my scalp, you know, sloughing off.

01:06:33.600 | Like when I'm in ketosis,

01:06:34.960 | I'm like, what the hell is going on here?

01:06:36.460 | Going back on some complex carbohydrates and going away?

01:06:40.100 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:06:40.940 | - So I don't need a randomized control trial

01:06:43.120 | to know I simply don't want to run that experiment again.

01:06:44.960 | - Don't want to lose your scalp.

01:06:45.800 | Yeah, so in the case of, say, time-restricted feeding,

01:06:50.100 | some people who do intermittent fasting

01:06:53.100 | lose a lot of muscle mass.

01:06:55.600 | And there are multiple reasons for this.

01:06:58.240 | I think people should make use

01:07:00.520 | of relatively widely available tools like DEXA and so on

01:07:04.960 | to ensure that your composition is actually moving

01:07:07.300 | the way you think it's moving.

01:07:09.600 | Make sure you standardize your hydration for that

01:07:11.660 | as well as time of day.

01:07:13.240 | Just pro tip, that's true for blood tests as well.

01:07:15.840 | But it seems to get net-net better effects

01:07:20.720 | than trying to teach people how to fast effectively,

01:07:23.640 | which you can do, and we can talk about fasting.

01:07:25.920 | That's something that was not included in the four-hour body

01:07:28.340 | that were I to rewrite it today,

01:07:30.560 | I would include a section.

01:07:31.800 | And there was a bit in Tools of Titans

01:07:34.400 | to address that on more extended fasts.

01:07:37.280 | Let's just call it three to seven-day fasts.

01:07:40.240 | So that's an area that's of great interest to me,

01:07:42.680 | as is ketosis and metabolic psychiatry,

01:07:45.400 | a la Chris Palmer, who we both know.

01:07:48.680 | - Incredible.

01:07:49.500 | I mean, what the awakening that he's created

01:07:54.380 | through his book and going on your podcast,

01:07:56.480 | my podcast and others, and letting people be aware

01:08:00.760 | that changes in diet can impact mental health.

01:08:03.700 | So I think in two, three years, it's going to be a duh.

01:08:07.140 | And we're not just talking about the difference

01:08:08.420 | between slamming back horrible foods,

01:08:12.440 | horrible for us foods versus eating really clean.

01:08:15.260 | I mean, really specific diet protocols

01:08:17.340 | to treat mental health, that's incredible.

01:08:19.920 | - Yeah, super exciting.

01:08:20.920 | So that's one of the things

01:08:22.160 | that I'm paying a lot of attention to right now.

01:08:23.840 | They're a handful in that realm within the,

01:08:27.400 | just say the interplay of mind and body,

01:08:30.620 | since the Cartesian duality and separation of those two

01:08:33.820 | makes no sense from a biological standpoint.

01:08:36.820 | So that's something that certainly captured my attention.

01:08:40.360 | I paid a lot of attention to even as far back

01:08:43.120 | as early 2000s for mental health

01:08:46.980 | and just cognitive performance.

01:08:48.680 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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01:09:53.160 | Thanks for revisiting some of the four-hour body

01:09:56.480 | and slow carb diet and elaborating on some of the process

01:10:00.660 | that went into that.

01:10:01.500 | And I think creators of all kinds, thinkers of all kinds,

01:10:04.880 | and people who are interested in the contents

01:10:06.720 | of the four-hour body are going to be very grateful

01:10:09.660 | for that information.

01:10:10.520 | I certainly am fascinated by your process.

01:10:13.900 | One of the things that you mentioned

01:10:15.280 | along the lines of process was, you know,

01:10:18.160 | the power of places and where one happens to live.

01:10:21.600 | I think there's an essay by Paul Graham

01:10:24.640 | that talks about this.

01:10:25.640 | It's a little outdated, you know,

01:10:28.160 | and it talks about the messages that you,

01:10:30.960 | the tacit messages of being in certain cities.

01:10:33.200 | I think it was, you know, like Boston,

01:10:35.200 | you're not smart enough.

01:10:36.560 | What was it?

01:10:39.360 | New York, you're not powerful enough.

01:10:41.800 | And not you, I always say, I'm just thinking.

01:10:45.280 | Or you should be more powerful is the message,

01:10:47.200 | like the tacit message.

01:10:48.880 | Los Angeles, what you're doing,

01:10:52.680 | people aren't paying attention,

01:10:54.000 | paying enough attention to it, something like that.

01:10:55.880 | Like the tacit messages, these are stereotypes about cities.

01:10:58.440 | Certainly cities change.

01:11:00.720 | The role of places is an interesting one.

01:11:02.660 | Like, you know, you mentioned, you know,

01:11:04.120 | a small gathering, Kevin Kelly's house, quantified self.

01:11:06.980 | And I think for people who don't know people like that,

01:11:10.840 | right, maybe we could get your thoughts on, you know,

01:11:14.540 | how would one think about where to live

01:11:17.500 | and maybe even curating their own gatherings,

01:11:20.660 | useful gatherings, because it's not that,

01:11:23.260 | I have to imagine it's not that you guys sat back

01:11:25.060 | and you're like, I'm Tim Ferriss.

01:11:26.380 | And he's like, I'm Kevin Kelly, let's have a gathering

01:11:28.380 | so we can talk about it in a few years on a podcast.

01:11:31.120 | This stuff happens, that word, you know,

01:11:34.380 | it's a dangerous word, organically.

01:11:36.920 | When people who have common interests decide

01:11:39.320 | to get together and talk and listen and brainstorm.

01:11:43.360 | And I'm yet to do that with good people

01:11:47.840 | and not have something really incredible come out of it.

01:11:51.140 | Not necessarily that day, but looking five years,

01:11:53.960 | looking back five years later and just going,

01:11:55.360 | God, that was really worthwhile.

01:11:57.040 | - Totally.

01:11:57.880 | - Yeah.

01:11:59.300 | - Few thoughts in no particular order.

01:12:00.760 | I would say the first is it depends,

01:12:03.400 | my recommendations depend a lot on where you are

01:12:05.920 | in the arc of your career in life.

01:12:08.200 | If you are in full growth hyperdrive mode

01:12:13.200 | and you are trying to build both yourself

01:12:19.700 | and your capabilities in a very concentrated way

01:12:22.920 | where you're not necessarily focused on family,

01:12:25.200 | maybe have fewer obligations, then if you're serious,

01:12:30.200 | I think many people should consider moving

01:12:33.360 | to an area of high density.

01:12:35.800 | For a period of time, it could be three months,

01:12:38.060 | it could be six months, could be longer,

01:12:41.320 | but putting yourself in a New York or an LA

01:12:45.700 | or a San Francisco or Chicago or as new places develop,

01:12:50.700 | I'll give you one you might not expect,

01:12:53.280 | say Ottawa, Canada, where Shopify is based

01:12:56.600 | and the presence and growth of Shopify

01:13:00.000 | has spawned an entire ecosystem of startups.

01:13:03.560 | So there may be options outside of the usual cast

01:13:06.600 | of characters, Pittsburgh and Duolingo, similar effect.

01:13:10.880 | So there are more options than people might recognize,

01:13:13.640 | but taking a journey and placing yourself

01:13:18.640 | in a place where you can be in a very active

01:13:23.440 | pinball machine where you may interact serendipitously

01:13:27.160 | with many different people from many different worlds,

01:13:29.660 | I think is hard to overstate the value of.

01:13:33.980 | And my drive and my filtering function, let's just say,

01:13:38.980 | because when I first got to the Bay Area,

01:13:41.620 | nobody cared about me, I was nobody.

01:13:42.900 | I was driving my mom's used minivan hand-me-down

01:13:45.660 | that had the seats stolen out of the back,

01:13:47.540 | it looked terrible.

01:13:48.380 | - Were you in the South Bay?

01:13:49.560 | - I was working in San Jose, yep.

01:13:52.700 | - I mean, no disrespect to San Jose, I'm from the South Bay,

01:13:55.700 | but there's a bleakness to the South Bay.

01:13:58.260 | - There is a little bit of bleakness,

01:14:00.200 | and then I lived across the street in this tiny apartment,

01:14:02.780 | lived across the street from the Jack in the Box

01:14:04.380 | in Mountain View.

01:14:05.420 | So it's not like I was strolling onto the big stage

01:14:08.100 | and just blowing people away.

01:14:09.660 | - Oh, I grew up right near Mountain View,

01:14:12.360 | I'm very familiar, I probably skated the curves

01:14:14.540 | at that Jack in the Box. - You probably did.

01:14:16.060 | - Did you train at the Gold's Gym in an off-ramp store?

01:14:18.300 | - I did, actually. - Amazing.

01:14:19.620 | That was a great gym. - That was a great gym.

01:14:21.180 | - That was a great gym.

01:14:22.020 | I don't think it's still there.

01:14:22.840 | - I'd go there super late before my writing sessions.

01:14:25.500 | And it had the benefit of being open really, really late.

01:14:29.160 | And wow, rang story, haven't thought about that

01:14:31.100 | in a long time.

01:14:32.060 | So the point is, I also started

01:14:34.420 | where a lot of people are starting.

01:14:36.940 | And what did I do?

01:14:39.660 | I put myself in a high-density environment.

01:14:42.480 | Next, what did I do, knowing no one?

01:14:44.560 | I started to volunteer at events

01:14:48.380 | where they had interesting speakers

01:14:50.460 | and interesting people coming to hear those speakers.

01:14:53.140 | So I put myself in Silicon Valley,

01:14:54.800 | and then I began volunteering for groups like S-VACE.

01:14:58.800 | I don't know if it exists anymore,

01:15:00.040 | the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs,

01:15:03.100 | I think it was, Thai, the Indus Entrepreneur,

01:15:05.680 | which is a very sort of Indian

01:15:07.420 | or Indian-American focused organization

01:15:10.420 | that does a lot in the realm of startups.

01:15:12.980 | And I would carry water, I would take out garbage,

01:15:17.060 | I would check name badges, I would check people in.

01:15:20.060 | Nothing was too low for me.

01:15:22.000 | And I'll give you guys a tip

01:15:25.420 | that will be obvious to some, but non-obvious to many.

01:15:28.860 | When you are volunteering, a lot of folks who volunteer

01:15:32.220 | do the absolute bare minimum

01:15:34.340 | because they are not getting paid.

01:15:36.520 | This is not gonna get you noticed.

01:15:38.740 | But it sets a very low bar,

01:15:41.040 | so that if you volunteer at these events,

01:15:43.300 | and someone's dropping the ball,

01:15:44.620 | or there's something happening that needs fixing,

01:15:46.380 | and you just proactively do it,

01:15:48.360 | the producers of these events will notice you.

01:15:51.460 | And this is what happened over time, over a few months.

01:15:54.720 | And then I got invited to join in on meetings

01:15:57.740 | that were planning future events,

01:15:59.420 | and I eventually got to the point

01:16:00.980 | where I was recruiting speakers

01:16:02.840 | and able to set the agenda for an entire main event.

01:16:06.920 | And then that's how I got to know, say, Jack Canfield,

01:16:10.420 | who is the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul,

01:16:12.780 | and many others, who introduced me to my book agent

01:16:15.780 | many, many, many, many years later, Jack Canfield.

01:16:20.120 | But I was a nobody then.

01:16:21.820 | You have to play the long game,

01:16:24.360 | but you can be methodical on how you play that.

01:16:27.360 | And that is one approach, just as an example,

01:16:30.980 | for how to build your network, which snowballs over time.

01:16:34.480 | Don't hump every VIP's leg

01:16:36.500 | within 10 minutes of meeting them.

01:16:38.460 | Play it cool, you know?

01:16:40.020 | - And in gatherings where that person

01:16:42.580 | has a lot of demands on them

01:16:44.620 | is the last place you wanna do that, right?

01:16:47.380 | - The way you're gonna make yourself memorable--

01:16:48.220 | - No saliency to that.

01:16:49.300 | - Yeah, the way you're gonna make yourself memorable

01:16:50.740 | with people like that is to be very professional,

01:16:53.520 | always on time, predict what they're going to need

01:16:56.720 | or problems they'll run into beforehand

01:16:58.300 | and address them before they even think of them

01:17:00.900 | and be easy to deal with.

01:17:02.440 | And people like that, high performers notice these things.

01:17:08.200 | They will make note of it.

01:17:09.780 | - Yeah, the being easy to work with is something that

01:17:12.320 | I used to tell my graduate students in postdocs.

01:17:16.420 | I mean, because the opposite of that, nobody wants.

01:17:19.700 | - Yeah. - Right, nobody wants that.

01:17:21.060 | - Yeah, especially in the beginning.

01:17:21.980 | Like later, okay, great, you're Steve Jobs.

01:17:24.020 | You wanna be difficult here and there or a lot, no problem.

01:17:28.420 | But in the beginning, that can be a real liability.

01:17:31.460 | You can make up for that if you're the best in the world,

01:17:34.940 | but in the very beginning, you probably won't be.

01:17:37.700 | So try to stack the deck in your favor.

01:17:40.580 | Volunteering is a shortcut.

01:17:42.900 | And that would be one way of doing it.

01:17:44.200 | Another now, especially given the virtual communities

01:17:46.620 | that exist, so you have subreddits,

01:17:48.540 | you have online communities, you have Twitter groups,

01:17:51.380 | you have Clubhouse, you've got a million different options,

01:17:54.180 | which can be overwhelming.

01:17:55.620 | - Clubhouse still going?

01:17:56.840 | - Maybe not, I have no idea.

01:17:57.780 | - Oh, no, I don't know, I'm not saying it's gone.

01:17:59.300 | I just, I remember during the pandemic,

01:18:00.820 | there were some Clubhouse gatherings that hopped on there,

01:18:03.260 | but I've sort of forgotten to get on there.

01:18:05.740 | - The platform affinity is really fickle,

01:18:08.440 | which is why I think to the extent possible,

01:18:12.080 | if you wanna build a world-class,

01:18:14.140 | and I use that term very deliberately,

01:18:16.820 | network in record time, just to give you a nice headline,

01:18:20.900 | I would say focus on the uncrowded channel,

01:18:22.940 | which is in person, it's out of fashion, it's out of vogue.

01:18:26.780 | Going to a conference and actually interacting with humans

01:18:30.540 | in the hallway, approaching panelists,

01:18:32.880 | this is another thing that I did.

01:18:34.600 | I'll give another tip.

01:18:35.980 | So very early on, I would go to conferences.

01:18:37.900 | Nobody cared who I was, nobody knew who I was, fine.

01:18:41.360 | And I would study the panels.

01:18:45.020 | Let's say I'm going to a big event like South by Southwest.

01:18:47.660 | And I would, this is what I did in 2007,

01:18:50.780 | which was just prior to the first book coming out.

01:18:54.700 | And I would go to these various in-person events.

01:18:57.940 | I was focused mostly on events

01:18:59.420 | that had the thematic focus of blogs.

01:19:03.080 | We could come back to that.

01:19:03.920 | But blogs were what podcasts were a few years ago, right?

01:19:07.060 | They drove incredible traffic,

01:19:09.460 | but they were undervalued by mainstream media,

01:19:11.660 | undervalued by mainstream publishers, et cetera,

01:19:14.160 | which meant there was an arbitrage opportunity in a way.

01:19:17.220 | And I would pick, say, a handful of panels

01:19:23.160 | with topics I thought were super interesting.

01:19:25.680 | And then the panel would end and what would happen?

01:19:28.380 | The panelists would get rushed by various folks

01:19:32.040 | because many of them were well known.

01:19:33.780 | Who was not getting rushed?

01:19:35.400 | The moderator.

01:19:36.820 | I would go straight to the moderator.

01:19:38.360 | And I would talk to the moderator.

01:19:39.680 | I'd thank them for the panel.

01:19:40.920 | I would be very genuine.

01:19:41.900 | None of it was made up.

01:19:43.320 | And talk to them for a bit.

01:19:44.440 | They would generally ask why I was there,

01:19:47.200 | what I was interested in.

01:19:48.040 | I would mention whatever that happened to be.

01:19:50.200 | In this case, it was I'm finishing my first book

01:19:52.540 | or I had my first book coming out soon.

01:19:54.000 | I'm here to hopefully meet people

01:19:55.720 | who are involved with A, B, or C.

01:19:58.480 | And then if we hit it off, which was not true every time,

01:20:01.120 | but if it seemed to be going well,

01:20:03.440 | I would say I don't know anyone here.

01:20:06.720 | I'm really sort of orphaned here,

01:20:08.920 | making my way through this entire event.

01:20:12.480 | Is there anyone else here you think I would get along with

01:20:15.280 | who maybe I could buy a drink or a coffee?

01:20:17.320 | And the vast majority of the time, they'd be like,

01:20:19.540 | oh yeah, you should meet so-and-so.

01:20:21.560 | And then I get the introduction

01:20:22.680 | and then I would meet that person.

01:20:24.720 | I would have a genuine interaction with that person.

01:20:27.960 | And if it made sense, if things were going well,

01:20:30.400 | I'd do the same thing.

01:20:31.500 | Is there anybody else here you think I should

01:20:34.160 | just say hi to and I'd get along with?

01:20:36.520 | Not who I can ask for something.

01:20:38.120 | And that wasn't deception, I was being honest.

01:20:41.200 | Like someone I could actually vibe with

01:20:45.560 | and if so, would you mind making the intro?

01:20:48.900 | Yeah, sure, no problem.

01:20:50.400 | Many of those people are still my friends.

01:20:52.560 | And by being surgical in that way,

01:20:57.280 | not trying to gather business cards,

01:20:59.640 | to use a really antiquated metaphor at this point.

01:21:03.160 | - People still hand them out.

01:21:04.000 | - Yeah, people still hand them out.

01:21:04.820 | I guess it depends on where you are,

01:21:05.660 | especially like Boston.

01:21:06.840 | But rather than trying to collect people as Pokemon cards,

01:21:11.840 | developing say five, three to five deeper relationships

01:21:19.540 | through longer conversations at an event,

01:21:22.720 | that is what directly led ultimately to the hockey stick

01:21:27.420 | for the four hour work week within tech,

01:21:29.640 | within specifically San Francisco.

01:21:32.600 | So those would be a few approaches for building your network

01:21:35.720 | when you don't have the ability to just walk up

01:21:39.280 | to say a Kevin Kelly and have a conversation.

01:21:41.500 | That came over time.

01:21:43.240 | - Yeah, whether or not it's health practices

01:21:46.800 | or nutritional practices or at meetings,

01:21:51.620 | it seems you're oriented toward the uncrowded

01:21:55.140 | but very interesting people in spaces.

01:21:59.020 | But the keyword there I think is uncrowded

01:22:01.760 | and of course the other key word is interesting, right?

01:22:04.760 | I mean, it's not like you're standing in the parking lot

01:22:06.680 | talking to whoever happens to be there,

01:22:08.240 | although that can be interesting, right?

01:22:09.720 | There's a serendipity there

01:22:10.940 | and there's always things to learn from people.

01:22:13.600 | But in terms of career advancement and building new ideas

01:22:17.680 | and forging for information,

01:22:19.160 | I'm just struck how you've done that over and over.

01:22:21.820 | And again, thank you for giving us some insight

01:22:25.680 | into the process, please.

01:22:27.480 | - Here's another one.

01:22:28.620 | So I think there's a tendency among people

01:22:31.400 | who want to develop their networks or their relationships

01:22:35.960 | to be star fuckers, not to get too technical, but--

01:22:40.000 | - That's a technical term.

01:22:41.040 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:22:42.600 | They want to tell other people they are friends with someone

01:22:45.640 | more than they want to develop skills

01:22:47.600 | or learn from someone.

01:22:49.400 | This puts you in a very disadvantaged position

01:22:52.600 | because then that means, all right,

01:22:54.140 | you want to become friends with Elon Musk, good luck.

01:22:57.320 | Or you want to become friends with this A-lister,

01:23:00.640 | celebrity who everyone else wants to meet, good luck.

01:23:04.200 | It's going to be a crowded, bloody path to get there.

01:23:08.140 | And by the way, they've also certainly developed

01:23:11.420 | really attuned defenses against people like you.

01:23:14.720 | So it's going to be hard.

01:23:16.440 | - Yeah, they have staff to prevent that from happening.

01:23:19.000 | - They have a phalanx of protectors to prevent you

01:23:22.520 | from ever getting to that person.

01:23:24.320 | On the other hand, if you're approaching it

01:23:25.560 | from the standpoint of developing skills, learning,

01:23:29.160 | and actually becoming potential friends with someone,

01:23:32.520 | I'll give you an example, you could go after,

01:23:35.060 | you want to become better at boxing.

01:23:39.940 | Let's just make that up, all right.

01:23:41.760 | Maybe not the greatest example, skiing would be another one,

01:23:44.800 | but let's stick with boxing

01:23:46.360 | just because of the way I'll explain it.

01:23:48.960 | If you wanted to, say, get personalized lessons

01:23:51.540 | from Floyd Mayweather, ain't going to happen.

01:23:54.480 | Okay, let's go then maybe a step down out of the pro ranks

01:23:58.280 | to gold medalist.

01:24:00.080 | Okay, if it's a brand new gold medalist,

01:24:01.520 | let's just say like Oscar De La Hoya

01:24:02.840 | when he was really the golden boy

01:24:03.920 | and it just thrashed everyone, still going to be hard.

01:24:07.780 | What about the silver medalist who just had a bad day

01:24:11.120 | when he had that last bout against Oscar De La Hoya,

01:24:13.920 | potentially, right?

01:24:14.920 | From a technical perspective,

01:24:16.440 | from a personal connection perspective,

01:24:19.640 | you may have more in common with that person

01:24:21.240 | or a bronze medalist, and they can get you 70, 80, 90%

01:24:24.800 | of the way there, and by the way,

01:24:26.420 | you probably don't have the physical attributes

01:24:28.120 | to make it through 100% anyway,

01:24:30.240 | if you're coming to it this late.

01:24:32.240 | And you could get, in many cases,

01:24:36.400 | one-on-one lessons, whether in person or virtually,

01:24:40.720 | with someone who is of that caliber.

01:24:43.800 | They're in the same front of the pack

01:24:45.640 | as the names I just mentioned, maybe not as famous.

01:24:48.880 | 100 bucks, 200 bucks per hour?

01:24:52.160 | For a lot of people, that is within reach.

01:24:56.480 | - Yeah, and I'm not sure what the value of saying

01:24:58.760 | one knows somebody very famous is.

01:25:03.140 | It's just never been something that I've oriented to.

01:25:05.400 | - It's a common orientation, though,

01:25:07.120 | and I think that's true for a lot of things.

01:25:09.240 | Many people use, say, psychedelics because they want

01:25:12.200 | to tell other people the story that they have

01:25:15.800 | of doing psychedelics, right?

01:25:17.840 | They're not doing it intrinsically for what they hope

01:25:20.920 | to get out of that experience.

