I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit about your mindset, maybe even your motivation, but certainly your mindset around sharing some of the hard personal tribulations that you've shared. In preparation for this discussion today, I went back to some of those posts that you did and the podcasts that you did around this, and I'd listened to them at the time, and they deal with quite serious violations of childhood and of self, and they're hard.

They're hard to listen to, and I can only imagine they must be even far, far harder to experience. And I was curious what led to your willingness to do that, and yeah, I mean, I have my own ideas about what might have motivated it, but I'd like to hear it from you.

Sure. Happy to talk about it, and I think there are two particular examples that come to mind. So one is my near-suicide in college, and if people search some practical thoughts on suicide and my name, it'll pop right up. I mean, if you just search my name and suicide, it'll probably pop right up.

Pretty well indexed at this point, which is very deliberate. People can look at the URL structure for a little wink and a hat tip. It'll tell you something about optimizing for Google. If you look at it, I'll just tell you the URL, it spells out how to commit suicide.

But clearly, I'm not teaching people how to commit suicide, but I wanted that to be a honeypot for some of that traffic, because it's a lot easier now to find that type of practical implementation advice, and it's a bit harder to find, I think, compelling intervention. So first of all, if you're feeling suicide, obviously call Suicide Hotline, please.

That's sometimes the last thing that people want to hear when they are in a place of suicidal ideation. And the reason I ended up writing a long post about this, which was terrifying to write, because I had never told my parents, I had never told my closest friends. This was a secret.

It was a dark, dark secret. And I wrote about it because I went to an event in San Francisco. I was interviewed on stage by Jason Calacanis, who's a friend and a very good interviewer, at an event. And after I got off stage, a bunch of people approached me and I was saying hi and taking photos and signing things and so on.

And there was one young man there, very well-dressed, which isn't really relevant. It was striking because in San Francisco, sometimes people are very underdressed and he had dressed up for it, like he'd taken it seriously and he was in a suit and tie. He asked me if I could sign a book for his brother.

And I said, sure, no problem. And I asked him, what would you like me to write to your brother? And he kind of blanked. He didn't kind of blank, he totally blanked. But the look behind his eyes was unusual. It wasn't just, I don't know what to say blank, there was something else behind it.

And I could tell that he felt under pressure. And I said, no problem. Take your time. I'll tell you what, I'll just chat with a couple of other people and I'll sign the book. No problem. I'm not going anywhere. And chatted with the other folks and then he asked if he could just walk me to the elevator and then I could sign the book.

I was like, sure. And he explained to me, as I walked to the elevator, how his brother had been a huge fan of mine and that I'd really kept his brother afloat for a long time and eventually his brother killed himself. And that they'd kept his room exactly how it was and he wanted me to sign the book so that he could put the book in his brother's room.

And he asked me if I'd ever considered talking about mental health and mental health challenges publicly because he thought it would really help a lot of people. And that just, I mean, I'm feeling myself tear up right now. It was so crushing to hear this story. And totally unbeknownst to him, I had a lot of history with depressive episodes.

And when I say near suicide, I had it on the calendar. I had a plan. I was going to kill myself. I knew exactly how I was going to do it. I knew where I was going to do it. I knew all of the variables that I needed to account for to get it done.

And the only reason that didn't happen for people who don't have the context, which most people want, is I had tried to reserve a book at Firestone Library. This is at Princeton, which had something to do with suicide. It was like assisted suicide, like the clinician's guide to euthanasia, something like that.

And it wasn't in. And I had forgotten to change my address at the registrar's office. I was taking a year away from school. And that was to focus on finishing my thesis. It was to try a few jobs. But I'd ended up in a very bad place and was feeling very isolated.

And my friends were graduating a year ahead of me. And I was stuck on this thesis. And there's a lot of back story that I won't bore people with. But it got to the point where I decided, not that objectively my life is bad. I think this is where people who haven't experienced depression get a little confused or that it's hard for them to identify when they give advice to a depressed person.

