Tim Ferriss: How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and i'm a professor neurobiology and opened ology at stanford school of medicine today. My guest is tim ferris.

Tim ferris is an author, a pod caster, an investor, and is known for having a near supernatural ability to predict the future, which I has allowed him to obtain success in a huge number of different endeavors. For instance, he is a five time number one new york times best selling author. But perhaps equally or more important to that, he's also exceptionally good at teaching people how to write the entire process of writing and marketing a book.

His books for our chef and the for our body and the for our work week. Not only explain his own exploration of how to optimize and prioritize this time and learn particular skills, but he teaches you those skills as well. This is really what sets him apart.

He is an exceptional learning and an exceptional teacher. And today you learn why that is. And in a characteristic tim veris way, he explains the process in a way that you can apply IT. He lives out, for instance, the specific questions that you should ask when approaching any endeavor in order to get the information that you want and to make the process of learning and getting Better at something and achieving great success in something that much more likely, that ability that tim has to identify the specific questions that one needs to ask and answer, and the specific action steps to take in order to achieve success is really what I believe sets him apart from everyone else on the internet or on the book shelf, that giving advice as to how to become good at something.

Ting furs is also dedicated to various philanthropic efforts, the most recent of which is the donation of several millions of his own dollars to research on psychedelics s for the treatment of otherwise tractable psychiatric chAllenges such as major depression, so a cdl depression, eating disorders and addiction. And he's also brought together other philanthropist, which has really gavi, zed, the whole field of psychiatric research for the treatment of mental health, transforming IT from what was recently kind of a fringe area of science to a main state that's actually funded not only by philanthropy, but by the nal institutes of health. So he's really transform this entire scientific field into one that now is transforming the laws around psychodeviant s and is providing mental health treatment for people that would otherwise suffer.

Today's discussion was a particularly meaningful one because not only as tim, a pioneer in the world of podcasting, but IT also marked the nine year anniversary of his podcast, the time fair show. Now, as I mentioned earlier, tim is known for being able to see around corners or predict the future. He really does seem to be about five, if not ten years, ahead of everybody else in thinking about tools for optimization, in particular domains of life.

And so we were very fortunate that during today's discussion, he shares with us his current creative endeavors and how he's thinking about and approaching those. And he also breaks down for us the process of how to think about and prioritize one scheduled, not just on the order of the day, not just on the order of the week, but really thinking about one's life as a journey and how to organize and go about that journey. So today's discussion will provide with you tremendous insight into who tim fairs is and how that incredible mind of his works in order to do all the amazing things that he's done.

And of course, he teaches you how to do IT. He will tell you the exact questions that you should ask and that you should answer and how to step back and think about those questions and then prioritize so that you can decide how to best invest your time. I'm sure many of you familiar with the tim fairs show.

However, if you're not already subscribing to the time fairs show, I highly recommend you. Do I still go back and listen to early episodes of the tempie show? And i'm a weekly listener to the new episode? We provide a link to the temper err show in the captions.

Also in the shown, no captions, you will find links to teams, many new york times, best selling books and a link to its excEllent weekly blog. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electronic drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means plenty of salt, magnesium and paci um the so called electronic light and no sugar. Now salt, magnesium and patasse are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrical lights need to be present in the proper ratio.

And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits. And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electronic light ratio of one thousand milligrams at one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of parasitic and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure enough electoral lites.

And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element t dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element element dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate.

And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga media sessions. Those who you don't know, yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind.

It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial.

And now for my discussion with tim virus, tim ferris, I am nothing short of thrilled to have you here. I've been reading your books, reading your blogs, listen your podcast for a very long time. And in preparing for today, thinking, you know, who does tim remind me of? Because I knew you remind me of somebody, but I didn't know who.

And then I realized that you remind me of the nearby ologies romona kahl. You don't look anything like him. He doesn't look anything like you.

He was a brilliant scientist. He won the nobel prize in one nine, nine six for essentially describing the structure of the nervous system. He was the first, along with another guy, to define synapses with fundamental connection, the nerve system.

But the reason that you remind me of the hall is that it's a well known or not so secret secret in neuroscience that if you want to pick a really excEllent project to work on, you simply go and look at what kahl talked about or hypothesized and then you work on that. Ah he had this almost supernatural ability to look at fixed stained tissue of the nervous system, much of IT incredibly beautiful, by the way, and think about how IT worked when I was alive. And he's consider the greatest neurologist for all time without question.

And it's really this feature of being able to like see around corners or into the future that establishes that link for me. It's it's absolute truth that if you look back to what you were doing ten years ago, fifteen years ago, the kinds of things are doing, the kinds of questions you are asking, that translates to much of what people like myself and people on the fitness space, tech space, investor space, mindfulness space, psychiatric space, all these different arenas, what they're doing now. So um it's not hyperbole to say that you are the romanic hall of all those different spaces and podcasting, of course, is one of those.