01:25:22.100 | Maybe there's part of them, but it's more

01:25:24.560 | of the social signaling and validation they get

01:25:26.680 | when they project that out at a group dinner

01:25:29.280 | into a story that they can tell.

01:25:31.320 | And that's true for many things.

01:25:32.920 | So one of the questions I ask myself

01:25:34.280 | with all sorts of things, if I could never talk about this,

01:25:37.200 | would I do it?

01:25:38.800 | - What a great, great thing to think about.

01:25:43.360 | - Right, like, if I could have,

01:25:44.800 | let's just say we didn't know each other,

01:25:46.440 | and I was like, okay, I'm earlier in my career.

01:25:48.880 | Let's apply some constraints.

01:25:50.200 | So I'm not where I am.

01:25:51.760 | I still want to do A, B, and C in the public eye.

01:25:54.360 | Maybe I want to build a podcast, whoever.

01:25:57.200 | If I could meet with you, but I could never tell a soul,

01:26:00.040 | would I do it?

01:26:00.860 | - I don't know, would you?

01:26:01.700 | - I would. - Thank you.

01:26:02.880 | - I would.

01:26:03.720 | - I would too, right?

01:26:04.800 | - But for a lot of folks, if they--

01:26:06.400 | - Meaning I'd meet with you.

01:26:07.320 | I'm not saying I'd meet with me, by the way.

01:26:09.680 | I'd meet with me.

01:26:12.280 | Believe me, I meet with me all the time,

01:26:14.640 | and sometimes it's pretty unpleasant.

01:26:15.960 | - Yeah, and that can be applied to all sorts of things,

01:26:18.160 | right, and it's a useful question,

01:26:20.580 | 'cause I ask myself this, for examining your motivations.

01:26:24.620 | And I'm not saying one motivation

01:26:26.140 | is always better than another,

01:26:27.200 | but you should at least be aware

01:26:30.260 | of your driving motivations,

01:26:31.660 | because you can end up playing games

01:26:33.140 | you're not even aware you're playing,

01:26:34.700 | and that's how you end up, I think,

01:26:36.060 | getting into a lot of trouble in life, one of the ways.

01:26:39.020 | So that would be a question I might apply.

01:26:41.500 | I apply other questions, like there's a great question

01:26:44.660 | that Seth Godin applies, who really I admire tremendously,

01:26:48.580 | and has built an incredibly unorthodox,

01:26:52.860 | unique life for himself and his family.

01:26:55.740 | He's zigged when everyone would expect him to zag,

01:26:59.100 | and he always has a defensible logic behind it.

01:27:02.620 | And much like Derek Sivers, but most people

01:27:05.700 | have probably heard the hypothetical question,

01:27:07.980 | like what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail, right?

01:27:10.940 | Or what would you do if you couldn't fail?

01:27:13.080 | And Seth turns that around.

01:27:15.520 | I think that's a good question.

01:27:16.580 | He turns around and he said,

01:27:17.400 | what would you do if you knew you were gonna fail?

01:27:19.860 | In terms of identifying what you would do for the process.

01:27:24.340 | What would you do if you knew it was gonna fail?

01:27:27.920 | Okay, you're considering these five different projects.

01:27:29.560 | Let's say they're all gonna fail,

01:27:30.680 | but you still have to choose one of the five.

01:27:32.820 | Which would you choose?

01:27:34.140 | - Yeah, that's a great question.

01:27:35.820 | Much harder to answer.

01:27:39.220 | - Yeah.

01:27:40.060 | - And at the same time, I'm called back to

01:27:42.700 | when I was a graduate student,

01:27:45.100 | and still now with the podcast,

01:27:47.380 | I have this litmus test, which is,

01:27:51.680 | is the experiment that I'm working on

01:27:54.420 | the one that I want to be working on most?

01:27:56.420 | Is the podcast that I'm working on

01:27:57.700 | the one that I want to be working on most?

01:27:59.080 | I mean, there's truly no other podcasts

01:28:00.820 | I'd rather be having today than this one, right?

01:28:03.180 | And the moment I'm starting to think,

01:28:04.240 | oh, I wish I was doing that thing over there,

01:28:07.020 | I realize I'm off target.

01:28:08.800 | I'm off target.

01:28:09.640 | And I think that asking really good questions

01:28:13.960 | is something clearly that you're very good at.

01:28:15.800 | And getting a little bit deeper

01:28:17.920 | into your process around that,

01:28:19.280 | do you write those things down?

01:28:20.780 | Like, is there a notebook someplace

01:28:22.280 | in the kingdom of Tim Ferriss in Austin or elsewhere

01:28:26.740 | that says those questions that,

01:28:31.200 | essentially those questions are written, are they--

01:28:32.880 | - Yeah, I collect, I literally have a document

01:28:34.960 | with questions that I've gathered from Seth,

01:28:37.600 | printed out and at the Airbnb where I'm staying here.

01:28:40.880 | So I'm--

01:28:41.720 | - You brought it with you.

01:28:42.540 | - I printed it out here.

01:28:43.760 | And then I went through and I read it last night

01:28:45.560 | and I was highlighting questions from past interviews

01:28:48.560 | I've had with him on my podcast to revisit his questions.

01:28:51.960 | So I was literally doing that last night over dinner.

01:28:55.400 | And I collect questions.

01:28:57.200 | I collect questions if I am reading a magazine

01:29:00.440 | and I come across a good question,

01:29:01.680 | I take a photo or I capture it somehow in notes

01:29:05.280 | or in Evernote, which I know is kind of old fashioned

01:29:07.200 | these days, but I used it for everything.

01:29:08.640 | So the critical mass is beyond enormous.

01:29:12.360 | And I do collect and revisit these things.

01:29:15.920 | I capture them in journals as well,

01:29:17.880 | but I absolutely capture good questions when I find them.

01:29:22.340 | - Questions are so powerful for the brain.

01:29:24.520 | I don't want to go into this in too much detail

01:29:26.120 | 'cause I have a lot more questions for you,

01:29:27.680 | but we just wrapped a series on mental health

01:29:31.880 | that will come out later this year with Paul Conte

01:29:34.000 | and he is brilliant as we both know

01:29:36.340 | and does truly important work.

01:29:38.360 | And he pointed to the value of asking really good questions

01:29:43.360 | about oneself and because of the way that questions

01:29:48.760 | that are really directed at self-inquiry

01:29:51.440 | queue up the subconscious.

01:29:53.100 | So you ask the question and unlike a statement or a meme,

01:29:56.200 | the brain works with that in the days and hours

01:30:00.840 | after asking the question in ways

01:30:02.440 | that simple declarative statements

01:30:05.680 | probably don't ping the system the same way,

01:30:08.240 | which is probably why we can see so many points of wisdom

01:30:11.600 | and truth everywhere.

01:30:12.960 | And it doesn't necessarily transform us,

01:30:14.620 | but asking really good questions

01:30:16.280 | really does seem to transform us.

01:30:18.240 | - Yeah, I think judging people by their questions

01:30:23.240 | is also a shortcut to assessing and learning a lot

01:30:28.500 | about how someone functions and what makes them tick.

01:30:32.280 | I think it was Voltaire who said,

01:30:33.680 | judge a man by his questions, by his answers,

01:30:36.220 | something along those lines.

01:30:37.560 | But when in doubt, attribute to Voltaire, it sounds good.

01:30:40.120 | - Does sound good.

01:30:40.960 | - And I think about this a lot.

01:30:42.800 | I do think about the questions

01:30:45.240 | and I refine the questions that I ask myself,

01:30:47.720 | especially while journaling,

01:30:49.080 | because it's easier to cross-examine

01:30:52.160 | and stress test your own certainty and beliefs

01:30:56.160 | when they are captured on paper

01:30:58.600 | or digitally on a laptop, for instance.

01:31:03.520 | So I do routinely revisit certain questions

01:31:08.220 | that I've found helpful over time.

01:31:10.760 | I mean, one that people can play with

01:31:12.800 | is with whatever is really causing you consternation

01:31:17.120 | or stress at the moment, some kind of decision

01:31:19.320 | or relationship, business could be anything.

01:31:23.000 | Just what might this look like if it were easy?

01:31:25.760 | What might this look like?

01:31:27.840 | If it were easy, if it had to be easy,

01:31:29.580 | if that were possible, what might it look like?

01:31:32.380 | - And that could apply to anything.

01:31:33.580 | - Yeah, it could apply to anything.

01:31:35.700 | Could apply to fitness.

01:31:37.000 | It's like, look, if you do really intense

01:31:39.400 | kettlebell swings twice a week

01:31:42.080 | with proper weight and load and time under tension

01:31:44.920 | and you do pushups a few times a week

01:31:48.100 | and handle a couple of other elements,

01:31:51.420 | you can get in pretty good shape.

01:31:53.200 | It's so simple, but it hits a lot.

01:31:57.080 | I mean, it hits your entire posterior chain.

01:31:58.660 | Okay, fine, do some pushups and some core work.

01:32:01.240 | But if you're not exercising at all

01:32:04.220 | because you've made the assumption

01:32:05.580 | that it's four hours, five hours a week,

01:32:10.160 | rather than completely remove that objective

01:32:14.160 | and call it just impractical,

01:32:19.220 | can you ratchet down the scale?

01:32:21.060 | How far can you ratchet down the scale

01:32:23.180 | until you have no excuses?

01:32:24.560 | That would just be one example.

01:32:27.920 | Language learning, tech investing, it applies to everything.

01:32:31.940 | - Making life easier is something

01:32:34.040 | that definitely gets my vote.

01:32:35.400 | - Yeah, making it easier and making it more elegant.

01:32:38.840 | The more pieces in your life you have floating around,

01:32:41.120 | the more context, the more extraneous, loose connections,

01:32:44.720 | the harder your life is gonna be.

01:32:46.040 | The cognitive overload or overhead is really high.

01:32:50.360 | So I'm always looking for maybe like Japanese

01:32:54.280 | and a flower arranger.

01:32:55.120 | It's like, okay, how many pieces can I remove

01:32:57.480 | while still maintaining the essence

01:32:59.520 | of what I'm trying to achieve?

01:33:00.760 | - You and Rick Rubin, man.

01:33:02.360 | I'm telling you, two people I am fortunate enough

01:33:05.280 | to know personally and that I have tremendous respect for

01:33:07.600 | and the work is self-evident.

01:33:12.320 | It's really remarkable.

01:33:13.600 | So rewind that and listen to that segment right there, folks.

01:33:17.520 | I'm telling you, I've worked hard to apply it

01:33:20.160 | because it's not my default.

01:33:21.360 | And boy, does it make a significant improvement

01:33:24.280 | to simplify, simplify, simplify.

01:33:26.000 | It takes some thought and question asking.

01:33:27.760 | It's like, you just can't delete things at random

01:33:30.080 | till you get down to some fixed number.

01:33:31.760 | But I'd like to ask you about another area

01:33:35.980 | where you really have seemed to see around corners.

01:33:40.120 | And this is one that actually carried with it

01:33:43.680 | significant risk, not necessarily risk to health and to life,

01:33:48.360 | but risk in terms of outside perceptions.

01:33:51.480 | And that's psychedelics.

01:33:53.740 | As you know, I've substantially changed my view on this.

01:33:57.280 | We don't need to go into my former stance on it.

01:33:59.520 | I talked about that when you were gracious enough

01:34:01.440 | to host me on your podcast for a second time.

01:34:03.920 | I'd done some psychedelics recreationally as a kid.

01:34:06.480 | It was correlated with not so great times in my life,

01:34:09.280 | stayed away from them, then eventually revisited MDMA

01:34:11.920 | in particular from a therapeutic standpoint,

01:34:13.960 | found tremendous benefit.

01:34:15.140 | Again, therapeutically with a medical doctor.

01:34:17.840 | Again, these drugs are illegal.

01:34:20.600 | Soon to change, perhaps, hopefully.

01:34:23.280 | And we'll talk about that.

01:34:24.600 | But it's becoming clear from the controlled studies

01:34:29.600 | by Robin Carter Harris.

01:34:32.100 | There are many others, okay, Nolan Williams, others,

01:34:35.360 | that these drugs have enormous potential

01:34:39.020 | to help relieve depression, trauma,

01:34:41.800 | help people explore their psyche, their mind

01:34:45.600 | for sake of feeling better, doing better in the world,

01:34:48.240 | for leaning into life, not tune in, drop out,

01:34:50.440 | but to really lean into life with more purpose

01:34:54.680 | and more satisfaction.

01:34:55.880 | In some cases, they've really have saved lives, I think.

01:34:59.440 | What was your mindset around psychedelics

01:35:03.800 | when you first started exploring them?

01:35:06.400 | What led you to overcome the inevitable fear gap there?

01:35:11.400 | Because you do seem like somebody who takes value

01:35:16.320 | in your health, right?

01:35:17.200 | You're not reckless.

01:35:18.640 | You may have been more adventurous in the past

01:35:20.680 | with things like, I hate the word,

01:35:22.340 | but biohacking and self-experimentation than you are now.

01:35:24.980 | But you obviously have some self-preservation mechanism

01:35:28.200 | intact. - We learn, we learn.

01:35:29.680 | - We learn.

01:35:30.840 | What was your mindset around it at the time?

01:35:33.100 | And then I want to get to what you've learned from it

01:35:36.660 | and frankly, the tremendous efforts that you've put

01:35:41.280 | that are now translating to tremendous value

01:35:43.680 | for really millions of people.

01:35:45.520 | And ultimately, I think it's going to be billions of people.

01:35:48.900 | By establishing funding for the pioneering research

01:35:52.280 | in this area, helping to promote the movement

01:35:55.480 | of these compounds from illegal to legal

01:35:58.020 | in the therapeutic setting, so on and so on.

01:36:00.920 | So take us back to your first thoughtful exploration

01:36:05.920 | of psychedelics.

01:36:07.140 | What did that look like?

01:36:08.020 | You're like, oh, mushrooms, I'll eat them.

01:36:10.320 | Was that it?

01:36:11.160 | Or was it a dedicated research process?

01:36:16.160 | And who'd you talk to?

01:36:17.840 | What was it all about?

01:36:19.320 | - So let's go way back to my undergrad experience.

01:36:25.120 | And there were many reasons that I ended up

01:36:28.040 | going to Princeton.

01:36:29.160 | I think I was very lucky to get in.

01:36:31.520 | My SAT scores because I could never finish the damn test.

01:36:34.360 | I was so much of a perfectionist, I'd get stuck

01:36:36.840 | and ended up not doing terribly well.

01:36:38.440 | But through essays and other things,

01:36:40.560 | ultimately was able to go.

01:36:42.640 | Part of the draw-- - Well, let me interrupt you

01:36:43.920 | and just say, I think at this point we can say

01:36:46.320 | they were lucky to have you.

01:36:47.480 | - Well, thank you for saying that.

01:36:48.720 | - Yeah. - Thank you for saying that.

01:36:49.840 | - Great institution and you've done great

01:36:51.440 | and you're a great poster on the wall for them.

01:36:55.860 | - Yeah. - Oh, really?

01:36:57.000 | - I hope so. - Really, really.

01:36:58.440 | Yeah, I just want to say it 'cause you're not going to

01:37:00.680 | and I think it's important that these are great institutions

01:37:03.000 | of great minds go through there and, you know,

01:37:06.360 | Einstein went through there and their success rests

01:37:09.960 | not just on the Einsteins, but also on the student body

01:37:12.800 | and what they go out into the world and do.

01:37:14.240 | And not just in the realm of science.

01:37:16.040 | So really, they're lucky to have had you.

01:37:18.320 | - Yeah, thank you, Andrew.

01:37:19.860 | I studied Chinese in a room where Einstein used to teach.

01:37:22.240 | It's pretty cool to set foot and spend time weekly

01:37:26.400 | in a space that was shared by some of these people.

01:37:28.560 | - Amazing. - It really gets

01:37:30.740 | the imagination firing.

01:37:32.760 | If we go back to that chapter in my life,

01:37:36.120 | I was initially a psychology major

01:37:39.700 | with a focus on neuroscience.

01:37:41.200 | So I wanted to be a neuroscientist.

01:37:43.280 | And there are many reasons for that.

01:37:45.700 | I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family,

01:37:48.760 | so Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

01:37:51.920 | So that was certainly a personal driving interest

01:37:56.280 | in terms of looking at mechanisms,

01:37:58.780 | understanding what therapeutics existed or did not exist,

01:38:02.140 | how things were developing in the research.

01:38:04.620 | And while I was there, which later I ended up

01:38:09.620 | switching gears and transferring to focus

01:38:12.040 | on language acquisition and East Asian studies,

01:38:14.320 | hence the Chinese that I mentioned earlier

01:38:16.020 | and Japanese and Korean.

01:38:16.960 | But on the neuroscience side,

01:38:19.960 | there were a lot of cool breakthroughs also

01:38:21.800 | that came out of Princeton around that time,

01:38:25.800 | looking at the amazing discovery of, say,

01:38:28.800 | neuronal, I don't want to say regenesis,

01:38:33.420 | but neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

01:38:35.520 | - Yeah, Liz Gould's work. - Exactly, exactly.

01:38:37.940 | So there was quite a bit happening at that time.

01:38:39.940 | I was a subject, I loved volunteering for studies

01:38:42.960 | just to try to get an inside look at how things were done

01:38:47.280 | in some of Daniel Kahneman's experiments.

01:38:50.240 | So it was a cool time to be there.

01:38:52.660 | And within the first two years, I want to say,

01:38:56.880 | I had my first experience recreationally with mushrooms.

01:39:00.840 | And looking back now, I'm horrified by the lack of control,

01:39:05.840 | and meaning not control, but lack of supervision, right?

01:39:10.160 | I mean, the setting, the set and setting ended up being fine.

01:39:13.520 | Nothing terrible happened,

01:39:14.560 | but there were a lot of ways it could have gone sideways.

01:39:17.040 | But that first experience,

01:39:18.920 | and I must have consumed in retrospect,

01:39:20.640 | just a dizzying amount of mushrooms.

01:39:23.240 | - It used to be in excess of five grams.

01:39:25.000 | - Oh, a little bit more, yeah.

01:39:26.320 | Just knowing what I know now, it would have been-

01:39:28.800 | - Kids don't do this at all.

01:39:30.520 | - Don't do that.

01:39:31.360 | - I'm not going to say don't do it at home.

01:39:32.960 | Don't do it at all.

01:39:33.780 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:39:34.620 | - Please, I actually don't think the young developing brain

01:39:39.040 | should be exposed to psychedelics.

01:39:40.880 | - We can talk about that.

01:39:41.720 | - We can talk about that.

01:39:42.560 | I'm going to take my stance.

01:39:44.160 | I'm going to take my stance for now.

01:39:45.800 | - Yeah, I mean, in the world in which we live, in the US,

01:39:50.800 | I would totally agree with you.

01:39:53.160 | There are some interesting cultural exceptions

01:39:55.200 | in other places where things are more set up

01:39:58.880 | to provide for that type of use,

01:40:02.100 | but I certainly would not recommend it.

01:40:04.220 | But coming back to my recreational experience,

01:40:07.640 | my subjective experience was so bizarre

01:40:10.800 | and my experience of time so nonlinear,

01:40:15.640 | my experience of self so different

01:40:19.280 | from anything I had experienced up to that point.

01:40:22.040 | And therefore, my construction of reality

01:40:26.560 | being so completely unlike anything I had experienced

01:40:31.340 | was enough to make me want to learn about these compounds.

01:40:34.560 | And very early on, I still have a scan of it somewhere.

01:40:39.560 | I think it was in 1998 or '99, I actually wrote a paper.

01:40:43.320 | One of my junior papers was focused

01:40:46.000 | on examining potential similarities

01:40:48.640 | between REM sleep and LSD, LSD 25.

01:40:53.640 | And looking at some of the patterns of neural activity,

01:40:59.960 | of course, we can do a lot more now

01:41:02.160 | with the tools that we have available.

01:41:04.360 | But from a scientific perspective,

01:41:06.560 | I was very curious about how much we knew

01:41:11.160 | and how much we didn't know.

01:41:13.520 | And I would say that latter category

01:41:15.400 | gets me more excited in a way.

01:41:17.280 | And I'm like, okay, how much room is there for growth here?

01:41:22.280 | Because if we're just putting on the finishing touches

01:41:24.880 | with marginal incremental improvements

01:41:28.280 | on something that we feel like we've largely figured out,

01:41:30.340 | that's less interesting to me

01:41:31.680 | than something that baffles most people

01:41:35.320 | examining them on some level.

01:41:37.440 | And there was a professor named Barry Jacobs

01:41:39.320 | who was doing some very interesting work.

01:41:40.800 | He did a lot of work looking at the serotonergic systems

01:41:44.320 | and did a lot of work with cats.

01:41:46.960 | Ultimately, I could not do personally

01:41:50.120 | the animal work required of the sort of indentured servitude

01:41:54.360 | that I would [laughs]

01:41:56.200 | - I think you wrote someplace once,

01:41:58.360 | you said when confronted with the prospect

01:42:02.080 | of installing a computer printer into the head of a cat.

01:42:05.440 | - A printer jack on the back of a cat head.

01:42:07.400 | - On the back of a cat head.

01:42:08.520 | - They literally had those little VGA ports

01:42:11.960 | on the back of these cats' heads because cats sleep a lot.

01:42:14.560 | And so they're an interesting study.

01:42:16.280 | - Cats, very few laboratories work on cats any longer.

01:42:20.200 | It's mostly a mouse, still some non-human primate work.

01:42:22.840 | My laboratory is essentially shut down

01:42:25.260 | or as in the process of shutting down even our mouse work.

01:42:27.600 | I much prefer to work on humans.

01:42:29.760 | They can give consent and they house themselves.

01:42:32.440 | The animal research thing is tough for any sentient being.

01:42:36.000 | - Yeah, it's tough.

01:42:37.520 | For what it's worth, the cats seem pretty happy.

01:42:39.280 | They were just sleeping.

01:42:40.120 | I mean, the ports were for tracking.

01:42:42.680 | So the cats were pretty, I mean, they were just normal cats.

01:42:45.360 | The cats were fine, but I would have been,

01:42:47.300 | we would have been injecting retroviruses into rats

01:42:50.520 | and then perfusing them, which means bleeding them to death

01:42:53.480 | to avoid bruising of the tissue

01:42:56.280 | because then if you were gonna take thin slices and scans,

01:42:59.040 | you didn't wanna have bruising.

01:43:00.720 | And I just couldn't, I just couldn't do it.

01:43:03.080 | I think it's important.

01:43:04.120 | I do think, I do think there's a place for it,

01:43:08.240 | but I couldn't do it.

01:43:09.080 | So that's why I transferred out.

01:43:10.280 | But the point I was trying to make

01:43:11.800 | is that I had the experience

01:43:14.240 | and then I had that drive the scientific interest.