Because you might say to a depressed person like, but look, your life is so great. Like there's this, there's that, there's this. And for a lot of depressed people to say, yeah, I know. I look at that and I can't fix my state because I am broken. And if this is how I'm going to have to live forever with being this broken and dysfunctional and to have this internal hell that I live day by day, I just want to escape.

It's like someone jumping out of a burning building. It's like, they don't want to kill themselves, but they're jumping out of a burning building. And so I had it on the calendar and thank God this is back when they would still send you a physical reminder in the mail, a little postcard that says your book is in.

And that card went to my parents' house. And my mom saw it and panicked and called me. And I lied. I said it was for a friend who went to Rutgers who was doing a project on A, B, and C. But it was just enough to kind of snap me out of the trance and realize that killing yourself is like putting on a suicide vest with explosives and walking to a room of all the people you care the most about and blowing yourself up.

So that snapped me out of it. But no one knew this. This guy certainly didn't know that. And that is when I went home and thought about it and just decided, okay, there's a chance if I write this, it's not certain, but there's a chance that this might help someone.

It might prevent someone from doing what I was almost about to do. And so I spent months getting this post written and put it out. And I know for a fact it has saved minimum dozens of lives. And there are other things, including a very extensive list of resources.

And so that gave me, I suppose, not a toe in the water, but sort of jumping feet first into the deep end and experience of being that vulnerable. And this was a long time ago. I mean, this is, I want to say at least eight to 10 years ago when I put that post out.

And then I want to say it was just before COVID lockdown. I was in Costa Rica visiting a friend, I was with my girlfriend at the time, and she knew a secret of mine. And she was one of maybe two or three people who knew that I'd been sexually abused when I was a kid by a babysitter's son, from two to four, roughly, and routinely, all the time kind of thing.

And what you're envisioning is what happened. So it was not good. And that had been compartmentalized and locked away for my whole life. I was like, that's in the past. We're focused on moving forward. And nothing to be fixed, nothing to fix. And that was my perspective on things.

It turned out it wasn't quite that simple. And so I had done a lot of work, a lot of therapy, used psychedelic assist therapies as well, which once again, are not all upside potential. There are some significant risks. But I had come a long way. And my plan had always been to wait until my parents passed, because I didn't want them to blame themselves for this, and then to write a book.

And there was something, though, at the time when I was having dinner with my girlfriend, that was dissatisfying about that plan. There's something about it that bothered me, and I couldn't quite put a finger on it. And I was talking to her about it. And she said, that's going to take a long time.

She's like, have you ever thought about how many people are going to pass away, or die, or suffer between now and when you publish that book? And I thought about it, and it was at that dinner that I decided to at least record a podcast covering this terrain. I was not at all convinced that I wanted to publish it.

I was terrified of publishing it. Also because it meant opening myself up to a lot of conversations, or maybe just hurtful commentary online. Who knows? There are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of otherwise fine people who are idiots on the internet. So I was very hesitant, ultimately decided I didn't want to do it as a one-man show.

I didn't want to make it a monologue. So I asked my friend Debbie Millman, who had been on my podcast. She's an amazing graphic designer and teacher, but she had unexpectedly on my podcast, based on some of my questions, for the first time publicly told her story about being sexually abused.

And so I had leaned on her in years after that in private. And I asked her if she'd be willing to have a conversation with me about our respective journeys and what it felt like, what it looked like, what helped, what didn't help, what worked, what didn't, to provide at the very least a glimmer of hope for people who were keeping some of these dark secrets or contending with them, not knowing what to do with them.

And we had that conversation, and I sat on it, I sat on it, I sat on it, and then I put it out and decided in advance that I would not look at any social media for at least several weeks afterwards. If my team saw anything on social media or got emails, I didn't want to see anything other than positive feedback, which is not my de facto.

I'm usually eager to solicit constructive feedback, but in this case, I knew that my own position was too vulnerable. I didn't want to open up the possibility of destabilizing myself. And I put it out, and I think it's the most important podcast I've ever put out. So I kind of felt like my job was done from a podcasting perspective after that.