So I tell you a great death of gratitude and many others do as well. So my first question for you is what was your mindset around the time that you wrote for our body for our work week but in particularly for our body because the protocols in that book are so very useful, they worth the time that was published. They still are now.

And so many of the things like ice bath, the discussion around Brown fat thermogenesis resistance training in its, you know, kind of basic form of just providing enough progressive overload to get an adaptation, not excessively long workouts, weight loss, slow carb diet and on and on and on. What are you thinking at that time? Like if you can think back to them, like what were you forging ing for when you thinking about when you woke up in the morning thing? I am going to go find all this stuff at the time was really ethic, because he is all played out very well. What amazed saying is, if you want to know what's going to be happening hot and useful in five years, ten years, and honor ds, just look at what time is doing at any moment. So there IT is, well.

thank you for the very generous comparison and infill i'm thills to bear. So thanks for having me. And the four body represented an opportunity for me to do a few things.

The first was to diversify my identity from outside of the realm of the a business category. So was a deliberate move since the success of the first, but bought me permission to do something else that publishers would still want a gamble on. I wanted to see if I could maybe like a Michael Lewis.

Take my audience with me to other topics. So that was a lateral move that was very deliberate from A A career optionality standpoint. And then I was doing, I think, what i've done for a very long time and what I enjoy doing, which is looking at the most prevalent beliefs and maybe dogmatic assumptions in a given field, could be anything, if anyone says, always, never.

Should I pay attention and take note of that? IT may very well be right. But if anything is set in absolutes, I like to stress test.

And in the case of a physical performance or physical manipulation, tracking two thousand and eight, two thousand nine is a very interesting time because the number of different technologies were coming online, meaning being adopted by small groups. You had the very early stages of six cello etas wearables. You had a number of different innovations and means of tracking that had never been available before you had, for instance.

And this took a bit of fairing on my side. IT wasn't immediately on the road, not for the for our body, but continuous lucas manors at time. That was, I want to say, exclusively limited type one diabetics, or the maybe types to diabetes tics, but largely type one diabetics.

And what's captured my interest, and I can't recall how I came across, but IT was probably through the very earliest iterations of what later became the quantified self movement. And I remember attending the very first gathering at Kevin Kelly house in a pacific, california. This was around two thousand and nine, twelve people, thirteen people to discuss quantifying health.

The the example of a professional race car driver, I can't remember the the form factor, whether is f one or nascar other. Who was using this continued glucose monitor for paying attention to glucose levels, wild driving. And I thought to myself, would that not be useful for healthy Normally? Would that not have other applications?

If this is being used by high performer in this type of context, might IT have other types of applications, which then let me to use the very early versions of dex, com, which were really painful to implant. No longer the case. Of course, that's changed a lot.

And I wanted to see how I might be able to find a handful of different categories of things. There's the new like the genuinely new like cgm at that point was genuinely new. The very old that might have some room for scientific investigation.

And I would say when I say scientific, I don't necessarily mean analyze control trials at the university. I do think as an end of one, if you think about study design, and you can even blind, you could even placido control. And I knew people in the small subculture of quantified itself, you did this.

You can, I think, approach things in a methodical way where you can make a lot of progress in trying to determine causes, or like there, of looking at very old things, looking at orphan things. So for instance, there are many examples in the world of doping where you have a belco back in the day were famously barry bonds and others reportedly use things like the cream and the clear. And these were based on antibodies that were sourced from soviet literature or older literature from the fifties and sixties, that might not be on the radar of saying anti coping groups that would administer the testing.

So all of these different buckets were of interest to me, and I began, where I usually do, just interviewing folks. So I would interview one, two people in a given field, and I might ask them any number of questions. So one is, what are the nerds doing on the weekends or at night? This is also really good for investing.

It's like, what are the really technical nerds doing at night or on the weekends after they've ve put in a really long work day or work week? Let's take a really close look at that. Another one is, and all help create a flow for this.

But what are rich people doing now that everyone, or tens or hundreds of millions of people might be doing ten years from now? And an example of that would be less to say, full time assistant, virtual assistant, ai, right? So we've seen the needs and wants being addressed by different technology, but it's in the iteration of the same thing on some level in the case of see using ChatGPT tighten as APP for various functions and then where people cobble together awkward solutions.

So where people peeing together awkward solutions? And is there room for some type of innovation there? These are a few of the questions that I would not only ask myself, but ask experts in different areas. So if I end up spending time, say this was few years prior to writing, the for our body has spent time at NASA aims and was interacting with a number of scientists, some people who were working on all sorts of biological tests and looking at genomics, and had a very Frank discussion about where they thought if they had to push, right? So I ask questions like push a little bit into the ramal of science fiction and speculation because 我们是 you can support any type of projection like that with the literature， with science fc literature.