01:43:18.640 | And then I had probably one experience per year

01:43:22.680 | for a few years after that.

01:43:25.620 | And what I noticed for myself personally,

01:43:29.160 | because I suffered from major depressive disorder

01:43:32.360 | and extended depressive episodes,

01:43:35.220 | let's just say on average, three to four a year.

01:43:37.080 | And by extended--

01:43:38.540 | - Even before you had started?

01:43:39.800 | - Oh, even before, yeah.

01:43:40.860 | - From a young age.

01:43:41.700 | - Yeah, from a very young age.

01:43:42.540 | And I would say, so let's just call it three to four

01:43:44.800 | on average a year.

01:43:46.080 | Those could last each a few weeks or a few months.

01:43:49.080 | I mean, this is a very high percentage of my total year.

01:43:53.840 | And when I had these higher dose experiences with mushrooms,

01:43:58.600 | so we're talking about psilocybin mushrooms,

01:44:00.300 | and then if we're looking at the molecule

01:44:02.840 | that's being examined scientifically, psilocybin,

01:44:05.760 | I noticed this afterglow effect that was really durable.

01:44:10.920 | And that was an antidepressant effect

01:44:14.860 | or a mood elevating effect that lasted far longer

01:44:18.080 | than the half-life could explain, right?

01:44:19.980 | Because four to six hours, you're kind of on the other side.

01:44:24.540 | And I would experience this afterglow effect

01:44:28.420 | for three to six months.

01:44:30.180 | And that raised all sorts of interesting questions.

01:44:33.020 | What the hell is going on here?

01:44:34.660 | Is it the content?

01:44:36.040 | Is it some structural change?

01:44:37.340 | There were a lot of unanswered questions for me.

01:44:39.260 | And then I had a very, very scary experience

01:44:42.380 | that led me to completely stop use of psychedelics

01:44:46.520 | where, again, uncontrolled environment ended up

01:44:50.260 | in rural New York coming out of my trip

01:44:55.000 | standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night

01:44:56.480 | with headlights coming at me.

01:44:57.840 | - Goodness gracious.

01:44:58.820 | - So you don't want to do that.

01:45:00.000 | And I was like, okay, too dangerous.

01:45:01.760 | - Were you taking them alone?

01:45:02.800 | Is that how that is?

01:45:03.640 | - I was taking them with two friends and my two friends

01:45:05.680 | without telling me just went for a walk and left me alone.

01:45:09.080 | So don't do that.

01:45:09.920 | - It points to the, I mean, these are powerful compounds.

01:45:12.820 | - Yeah, you're playing with nuclear power.

01:45:15.680 | Like these are the, this is the nuclear power

01:45:18.840 | of psychological or psycho-emotional surgery

01:45:23.840 | is the way I encourage people to think about them.

01:45:28.960 | And I stopped using any psychedelics completely.

01:45:33.360 | I was still very interested in them,

01:45:35.740 | but I basically hit pause.

01:45:38.960 | And I didn't revisit that until let's call it 2012, 2013

01:45:43.720 | where I was still struggling

01:45:44.840 | with major depressive disorder.

01:45:45.980 | And I saw my girlfriend at the time completely transformed

01:45:49.080 | by supervised facilitated use of, in this case, ayahuasca,

01:45:53.800 | which was not quite as common as it is in conversation

01:45:58.800 | at the time.

01:46:01.520 | And she did that in South America,

01:46:03.320 | but she not only explained her experience,

01:46:08.320 | but I was able to see the transformation in her

01:46:12.200 | that seemed to have some durability over time.

01:46:15.000 | And that is when I started stepping back

01:46:17.400 | into researching psychedelics,

01:46:21.160 | looking at what had been published in the last,

01:46:24.200 | let's just call it 10 years as of that point in time.

01:46:28.860 | And thinking about how I would approach it systematically

01:46:33.860 | with safeguards, with proper supervision,

01:46:38.200 | and basically approaching it the way

01:46:39.480 | I would have approached any of the topics

01:46:41.040 | in the four-hour body.

01:46:42.600 | And that is what led me back into,

01:46:46.120 | along with a number of other interventions, I should say.

01:46:48.720 | So I wasn't betting the farm on psychedelics.

01:46:51.140 | I also started TM at that point.

01:46:53.720 | I was-

01:46:54.540 | - You just have some people might-

01:46:56.240 | - Transcendental meditation.

01:46:58.200 | - These are like four to 10-day meditation retreats.

01:47:02.000 | - This was actually much shorter.

01:47:03.120 | It was a two or three-day training.

01:47:04.920 | And you're visiting the instructor,

01:47:08.020 | I want to say it's once or twice a day,

01:47:09.820 | probably once a day, and getting up to speed.

01:47:12.460 | And I did this because I was going

01:47:14.360 | through a period of acute stress.

01:47:18.420 | This was finishing the four-hour chef.

01:47:20.860 | This was actually probably in the years preceding that.

01:47:24.040 | And I had one friend who I'd seen really change

01:47:28.820 | from let's just call hyperkinetic high anxiety

01:47:31.820 | to low anxiety.

01:47:34.260 | And he said, "You have the time, you have the money,

01:47:36.840 | "pay for the course, just take it."

01:47:39.300 | Yes, there are all these criticisms of TM.

01:47:41.520 | Yes, there are all these weird historical anecdotes,

01:47:43.980 | people trying to levitate and all this weirdness.

01:47:46.140 | Just ignore that.

01:47:47.160 | - Trying to levitate, nothing against that.

01:47:48.840 | If you actually levitate, then we got to have a discussion.

01:47:51.320 | But trying to levitate seems like-

01:47:52.580 | - Why not?

01:47:53.420 | - Every kid tries all sorts of things.

01:47:55.420 | - Give it a go.

01:47:56.260 | He's like, "Just put that aside."

01:47:58.380 | Because I kept coming up with pushback.

01:48:01.060 | And he was like, "Look, all I'm saying is,

01:48:03.440 | "it's like a warm bath for your mind

01:48:04.760 | "that you take twice a day and it'll chill you the fuck out.

01:48:06.800 | "So try it."

01:48:07.700 | And I was like, "Okay, fine."

01:48:08.540 | - That's a good endorsement.

01:48:09.500 | - I was like, at this point,

01:48:10.700 | I had been burning the candle at both ends so intensely.

01:48:14.620 | I was like, "Okay."

01:48:15.580 | So there was TM and then I began examining

01:48:17.780 | how I might approach.

01:48:18.900 | Notice I didn't just jump into using them.

01:48:20.740 | I was like, "How could I approach taking psychedelics

01:48:23.700 | "in a logical sequence with proper protections,

01:48:28.700 | "with safety assurances?"

01:48:31.340 | And that took me probably a month or two.

01:48:35.460 | And I was right in the middle of things.

01:48:36.900 | In Northern California, you have access to a lot.

01:48:39.460 | And only then did I start looking at

01:48:41.820 | having my own experiences.

01:48:44.940 | And lo and behold, I mean, I'll cut to the chase,

01:48:48.300 | but the personal outcome,

01:48:51.500 | and there are many different benefits and risks,

01:48:55.860 | I should make very clear.

01:48:57.380 | These things can be extremely dangerous in certain ways.

01:49:00.380 | Generally not physiologically, but they can be dangerous.

01:49:04.540 | I would say instead of three to four times per year,

01:49:07.260 | on average, I probably have one depressive episode

01:49:10.700 | every two years.

01:49:12.260 | - That's a significant improvement.

01:49:14.500 | - Right, I mean, from a quality of life perspective,

01:49:17.240 | those are two different people.

01:49:18.940 | And that then led me to,

01:49:23.140 | and as I did with all my workouts,

01:49:25.180 | I took copious notes over the span,

01:49:29.300 | I mean, now we're looking at 10 plus years.

01:49:32.660 | So if I were to ever write another book,

01:49:35.220 | it would probably be related to all of the really

01:49:38.340 | fine details of the experiments and my learnings,

01:49:44.380 | including some of the more bizarre things

01:49:47.260 | over the last 10 years,

01:49:48.300 | but it would be just a beast to create.

01:49:51.900 | - With psychedelics, experiences with psychedelics.

01:49:54.700 | - Psychedelics and sort of psychedelic adjacent

01:49:58.380 | non-ordinary experiences of consciousness,

01:50:03.060 | which I think often are touching at edges of the same thing,

01:50:08.060 | which is gonna be controversial for some folks.

01:50:10.980 | But to come back to the storyline,

01:50:12.980 | just to put a bow on that,

01:50:14.500 | when I saw the personal outcomes for me,

01:50:19.740 | the anecdotal data from friends who are facilitators

01:50:23.460 | who have worked with thousands of people, right,

01:50:26.060 | which is a pretty good sample size.

01:50:28.340 | Still anecdote, but these are people who are very smart,

01:50:31.660 | who keep records.

01:50:33.340 | And I believe that these people have spotted patterns

01:50:37.500 | that are only going to be possible to test and verify

01:50:40.980 | over the next five to 10 years.

01:50:42.460 | So I, at least as a means of generating hypotheses,

01:50:47.380 | I take these people very seriously.

01:50:49.460 | And then I started to connect with scientists

01:50:54.100 | whose work I had read,

01:50:55.020 | like Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins,

01:50:57.980 | began looking at the most compelling data

01:51:00.060 | related to say MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and complex PTSD.

01:51:05.060 | I made the commitment to myself

01:51:10.380 | that as soon as I had enough money to move the dial,

01:51:13.060 | 'cause I really felt like these tools

01:51:15.420 | were so outside of the normal paradigm

01:51:18.580 | of psychiatry and pharmacology.

01:51:21.900 | And that made me very excited because it was uncrowded.

01:51:24.500 | There's very little funding coming into the space.

01:51:27.100 | It was high leverage.

01:51:28.220 | And I looked at it just as I've looked

01:51:29.780 | at my many startup investments.

01:51:31.580 | Limited downside risk, really high upside potential.

01:51:35.940 | And I should say before that,

01:51:37.940 | I'd already been funding in a very small way science.

01:51:42.340 | So the first check I ever wrote was personally

01:51:45.340 | to Adam Ghazali's lab at UCSF.

01:51:47.980 | - Yeah, great lab.

01:51:48.820 | - Which at the time was looking at software.

01:51:52.940 | He's not gonna like this description,

01:51:54.260 | but I'm gonna simplify it.

01:51:55.580 | Software that might attenuate

01:51:58.060 | or reverse age-related cognitive impairment,

01:52:01.900 | specifically related to various aspects of attention.

01:52:06.900 | And that was my first foray

01:52:10.740 | into funding early-stage science,

01:52:12.500 | which was very analogous to funding early-stage startups.

01:52:17.020 | And then later on, to touch on the reputational thing,

01:52:19.980 | I know this is a TED Talk, so thank you for listening.

01:52:22.260 | - No, this is great.

01:52:23.100 | Please, you're always so gracious on your podcast.

01:52:26.420 | This is what people want.

01:52:27.740 | This is certainly what I want to hear.

01:52:29.660 | - So on the reputational side, you're right that

01:52:32.500 | at the time, especially, let's just call it 2013 to 2015,

01:52:37.500 | this was not a comfortable national conversation

01:52:41.180 | of any type.

01:52:42.020 | - Yeah, I wouldn't have had this conversation back then.

01:52:43.860 | - No way.

01:52:44.780 | - I don't know that I would have lost my job.

01:52:46.580 | It just would have raised a lot of eyebrows.

01:52:48.440 | Now that such studies are happening at Stanford.

01:52:50.180 | - Yeah, the perception was

01:52:53.700 | that these are a professional third rail,

01:52:57.060 | at the very least, right?

01:52:58.540 | Also illegal, therefore, if I talk about them,

01:53:01.660 | am I giving someone probable cause?

01:53:03.460 | Am I gonna get myself in some type

01:53:05.060 | of really tricky legal situation, et cetera?

01:53:07.400 | There are a lot of considerations.

01:53:09.040 | But I tested that, just like I was saying,

01:53:12.580 | I like to capture my assumptions on paper

01:53:14.620 | so I can stress this.

01:53:15.460 | And I was like, okay, I think that might be true.

01:53:19.060 | Most people I know think that is true, but is it true?

01:53:22.300 | How could we test to see if that is true or not?

01:53:25.700 | And I decided to crowdfund

01:53:29.320 | for a Hopkins pilot study looking at psilocybin

01:53:33.540 | for treatment-resistant depression.

01:53:35.540 | And I thought to myself, okay,

01:53:38.100 | we have a couple of things falling in our favor here.

01:53:42.720 | Number one, depression does not discriminate.

01:53:45.740 | So across socioeconomic classes, across gender,

01:53:48.380 | across race, this is a problem.

01:53:50.900 | Almost everyone knows someone who takes antidepressants

01:53:54.740 | who is still depressed.

01:53:56.020 | Okay, treatment-resistant depression,

01:53:58.860 | therefore, is the indication.

01:54:00.900 | Psilocybin is the intervention.

01:54:04.140 | Let me crowdfund, and I did that throughout the time,

01:54:07.860 | CrowdRise, which was co-founded by Edward Norton,

01:54:10.820 | who had become a friend and was--

01:54:12.340 | - The actor, Edward Norton. - The actor,

01:54:13.460 | who's very smart, very, very, very smart.

01:54:16.220 | Also one of the best investors I've ever met,

01:54:18.620 | which a lot of people don't know.

01:54:20.020 | Very bright guy.

01:54:21.400 | And so, crowdfunded, and I also like to put my money

01:54:26.400 | where my mouth is.

01:54:27.900 | I said, okay, guys, I'm gonna seed this.

01:54:29.500 | I'm putting in X.

01:54:30.840 | The goal is to raise, I think it was 80,000,

01:54:32.740 | something like that, for the following study.

01:54:35.700 | And then I was like, let's see.

01:54:37.700 | Let's see what happens.

01:54:38.780 | And there was basically zero negative blowback.

01:54:44.580 | And not only was there no discernible negative blowback,

01:54:48.580 | a number of people, and this was deliberate,

01:54:50.620 | I wanted to see this, a number of people came out

01:54:52.680 | of the woodwork to support in a bigger way.

01:54:54.940 | And I was like, oh, okay, I see you.

01:54:57.380 | A handful of folks I knew.

01:54:58.460 | And I was like, oh, interesting.

01:54:59.580 | Okay, there are at least a half a dozen folks

01:55:02.340 | who are studying the same thing,

01:55:05.260 | or paying attention to the same thing.

01:55:07.420 | And then I just got bolder.

01:55:08.600 | I was like, okay, if I tested that, let me push.

01:55:12.380 | And then let's see what happens, and I'll wait.

01:55:15.040 | And lo and behold, I realized that the perception

01:55:19.580 | did not match the reality.

01:55:20.700 | The reality was, if you're talking about indications

01:55:23.220 | that cause an incredible amount of suffering

01:55:25.180 | for a very large number of people,

01:55:27.420 | even those who are anti-drug, per se,

01:55:32.940 | just say no to drugs, want solutions.

01:55:35.440 | And the current treatments for many of these things

01:55:37.900 | do not work very well.

01:55:39.700 | And in the best of cases are often masking symptoms

01:55:43.060 | and not addressing root causes, I would say.

01:55:46.620 | So at that point, I just went whole hog,

01:55:49.260 | and I said, okay, look, I like to think

01:55:51.780 | that I am exactly what you see is what you get, right?

01:55:54.500 | The person you talk to off camera,

01:55:56.180 | person you talk to on camera, same.

01:55:58.520 | And if I start feeling like I have too much to protect,

01:56:03.440 | I want to do something to counteract that.

01:56:06.500 | In other words, if I feel like I need to censor

01:56:10.220 | my true feelings and beliefs, maybe not share my hardships,

01:56:13.860 | perhaps not promote certain things

01:56:16.540 | because I have a reputation to lose,

01:56:18.260 | that's a fragile position.

01:56:20.300 | I want to be as anti-fragile as possible.

01:56:22.820 | And so by talking about this, I viewed it as a way

01:56:25.580 | of inoculating myself against fear of reputation loss.

01:56:29.060 | Like, okay, let me push this, I'll ride this horse.

01:56:31.420 | Other people might not, but I want to remove the stigma

01:56:34.740 | for funding purposes, hopefully open up federal funding,

01:56:38.340 | that's starting to happen now from different agencies,

01:56:41.780 | and then to focus on access and reduction of cost

01:56:47.680 | and insurance reimbursement and so on.

01:56:50.060 | So I set a game plan, let's call it maybe five years ago,

01:56:53.260 | and I've just been slowly, methodically

01:56:56.500 | executing on that since.

01:56:58.360 | And the reason I chose this to focus on,

01:57:02.160 | and I've funded other things,

01:57:03.300 | but I've really focused on this, mental health therapeutics,

01:57:05.940 | which is not limited to psychedel.

01:57:07.740 | And we can talk about some other things

01:57:09.780 | that I find interesting.

01:57:10.660 | But psychedelics are, like I said,

01:57:13.700 | what makes it attractive.

01:57:15.500 | Very uncrowded, you can do a lot with a small amount of money

01:57:19.540 | unlike, say, in cancer research, can be very hard.

01:57:22.100 | Like, okay, you're a deca-billionaire, great,

01:57:23.740 | maybe you can do something interesting.

01:57:25.340 | And I'm sure other people could,

01:57:26.520 | but if you have $20,000, $50,000,

01:57:29.620 | it's gonna be hard to make a dent there.

01:57:31.000 | In psychedelics, you can actually still make a difference.

01:57:33.820 | And very high leverage in part

01:57:35.680 | because these compounds seem to challenge

01:57:38.680 | much of what we assume to be true

01:57:40.840 | about treating mental health.

01:57:43.360 | And so that makes for an attractive bet.

01:57:47.400 | So that's where I've been going.

01:57:49.980 | - Yeah, I'm so glad you shared that with us

01:57:52.520 | and that you did that exploration

01:57:54.780 | and that you've been spearheading the funding efforts.

01:58:00.480 | This podcast has a premium channel

01:58:03.540 | that's for raising funds for scientific studies.

01:58:06.360 | We are in the process now

01:58:07.740 | making our first four contributions.

01:58:10.380 | One of those includes work in Nolan Williams Laboratory

01:58:13.580 | at Stanford combining transcranial magnetic stimulation

01:58:16.740 | with studies of Ibogaine and 5-MeO DMT,

01:58:21.140 | maybe a few other things.

01:58:22.140 | But basically, he's free to do what he wants with the funds.

01:58:24.440 | We trust him to do great work.

01:58:25.940 | But that, again, was inspired by you, right?

01:58:29.820 | A podcast with a scientific slant, certainly.

01:58:33.120 | This podcast obviously has a scientific slant,

01:58:36.720 | but the idea of doing philanthropy for the sorts of work

01:58:39.760 | that really deserves funding and exploration.

01:58:42.920 | And by the way,

01:58:44.540 | in thinking about other hybrid things

01:58:47.680 | that would be fun to do,

01:58:48.520 | I mean, I would love to contribute and join those efforts

01:58:52.600 | 'cause the work to continue to raise funding

01:58:55.640 | for psychedelic studies

01:58:56.820 | and all these great laboratories continues, right?

01:58:59.440 | - It continues.

01:59:00.280 | - And you've rallied a collection

01:59:01.740 | of some pretty powerful people to contribute to this.

01:59:05.300 | And I know you've joined arms with Michael Pollan

01:59:08.420 | in many ways.

01:59:09.260 | Do you want to talk about the fellowships

01:59:10.620 | that you guys put together?

01:59:11.540 | I find that really cool.

01:59:12.380 | You've got fellowships in the works

01:59:15.000 | or maybe already happening at UC Berkeley.

01:59:17.660 | Is that right?

01:59:18.500 | - At UC Berkeley, yeah.

01:59:19.320 | So what I try to do,

01:59:20.720 | and for people who want to check it out,

01:59:22.740 | the name of the foundation is SAISEI Foundation.

01:59:24.940 | And let me explain that for a second.

01:59:26.280 | So it's S-A-I-S-E-I.

01:59:28.360 | So saiseifoundation.org.

01:59:31.120 | I speak Japanese.

01:59:31.960 | I went there as an exchange student

01:59:33.240 | and speak, read and write it.

01:59:35.180 | Still to this day pretty well.

01:59:37.160 | SAISEI can mean a lot of things.

01:59:38.640 | It means rebirth in Japanese.

01:59:40.400 | And I've seen what can only be described

01:59:44.040 | or can certainly be described as rebirth

01:59:45.980 | in so many clinical outcomes

01:59:47.920 | that I thought it was appropriate to use.

01:59:50.880 | And what I've tried to do with the foundation is,

01:59:58.040 | I think, do what I'm pretty good at,

01:59:59.160 | which is trying to peek around corners

02:00:01.000 | and find something to prototype, right?

02:00:04.000 | So just like the CGM and like, all right,

02:00:06.000 | how can I, just getting a hold of a Dexcom back then

02:00:08.920 | when it was just for type 1 diabetics was hard.

02:00:11.760 | - Isn't this the thing that you have to actually

02:00:13.240 | go under the skin?

02:00:14.680 | - It's like taking a barbecue prong

02:00:16.100 | and putting it under your abdominal skin.

02:00:18.980 | It was not comfortable.

02:00:20.120 | - Can you describe your cortisol level

02:00:23.220 | and subjective terms when you're at home,

02:00:25.920 | you got this thing and you're about to implant it

02:00:28.160 | and you don't have any precedent.

02:00:29.200 | It's not like this is, you know, like levels

02:00:31.440 | or one of these other CGMs that are out there.

02:00:34.060 | You know, you stamp the thing in,

02:00:35.260 | you can look on Instagram and see someone else do it.

02:00:37.840 | There's nothing like that.

02:00:38.660 | So you're at home wondering if you're going

02:00:40.040 | to skewer your liver.

02:00:41.080 | - Yeah, I'm at home doing it myself

02:00:43.160 | and I'm sweating like a stuck pig.

02:00:45.480 | I'm sitting there, I'm like, my God,

02:00:46.640 | I don't even know if I can hold off.

02:00:47.460 | - Is your girlfriend there like to support you

02:00:49.360 | in case you die?

02:00:51.200 | - I think at the time she wasn't

02:00:52.440 | because she was squeamish and didn't want to see it.

02:00:54.520 | And so I'm sitting there at my kitchen table.

02:00:57.320 | I remember this, God, I'm sweating just thinking about it.

02:01:00.040 | And no videos to watch.

02:01:03.520 | And wasn't really supposed to have it in the first place.

02:01:07.640 | And the device for readout, by the way, no iPhone, right?

02:01:12.320 | So it was like this janky pager looking thing

02:01:16.360 | that had a readout that made you think

02:01:17.880 | you were playing Pong or something.

02:01:19.200 | I mean, it was very--

02:01:20.040 | - The green tint screen.

02:01:21.960 | - Yeah, green tint screen.