And it's been incredibly gratifying. I think it has certainly helped a fair number of people. And it was also really hard because what I didn't anticipate was I would say of my really super high performing close male friends, maybe half reached out to me to tell someone for the first time about their extremely awful graphic firsthand experience of being sexually abused.

The percentages were mind blowing. The actual percentages were super, super, super high, which is part of the reason I mentioned earlier. I think it's good to spend a little bit of time in those empty spaces to see am I in a positive energetic sense pursuing something good or am I running away from demons whipping my back.

And for a lot of those guys, I'm sure it's true for a lot of women too, they find medication through intense focus and achievement, which is super adaptive in a lot of ways. But it doesn't always have lifetime reliability. And that's the story. It's impossible to hear those stories, your story, without feeling some substantial emotion.

I'm not trying to intellectualize it. Both of those aspects of your history that you shared are huge. They really are. They're obviously huge for you and they're huge in terms of the positive impact in the world. And I know this because I have read the comments and I've talked to people who have listened to those podcasts and read those blogs and have similar or maybe different stories of trauma.

But I think as with your work in the psychedelic space, as with your work in the physical augmentation space, whatever you want to call it, it's apparent that you're willing to be first man in on a lot of things and really you're sitting alone there in those moments and these categories of revealing trauma are, in my mind anyway, so much more substantial in terms of their impact, positive impact.

And the other aspects for our body and psychedelic work, et cetera, is also tremendously impactful. So that's saying a lot. So I just want to say thank you for your bravery. And- Thanks, Andrew. And it's crazy because I think that a lot of people can't imagine telling a story or to a close friend or something, but to put it out into the world, it's huge.

You don't know how that's going to ripple. And you've been a real pioneer and example for me, for Lex, for other people in revealing things not like that, but different. Peter Atiyah has recently been opening up about some serious challenges that he's had in his book. He does that on podcast.

He's been doing it. So yet another category, arguably the most important category for exploration and sharing and thoughtful bravery, because you didn't just put it out there in any form. So one thing I do know by experience is there's nothing weirder than being told thank you for the painful thing that you did.

So I don't want to push that too far, but I'd be remiss if I didn't, because it really has its impact and for doing it again here today, because so yeah, that huge thanks for doing that. Yeah. My, my pleasure. And I'll also say, you know, I got advice from a very, very experienced psychedelic facilitator at one point who said, take the pain and make it part of your medicine.

And the way I think that applies here is we all experience pain. We all experience suffering. Many of us have experienced trauma of one type or another and that can consume you. I mean, it can consume you, but it's like fire, right? It can consume you, but you can also harness it and use it for different things.

And I know for, I think it's, I'm not going to hedge, I'll say I know for a fact that there are people I've spoken to who are suicidal. And by the way, I'm not inviting everyone who's listening, if you are suicidal to reach out to me, because it won't work.

I've had to disengage from that because it gets too heavy, right? Just to engage one-on-one with people who are suicidal, but there are resources in that post I mentioned, the practical thoughts on suicide. But let's just talk about closer friends, people you would never suspect in a million years who are this close to blowing their brains out.

People folks would recognize in some cases. The fact that I was also there once is why they listen to me. Because I have, unfortunately, I'm a subject matter expert and I have credibility. And that actually is very redeeming. It provides some meaning to the suffering that I experienced. It's like, okay, here I am, for whatever host of reasons, I am put in this place in time with this person and they don't trust the input of these other people they're talking to because those people don't know what it's like.

But I can look at this person in the eye and be like, oh, I know. And that's just a different thing. So you can find a way to transmute that pain into something meaningful, into a gift that hopefully you can share in some way. Not necessarily with the whole wide world, just one person.

That's a big deal. One person is a big deal. There's a lot out there that is intended for mass consumption that gets in front of millions of people. It doesn't really impact a single person very much. So even if you don't have a podcast, you don't have books, if you have the ability to sit down with one person and really make an impact, that's actually more meaningful than most of the crap that gets put out there.

So take heart.