02:01:22.800 | - With the dot font.

02:01:24.000 | - It was so primitive.

02:01:25.880 | And put this thing under my skin, would tape,

02:01:30.880 | I would cut a Ziploc bag and put it on top

02:01:33.600 | and masking tape it to my skin to take showers

02:01:36.920 | because otherwise it wouldn't work.

02:01:39.380 | And it was great.

02:01:41.560 | And I'll just say that I don't use a seat.

02:01:44.040 | - It was great.

02:01:44.880 | You realize you said it was great.

02:01:46.020 | - I did.

02:01:46.860 | I did say it was great because--

02:01:47.680 | - I'm sweating and I was afraid.

02:01:49.240 | - But it gave me a lot of insight.

02:01:51.400 | And then once I had the insight over a course

02:01:54.780 | of a handful of weeks, then I felt like

02:01:56.120 | I didn't really need it anymore.

02:01:57.520 | And that was also just a heavy tax to pay

02:02:01.440 | to have to wear that thing around.

02:02:02.360 | Look like you have a, what is it called,

02:02:04.440 | a colostomy bag or something.

02:02:05.960 | It was big, it was bulky.

02:02:08.100 | So just like I did that, I wanted to do a proof of concept.

02:02:13.100 | The goal was can I use this for healthy normal applications?

02:02:19.520 | Will the insights be actionable?

02:02:22.760 | And they were, lo and behold.

02:02:24.040 | Similarly with the foundation,

02:02:26.580 | since I'm dealing with smaller amounts of money,

02:02:28.360 | and I'm not in the billionaire club

02:02:30.760 | by any stretch of the imagination,

02:02:33.280 | and science can be expensive, I'm looking for small bets.

02:02:36.600 | Where can I pilot something that if successful

02:02:40.040 | will be emulated or can be scaled?

02:02:42.240 | And so in the crowdfunding for the Hopkins

02:02:46.760 | treatment resistant depression pilot study,

02:02:49.240 | we ended up exceeding the goal.

02:02:50.420 | They were able to recruit more subjects.

02:02:53.040 | In the case of UC Berkeley, Michael Pollan

02:02:56.280 | and I partnered on this and my foundation funded it.

02:02:59.280 | The Ferris UC Berkeley Journalism Fellowship,

02:03:02.160 | Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship,

02:03:04.120 | is providing funding to up and coming journalists

02:03:08.720 | who want to focus on psychedelics as their beat,

02:03:11.720 | which to this date has not been financially feasible.

02:03:16.360 | You just don't have the space to do

02:03:19.940 | really long form investigative work.

02:03:24.280 | The hope being that these journalists can apply

02:03:29.780 | their skills and their dedication to examining

02:03:33.400 | different facets of the psychedelic ecosystem,

02:03:36.720 | therapeutic potential, regulatory issues, et cetera,

02:03:41.360 | in a way that can shape and inform national

02:03:45.640 | and international discourse in a very critical way.

02:03:49.720 | Because these things are not a panacea,

02:03:51.960 | there's a lot of claims that are made about these

02:03:54.400 | that are totally unbacked by any type of science,

02:03:57.800 | and there are a lot of charlatans.

02:03:58.920 | And so I wanted to also invite really competent,

02:04:03.700 | really good journalists to the table

02:04:05.920 | who might want to watch for bad actors.

02:04:08.640 | I think that's really important.

02:04:10.240 | And so this fellowship has been,

02:04:15.580 | has been awarding fellows with these grants.

02:04:18.360 | And I think it's a relatively small amount of money.

02:04:20.080 | It's like $10,000 per or something like that.

02:04:22.520 | But the outcomes have been amazing.

02:04:24.520 | We had a huge, I want to say a 7,000 word piece

02:04:27.480 | that was one of the main features in Rolling Stone magazine,

02:04:30.760 | huge piece in National Geographic focused on iboga

02:04:34.280 | and fair trade and some of the implications

02:04:37.800 | for local harvesting and or overharvesting,

02:04:43.880 | all the dynamics present in that,

02:04:46.500 | which I think has some incredible promise

02:04:49.140 | for particular forms of opioid use,

02:04:53.380 | opioid use disorder in particular,

02:04:54.820 | but that has been a huge success.

02:04:57.820 | So the hope is that other journalism schools

02:05:00.320 | will say that's a great idea.

02:05:01.420 | And I will have de-risked it for some other philanthropists

02:05:05.020 | or foundation or government, say director and agencies say,

02:05:09.420 | okay, we'll green light that, right?

02:05:11.340 | Because I've done it and it's been received very well.

02:05:13.780 | And it's had a real impact on how things are moving along.

02:05:18.180 | Another one would be say at Harvard Poplar,

02:05:20.580 | this is at Harvard Law School.

02:05:21.780 | It was the first, is the first dedicated team

02:05:25.160 | focused on law, policy and regulation related to psychedelics

02:05:29.420 | from a legal perspective.

02:05:30.520 | - Super important. - Super important.

02:05:32.540 | - Super, super important.

02:05:34.080 | Also another pilot, let's just call it a proof of concept

02:05:39.540 | that Sci-Safe Foundation funded was helping to develop

02:05:43.980 | curricula for, I think it was Yale, Johns Hopkins and NYU,

02:05:48.980 | effectively an accreditation or module

02:05:52.580 | that they could put into their existing psychiatry MD

02:05:56.460 | programs such that people could develop

02:06:01.980 | the skills necessary and the understanding necessary

02:06:05.300 | to administer psychedelic assisted therapies

02:06:07.740 | if and when they become legal, prescribable.

02:06:10.900 | - If I understand correctly, it sounds like within the next

02:06:15.140 | 12 to 24 months, MDMA assisted psychotherapy

02:06:19.700 | for the treatment of trauma is likely to become legal

02:06:24.420 | in the hands of psychiatrists at least

02:06:27.420 | and maybe certain clinical psychologists as well

02:06:29.740 | in the U.S., is that right?

02:06:31.820 | Through the efforts of the MAPS group.

02:06:33.820 | - Yeah, through the efforts of maps.org

02:06:35.820 | and Rick Doblin and many others,

02:06:37.820 | that is the tip of the spear.

02:06:39.340 | So I think anyone who's interested in psychedelics

02:06:43.420 | should have a vested interest in supporting those efforts.

02:06:47.760 | Not because we know everything works, I wanna be clear.

02:06:52.300 | Not because we know a priori that all of these things

02:06:55.040 | do all the things, no.

02:06:56.280 | But if MDMA fails, it's gonna be very hard to draft.

02:07:01.280 | It'll be impossible to draft on that with commands

02:07:05.100 | that are more difficult to administer like psilocybin,

02:07:08.620 | which would be next in line for alcohol use disorder,

02:07:11.340 | also major depressive disorder.

02:07:13.020 | So I really feel that just like everything

02:07:17.220 | I've talked about, whether it's networking,

02:07:19.380 | putting together for our body or trying to change

02:07:24.120 | national policy and say reclassification of these compounds,

02:07:29.120 | getting them out of schedule one to some extent,

02:07:34.900 | you wanna break it down into its constituent pieces.

02:07:38.220 | You wanna do an 80/20 analysis,

02:07:39.700 | figure out what the critical few are

02:07:41.660 | and then put them in a logical sequence

02:07:43.360 | and execute the plan.

02:07:45.220 | One of the greatest weaknesses in the psychedelic ecosystem

02:07:47.600 | is there are a lot of people who just wanna do

02:07:49.300 | all the things and save all the people

02:07:51.300 | and all the animals and all the places all at once.

02:07:54.140 | And that just doesn't work very well.

02:07:55.620 | There are also some really good people who are executing.

02:07:58.660 | And we could talk about the for-profit side and so on.

02:08:00.460 | But I've been very, very, very pleased

02:08:05.140 | with the outcomes that Psi-State Foundation

02:08:07.740 | has been able to achieve with very limited money.

02:08:10.620 | I'm prouder of those outcomes

02:08:12.060 | than I am of the startup record.

02:08:13.420 | And the startup record's pretty good.

02:08:15.740 | And it's the same lens.

02:08:17.220 | I'm using the same filters and the same approach,

02:08:22.220 | which is kinda what I'm always looking for.

02:08:24.060 | I'm looking for stuff that'll translate across fields

02:08:26.460 | if possible.

02:08:27.300 | And then you mentioned one like TMS, I think.

02:08:29.860 | TMS, very interesting.

02:08:31.700 | - Transcranial magnetic stimulation.

02:08:33.300 | Yeah, which at one point was more commonly used

02:08:36.260 | to inhibit specific brain areas.

02:08:38.340 | This is a non-invasive technique.

02:08:40.400 | I've had it done where it's over my motor cortex

02:08:42.420 | and you're tapping your finger

02:08:43.260 | and all of a sudden you can't tap your fingers.

02:08:44.940 | It's pretty eerie, but now it can be used to stimulate

02:08:47.580 | at particular frequencies, enhance neuroplasticity.

02:08:50.300 | And in combination with psychedelics is the,

02:08:53.060 | that's kind of the burning question now.

02:08:54.340 | Can you get a synergistic effect of TMS and psychedelics?

02:08:59.500 | Maybe not just during the psilocybin or iboga journey,

02:09:04.500 | but in the days and weeks after when we know for sure

02:09:07.780 | a lot of plasticity is still occurring.

02:09:09.580 | So keep the plasticity on board or accelerate it.

02:09:12.900 | - Yeah, so TMS also is a monotherapy.

02:09:16.220 | Very interesting to me for depression, anxiety,

02:09:19.860 | even substance use disorders, super interesting.

02:09:22.980 | And there are many different protocols,

02:09:24.420 | all sorts of different technology.

02:09:27.460 | I would say low intensity or low power ultrasound,

02:09:30.520 | also super interesting for various applications,

02:09:35.520 | potentially to addiction.

02:09:37.580 | So I'm not to be clear,

02:09:40.420 | a card carrying evangelist for psychedelics.

02:09:45.420 | I am a proponent of looking for high leverage uncrowded bets

02:09:52.620 | with limited downside and testing them out.

02:09:55.640 | And very optimistic about psychedelics.

02:09:59.620 | If anyone listening has a family history of say,

02:10:02.300 | schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder,

02:10:06.140 | which we might, which this is being very simplistic,

02:10:09.620 | but categorize or describe as more sort of chaotic conditions

02:10:14.620 | compared to hyper-rigid conditions like an OCD

02:10:19.480 | or anorexia nervosa, chronic depression, et cetera.

02:10:24.920 | And then we can talk about why some of these psychedelics,

02:10:27.940 | at least some of the classical psychedelics

02:10:29.220 | seem to have cross-efficacy with multiple conditions,

02:10:33.460 | but psychedelics seem very helpful

02:10:36.580 | for certain types of hyper-rigidity.

02:10:39.100 | When you get into schizophrenia

02:10:41.540 | and borderline personality disorder,

02:10:43.260 | they can be really heavily contraindicated.

02:10:46.200 | Not to say that they cause those conditions,

02:10:48.720 | but they can precipitate the onset of those symptoms.

02:10:52.860 | And for that reason can be very destabilizing

02:10:55.580 | and dangerous for certain people.

02:10:58.240 | However, that's where something like metabolic psychiatry

02:11:02.140 | comes in and the use of ketosis and the ketogenic diet,

02:11:05.360 | which appears to be very effective in some patients

02:11:10.240 | for that grouping of say more chaotic conditions,

02:11:14.380 | which is very exciting.

02:11:16.240 | So I'm interested in any tools that are off the beaten path

02:11:21.220 | that seem to raise interesting questions

02:11:23.460 | that have not been answered in a satisfying way

02:11:26.580 | yet in medicine.

02:11:28.020 | And I think we're still largely in the dark ages

02:11:32.480 | with respect to psychiatry.

02:11:34.380 | - Oh, I think the best psychiatrist would agree with you.

02:11:37.940 | - Yeah, and the best psychiatrists and the best scientists

02:11:42.940 | and the best fill in the blank are acutely aware

02:11:46.780 | of the limitations of our current methods

02:11:49.500 | and the limitations of our current knowledge.

02:11:51.980 | So I think the mark of a good thinker,

02:11:53.580 | the mark of a good scientist,

02:11:55.480 | the mark of a good fill in the blank,

02:11:56.900 | anything is someone who says I have no idea

02:11:59.860 | or we have no idea a lot.

02:12:02.260 | - And hopefully they also say let's go figure it out

02:12:05.180 | or try some things.

02:12:06.260 | And I really want to thank you for sharing that narrative,

02:12:10.900 | especially because it makes clear that you brought

02:12:12.280 | the same systematic process of using

02:12:16.520 | and asking excellent questions to arrive at solutions,

02:12:21.420 | to arrive at more questions, to fund areas of inquiry

02:12:25.620 | and to do it all in this really structured way.

02:12:27.400 | As you said, from policy all the way down

02:12:29.940 | to like how many grams or X of some substance

02:12:34.940 | somebody might take.

02:12:36.340 | I mean, I think Matthew Johnson's laboratory at Hopkins,

02:12:40.100 | Roland Griffiths, Robin Cardart Harris at UCSF,

02:12:44.400 | Nolan Williams, the MAPS group, Rick Doblin.

02:12:46.940 | - Peter Hendricks at University of Alabama

02:12:48.940 | looking at cocaine addiction and other things.

02:12:51.620 | - Yeah, you, Michael Pollan.

02:12:54.160 | I'm leaving some names out here

02:12:55.340 | and I don't want to take anything away

02:12:56.660 | from the classic as they're called,

02:13:00.900 | explorers of psychedelics and writers about psychedelics.

02:13:03.640 | But we are in the moment of a Renaissance now

02:13:06.820 | and it's important that this have a lot of fuel.

02:13:08.860 | So we'll put a link to your philanthropy efforts

02:13:12.480 | and the journalism fellowships as well

02:13:15.180 | because I think there's going to be a lot of interest there.

02:13:16.960 | And I'm huge supporter of what you're doing as you know.

02:13:19.960 | And I just think it's the way great science

02:13:22.620 | and clinical progress is made.

02:13:25.140 | So yeah.

02:13:25.980 | - Yeah, thanks Andrew.

02:13:27.020 | - Yeah, which brings me to another parallel topic.

02:13:30.420 | You know, it used to be that meditation and psychedelics

02:13:32.460 | were nested in the same territory.

02:13:34.660 | This would be in the late sixties, early seventies,

02:13:36.460 | the birth of places like Esalen, et cetera,

02:13:39.100 | or the consequence of the dual exploration of those things.

02:13:42.260 | Meditation sort of escaped from the psychedelics umbrella

02:13:47.260 | and vice versa starting sometime in the mid two thousands

02:13:52.360 | when neuroimaging became a little bit more accessible.

02:13:55.620 | And, you know, I think nowadays if you told anybody,

02:13:57.920 | okay, you know, meditation is good for you.

02:14:00.180 | It can help ratchet down your anxiety,

02:14:03.500 | give more self-awareness, you know, improve sleep

02:14:06.600 | and on and on, maybe even give some insight

02:14:08.780 | into consciousness.

02:14:09.680 | No one's going to bulk.

02:14:11.000 | There's just a lot of studies or thousands of studies.

02:14:13.660 | My laboratory's done a few of them.

02:14:15.360 | There are other laboratories who have done far more.

02:14:17.900 | The book "Altered Traits" is the one that comes to mind

02:14:19.820 | and the group out of Wisconsin was early to the game on this.

02:14:23.160 | In any event, you talked about TM.

02:14:27.620 | I'm curious from a practical standpoint,

02:14:31.340 | do you still meditate daily?

02:14:33.800 | Do you do meditation retreats?

02:14:35.540 | What sorts of meditative practices do you have?

02:14:39.500 | 'Cause I realize this can be done walking,

02:14:41.680 | writing is its own form of meditation.

02:14:43.180 | What sorts of formal practices do you still engage in now?

02:14:46.480 | - Yeah, I do 10 to 20 minutes in the morning.

02:14:48.680 | So I am not currently doing the TM twice daily, 20 minutes.

02:14:53.060 | I think that would be better for me, probably.

02:14:55.180 | - Do you set a clock and you...

02:14:57.260 | - Yeah, I'll set a clock,

02:14:58.520 | which would be more of the concentration practice

02:15:02.060 | of say a TM where you're repeating a mantra.

02:15:04.020 | Honestly, it could be any, in my opinion,

02:15:07.260 | some TM purists will bulk at this,

02:15:09.020 | but it could be really any nonsense.

02:15:11.380 | Syllable could be a word,

02:15:12.700 | although I think something without any attached meaning

02:15:15.040 | is probably more beneficial for a host of reasons.

02:15:17.480 | So it could be a concentration practice

02:15:19.360 | with 20 minutes of sitting.

02:15:20.700 | It might also be a guided meditation,

02:15:24.160 | and I have no vested interest in this app,

02:15:26.420 | but I think the Waking Up app by Sam Harris is fantastic.

02:15:29.880 | I have used the introductory course,

02:15:33.300 | which is Sam leading you through my catnip,

02:15:36.780 | which is a logical progression of skill development

02:15:39.940 | from day one, two, three, and forward.

02:15:42.940 | I have gone through that course multiple times

02:15:45.580 | when I'm getting back on the horse for meditation

02:15:47.920 | as a bit of a reboot.

02:15:49.380 | Once you develop, I think,

02:15:50.900 | a certain degree of awareness and mindfulness,

02:15:54.980 | I do think there are other activities

02:15:56.980 | that probably allow you the parallel experience

02:16:01.980 | of doing one thing while experiencing

02:16:04.820 | some of the benefits of meditation.

02:16:06.820 | And so for me, I wonder at times,

02:16:10.420 | are the benefits of meditation

02:16:12.080 | the concentration practice itself?

02:16:14.140 | Is it just sitting still with my eyes closed,

02:16:17.980 | down-regulating my system a little bit,

02:16:19.900 | activating my parasympathetic,

02:16:21.740 | and not rushing or doing anything for 20 minutes?

02:16:25.180 | Is that it?

02:16:26.020 | Maybe.

02:16:27.180 | Is it simply correcting my posture for 20 minutes?

02:16:31.860 | How do I weight these different inputs?

02:16:34.620 | And the short answer is you probably don't need to know,

02:16:38.220 | but I have found that spending time in silence in nature

02:16:43.220 | without anything to do,

02:16:47.340 | disallowing myself from doing things,

02:16:50.340 | no note-taking, no reading, et cetera,

02:16:52.380 | and spending, I have spent a number of extended fasts

02:16:56.900 | in nature, just water only by myself.

02:16:59.720 | No talking, no reading, no writing.

02:17:01.280 | - What's extended?

02:17:02.580 | - Seven days, generally.

02:17:04.180 | - Wow.

02:17:05.020 | So you're camping in nature with just water.

02:17:08.260 | - Yep, that's it, by myself.

02:17:09.660 | And there are risks associated with that, right?

02:17:12.500 | You got to be careful, not stupid about it,

02:17:14.160 | but that does a lot for me with some persistent benefits.

02:17:19.160 | - Are there some favorite places

02:17:22.380 | that you've gone into nature?

02:17:24.180 | It doesn't have to be too fast.

02:17:25.580 | For instance, I'm a big fan of some of the national parks

02:17:28.500 | up in the Pacific Northwest,

02:17:29.760 | because it's like being transported to a different planet.

02:17:32.260 | Yosemite is obviously amazing,

02:17:34.120 | but any favorite spots where people

02:17:37.700 | won't go looking for you there, don't worry.

02:17:40.100 | You live in Austin all the time.

02:17:42.300 | - That's right, yeah.

02:17:43.180 | So I would say Colorado, Utah, New Mexico,

02:17:48.180 | spending time in mountains, around rivers, lakes,

02:17:52.560 | I find very therapeutic and just gorgeous.

02:17:57.180 | I do think we suffer from odd efficiency disorder,

02:18:01.780 | you know, a bit of ADD when we're trapped in the mundane

02:18:05.700 | for too long with too much distraction,

02:18:07.860 | with too many to-dos, with too many relationships.

02:18:12.280 | And there's no space for awe there.

02:18:14.800 | There isn't the room necessary.

02:18:16.420 | Awe isn't, from my perspective,

02:18:19.220 | generally a quick hit that you get in the 30 seconds

02:18:22.280 | between using two abs.

02:18:23.640 | There's more breathing room required

02:18:26.540 | for genuine transcendent experience of awe.

02:18:28.880 | So I try to, on a yearly basis,

02:18:31.980 | as one of my top priorities,

02:18:34.080 | block out these weeks of time in nature.

02:18:37.040 | - Yeah, last year was the first year I did that.

02:18:38.840 | I went out to Colorado in August and just took daily hikes.

02:18:43.640 | I stayed in a hotel.

02:18:44.860 | I'm not as beastie as you, doing water fasts.

02:18:47.520 | I was eating every day, but it was spectacular.

02:18:51.520 | One thing I noticed, and I'd like to know your process on,

02:18:54.560 | how do you handle going back into life?

02:18:58.060 | - Great question.

02:18:59.020 | - Because those days were and are amazing.

02:19:01.860 | Detached and maybe one text message here or there

02:19:05.460 | or in between hikes or something,

02:19:06.960 | and then you just really clued in.

02:19:08.320 | Even the process of watching a show at night,

02:19:11.620 | one felt so rich and like enough.

02:19:13.620 | So I wasn't as aesthetic as you

02:19:16.040 | and really cleaned all the clutter.

02:19:18.800 | But once you return to life,

02:19:20.740 | it's almost like you're being awash in demands.

02:19:23.560 | And I can see from a place of more equanimity

02:19:26.100 | how one could make better choices.

02:19:27.520 | But how do you handle those transitions?

02:19:29.740 | - The re-entry, yeah.

02:19:31.400 | So before getting to the re-entry,

02:19:33.160 | I think it might make sense for me to talk

02:19:34.800 | about what comes before.

02:19:36.120 | So let's say it's like pre, during, post.

02:19:40.960 | Part of the reason I do these one week or longer periods

02:19:46.800 | off the grid is because it forces me

02:19:50.400 | to put better systems in place.

02:19:52.260 | So there's the benefit that you derive from say that week.

02:19:56.800 | And I have three weeks coming up right after this interview

02:19:59.520 | where I'm gonna be off the grid.

02:20:01.320 | To set myself up for three weeks off the grid,

02:20:04.240 | I have a team, I have the podcast,

02:20:06.980 | I have a lot of things that are in motion

02:20:08.880 | at any given point in time.

02:20:10.320 | If you disappear for say a two to four week period,

02:20:15.620 | generally you cannot let the whole house catch on fire,

02:20:17.840 | then come back and put it out effectively.

02:20:20.000 | Which means you need to put some policies

02:20:21.680 | and rules and so on in place in advance.

02:20:24.760 | And there's a carryover effect that has a host of benefits

02:20:28.840 | and makes things smoother for the re-entry,

02:20:31.240 | so they're related.

02:20:32.080 | Like the more you set up the pre,

02:20:35.240 | the easier the post is gonna be.

02:20:37.280 | And then you have this beautiful expansive experience

02:20:40.400 | in nature, whatever it might be,

02:20:41.720 | whether you're making it a suffer fest like I do

02:20:45.040 | or at a hotel at night, either way, these things can work.

02:20:49.200 | And nature in and of itself is super helpful.

02:20:51.000 | I do think that a lot of the time we like to imagine

02:20:55.320 | because we're driven, smart, accomplished people

02:20:58.760 | that our problems are very complex.

02:21:00.400 | And at the end of the day it's like,

02:21:01.440 | you just need some time in nature and a cold shower

02:21:04.760 | and some fucking macadamia nuts and you'll be fine.

02:21:08.040 | You don't need to solve all the existential dilemmas

02:21:10.580 | of humankind actually or fancy pharmaceuticals.

02:21:13.440 | So you have this experience over this week

02:21:17.680 | and what I will do then is set at least a,

02:21:22.680 | let's call it integration period of two to three days

02:21:26.440 | where I will slowly edge back in to my previous routine.

02:21:31.440 | I will not, within 12 hours of getting back

02:21:36.180 | to so-called civilization,

02:21:38.000 | have a day full of calls or meetings.

02:21:40.440 | I will not do that.

02:21:41.280 | It's too much of a shock to the system

02:21:42.920 | and I think it robs you of a tail end of benefits,

02:21:46.280 | which would also be the case with say,

02:21:48.200 | fast or ketogenic diet or any number of interventions.

02:21:51.840 | You can squeeze out a long tail of benefits

02:21:54.720 | if you make a handful of changes.

02:21:56.040 | For instance, after an extended fast,

02:21:58.060 | what if you started with a sub caloric ketogenic diet

02:22:03.060 | for a few days?

02:22:04.280 | You get to extend some of the benefits

02:22:06.560 | as opposed to going straight back to say,

02:22:09.000 | a diet that includes a lot of carbohydrates.

02:22:11.600 | Similarly, when you create more of a vacuum,

02:22:15.160 | more space for awe, insight, reflection, recovery,

02:22:20.160 | I think you're doing yourself a disservice

02:22:22.100 | if you jump from park into sixth gear.

02:22:24.880 | And so I plan for that.

02:22:26.120 | And it's a function of scheduling.

02:22:29.220 | I also have a predictable weekly schedule.

02:22:32.200 | So I tend to schedule podcast recordings

02:22:34.560 | on Mondays and Fridays.

02:22:36.600 | In preparation for an extended trip,

02:22:39.280 | I will batch a lot of similar activities

02:22:42.000 | that we have, say a bunch of episodes in the bank

02:22:44.660 | that are pre-scheduled.

02:22:45.500 | Everything is figured out in advance.

02:22:47.480 | And over time, the more you take these breaks,

02:22:50.340 | the better your systems become.

02:22:52.360 | And the more liberated you are from the day to day,

02:22:55.200 | which means when you get back,

02:22:56.720 | you also don't need to rush as much into hyperactivity.

02:23:00.800 | And if you do, you know that that is more

02:23:03.600 | from a compulsivity than from a necessity.

02:23:06.900 | - While you're on these nature retreats,

02:23:11.400 | are you writing on a daily basis?

02:23:13.320 | Or are you just thinking and allowing thoughts

02:23:15.280 | to enter and leave your system?

02:23:17.720 | - Depends on the retreat.

02:23:19.540 | So sometimes I'm writing,

02:23:21.040 | but writing I think can underscore for me

02:23:26.100 | a desire to be compulsively productive.

02:23:30.240 | And I think that is inversely correlated to my happiness

02:23:34.460 | or sense of wellbeing a lot of the time.

02:23:36.780 | So there are many areas in my life now.

02:23:39.420 | So if you were to ask me what has changed significantly

02:23:42.100 | since the time that you wrote For Our Body,

02:23:43.620 | I would say that rather than looking for areas to optimize,

02:23:48.620 | I am looking where I can very deliberately

02:23:52.820 | de-optimize certain areas to increase sense of wellbeing.

02:23:56.540 | Where can I de-optimize?

02:23:57.500 | Where can I stop measuring?

02:23:59.000 | Where can I stop reading books?

02:24:02.280 | Which areas can I ignore completely?

02:24:05.820 | What types of information can I just excise from my life

02:24:09.460 | altogether for a period of time?

02:24:11.620 | Delete Twitter.

02:24:12.960 | Stop reading about books in X related to say AI.

02:24:16.400 | Or whatever it might be.

02:24:19.180 | Where can I de-optimize selectively

02:24:22.380 | to sort of optimize the whole?

02:24:23.900 | Does that make sense?

02:24:24.740 | - Makes good sense, yeah.

02:24:25.620 | - And before we started recording, I gave you a book,

02:24:28.500 | which is a short collection of poetry,

02:24:31.100 | by Halaliza Ghafouri, which is called Gold.

02:24:34.540 | It's a collection of Rumi poetry.

02:24:36.620 | Reading poetry is an activity almost by definition,

02:24:40.720 | which is the antithesis of optimization.

02:24:45.720 | So I've tried to also integrate more of those activities

02:24:48.820 | into my life, and this relates to your question,

02:24:51.280 | because there are times when I will force myself

02:24:53.980 | to sit on my goddamn hands and not write, not read.

02:24:58.440 | Just do the thing that is so uncomfortable sometimes,

02:25:01.080 | which is just sitting there with yourself.

02:25:03.080 | [laughing]

02:25:04.380 | - You know, it can be incredibly uncomfortable,

02:25:06.720 | in part because of the fear

02:25:09.580 | that it could become comfortable,

02:25:11.700 | especially for proactive people with a strong,

02:25:15.780 | to use Paul Conte's words, generative drive.

02:25:18.500 | You know, you're going to,

02:25:19.740 | which is a good thing, I believe.

02:25:24.500 | - It's a good thing, and it can be a good thing.

02:25:28.080 | It can indicate really incredible adaptations.

02:25:33.080 | It can also sometimes, I think, indicate maladaptations.

02:25:40.000 | Right, and so I think it's helpful to take a break

02:25:42.440 | from that generative drive, or at least just put it

02:25:46.320 | in park position to see if that generative drive

02:25:51.080 | is perhaps indicative of you leaning towards something

02:25:56.080 | in a healthy, proactive way versus running from something

02:26:01.880 | in a long-term, destructive way.

02:26:05.180 | - Yeah, well, and I think Paul would say

02:26:06.560 | that part of the generative drive process is peace,

02:26:10.960 | you know, not necessarily even as a still state,

02:26:14.240 | but as a, you know, being able to experience peace

02:26:17.160 | even in the transitions, and there's a lot more

02:26:19.320 | to say about that, and he would say it far better

02:26:21.120 | than I ever would, so I'll leave it at that.

02:26:24.480 | - I mean, for people who have the option,

02:26:27.160 | getting in nature, it doesn't have to be all day,

02:26:28.920 | every day on a water fast.

02:26:30.040 | I just take certain things to an extreme,

02:26:32.360 | because that's who I am, but--

02:26:33.580 | - Sorry, when you say water fast,

02:26:34.840 | that means fasting with water.

02:26:37.080 | - Right.

02:26:37.920 | - Fasting, but yes, drinking water.

02:26:39.520 | - It just means you're allowed to have water

02:26:41.000 | and nothing else.

02:26:41.840 | - For a long time, I thought it meant

02:26:43.320 | that you're not drinking water.

02:26:44.660 | - Oh, yeah, no, don't do that.

02:26:46.000 | - Some people do that, right?

02:26:47.320 | They do these crazy food water fasts as a way,

02:26:50.340 | I think they believe it clears senescent cells or something,

02:26:53.020 | but probably clears a lot more than just senescent cells.

02:26:56.440 | - Yeah, there might be something to it.

02:26:59.960 | I mean, like there are people who recycle

02:27:01.560 | by drinking their own urine, not my jam,

02:27:04.320 | but I would say it's like three hours without shelter,

02:27:07.840 | three days without water, three weeks without food.

02:27:09.920 | General rule of thumb, so be careful with dehydration.

02:27:14.360 | You can go a long time without food.

02:27:16.440 | I don't care how ripped you are.

02:27:17.560 | You got 8% body fat, man, you got plenty of time.

02:27:19.720 | You can go a couple weeks, no problem.

02:27:21.680 | - Yeah, you got calories stocked away.

02:27:22.760 | - 9,000 calories per pound stored body fat,

02:27:24.800 | you got plenty, don't worry.

02:27:26.200 | So for people who have the option to be in nature

02:27:32.560 | and just exercise several hours a day to exhaustion,

02:27:37.560 | see how many of your problems seem to just go away.

02:27:41.640 | Just try that.

02:27:43.000 | - Yeah, well, my Sunday routine is to try and get outside

02:27:46.860 | and move as much as possible.

02:27:48.680 | I don't always succeed,

02:27:49.720 | but I'm going to try a longer retreat into nature.

02:27:54.300 | I think Olympic National Forest is calling me again.

02:27:59.000 | It seems like once a year, I just want to get back up there.

02:28:01.360 | - It's calling, you should get back out there.

02:28:04.120 | - Spectacular.

02:28:05.800 | I have a question about mentors.

02:28:09.080 | I'm a big believer in mentors,

02:28:10.840 | either mentors that know us and we know them

02:28:13.780 | or people that we assign as mentors

02:28:15.920 | without them realizing it, this sort of thing.

02:28:18.860 | Do you have mentors at this stage of life

02:28:22.960 | for particular areas of life?

02:28:25.380 | Are you mentoring yourself?

02:28:27.960 | Are you flying with a few voices in your head

02:28:32.560 | that serve you well?

02:28:33.760 | Who are your mentors?

02:28:34.980 | - I definitely have people I consider mentors.

02:28:38.740 | I think at this point, rarely one way

02:28:43.460 | in the sense that they tend to be friends.

02:28:47.200 | I spend time with, they get something from it,

02:28:50.220 | I get something from it.

02:28:51.460 | Not in a transactional way,

02:28:53.000 | but they find it fun or beneficial or amusing.

02:28:57.560 | In some way, redeeming to spend time with me.

02:28:59.880 | - That's the hope.

02:29:00.920 | How is that different from traditional friendship,

02:29:04.080 | your standard friendship?

02:29:05.440 | Are you spending time with some orientation

02:29:09.600 | toward their embodying areas of life

02:29:13.980 | that you would like to emulate?

02:29:15.760 | - Totally.

02:29:16.600 | I spend time around people I hope to be more like

02:29:21.600 | in some way, because guess what?

02:29:24.200 | You're going to average into, say,

02:29:28.060 | just the sum, holistic whole of the five or six people

02:29:32.660 | you spend the most time with.

02:29:33.600 | So you should choose that very carefully.

02:29:34.920 | That includes virtual parasocial relationships.

02:29:38.000 | Okay, if you're listening to a fill-in-the-blank person

02:29:41.300 | for four hours a week, five hours a week,

02:29:43.640 | two hours a week, whoever that group is comprised of

02:29:48.640 | is going to influence who you become.

02:29:50.480 | And for me then, I think carefully about my friendships.

02:29:55.480 | And they could be older, like Kevin Kelly,

02:29:58.560 | who's become a good friend,

02:30:00.120 | who has a wealth of life experience that I don't have.

02:30:05.480 | And so I might just call him and say,

02:30:07.200 | "Kevin, I have a question for you."

02:30:08.360 | But I do that with my younger friends too.

02:30:10.000 | And they could be younger than I am,

02:30:11.360 | and I might still view them as a mentor in X, Y, or Z.

02:30:14.480 | I think mentor has a heavy weight to it.

02:30:18.440 | It has a connotation of maybe never-ending,

02:30:23.440 | time-consuming obligation.

02:30:26.800 | So I would never, for instance,

02:30:29.240 | and I know a lot of people try this,

02:30:30.360 | ask someone to be my mentor.

02:30:32.540 | It's like, "Would you like to be

02:30:33.380 | my free life coach forever?"

02:30:34.720 | You know, that's kind of how it sounds to the recipient.

02:30:37.800 | - It sounds very formal.

02:30:39.160 | - Yeah, it sounds very formal.

02:30:40.520 | So for me, I would say there have certainly been mentors.

02:30:44.600 | I've had wrestling coaches, I've had teachers,

02:30:47.480 | I've had resident advisors who are reverents,

02:30:51.120 | who had a huge impact on my life,

02:30:52.720 | and followed up with me and paid attention to me

02:30:54.920 | and cared for me in more of a one-directional sense.

02:30:59.920 | I view myself as the beneficiary.

02:31:04.120 | Of course, they certainly got something out of it

02:31:06.280 | if they had that job, and they probably found it

02:31:08.600 | to be very gratifying in its own way.

02:31:10.840 | And teachers like Professor Ed Shao at Princeton,

02:31:13.920 | I feel incredibly indebted to.

02:31:17.560 | These days, and for a long time,

02:31:22.280 | I've believed that you can learn something powerful

02:31:26.680 | from almost anyone, probably anyone you interact with.

02:31:31.200 | Could be an Uber driver, could be someone

02:31:33.960 | taking garbage out of a restaurant.

02:31:36.000 | If you really take the time to dig, you can find something.

02:31:38.840 | And before you can, I think as an adult,

02:31:46.080 | effectively think about who you would like to learn from,

02:31:49.320 | if I put it that way.

02:31:50.400 | It's helpful to have a baseline of self-awareness

02:31:54.000 | that you know what you might want to work on

02:31:57.520 | to either amplify strengths, develop skills,

02:32:01.760 | address weaknesses.

02:32:03.160 | And so, for instance, one of my close friends,

02:32:05.080 | Matt Mullenweg, he's younger than I am.

02:32:07.320 | He's the founder of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com.

02:32:11.560 | He is the lead developer of WordPress,

02:32:13.720 | although it was an open-source project, of course,

02:32:15.280 | with many, many contributors.

02:32:17.240 | He was one of the lead developers,

02:32:19.080 | now powers something like 32% of the internet.

02:32:21.960 | And he exemplifies a cool and calm temperament,

02:32:26.960 | even in the most chaotic periods imaginable,

02:32:32.400 | during the most chaotic events imaginable.

02:32:35.040 | And when I find myself getting dysregulated,

02:32:39.640 | to use a fancy term, losing my shit,

02:32:43.360 | or getting carried away by emotion,

02:32:45.880 | getting righteously angry, or whatever it might be,

02:32:48.520 | and I recognize at some point

02:32:50.120 | that it's really not serving me,

02:32:51.960 | that I am being owned by the emotion, right?

02:32:55.280 | Like, I'm the dog on the leash, not the other way around.

02:32:58.560 | Then I think of Matt.

02:33:00.000 | I'm like, what would Matt do?

02:33:02.080 | What advice would Matt give me right now?

02:33:04.200 | How would Matt act in these circumstances?

02:33:07.400 | And I do that with many friends.

02:33:11.120 | I also think a lot about,

02:33:15.000 | and this is borrowing from someone named Kathy Sierra,

02:33:18.600 | from a long time ago,

02:33:20.240 | focusing more on just-in-time information

02:33:22.240 | as opposed to just-in-case information.

02:33:24.400 | So just-in-case information is like,

02:33:26.400 | I'm gonna read these 20 books,

02:33:27.560 | 'cause in two years I might be interested in X, Y, and Z.

02:33:31.760 | That, I think, is often a waste of time,

02:33:34.400 | because if it ever becomes relevant,

02:33:36.200 | you're just gonna have to reread those books.

02:33:38.280 | People do the same thing with humans.

02:33:40.560 | They're like, I wanna meet so-and-so

02:33:42.920 | and have them as my mentor,

02:33:44.320 | because maybe five years from now I'll do X, Y, and Z,

02:33:47.720 | and then they'll be useful for ABC.

02:33:50.200 | That's too speculative,

02:33:51.520 | and I think it ends up in a lot of wasted energy.

02:33:53.680 | So the podcast, for me,

02:33:56.760 | writing the books and doing the interviews,

02:34:00.520 | even prior to the podcast,

02:34:02.280 | becoming involved with startups,

02:34:04.160 | delving into the world of science and scientists,

02:34:08.600 | all helps me to develop a confidence

02:34:12.200 | that almost any question I could ask,

02:34:17.200 | I can find some semblance of an answer for

02:34:20.160 | by just reaching out to a few people and saying,

02:34:21.920 | who do you know who might be able to answer this?

02:34:25.160 | And that's very reassuring,

02:34:27.280 | and it relieves some of the anxiety or pressure

02:34:31.720 | that people might feel

02:34:33.240 | to assemble some personal board of directors

02:34:35.600 | of X men and women who can help them with everything.

02:34:39.200 | And then there are people I hire to be accountable to.

02:34:44.040 | So I might work with coaches, therapists, and so on,

02:34:48.040 | who I would view as mentors.

02:34:49.960 | They just happen to get paid for it.

02:34:52.640 | - Yeah, the reason I ask the question

02:34:53.880 | is because we were talking about the meditative process

02:34:56.400 | going into nature,

02:34:57.240 | and even with psychedelics,

02:34:59.200 | it can be viewed a lot of different ways,

02:35:01.760 | but I think of them largely as going inward to explore.

02:35:04.840 | I mean, you're out in nature and learning from nature.

02:35:07.600 | There's such a core truth to nature.

02:35:11.520 | I know that sounds a little bit, you know,

02:35:13.760 | wishy washy, but it's true.

02:35:17.880 | Like if it's there, it's concrete, it's really something.

02:35:21.400 | It was there long before any of us,

02:35:22.860 | and it'll be there a lot longer

02:35:24.080 | than any of us will ever be, we hope.

02:35:27.440 | Certainly if it goes, we go.

02:35:32.120 | But the process of learning from others

02:35:34.920 | and paying attention to others

02:35:36.240 | is really an outward looking thing.

02:35:37.720 | I mean, we have to bring that in,

02:35:38.920 | but I was just curious how you balance those

02:35:41.000 | and as a way to really understand

02:35:43.720 | not just your time allocation, right?

02:35:46.120 | I think we could talk about that.

02:35:47.620 | You know, how's your morning structured, et cetera,

02:35:49.840 | which I think there's great value in knowing,

02:35:53.000 | but more what's your mind allocation?

02:35:56.680 | Right, I think about this, you know, like where's my brain?

02:35:58.840 | Is it, am I focused on what's going on in here?

02:36:01.200 | And, you know, is there a need to excavate there?

02:36:04.120 | Sure, you know, but how much time am I out of my head

02:36:06.560 | and bringing things in from the outside world

02:36:08.600 | and back and forth?

02:36:09.760 | So do you have some sense of across the year,

02:36:13.600 | across the day, how you mind allocate?

02:36:17.000 | I don't know if that's the best phrase,

02:36:19.160 | but I can't think of any better one.

02:36:20.760 | If you can think of a better one, please, please table it.

02:36:23.840 | 'Cause I'm happy to use that.

02:36:25.400 | - How do I think about mind allocation

02:36:27.720 | or attention allocation?

02:36:30.980 | - I try to, and most frequently think of my mind share

02:36:35.980 | across a year and across a week, a weekly timeframe.

02:36:45.260 | And I find that to be manageable

02:36:52.460 | in the sense that on a yearly basis,

02:36:57.260 | on New Year's Eve or roughly around New Year's,

02:37:02.260 | every year I'll do a past year review, PYR,

02:37:06.420 | past year review, where I'll go back

02:37:08.140 | and I'll look at my entire last year,

02:37:09.980 | piece of paper in front of me,

02:37:12.580 | line down the center, plus negative.

02:37:15.700 | And I will go through every week in my calendar

02:37:19.220 | for the previous year, and I'll write down

02:37:22.140 | the people, places, activities, commitments, et cetera,

02:37:27.140 | that produced peak positive emotional experiences.

02:37:33.460 | So, all right, we're doing an 80/20 analysis here.

02:37:36.020 | Like, what are the big rocks that really moved the needle

02:37:38.180 | in a meaningful way?

02:37:39.500 | And conversely, who are the people, what are the things,

02:37:42.900 | what are the places that just made me go, ugh?

02:37:47.180 | And we're draining produced peak negative experiences.

02:37:50.220 | Why the hell did I commit to this type experiences?

02:37:53.740 | And that presents me with a do more of, do less of list.

02:37:58.500 | Then I look forward to the next year, and I did this,

02:38:01.820 | I suppose, just a handful of months ago,

02:38:03.340 | around New Year's, with the positive.

02:38:05.620 | I'm like, okay, here's my list of do more of.

02:38:09.220 | It's not real until it's in the calendar.

02:38:11.380 | Let's get these things in the calendar.

02:38:13.260 | And then I'll start talking to people, booking things,

02:38:16.340 | having people help with organizing if that is required,

02:38:20.100 | and getting things blocked out.

02:38:21.660 | So I have already, this year,

02:38:25.100 | and we're in the reasonable beginning stages of the year,

02:38:28.140 | I have things blocked out until November of this year.

02:38:32.180 | And those provide the breaks in the action,

02:38:36.660 | not just the breaks in the action, but the fun stuff.

02:38:38.580 | Because by the way, guys, I thought for a long time,

02:38:41.500 | like, yeah, you take care of A, B, and C,

02:38:42.900 | and the good stuff just takes care of itself.

02:38:44.700 | I have, I do not any longer believe that to be true.

02:38:48.900 | Unless you schedule these things that you claim

02:38:51.260 | are important, they're gonna get crowded out by bullshit.

02:38:54.780 | And maybe not bullshit, but just less important things.

02:38:58.740 | The urgent will crush the important.

02:39:01.180 | So I get these things on the calendar,

02:39:03.260 | and then I back up and I look at optimal weekly

02:39:07.660 | mind allocation, right, attentional allocation.

02:39:13.140 | And there's an incredible cost to cognitive switching.

02:39:18.420 | If you're just task switching all day.

02:39:20.540 | So I will try my best to format a weekly rhythm,

02:39:25.540 | a weekly sequence that allows me to focus

02:39:30.220 | on certain types of tasks.

02:39:32.820 | So Monday is very frequently admin of some type.

02:39:37.100 | Just bits and ends, flotsam jetsam,

02:39:39.500 | all the miscellaneous pieces that are part of life,

02:39:43.540 | you gotta deal with them.

02:39:44.780 | That tends to be Monday.

02:39:46.860 | Whenever possible, and especially if I am focused

02:39:50.220 | on physical activity, let's just say I'm in a place

02:39:53.140 | like Colorado, I will try to schedule most of that

02:39:57.980 | for after lunch to ensure that I get in a lot of exercise

02:40:02.860 | and movement in the first portion of the day.

02:40:04.860 | Not everybody has that ability, but I will say

02:40:06.900 | more of you have that capacity than you might think,

02:40:10.260 | because most of what we all do is just not important.

02:40:13.620 | - Time on social media first thing in the morning

02:40:16.620 | is probably the most poisonous activity

02:40:19.940 | that I could take part in.

02:40:22.260 | I don't want to point fingers at anyone else,

02:40:25.060 | but I think if people ask, what is the amount of time

02:40:29.180 | it takes to get in a really good workout?

02:40:32.100 | It's going to be about an hour,

02:40:34.140 | but a lot can be done in 45 for even 30 minutes.

02:40:36.780 | You think about how quickly that time goes by.

02:40:39.260 | - Yeah, I'm sure I'm not the only one

02:40:42.580 | that is part of the reason I deleted

02:40:44.720 | a lot of these apps from my phone.

02:40:45.720 | It's like I'd go into the bathroom

02:40:48.460 | to take a quick bit of business,

02:40:51.260 | and then 45 minutes later, I'm like,

02:40:53.860 | how have I been looking at Instagram for 45 minutes?

02:40:56.240 | - Lines for restrooms have gotten very long

02:40:58.780 | in the last 10 years.

02:41:00.540 | Has anyone noticed that?

02:41:01.620 | The wait for the restrooms has gotten very long.

02:41:03.720 | - So you have time for the important stuff, I think,

02:41:06.920 | and just look at some of the extreme overtures out there.

02:41:09.800 | They have the same amount of time that you do.

02:41:12.380 | - I was going to ask this later,

02:41:13.340 | but I'll just quickly interject this now.

02:41:16.300 | I saw, perhaps it was on Twitter,

02:41:19.200 | or maybe I overheard this,

02:41:20.320 | that you're back on Instagram.

02:41:22.840 | I mean, you've always had an account that posts,

02:41:26.840 | but are you back in there?

02:41:28.160 | Are you out of there?

02:41:29.740 | - I mean, look, the dirty little secret,

02:41:31.600 | I'm single again, and that's a great way

02:41:33.340 | to connect with eligible ladies who might be of interest.

02:41:37.140 | - Got it, so you're on Instagram.

02:41:40.180 | - I'm willing to pay the tax of dealing

02:41:42.940 | with the brain damage of using Instagram as a result.

02:41:47.220 | - Look, finding a great life partner is great.

02:41:51.580 | - So that is the reason for that,

02:41:54.700 | but otherwise, it would not be on my phone.

02:41:58.400 | - It wouldn't even be on your phone.

02:42:00.100 | - Absolutely not, it's too well designed.

02:42:02.520 | These companies are very smart.

02:42:03.540 | They have very good data scientists.

02:42:04.980 | They have very good UI specialists.

02:42:07.420 | If anyone out there thinks that they can,

02:42:10.020 | maybe Jaco can can discipline his way through it.

02:42:13.140 | I'm sure he can because he is Jaco,

02:42:15.660 | but in my case and in the case of most people,

02:42:18.180 | you're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

02:42:19.760 | If you think you can use your self-control

02:42:22.880 | to keep your use of Instagram to say 10 minutes at a clip,

02:42:27.500 | good luck, and even if you can,

02:42:30.300 | people say, ah, but I do that anyway.

02:42:31.620 | I'm like, all right, how much time do you spend

02:42:33.340 | sending memes and links from Instagram

02:42:36.700 | or fill in the blank platform to your friends in group chat?

02:42:39.220 | How much time does that consume?

02:42:41.200 | - I spend a fair amount of time on Instagram and Twitter

02:42:43.320 | posting things related to the podcast,

02:42:44.980 | but I don't have someone to do that for me,

02:42:47.460 | and I actually enjoy doing it,

02:42:49.040 | and it challenges me in certain ways,

02:42:50.960 | but I completely agree with everything you're saying.

02:42:53.060 | I also want to note that you didn't say

02:42:54.700 | that you're on Twitter possibly to meet somebody,

02:42:58.420 | which is more a statement about Twitter.

02:43:00.660 | - Yeah, it's not the friendliest neighborhood I've found,

02:43:04.020 | and I would say Twitter has its use cases.

02:43:08.320 | I find it useful in some respects.

02:43:10.340 | It has become much less useful and much less practical

02:43:14.000 | in the last year with a lot of the product changes,

02:43:16.560 | but it has its place.

02:43:18.940 | It's not on my phone.

02:43:19.980 | It was on my phone for a very brief period of time.

02:43:22.840 | I do not want, I find that my ability to be still and calm

02:43:27.840 | is eroded if I am too easily able to escape boredom.

02:43:35.760 | If you cease to have the ability to be bored

02:43:38.800 | for five to 10 minutes,

02:43:40.120 | I think that makes you very fragile.

02:43:42.160 | It makes you very easy to manipulate also,

02:43:45.480 | and there are a lot of forces at play online

02:43:47.920 | that want to manipulate or shape your behavior

02:43:50.240 | in different ways,

02:43:51.080 | so I feel like it is imperative for me

02:43:53.920 | to cultivate the ability to just sit still

02:43:58.240 | and not consume the five minutes in line,

02:44:01.640 | waiting to get into a restaurant by hopping on Twitter

02:44:05.260 | or Instagram.

02:44:06.740 | So that's part of the reason they're not on my phone.

02:44:09.380 | Could you tell us about Cockpunch?

02:44:11.900 | (laughs)

02:44:13.980 | Yeah, I can tell you about Cockpunch.

02:44:15.700 | So Cockpunch is a creative project

02:44:19.500 | intended once again to make me less precious

02:44:24.500 | about protecting whatever brand, I think it's called,

02:44:30.340 | and I think I might have.

02:44:32.540 | And this is an investment in my long-term mental health also,

02:44:37.200 | and I think in my career flexibility,

02:44:39.360 | my willingness to experiment.

02:44:41.000 | Cockpunch could be a long story,

02:44:44.400 | but the gist of it is I wanted to experiment

02:44:48.180 | with fiction writing.

02:44:49.020 | I've been saying this for years, and I've never done it.

02:44:52.080 | That's the backdrop.

02:44:53.800 | On top of that, I have wanted to get back into illustration

02:44:57.560 | and work in the visual arts,

02:44:58.900 | which I did for a long time when I was younger,

02:45:01.780 | and I've not done that consistently.

02:45:04.480 | Why not?

02:45:05.320 | Because I haven't had accountability,

02:45:06.700 | I haven't had deadlines, it hasn't been in the calendar.

02:45:09.420 | This should sound somewhat familiar by now.

02:45:13.220 | And at the same time, I was becoming very interested

02:45:16.780 | in Web3 and what was happening in the world of NFTs.

02:45:19.860 | This is probably 2020, and I know they've developed

02:45:23.260 | a fairly negative connotation for a lot of good reasons.

02:45:27.000 | But I started to think about fundraising

02:45:30.760 | for early-stage science.

02:45:32.800 | And if I could do, if I could conduct an experiment

02:45:37.220 | as a proof of concept with different novel approaches

02:45:41.040 | to fundraising, so rather than just calling the rich friends

02:45:45.640 | who might sort of bend to the pressure (laughs)

02:45:49.780 | or be willing to fund, I wanted to look at, say,

02:45:53.500 | crowdfunding back in the day.

02:45:55.200 | Then I wanted to look at different options

02:45:57.260 | for perhaps art auctions.

02:45:58.700 | And I was gonna do this with contemporary art.

02:46:01.380 | This is many years ago, and in the process

02:46:04.100 | of wanting to fund the Hopkins Center

02:46:07.140 | focused on psychedelic and consciousness research,

02:46:09.700 | which was the first of its kind in the United States.

02:46:12.520 | And the technology gave me the opportunity

02:46:19.020 | to learn about a new, let's just call it,

02:46:22.460 | set of technologies, so to develop skills and knowledge.

02:46:26.080 | It would give me the opportunity to reconnect

02:46:28.840 | and deepen friendships with a number

02:46:30.560 | of my very, very smart friends who were playing in that area.

02:46:34.400 | Also test fundraising, also get back into fiction

02:46:38.000 | and art and all that combined into this thing

02:46:40.320 | that I ended up calling Cockpunch because it made me laugh.

02:46:43.080 | And you know what?

02:46:43.980 | Man, if you take your work too seriously,

02:46:47.880 | you're gonna burn out before you get

02:46:49.260 | the really serious work done.

02:46:51.080 | And I think it was Bertrand Russell who said,

02:46:53.260 | "It's a sure sign of an impending nervous breakdown

02:46:56.120 | "if you start taking your work too seriously,

02:46:58.120 | "or believing your work to be very, very serious."

02:47:01.060 | And for that reason, I wanted to give it an absurd name

02:47:06.060 | that would also have some word of mouth benefit.

02:47:12.080 | And that too, see what would happen.

02:47:15.660 | Honestly, just see what would happen.

02:47:16.820 | 'Cause I was like, all right, look,

02:47:18.500 | what is honestly the worst thing that happens?

02:47:20.860 | Like people write a bunch of pieces

02:47:22.180 | where they're like shaking their fist at the sky.

02:47:24.060 | How dare Tim Ferriss create a project called Cockpunch?

02:47:28.000 | - You could turn it around on them and just say

02:47:29.440 | that what they were doing is a cockpunch.

02:47:31.860 | - No, well, I-- - Attempting, attempting.

02:47:34.140 | - Well, that was kind of the thing.

02:47:36.660 | That was kind of part of the thinking

02:47:38.260 | that it would just be entertaining to watch people

02:47:40.420 | seriously trying to critique something called Cockpunch.

02:47:43.300 | And the upshot of that is it raised almost $2 million,

02:47:48.320 | sold out in something like 30 minutes or 40 minutes

02:47:51.780 | for the foundation.

02:47:52.840 | All that money went to Sisam Foundation.

02:47:55.080 | All of that money has already been distributed

02:47:57.200 | in the form of grants.

02:47:58.360 | - Wonderful.

02:47:59.200 | - And along the way, I got to work with artists,

02:48:04.200 | with programmers, learn new technologies,

02:48:07.740 | reconnect with old friends, and now we're back in touch.

02:48:10.540 | And it's extremely fun to be back in touch with these folks.

02:48:13.700 | And I've written the equivalent of a short book

02:48:18.240 | in fiction in the form of short stories

02:48:20.340 | that are this fantasy world-building exercise for me.

02:48:23.820 | And I'm having a blast.

02:48:24.900 | So I'm exercising new creative muscles

02:48:27.620 | that has led me back into the worlds of comic books,

02:48:31.260 | which I haven't created yet,

02:48:33.260 | led me back into the worlds of gaming,

02:48:35.800 | led me back into my fascination with tabletop gaming

02:48:38.700 | 'cause I played D&D forever when I was a kid.

02:48:40.940 | That was my refuge as a runt who got the crap kicked out

02:48:43.580 | of him left and right.

02:48:45.300 | And I'm having just a blast.

02:48:47.860 | And the takeaway, I think, on some level

02:48:52.860 | is that you should do things,

02:48:56.560 | should is a loaded term.

02:49:00.500 | It's helpful for me to consider doing things

02:49:04.340 | that give me energy, right?

02:49:05.960 | Because if we say, all right, time management is fine,

02:49:08.680 | but time doesn't really have any practical value

02:49:11.900 | unless you have attention, right?

02:49:13.500 | So then there's attentional management.

02:49:15.420 | But that attention is limited also physically

02:49:19.740 | and sort of metaphorically by energy, right?

02:49:22.740 | So you have like substrates, diets,

02:49:25.020 | neurotransmitters, and so on.

02:49:26.680 | If you do not have the basic batteries required,

02:49:30.960 | the rest of the things that are higher up on that pyramid

02:49:35.960 | can't really be executed properly.

02:49:38.420 | So for me, it's like, okay,

02:49:39.540 | let's say "Cock Punch" doesn't do anything.

02:49:42.060 | It's total failure, right?

02:49:43.020 | Coming back to like--

02:49:43.860 | - It already raised $2 million for science.

02:49:45.800 | - It did.

02:49:46.640 | - And that science could be breakthrough science.

02:49:48.020 | - It could, it could.

02:49:49.300 | - "Cock Punch," sorry, I yelled, I'm sorry.

02:49:52.040 | So "Cock Punch" is at least thus far a success.

02:49:56.260 | - It is.

02:49:57.400 | But coming back to Seth Godin's question,

02:49:59.220 | I asked myself, would I do this

02:50:00.700 | even if it turns out to be a complete failure financially?

02:50:03.500 | And I was like, yes,

02:50:04.560 | because I think the relationships and the skills,

02:50:07.660 | even if this quote unquote fails

02:50:09.780 | from the outside looking in,

02:50:11.660 | those will transcend this project

02:50:13.800 | and be life-affirming and helpful and fun in other areas.

02:50:17.780 | And that's proven to be true,

02:50:18.820 | even though the project is ongoing.

02:50:21.180 | And I have more energy now

02:50:25.260 | because of this ridiculous project.

02:50:27.840 | I'm very proud of the fiction, actually.

02:50:29.860 | This ridiculous project called "Cock Punch."

02:50:31.740 | People can find the legend of "Cock Punch"

02:50:33.460 | on any fine provider of podcasts.

02:50:37.320 | And hired voice actors did the scripting, the production.

02:50:41.420 | I hit number one fiction worldwide on Apple Podcasts

02:50:44.340 | for a while, the whole thing's hilarious.

02:50:46.020 | - And if you could, can you explain a little bit

02:50:48.380 | about the characters in "Cock Punch"?

02:50:50.800 | - Yeah, I can.

02:50:51.640 | - Who's punching who's cock?

02:50:52.960 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:50:53.960 | - Or which cocks are punching?

02:50:55.220 | - Yeah, which cocks are punching which, how does this work?

02:50:57.860 | So here we go.

02:51:00.180 | All right, so the legend of "Cock Punch"

02:51:03.220 | takes place in this realm called Varlata.

02:51:06.340 | And Varlata is being described through the narrator

02:51:11.560 | who we know as the seventh scribe.

02:51:13.240 | We don't know much about the seventh scribe,

02:51:14.760 | but the seventh scribe makes an appearance in episode one

02:51:17.220 | as the reliable but possibly sometimes unreliable narrator

02:51:21.660 | of this space.

02:51:22.640 | And there's a mind-bending time component

02:51:25.180 | where there's something called restarts.

02:51:27.280 | Something like "The Edge of Tomorrow,"

02:51:28.760 | if people have ever seen this movie, where time restarts.

02:51:31.600 | Maybe like "Groundhog Day," time restarts.

02:51:34.320 | And it's unclear as of yet in the story why that is the case

02:51:38.000 | but people basically snap into being.

02:51:40.380 | They know who they are and what they do,

02:51:42.540 | but they have no real memories to speak of.

02:51:46.380 | So the world is constantly being reconstructed

02:51:49.680 | and pieced together by these scribes,

02:51:51.660 | the seventh of which is the narrator.

02:51:53.880 | So you might read into this that I am a fan of fantasy,

02:51:57.860 | Tolkien, you name it, Ursula K. Le Guin,

02:52:01.380 | "The Wizard of Earthsea," et cetera.

02:52:03.460 | Then there are eight primary houses.

02:52:06.800 | These are the greater houses.

02:52:08.360 | Some might call them clans

02:52:10.240 | and they have different characteristics.

02:52:12.240 | Just prior to the seventh scribe beginning

02:52:16.520 | his piecing together,

02:52:17.880 | which turns into the story in the podcast,

02:52:19.880 | there was a warring states period,

02:52:21.240 | this much he's been able to establish.

02:52:23.720 | And the peacekeeping mechanism that was devised

02:52:27.960 | is something called the Great Games.

02:52:29.980 | And the Great Games is a combat competition.

02:52:35.580 | And the eight greater houses send their best fighters

02:52:40.320 | who've been vetted through preliminary competitions

02:52:42.460 | to the Great Games, which is in the free trade zone,

02:52:45.240 | which is this one place where all of the races mingle

02:52:47.960 | and trade and so on.

02:52:49.180 | And all of these characters

02:52:51.680 | happen to be anthropomorphized roosters.

02:52:54.780 | So they have generally each one gauntlet of some type.

02:52:59.780 | And clearly they punch each other with this gauntlet

02:53:04.240 | and there are many other types of weapons.

02:53:05.780 | So the colloquial nickname for this Olympics of combat

02:53:10.640 | is cockpunch.

02:53:12.300 | And that is the etymology, so the scholars say,

02:53:16.800 | of cockpunch, the legend of cockpunch.

02:53:19.980 | And there's a lot more to it.

02:53:21.540 | And there are many wrinkles,

02:53:22.640 | a lot of Easter eggs in this entire story.

02:53:25.380 | The idea came to me and it started off

02:53:27.140 | as a bit of a farce, right?

02:53:28.220 | It was just gonna be something funny, see if it works.

02:53:31.780 | Maybe it raises some money, very light lift.

02:53:35.220 | But once I got into the fiction,

02:53:36.560 | I started taking it super seriously.

02:53:38.040 | So it's become very, very elaborate.

02:53:40.440 | It's become really, really elaborate.

02:53:42.700 | And I'm loving it, it's great.

02:53:44.680 | So who knows where it'll go.

02:53:46.580 | I have no idea.

02:53:47.420 | That's part of the reason why I called it

02:53:48.660 | an emergent long fiction project.

02:53:51.220 | I didn't call it an NFT project.

02:53:52.740 | I was like, this is an emergent long fiction project

02:53:55.060 | where I'm taking inputs from the audience.

02:53:57.860 | I'm watching very closely what people understand

02:54:00.320 | or don't understand or find interesting.

02:54:02.100 | I'm looking at, for instance, what is generated

02:54:04.420 | when I host an AI-assisted art competition,

02:54:07.700 | which I did with the fans.

02:54:09.600 | And a lot of these bits and pieces get integrated

02:54:12.380 | in some fashion into this thing

02:54:14.300 | that chapter by chapter is coalescing.

02:54:18.140 | So that's Cockpunch.

02:54:19.280 | - Amazing.

02:54:21.240 | - And I had to buy cockpunch.com

02:54:23.080 | and the @cockpunch Twitter.

02:54:24.800 | (laughing)

02:54:27.640 | - You had to buy it from somebody?

02:54:28.720 | - Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.

02:54:30.220 | - The whole process.

02:54:31.060 | - I don't want to ask what it was being used for

02:54:32.780 | prior to your purchase.

02:54:33.820 | - It was not being used for fantasy world building.

02:54:36.620 | I'll put it that way.

02:54:37.460 | - Got it.

02:54:38.780 | Amazing.

02:54:39.640 | And for so many reasons, I have so much to say,

02:54:41.860 | but first of all, your excitement about it is tangible.

02:54:45.900 | The energy you have around it is infectious.

02:54:49.460 | And while I don't want to go into the total depth

02:54:55.860 | and contour of what Paul Conti has been telling me

02:54:59.820 | over the last week of preparing this mental health series

02:55:03.300 | about what's really great in life

02:55:05.460 | that we all should cultivate,

02:55:06.480 | it has a lot to do with this generative drive,

02:55:08.580 | which has a lot to do with positive energy,

02:55:10.660 | not just positive thinking, but positive energy,

02:55:12.820 | but this triad of peace, contentment, and delight.

02:55:17.300 | And as you were explaining it,

02:55:18.660 | it's clear that it brings you great peace, contentment,

02:55:21.420 | and delight as action terms,

02:55:23.320 | not like sit there and just hover in the basking in it.

02:55:25.940 | It's just so clear that this was a great idea.

02:55:29.180 | And I love that you started it as a way to kind of,

02:55:32.720 | I don't know, like knock the fear out of yourself

02:55:37.820 | a little bit by knocking a little fear into the whole thing.

02:55:41.740 | Like what would happen if you let your mind go

02:55:43.740 | and allowed yourself to explore this?

02:55:46.940 | - And what permission would it buy you

02:55:49.480 | if it's not a total disaster?

02:55:51.020 | This is true for the four hour body too.

02:55:52.420 | I'm like, if this partially works,

02:55:54.900 | it's not even a home run, but let's say I get on base,

02:55:57.660 | what permission does this then buy me?

02:56:00.460 | What other "impossibles" and quotation marks

02:56:02.780 | am I willing to challenge?

02:56:04.660 | And I was able to make the hop from one category

02:56:08.080 | in the bookstore to a completely different category.

02:56:10.600 | And then the sky's the limit.

02:56:11.540 | I was like, I can do anything.

02:56:12.860 | I can do whatever I want.

02:56:13.680 | I've given myself permission

02:56:14.860 | and the market has given me permission.

02:56:16.100 | But the most important first step

02:56:18.500 | is you giving yourself permission.

02:56:20.780 | And with say cockpunch, as ludicrous as it is,

02:56:25.380 | now that I've done that, my career hasn't ended,

02:56:27.900 | hasn't had any negative impact on my career whatsoever.

02:56:31.100 | I'm like, okay, that's actually kind of surprising.

02:56:35.220 | - To the contrary, it seems like it gives you energy.

02:56:37.540 | It's raised money for science.

02:56:39.100 | Is it still raising money?

02:56:41.080 | - It's not.

02:56:41.920 | - Is there still an opportunity for people to contribute?

02:56:45.100 | - It's sold out.

02:56:46.780 | If people want to contribute to, say,

02:56:48.980 | the early stage science and let's just say

02:56:52.300 | specifically psychedelics, I would say

02:56:53.940 | it's very, very hard to get a very solid understanding

02:56:58.940 | of the field and the shifting sands

02:57:03.860 | and the projects and so on.

02:57:05.780 | It's very rapidly changing.

02:57:07.320 | So I would say just provide money to a foundation

02:57:11.500 | that's already doing good work.

02:57:12.620 | It could be River Styx Foundation.

02:57:14.120 | It could be Beckley Foundation.

02:57:16.460 | My foundation, Scise Foundation,

02:57:17.980 | I think does pretty good work.

02:57:19.180 | - And Scise is not just the journalism fellowships.

02:57:22.820 | They're also the, it's funding for psychedelics.

02:57:25.140 | - Oh yeah, there's tons of stuff.

02:57:26.700 | There's a project page on scisefoundation.org.

02:57:29.920 | You can see the projects.

02:57:30.880 | There are probably 15 to 20 of them

02:57:33.020 | and they can see the basic science

02:57:35.140 | all the way from really basic science

02:57:37.360 | looking at possible mechanisms of action

02:57:40.320 | for something like DIPT, which is a very strange compound

02:57:43.380 | that most people aren't going to know it,

02:57:46.020 | that produces profound auditory distortions

02:57:51.600 | and hallucinations in humans, very hard to animal model.

02:57:55.880 | And from that all the way up

02:57:59.360 | to really sophisticated imaging studies,

02:58:01.880 | from that to say at least a year or two ago

02:58:05.460 | supporting phase three trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy

02:58:09.200 | then the journalism, then the this, then the that,

02:58:11.120 | but a lot of different scientific studies

02:58:14.460 | that are being supported.

02:58:15.840 | So that's very exciting to me.

02:58:19.000 | But the cock punch side of things is all done.

02:58:22.060 | Money's been distributed

02:58:23.900 | and maybe I'll do more of this kind of thing,

02:58:26.540 | but I might take a different approach.

02:58:28.380 | I feel like, okay, I learned what I feel

02:58:32.540 | I wanted to learn from that

02:58:34.300 | and maybe I'll try something new next time.

02:58:36.660 | - One thing's clear.

02:58:38.640 | Nobody tells you what to do except you.

02:58:42.320 | But that's vetted through many important filters

02:58:45.700 | like structured filters and very thoughtful filters

02:58:50.520 | are the words that come to mind

02:58:51.640 | when I think about your process

02:58:53.420 | as you're sharing it with us.

02:58:54.260 | - And I'll add one more thing,

02:58:55.100 | which is one of the sources of joy of cock punch

02:59:00.100 | is that it is not over-planned.

02:59:04.400 | I set some initial conditions and now it's emergent.

02:59:08.520 | And as someone who has hyper-analyzed

02:59:12.820 | and meticulously planned most of my life for decades,

02:59:17.820 | I think it's helpful to have an improv component.

02:59:23.020 | So if you are a hyper-planner, if you're a hyper-measurer,

02:59:27.400 | if you like that degree of control,

02:59:29.020 | maybe you should try something

02:59:29.900 | that's a little less controlled.

02:59:31.380 | Take an improv class, try fiction writing,

02:59:34.520 | do something that isn't totally scripted

02:59:36.420 | where you don't know the outcome.

02:59:38.500 | I think it's really good medicine for people.

02:59:41.900 | Just like if you spend all your time in a yoga class,

02:59:43.760 | maybe you should spend one day a week lifting weights.

02:59:46.780 | See what that's like.

02:59:47.780 | And if you spend all your time in the gym

02:59:49.400 | and you can barely touch your toes,

02:59:50.580 | maybe you should do some more downward dog, try some yoga.

02:59:53.020 | Similar, I think the spectrum of hyper-planned

02:59:57.560 | to completely free-flowing and improv

03:00:00.780 | provides ample opportunity to enrich themselves

03:00:06.780 | and maybe address some weaknesses at the same time.

03:00:08.880 | So for me, "Cog Punch" has been incredibly therapeutic,

03:00:12.780 | probably the first time that anyone's ever uttered

03:00:15.220 | that sentence, but yeah.

03:00:16.400 | - Probably.

03:00:17.240 | But that's a part of what makes it so cool.

03:00:19.840 | - Yeah, totally.

03:00:20.860 | - I love it.

03:00:21.700 | I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share with us

03:00:25.340 | a little bit about your mindset, maybe even your motivation,

03:00:30.340 | but certainly your mindset around sharing

03:00:34.180 | some of the hard personal tribulations that you've shared.

03:00:39.380 | In preparation for this discussion today,

03:00:42.260 | I went back to some of those posts that you did

03:00:44.420 | and the podcasts that you did around this.

03:00:48.160 | And I'd listened to them at the time and, you know,

03:00:51.420 | they deal with quite serious violations of childhood

03:00:56.100 | and of self and they're hard.

03:00:59.300 | I mean, they're hard to listen to

03:01:00.880 | and I can only imagine they must be even far, far harder

03:01:05.880 | to experience.

03:01:08.020 | And I was curious what led to your willingness to do that.

03:01:13.020 | And yeah, I mean, I have my own ideas

03:01:17.580 | about what might've motivated it,

03:01:18.940 | but I'd like to hear it from you.

03:01:21.200 | - Sure.

03:01:22.140 | Happy to talk about it.

03:01:23.580 | And I think there are two particular examples

03:01:25.940 | that come to mind.

03:01:27.180 | So one is my near suicide in college.

03:01:31.960 | And if people search some practical thoughts on suicide

03:01:37.580 | and my name, it'll pop right up.

03:01:38.900 | I mean, if you just search my name and suicide,

03:01:42.380 | it'll probably pop right up.

03:01:44.340 | Pretty well indexed at this point, which is very deliberate.

03:01:47.380 | People can look at the URL structure

03:01:49.980 | for a little wink and a hat tip.

03:01:53.260 | It'll tell you something about optimizing for Google.

03:01:57.440 | If you look at it, I'll just tell you.

03:01:59.320 | The URL, it spells out how to commit suicide,

03:02:02.180 | but clearly I'm not teaching people how to commit suicide,

03:02:04.580 | but I wanted that to be a honeypot for some of that traffic

03:02:08.940 | because it's a lot easier now to find

03:02:11.340 | that type of practical implementation advice.

03:02:14.940 | And it's a bit harder to find,

03:02:16.340 | I think, compelling intervention.

03:02:18.600 | So first of all, if you're feeling suicide,

03:02:21.660 | obviously call Suicide Hotline, please, right?

03:02:24.700 | That's sometimes the last thing that people want to hear

03:02:28.040 | when they are in a place of suicidal ideation.

03:02:31.700 | And the reason I ended up writing a long post about this,

03:02:36.060 | which was terrifying to write

03:02:37.200 | because I had never told my parents,

03:02:41.440 | I had never told my closest friends.

03:02:43.600 | This was a secret.

03:02:44.540 | It was a dark, dark secret.

03:02:47.160 | And I wrote about it because I went to an event

03:02:52.160 | in San Francisco.

03:02:55.860 | I was interviewed on stage by Jason Kalkanis,

03:02:58.300 | who's a friend and a very good interviewer.

03:03:01.580 | At an event and after I got off stage,

03:03:06.580 | a bunch of people approached me and I was saying hi

03:03:09.020 | and taking photos and signing things and so on.

03:03:11.260 | And there was one young man there, very well dressed,

03:03:17.540 | which isn't really relevant.

03:03:18.940 | It was striking 'cause in San Francisco,

03:03:20.820 | sometimes people are very underdressed

03:03:23.260 | and he had dressed up for it.

03:03:24.500 | Like he'd taken it seriously and he was in a suit and tie.

03:03:27.340 | And he asked me if I could sign a book for his brother.

03:03:32.180 | And I said, "Sure, no problem."

03:03:35.500 | And I asked him,

03:03:36.340 | "What would you like me to write to your brother?"

03:03:37.940 | And he kind of blanked.

03:03:39.700 | He didn't kind of blank, he totally blanked.

03:03:41.340 | But the look behind his eyes was unusual.

03:03:45.480 | It wasn't just, I don't know what to say blank.

03:03:48.980 | There was something else behind it.

03:03:50.460 | And I could tell that he felt under pressure.

03:03:52.660 | And I said, "No problem, take your time.

03:03:55.600 | I'll tell you what,

03:03:56.440 | I'll chat with a couple of other people

03:03:57.780 | and I'll sign the book.

03:03:59.060 | No problem, I'm not going anywhere."

03:04:01.620 | And chatted with the other folks.

03:04:03.620 | And then he asked if he could just walk me to the elevator

03:04:07.440 | and then I could sign the book.

03:04:08.360 | I was like, "Sure."

03:04:09.880 | And he explained to me as I walked to the elevator

03:04:14.760 | how his brother had been a huge fan of mine.

03:04:19.500 | And that I'd really kept his brother afloat for a long time

03:04:24.280 | and eventually his brother killed himself.

03:04:26.660 | And that they kept his room exactly how it was.

03:04:30.960 | And he wanted me to sign the book

03:04:33.300 | so that he could put the book in his brother's room.

03:04:35.700 | And he asked me if I'd ever considered

03:04:42.280 | talking about mental health

03:04:44.780 | and mental health challenges publicly,

03:04:46.980 | because he thought it would really help a lot of people.

03:04:49.900 | And that just,

03:04:51.580 | I mean, I'm like feeling myself tear up right now.

03:04:54.320 | I mean, it was so crushing to hear the story.

03:04:57.780 | And totally unbeknownst to him,

03:05:01.060 | I had a lot of history with depressive episodes.

03:05:05.660 | And when I say near suicide,

03:05:07.160 | I had it on the calendar.

03:05:08.420 | I had a plan.

03:05:09.280 | I was gonna kill myself.

03:05:10.180 | I knew exactly how I was gonna do it.

03:05:11.460 | I knew where I was gonna do it.

03:05:12.540 | I knew all of the variables that I needed to account for

03:05:16.760 | to get it done.

03:05:17.600 | And the only reason that didn't happen

03:05:21.420 | for people that don't have the context,

03:05:22.820 | which most people won't,

03:05:24.460 | is I had tried to reserve a book at Firestone Library.

03:05:28.420 | This is at Princeton,

03:05:30.460 | which had something to do with suicide.

03:05:32.040 | It was like assisted suicide,

03:05:33.660 | like the Clinician's Guide to Euthanasia,

03:05:35.940 | something like that.

03:05:37.540 | And it wasn't in.

03:05:39.660 | And I had forgotten to change my address

03:05:42.980 | of the registrar's office.

03:05:44.180 | I was taking a year away from school.

03:05:46.060 | And that was to focus on finishing my thesis.

03:05:49.500 | It was to try a few jobs,

03:05:51.060 | but I'd ended up in a very bad place

03:05:53.580 | and was feeling very isolated.

03:05:55.220 | And my friends were graduating a year ahead of me,

03:05:57.260 | and I was stuck on this thesis.

03:05:58.860 | And there's a lot of backstory

03:06:00.020 | that I won't bore people with,

03:06:02.060 | but it got to the point where I decided,

03:06:06.700 | not that objectively my life is bad.

03:06:09.540 | I think this is where people

03:06:10.380 | who haven't experienced depression get a little confused,

03:06:13.740 | or it's hard for them to identify

03:06:15.440 | when they give advice to a depressed person.

03:06:17.880 | Because you might say to a depressed person,

03:06:19.500 | but look, your life is so great.

03:06:20.940 | Like, there's this, there's that, there's this.

03:06:23.260 | And for a lot of depressed people to say,

03:06:25.020 | yeah, I know, I look at that,

03:06:27.420 | and I can't fix my state because I am broken.

03:06:30.540 | And if this is how I'm gonna have to live forever

03:06:33.380 | with being this broken and dysfunctional

03:06:36.460 | and to have this internal hell that I live day by day,

03:06:40.540 | I just want to escape.

03:06:43.740 | It's like someone jumping out of a burning building.

03:06:46.780 | It's like they don't wanna kill themselves,

03:06:47.960 | but they're jumping out of a burning building.

03:06:50.020 | And so I had it on the calendar,

03:06:54.880 | and thank God this was back

03:06:56.180 | when they would still send you a physical reminder

03:06:58.600 | in the mail, a little postcard that says your book is in.

03:07:02.180 | And that card went to my parents' house,

03:07:05.480 | and my mom saw it and panicked and called me.

03:07:08.980 | And I lied.

03:07:09.880 | I said it was for a friend who went to Rutgers

03:07:11.520 | who was doing a project on A, B, and C,

03:07:12.880 | but it was just enough to kind of snap me out of the trance

03:07:16.540 | and realize that killing yourself

03:07:19.820 | is like putting on a suicide vest with explosives

03:07:22.760 | and walking into a room of all the people

03:07:24.440 | you care the most about and blowing yourself up.

03:07:27.600 | So that snapped me out of it, but no one knew this.

03:07:31.300 | This guy certainly didn't know that.

03:07:33.700 | And that is when I went home and thought about it

03:07:38.240 | and just decided, okay, there's a chance if I write this,

03:07:43.240 | it's not certain, but there's a chance

03:07:45.920 | that this might help someone.

03:07:47.480 | It might prevent someone from doing

03:07:49.960 | what I was almost about to do.

03:07:51.460 | And so I spent months getting this post written

03:07:56.960 | and put it out, and I know for a fact

03:07:59.400 | that it has saved minimum dozens of lives.

03:08:02.400 | And there are other things,

03:08:03.780 | including a very extensive list of resources.

03:08:08.780 | And so that gave me, I suppose,

03:08:16.280 | not a toe in the water, but sort of jumping feet first

03:08:18.960 | into the deep end and experience of being that vulnerable.

03:08:22.160 | And this was a long time ago.

03:08:23.320 | I mean, this is, I want to say at least eight to 10 years ago

03:08:27.040 | when I put that post out.

03:08:28.840 | And then I want to say it was just before COVID lockdown.

03:08:33.840 | I was in Costa Rica visiting a friend.

03:08:42.680 | I was with my girlfriend at the time,

03:08:44.400 | and she knew a secret of mine.

03:08:47.440 | And she was one of maybe two or three people who knew

03:08:50.880 | that I'd been sexually abused when I was a kid

03:08:53.540 | by a babysitter's son from two to four, roughly,

03:08:56.380 | and routinely all the time kind of thing.

03:09:01.680 | And what you're envisioning is what happens.

03:09:06.680 | So it was not good.

03:09:08.680 | And that had been compartmentalized and locked away

03:09:12.160 | for my whole life.

03:09:14.780 | I was like, that's in the past.

03:09:16.960 | We're focused on moving forward.

03:09:18.980 | And nothing to be fixed, nothing to fix.

03:09:24.300 | And that was my perspective on things.

03:09:26.540 | It turned out, it wasn't quite that simple.

03:09:33.320 | And so I had done a lot of work, a lot of therapy,

03:09:37.520 | used psychedelic therapies as well,

03:09:41.680 | which once again are not all upside potential.

03:09:44.080 | There are some significant risks.

03:09:46.140 | But I had come a long way.

03:09:49.180 | And my plan had always been to wait until my parents passed

03:09:53.120 | 'cause I didn't want them to blame themselves for this,

03:09:55.920 | and then to write a book.

03:09:58.720 | And there was something though at the time

03:10:02.360 | when I was having dinner with my girlfriend

03:10:04.580 | that was dissatisfying about that plan.

03:10:07.640 | There's something about it that bothered me,

03:10:08.960 | and I couldn't quite put a finger on it.

03:10:10.340 | And I was talking to her about it.

03:10:12.320 | And she said, "That's gonna take a long time."

03:10:15.520 | She's like, "Have you ever thought about how many people

03:10:18.880 | are going to pass away or die or suffer between now

03:10:23.880 | and when you publish that book?"

03:10:26.720 | And I thought about it.

03:10:31.920 | And it was at that dinner that I decided

03:10:34.800 | to at least record a podcast covering this terrain.

03:10:39.440 | I was not at all convinced that I wanted to publish it.

03:10:42.960 | I was terrified of publishing it.

03:10:45.600 | Also because it meant opening myself up

03:10:48.440 | to a lot of conversations

03:10:50.380 | or maybe just hurtful commentary online.

03:10:56.760 | Who knows?

03:10:57.600 | Like people are, there are a lot of idiots out there

03:10:59.020 | and a lot of otherwise fine people

03:11:01.040 | who are idiots on the internet.

03:11:03.000 | So I was very hesitant.

03:11:04.600 | Ultimately decided I didn't wanna do it as a one-man show.

03:11:08.960 | I didn't want to make it a monologue.

03:11:11.760 | So I asked my friend, Debbie Millman,

03:11:14.900 | who had been on my podcast,

03:11:17.080 | she's an amazing graphic designer and teacher,

03:11:19.320 | but she had unexpectedly on my podcast

03:11:22.480 | based on some of my questions,

03:11:24.040 | for the first time publicly told her story

03:11:27.240 | about being sexually abused.

03:11:29.380 | And so I had leaned on her in years after that in private.

03:11:34.380 | And I asked her if she'd be willing

03:11:36.960 | to have a conversation with me about our

03:11:39.760 | respective journeys and what it felt like,

03:11:44.560 | what it looked like, what helped, what didn't help,

03:11:47.000 | what worked, what didn't, to provide at the very least

03:11:49.820 | a glimmer of hope for people who were keeping

03:11:54.320 | some of these dark secrets or contending with them,

03:11:56.800 | not knowing what to do with them.

03:11:59.260 | And we had that conversation and I sat on it,

03:12:01.980 | I sat on it, I sat on it, and then I put it out.

03:12:05.840 | And decided in advance that I would not look

03:12:10.840 | at any social media for at least several weeks afterwards.

03:12:15.000 | If my team saw anything on social media or got emails,

03:12:17.440 | I didn't want to see anything other than positive feedback,

03:12:20.280 | which is not my de facto.

03:12:22.240 | I'm usually eager to solicit constructive feedback,

03:12:27.240 | but in this case, I knew that my own position

03:12:31.500 | was too vulnerable.

03:12:33.760 | I didn't want to open up the possibility

03:12:38.760 | of destabilizing myself.

03:12:41.420 | And I put it out, and I think it's the most important

03:12:47.660 | podcast I've ever put out.

03:12:49.040 | So I kind of felt like my job was done

03:12:51.400 | from a podcasting perspective after that.

03:12:55.080 | And it's been incredibly gratifying.

03:13:00.260 | I think it has certainly helped a fair number of people.

03:13:04.580 | And it was also really hard,

03:13:05.840 | because what I didn't anticipate was I would say

03:13:08.840 | of my really super high performing close male friends,

03:13:13.840 | maybe half reached out to me to tell someone

03:13:24.220 | for the first time about their extremely awful,

03:13:27.700 | graphic first-hand experience of being sexually abused.

03:13:31.240 | The percentages were mind-blowing.

03:13:34.360 | The actual percentages were super, super, super high,

03:13:38.240 | which is part of the reason I mentioned earlier.

03:13:40.640 | I think it's good to spend a little bit of time

03:13:43.260 | in those empty spaces to see,

03:13:45.600 | am I in a positive energetic sense pursuing something good,

03:13:50.600 | or am I running away from demons whipping my back?

03:13:54.280 | And for a lot of those guys,

03:13:57.820 | I'm sure it's true for a lot of women too,

03:13:59.560 | like they find medication through intense focus

03:14:04.560 | and achievement, which is super adaptive in a lot of ways.

03:14:12.720 | But it doesn't always have lifetime reliability.

03:14:17.180 | And that's the story.

03:14:22.980 | It's impossible to hear those stories,

03:14:25.560 | your story without feeling some substantial emotion.

03:14:29.820 | I'm not trying to intellectualize.

03:14:31.140 | It's both of those aspects of your history

03:14:36.140 | that you shared are huge, right?

03:14:39.480 | They really are.

03:14:40.300 | They're obviously huge for you.

03:14:41.740 | And they're huge in terms of the positive impact

03:14:44.780 | in the world.

03:14:45.620 | I know this because I have read the comments, right?

03:14:50.140 | And I've talked to people who have listened

03:14:54.640 | to those podcasts and read those blogs

03:14:57.160 | and have similar or maybe different stories of trauma.

03:15:01.900 | But I think as with your work in the psychedelic space,

03:15:05.220 | as with your work in the physical augmentation space,

03:15:09.360 | whatever you want to call it,

03:15:10.860 | it's apparent that you're willing to be first man in

03:15:15.480 | on a lot of things.

03:15:16.320 | And really you're sitting alone there in those moments.

03:15:19.080 | And these categories of revealing trauma are,

03:15:23.200 | in my mind anyway, so much more substantial

03:15:26.340 | in terms of their impact, positive impact.

03:15:29.260 | And the other aspects for our body and psychedelic work,

03:15:32.800 | et cetera, is also tremendously impactful.

03:15:35.120 | So that's saying a lot.

03:15:36.120 | So I just want to say thank you for your bravery.

03:15:39.760 | And- - Thanks, Andrew.

03:15:41.280 | - Yeah, it's crazy 'cause I think that a lot of people

03:15:47.660 | can imagine telling a story

03:15:49.660 | or to a close friend or something,

03:15:51.040 | but to put it out into the world, it's huge.

03:15:54.800 | You don't know how that's going to ripple.

03:15:57.300 | And you've been a real pioneer and example for me,

03:16:01.120 | for Lex, for other people in revealing things,

03:16:04.340 | not like that, but different.

03:16:06.200 | And Peter Attia has recently been opening up

03:16:08.860 | about some serious challenges that he's had

03:16:11.200 | in his book.

03:16:12.680 | He does that on podcasts, he's been doing it.

03:16:14.320 | So yet another category, arguably the most important category

03:16:19.320 | for exploration and sharing and thoughtful bravery,

03:16:25.140 | 'cause he didn't just put it out there in any form.

03:16:27.500 | So one thing I do know by experience

03:16:30.120 | is there's nothing weirder than being told thank you

03:16:33.040 | for the painful thing that you did.

03:16:34.480 | So I don't want to push that too far,

03:16:36.120 | but I'd be remiss if I didn't

03:16:37.400 | because it really has its impact.

03:16:39.220 | And for doing it again here today,

03:16:40.860 | because, so yeah, huge thanks for doing that.

03:16:44.780 | - Yeah, my pleasure.

03:16:46.040 | And I'll also say, I got advice

03:16:48.580 | from a very, very experienced psychedelic facilitator

03:16:53.580 | at one point who said,

03:16:56.800 | "Take the pain and make it part of your medicine."

03:17:01.100 | And the way I think that applies here

03:17:04.500 | is we all experience pain.

03:17:09.440 | We all experience suffering.

03:17:11.760 | Many of us have experienced trauma of one type or another,

03:17:15.020 | and that can consume you.

03:17:18.960 | I mean, it can consume you, but it's like fire, right?

03:17:22.200 | It can consume you, but you can also harness it

03:17:24.640 | and use it for different things.

03:17:26.900 | And I know for, I think it's, I'm not gonna hedge.

03:17:31.820 | I'll say, I know for a fact that there are people

03:17:34.160 | I've spoken to who are suicidal,

03:17:37.160 | and by the way, I'm not inviting everyone who's listening,

03:17:40.800 | if you are suicidal, to reach out to because it won't work.

03:17:43.520 | I've had to disengage from that because it gets too heavy,

03:17:46.160 | just to engage one-on-one with people who are suicidal.

03:17:48.260 | But there are resources in that post I mentioned,

03:17:50.980 | the practical thoughts on suicide.

03:17:52.680 | But let's just talk about closer friends,

03:17:57.600 | people you would never suspect in a million years

03:18:00.360 | who are this close to blowing their brains out,

03:18:05.520 | people folks would recognize in some cases.

03:18:07.720 | The fact that I was also there once is why they listen to me

03:18:13.600 | 'cause I have, unfortunately, I'm a subject matter expert,

03:18:17.560 | and I have credibility, and that actually is very redeeming.

03:18:22.560 | It provides some meaning to the suffering

03:18:24.940 | that I experienced.

03:18:25.780 | It's like, okay, here I am, for whatever host of reasons,

03:18:30.720 | I am put in this place in time with this person,

03:18:34.000 | and they don't trust the input

03:18:37.160 | of these other people they're talking to

03:18:38.800 | because those people don't know what it's like.

03:18:41.800 | But I can look at this person in the eye and be like,

03:18:44.280 | oh, I know, and that's just a different thing.

03:18:48.240 | So you can find a way to transmute that pain

03:18:53.240 | into something meaningful,

03:18:57.260 | into a gift that hopefully you can share in some way.

03:19:02.700 | Not necessarily with the whole wide world, just one person.

03:19:06.400 | That's a big deal.

03:19:07.400 | One person's a big deal.

03:19:09.100 | There's a lot out there that is intended

03:19:11.040 | for mass consumption that gets in front of millions of people

03:19:13.320 | doesn't really impact a single person very much.

03:19:15.920 | So even if you don't have podcasts, you don't have books,

03:19:19.120 | if you have the ability to sit down with one person

03:19:21.480 | and really make an impact,

03:19:22.400 | that's actually more meaningful than most of the crap

03:19:25.240 | that gets put out there.

03:19:26.880 | So take heart.

03:19:28.460 | - Amen to that.

03:19:32.600 | I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about

03:19:35.320 | the roles you see yourself in.

03:19:38.120 | I had this list coming in here of, okay,

03:19:40.520 | you've done the exploration of the health sphere,

03:19:43.680 | self-experimentation, you've been an investor,

03:19:47.580 | you are an investor, you're a podcaster.

03:19:52.920 | I think these are more than titles.

03:19:56.300 | I think titles are great,

03:19:59.760 | but titles are what we get from other people

03:20:02.320 | telling us what we do or deciding what we do.

03:20:04.520 | I'm more interested in how you think about yourself,

03:20:10.320 | like your own role identity.

03:20:12.920 | And I have to assume you've spent

03:20:15.000 | a little bit of time on this.

03:20:15.920 | Like if one were to go through

03:20:17.040 | the checklist of possible roles, okay, I confess I do this.

03:20:21.780 | I think I check the box of animal

03:20:25.680 | because we're animals after all, and we're humans.

03:20:28.440 | - You're still pole dancing?

03:20:29.280 | I think you're just a pole dancer.

03:20:30.600 | - Absolutely not. [laughing]

03:20:33.920 | - Are you still tango dancing?

03:20:35.860 | - I'm planning on getting back into it.

03:20:37.960 | - Great.

03:20:38.800 | - That does have some background.

03:20:40.040 | - I have Argentine lineage and I'm embarrassed to say

03:20:42.000 | I don't know tango, but-

03:20:44.320 | - You got the mate in the green room, so you're set.

03:20:48.320 | - My grandparents tango into their eighties, I think.

03:20:52.680 | - Good for them. - Late eighties, yeah.

03:20:54.040 | - Good for them. - Late eighties, yeah.

03:20:55.000 | Ate steak and smoke cigarettes

03:20:56.560 | and lived until their nineties.

03:20:58.960 | My time died a champion. - Exactly.

03:21:00.920 | But I'm curious about the roles that you see yourself in.

03:21:05.560 | Like role identity to me is so important

03:21:09.440 | in terms of where we see ourselves now

03:21:12.240 | and where we see ourselves going forward.

03:21:14.320 | And who knows, maybe you don't have any role identity plan,

03:21:17.120 | but what are some boxes that you see yourself in now

03:21:20.240 | that you really strongly identify with?

03:21:23.120 | And then what are some boxes

03:21:24.460 | that you'd like to check off going forward?

03:21:28.480 | - So current boxes, I would say the two

03:21:33.060 | that I probably identify with most, maybe three,

03:21:37.660 | but I'll focus on two.

03:21:40.560 | Experimentalist, which can take a lot of forms.

03:21:43.640 | That can apply to a whole lot of different spheres.

03:21:49.040 | So experimentalist and then teacher.

03:21:52.840 | And for the longest time, long, long time,

03:21:57.080 | I thought eventually I would go back

03:21:59.400 | and actually be a ninth grade teacher

03:22:01.040 | because I feel like that is such a critical window

03:22:03.800 | for so many kids where they can either

03:22:07.860 | hit an inflection point and go in a really good direction,

03:22:10.100 | or they can go in a really bad direction.

03:22:12.300 | And I certainly saw that on Long Island

03:22:14.480 | with a lot of my friends, a lot of overdoses,

03:22:16.800 | a bunch of friends who have died of opiate addiction

03:22:20.660 | and various things.

03:22:21.500 | And I had some intervention with mentors early on

03:22:24.600 | that sort of flipped the switch on the railroad track

03:22:28.760 | and sent me in a different direction.

03:22:29.920 | So I thought for a long time I would go back

03:22:32.480 | and be a ninth grade teacher.

03:22:34.080 | And my impulse to experiment leads to enthusiasm

03:22:38.640 | for teaching, if that makes any sense.

03:22:40.960 | Because I feel like as good as I might be

03:22:45.560 | or decent at taking a complex subject,

03:22:49.240 | deconstructing it, applying 80/20,

03:22:52.280 | putting things in order, and learning things very quickly,

03:22:57.000 | which includes stress testing assumptions

03:23:01.240 | in that sort of assumed progression for skill,

03:23:06.160 | like language learning.

03:23:07.000 | There's so many myths in language learning, as an example.

03:23:09.800 | If it takes me, say, six months

03:23:14.220 | to become reasonably competent in field X,

03:23:18.520 | I can usually get other people

03:23:20.360 | to that same point of competence in a third of that time.

03:23:24.040 | So for me, it's very gratifying to teach.

03:23:26.600 | And I view all the books as teaching tools.

03:23:30.200 | I'm no Tolstoy.

03:23:31.280 | I recognize I'm not the world's greatest writer.

03:23:33.540 | I take the writing seriously.

03:23:35.580 | I don't half-ass it.

03:23:37.160 | I do many, many, many revisions, even for Cockpunch.

03:23:39.920 | It's like 27 revisions for a short story called Cockpunch.

03:23:44.540 | So I take it seriously, but I recognize

03:23:46.600 | that I'm not the world's greatest wordsmith,

03:23:50.800 | but I am looking for outcomes in readers or listeners,

03:23:57.960 | and I view my job as that of teacher.

03:24:01.280 | So I'd say experimentalist and teacher are the two.

03:24:04.320 | And those both go a long way,

03:24:08.440 | and applies to, say, dog training.

03:24:13.120 | Ran lots of experiments.

03:24:16.240 | For those listening, Tim just looked under the table.

03:24:18.480 | One thing I should have said at the beginning,

03:24:20.140 | and I did not, is that this is the first

03:24:24.040 | Huberman Lab podcast to feature a guest

03:24:26.760 | who brought their dog.

03:24:27.920 | So we have Molly is here as well,

03:24:30.020 | and we're absolutely delighted.

03:24:32.680 | There has not been a dog at on the Huberman Lab podcast

03:24:36.480 | since Costello passed away.

03:24:38.260 | And I'm practically floating in delight

03:24:43.260 | that Molly's here today.

03:24:44.900 | She's amazing.

03:24:45.740 | - You've done an amazing job training her, too.

03:24:47.700 | - Thank you, yeah.

03:24:48.540 | She's laying right next to my feet,

03:24:50.280 | licking my hand as I speak.

03:24:52.160 | - So good.

03:24:53.000 | - And I'd say if I were to expand that by one,

03:24:55.540 | I would probably say explorer,

03:24:57.860 | but the exploring goes hand in hand with the experimentation.

03:25:01.600 | So that could be geographic exploration.

03:25:06.480 | It could be spending time with people

03:25:08.600 | who are excellent at anything in any field,

03:25:15.080 | and seeing where that gingerbread trail leads me.

03:25:19.200 | And I think the exploration and the experimentation

03:25:22.840 | are, for me, bedfellows.

03:25:26.400 | They go together.

03:25:27.240 | - What about roles that you would like to explore

03:25:32.340 | or potentially see yourself in?

03:25:34.080 | I mean, I don't have a magic wand,

03:25:35.520 | but if I did as a fellow podcaster

03:25:37.760 | and I consider you a friend, I would say,

03:25:40.660 | okay, if I could wand you to the success in a given role.

03:25:44.920 | That wouldn't be the way it would work,

03:25:46.240 | and that wouldn't be as gratifying

03:25:47.440 | as having to figure it all out,

03:25:49.100 | 'cause that's part of your machinery, as you just told us.

03:25:52.880 | So yeah, what are some life roles

03:25:55.080 | that you're interested in expanding

03:25:57.680 | or stepping into that you haven't explored?

03:25:59.640 | - Yeah, I'd say more artists, more artistry,

03:26:03.480 | especially in the visual sense,

03:26:06.900 | because I wanted to be a comic book penciler

03:26:09.480 | for a really long time, got paid as an illustrator

03:26:12.760 | towards the end of high school and during college,

03:26:14.960 | so they illustrated books and magazines and so on.

03:26:17.220 | Then I just dropped it. - I didn't know that.

03:26:18.080 | - I dropped it when I graduated because that was kid stuff

03:26:20.000 | and it was time to get serious and be an adult,

03:26:21.440 | and I just, cold turkey, just stopped all of it.

03:26:23.640 | And so the skills have atrophied a lot,

03:26:25.600 | but there's still a bit in there.

03:26:28.920 | - I've seen some posts on Instagram that were quite good.

03:26:32.120 | - So I'm still messing around, I'm still messing around,

03:26:34.200 | and especially when I have some structure, I do well,

03:26:36.720 | so I'd like to pursue that.

03:26:38.800 | I would like to experiment with animation.

03:26:43.720 | So I don't know if animator would be the right label

03:26:46.160 | because I'd most likely not be doing the animation myself,

03:26:48.680 | but playing a role in visual art would be one.

03:26:53.540 | Father would be another one, eventually.

03:26:57.320 | And try not to be attached to it,

03:27:00.000 | but we all play games of various types,

03:27:04.080 | and if we get really good at certain games

03:27:06.200 | that are socially rewarded, then you make money

03:27:08.540 | doing a podcast, or investing, or whatever it might be.

03:27:13.400 | But when my, when the sort of ramp of my learning

03:27:18.400 | starts to flatten out a bit,

03:27:21.480 | I tend to get bored of those games,

03:27:23.780 | and I think that certainly one of the biggest adventures

03:27:28.780 | must be parenthood.

03:27:32.620 | So at some point, I think Father would be on there.

03:27:38.300 | And I should say, this is very judgmental of me to say,

03:27:40.440 | but I think there's a big difference

03:27:41.480 | between wanting to be a parent and wanting to have kids.

03:27:46.480 | I'm very cautious about saying I wanna have kids,

03:27:49.880 | because it doesn't automatically imply

03:27:51.440 | you wanna be a good parent,

03:27:53.520 | which is also why I thought it was very important

03:27:56.000 | for me to spend a lot of time training Molly, and--

03:28:00.320 | - A lot of learning there, right?

03:28:01.520 | - Yeah, it just seems like, all right,

03:28:02.840 | am I gonna do the heavy lifting and the hard work?

03:28:06.400 | Recognizing that kids are not deferred dogs,

03:28:10.000 | but I do think there are actually a lot of similarities

03:28:14.160 | in terms of just predictive ability.

03:28:16.980 | If you see someone who has dogs that are terribly trained,

03:28:20.260 | look at their kids.

03:28:22.420 | [laughing]

03:28:23.340 | You might see some similarities.

03:28:24.420 | - My good friend, my good friend, I'll out him here,

03:28:27.820 | who's a MD, PhD, is there,

03:28:29.440 | Chair of Ophthalmology at Stanford, Jeff Goldberg,

03:28:33.180 | once asked him if he has any pets,

03:28:35.240 | and he said that he and his wife had three children

03:28:37.660 | as preparation for having a dog.

03:28:39.900 | - That's hilarious.

03:28:41.360 | There's a quote also from a book called "Don't Shoot the Dog,"

03:28:44.080 | which is a terrible title, but excellent book,

03:28:46.420 | written by Karen Pryor, who was an aquatic mammal trainer.

03:28:51.360 | So she was training dolphins and whales and so on,

03:28:54.240 | which don't respond to negative reinforcement.

03:28:57.440 | You can't really hit them with a rolled up newspaper

03:28:59.240 | if they don't do what you want.

03:29:00.820 | And there's a quote in that book,

03:29:03.980 | which is something along the lines of,

03:29:05.380 | I can't remember the attribution, it's another trainer,

03:29:07.700 | and it was, "People should not be allowed to have children

03:29:10.760 | "until they've successfully trained a chicken."

03:29:13.580 | [laughing]

03:29:15.540 | Because also chickens, they just don't have the brain power

03:29:18.620 | to respond to much negative reinforcement.

03:29:22.820 | So you have to coax them to do what you want them to do

03:29:25.780 | with positive reinforcement.

03:29:27.500 | And I mean, operating classical conditioning,

03:29:29.940 | it's kind of same-same across the board.

03:29:32.140 | Whether you're like the CIA trying to train cockroaches

03:29:35.180 | to flip lights, which is not making that one up, by the way,

03:29:38.060 | or training a whale or training a cat or training a human,

03:29:42.240 | training sounds bad, cultivating a wonderful human,

03:29:46.680 | then I think there's a lot to be learned across the board.

03:29:49.340 | So I've successfully proven to myself

03:29:52.300 | that I can keep a dog alive and happy.

03:29:55.020 | - Yeah, and train up another happy nervous system.

03:29:57.780 | - Yeah.

03:29:59.100 | - Curate another nervous system, that's a big deal.

03:30:01.320 | - Oh yeah, well, she's also like my external nervous system.

03:30:04.420 | So we sort of work in tandem.

03:30:06.660 | I pay a lot of attention to how she relates

03:30:09.260 | to different people.

03:30:10.820 | - Yeah, I saw earlier today, I mean,

03:30:12.520 | as someone who was the owner of a Bulldog Mastiff

03:30:14.660 | who knew one command, which was weight,

03:30:17.140 | which is by default the easiest thing to train a bulldog,

03:30:20.740 | because when you, by the way, folks,

03:30:22.720 | if you stop a bulldog on the street to scratch them

03:30:25.480 | and they look delighted, they might like you,

03:30:27.660 | but chances are they're just really relieved

03:30:29.320 | that they get to stop. (laughing)

03:30:32.080 | And Costello, he had a forebrain and he was smart

03:30:37.220 | about what he needed to be smart about,

03:30:38.280 | but Molly is exceptional, like she knows

03:30:40.980 | where she needs to be and she's super connected to you.

03:30:43.440 | And she knows a ton of commands, it was ridiculous.

03:30:45.920 | Our staff was like delighting in the number of things

03:30:48.580 | that Tim could get her to do just by looking at her.

03:30:51.020 | - Yeah, yeah, she's also quite calm out of the box,

03:30:58.380 | which helps, although it makes it harder in some respects

03:31:01.420 | to train because she doesn't have much food drive.

03:31:03.940 | - If you like those Maui Nui sticks,

03:31:05.500 | we were chomping around. - She did like

03:31:06.340 | the Maui Nui sticks, yeah, she loves the Maui Nui,

03:31:08.200 | venison sticks, but she, well, okay, I'll give,

03:31:12.260 | I'll say two things.

03:31:13.180 | So first is if your dog is a spaz about food,

03:31:15.560 | that's actually great news.

03:31:16.980 | It will make your dog very easy to train in some respects.

03:31:20.360 | Read Don't Shoot the Dog, it's excellent.

03:31:24.340 | And there are some others I could recommend.

03:31:25.760 | I had a woman named Susan Garrett on my podcast

03:31:30.460 | because I wanted an objective measure

03:31:32.780 | of successful dog training,

03:31:34.660 | and competitors have objective measures.

03:31:36.620 | So she was a dog agility champion for many years,

03:31:40.940 | which has a lot of metrics.

03:31:42.820 | So anyway, I had her on for people who are interested.

03:31:44.500 | But the tip that I got from one dog trainer early on,

03:31:49.500 | because I was trying to train Molly

03:31:51.180 | and I was using just some of her kibble.

03:31:52.700 | I'd like put some kibble in a bag and carry it around.

03:31:55.220 | And she was like, "What are you doing?"

03:31:57.100 | And I said, "What do you mean, what am I doing?"

03:31:58.460 | She's like, "Is that kibble?"

03:31:59.420 | I'm like, "Yeah, it's kibble."

03:32:01.020 | And she goes, she's like, "Hey pal."

03:32:03.300 | She's like, "You're at a crowded bar.

03:32:04.460 | You got to tip with 20s to get your dog's attention.

03:32:07.160 | You take your puppy to the dog park.

03:32:09.200 | It's like squirrels, other dogs, grass,

03:32:11.440 | piss on the pavement, whatever it happens to be.

03:32:13.960 | You have to have good treats.

03:32:15.040 | So if your dog isn't responding,

03:32:16.300 | chances are maybe you're trying to tip with singles.

03:32:18.260 | - I love it, I love it.

03:32:20.860 | Well, thank you for sharing the roles you see yourself in

03:32:23.560 | and the ones that you'd like to step into more.

03:32:27.740 | I certainly feel I have the jurisdiction to say

03:32:30.080 | that you are an exceptional experimentalist

03:32:33.280 | and a phenomenal teacher.

03:32:35.500 | We've seen this across so many.

03:32:37.540 | You're welcome.

03:32:38.380 | And I'm not just speaking for myself.

03:32:39.820 | I'm speaking for so many other people as well.

03:32:42.860 | We've seen this across so many domains.

03:32:44.580 | It's like blogging, podcasting, book writing,

03:32:47.620 | stage lecturing, being a guest on a podcast and on and on.

03:32:52.820 | And in terms of the roles that you want to expand into more,

03:32:56.400 | I can't wait to see the illustrations that emerge.

03:33:01.060 | Yeah, please do grow that flame

03:33:03.620 | because I'm excited for what comes out.

03:33:06.200 | Cockpunch being just the first of them.

03:33:09.320 | - Leading the charge.

03:33:10.260 | - Yeah.

03:33:11.900 | And I can say because I know, because I have one

03:33:18.060 | and because I have observed many kids and friends

03:33:23.060 | who are fathers, you're going to be an exceptional father.

03:33:26.420 | I'm absolutely confident of that.

03:33:28.340 | - Thanks, man.

03:33:29.300 | I appreciate that.

03:33:30.140 | - And I want to say thanks for taking the time

03:33:33.640 | to talk with me today.

03:33:35.200 | I've been looking forward to this so much.

03:33:37.000 | My team knows this.

03:33:37.860 | Wait, we were sort of buzzing.

03:33:39.780 | We've had some heavy hitters on this podcast.

03:33:43.460 | We only look to the top 1% in field

03:33:47.260 | and they're incredibly credentialed

03:33:49.860 | by whatever standards we happen to be exploring.

03:33:52.060 | And they have to be people that I really want to talk to.

03:33:55.120 | So I have so much respect for what you do

03:34:00.120 | and the way you do it.

03:34:01.660 | You've certainly inspired me.

03:34:03.060 | This podcast would not exist.

03:34:05.320 | I don't think the genre of podcasting would exist

03:34:08.020 | and look the way that it does

03:34:09.840 | had you not made the decision to start podcasting.

03:34:12.860 | And in anticipation of this episode,

03:34:15.700 | I did put out a ping on Twitter for questions

03:34:17.940 | and there were many, many of them.

03:34:20.180 | Then maybe we'll do a Q&A sometime.

03:34:21.540 | Maybe not, who knows.

03:34:22.740 | But one of the questions that really stood out to me was,

03:34:25.900 | how does Tim feel about all these other people

03:34:27.820 | coming into all the spaces that he's worked

03:34:29.780 | and doing successful work

03:34:32.420 | that builds off so much of what he's done?

03:34:34.460 | And I'll let you answer.

03:34:36.420 | But for me, I can say that I've been positively inspired

03:34:40.860 | and built so much of what we've been doing here

03:34:43.380 | and what I think about based on the ways

03:34:46.360 | that you've podcasted and communicate with the public

03:34:48.740 | to maintain your stance and integrity

03:34:50.900 | in the way that you interact with people.

03:34:53.240 | It's really inspiring.

03:34:54.380 | And you've always been so gracious to me

03:34:56.300 | and so humble and so giving.

03:34:58.700 | And at the same time,

03:35:00.140 | I know there's a fierce guy in there

03:35:01.500 | who likes to get it done.

03:35:02.540 | So once again, thanks for being first man in.

03:35:05.580 | Thanks for taking on all the roles that you have

03:35:08.140 | and that you are and that you will.

03:35:10.260 | And thanks for being a giver.

03:35:12.340 | We all benefit.

03:35:13.300 | - Thanks, Andrew.

03:35:14.180 | I really appreciate you saying all that.

03:35:17.240 | And I want people to just get after it,

03:35:22.240 | take things seriously, have fun,

03:35:25.180 | and be really, really good.

03:35:27.060 | So watching, for instance, what you've done,

03:35:30.220 | which has been so spectacular, so well executed,

03:35:33.340 | makes me super happy.

03:35:35.360 | And I don't view anyone as competition

03:35:39.700 | in the podcasting world, for instance,

03:35:42.940 | in the book world, I don't view it that way either.

03:35:45.980 | And I just hope that people keep experimenting,

03:35:50.980 | pushing the envelope.

03:35:52.600 | And if people aren't, say, getting better over time,

03:35:58.460 | if people aren't following who are substantially better

03:36:00.980 | than me in all of these ways,

03:36:02.620 | then I would be super disappointed.

03:36:05.060 | So every time I see someone doing something really impressive

03:36:07.780 | or doing something I never would have thought of,

03:36:09.500 | I get so extremely excited.

03:36:12.300 | I find it really fun to watch.

03:36:14.300 | So appreciate you also getting out there and hard charging

03:36:19.300 | and taking your podcast as seriously as you do.

03:36:21.900 | I mean, I've seen the notes, I've seen the setup,

03:36:24.000 | I've met the team.

03:36:25.500 | It's very inspiring for me also.

03:36:28.560 | It makes me want to dust off my cleats

03:36:31.620 | and get back on the field.

03:36:33.420 | - Oh man, you've never left the field

03:36:34.980 | and you've had a hand in it all.

03:36:36.260 | So thank you so much.

03:36:37.500 | And I hope you'll come back and visit us again here.

03:36:41.560 | - Yeah, I hope so.

03:36:42.820 | It's been a real pleasure.

03:36:44.040 | I've been looking forward to this for a long time as well.

03:36:46.720 | And I appreciate you inviting me on.

03:36:50.220 | - Till next time.

03:36:51.060 | - Till next time, man.

03:36:52.240 | - Thank you for joining me

03:36:53.100 | for today's discussion with Tim Ferriss.

03:36:55.000 | I hope you found it to be as informative

03:36:57.360 | and as actionable as I did.

03:36:59.300 | For links to Tim's books,

03:37:00.920 | as well as for a link to his weekly blog,

03:37:03.580 | please see the show note captions.

03:37:05.060 | You'll also find a link to Tim's podcast,

03:37:06.720 | the Tim Ferriss podcast.

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03:39:03.720 | (upbeat music)

03:39:06.300 | you

Tim Ferriss: How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future | Huberman Lab Podcast

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