But what do you think some of the risks are of, say, publishing your gene at the time, a number of high profile folks are just made their full gye ms element like, well, I think in the near future will be possible to reconstruct someone's face based on their genetic data. And they're like high degree of confidence, like zero, one hundred percent. How confident? Yeah, eighty, ninety percent.

okay. I should pay tension to that because if you're making your data available as just say and it's anonymized persue, you still might be identified OK. That raises some interesting questions like, okay, well, how might you get around that? How much you put in safeguards so that you are the one and only keeper of your data, so to speak, brought up all sorts of targeted weapons by of bioweapons possibilities that I was interested in.

And then i'd asked that person who is clearly like willing to step outside of the box of whatever he's working on day to day, who are two of your close friends or two thinkers you really pay a lot of attention to, are kind of at the bleeding edge of something and unorthodox. And then I would just continue to have these conversations over and over again. And the the the the stream of development that I paid a lot of attention to, something along the lines of the alling.

So the the very beginnings are usually in some type of extreme case. And I think the extremes, and this goes for product designs well, but the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versus you can actually learn a lot by stunning education. So race horses, for instance, uh, you'll always see things start with a raise horses, uh, or people with wasting diseases, for instance, or any type of chronic or terminal illness who are willing to try some more experimental interventions.

Then let's just take one step for their body building, see a lot of interesting behavior and body building and high love athletes, then billionaire, then rich people than the rest of us, right? So my assumption is and was for the for our body, that a long lines of William gibsons quote, you know, the future is already here. It's just not even they distributed.

So i'm never predicting the future. I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating that I think you're gonna bloom and end up spreading really, really wide. So that's that's that's generally where I start. And I seem the practitioners are going to be ahead of the papers. So studying, say, the coaches whose jobs are on the line, who are getting paid based on athlete performance and assuming that a lot of that will eventually, if IT holds up, make its way in to say the peer reviews exercise science papers but it's going to have a lag time of three .

to five .

years at least at least at least .

yeah the yeah science is often very slow to catch up. Yes, you mention many things I have questions about um you mention paying attention to the new, the very old. Were the orphant so interesting? And I just thought tell you that when you used sit down with the graduates student or a postdoc and they're going to come up with a project, rarely do you say like what you want to work on and they fired back like a really interesting question.

Sometimes they do, but that's the rare person. More often than not, you'll send them to the literature and they'll come back with like, okay, there's this new technique that we can use to answer a set of questions Better than ever before, where there's a very old theory want to revisit or there's a theory that no one pays attention to. In fact, we had one guest on here or at rosalva, who dying IT essentially inheritances of traits, transliteration and inheritance of traits is a little bit although different from the markin um uh evolution but it's a lot like that in some ways and you know these orphant theories that everyone assumed were wrong and there is a basis for them so I think there's real genius in that um analysis.

Um IT also struck me as you are listing off some of your process circle the the writing of the four our body that I am. Many other people are are pretty curious about what the Operations around all that looked like. So are you or were you at the time like waking up in the morning going, okay, i'm going to take a walk and think about the new, the old and the orphans, or i'm gna take a Walker, sit in and sharing about, like, what are the nerds doing right now? What are rich people doing right now? Covering together awkward solutions was was that exploration of structured practice for you? Or is this just something that um was the consequence of being tim various waking up in the morning and just like leaning into that because I have experiences both, right.

But I think a lot of us are a curious I mean that there's a lot of mistake around you, whether you like to decel IT rather what do you like IT or not. It's there and and we're not trying to try. But prior is the is the establishment of structure for you, something that's the consequence of structure in the first place is like, okay, now time to think. Or do you just allow things to guide you up to the surface?

I do both. And I would say in the case of for our body, it's it's a bit of an anomaly compared to my later books because I had recorded effect vely every work that i'd done, some stage sixteen as a competitive athi. Just I had a lot of records and I kept copious notes on supplement use and everything imaginable.

So I have what you might call hyper graph hia. I just capture IT almost everything in writing and that was very useful because at various points in time, let's just say, and looked at a photograph of myself from making this up. but.

Two thousand and four. And I think I would like to look and feel like that again. Okay, let me revisit my work out logs. Let me just replicate the proceeding three to six months of workouts and look at my intake and my diet at the time. And lone behold, more or less I could replicate the same type of look and feel and performance.

So I had a lot already logged that I thought was worth examining and putting other scrutton, trying to replicate with other people, I do think, and is really important. And then when I came time to commit to a writing the book, I thought about what types of many books would be of great interest to meet personally. And that book, like many of my other books, was written in such a fashion that I could be a choose and adventure book, did not need to be read.

In fact, in anyway IT shouldn't be read linearly. From page one to the end, you get to pick and choose which chapters are our interest based on breath hold, vertical jump endurance hyperdrive phy called exposure for fat loss, whatever IT might be. And then I being in talking to people and at the at the very outer bounds of self experimenting, at least in the bay area, it's a pretty small community.

So you're wanted to lilly pads from just about everyone. And it's not accidental that I put myself in that environment in 3Frances， go specifically and more generally in the bay areas or convalescence is just a high service area for luck to stick to because you have so many serendipity encounters, you have so many people focusing on different disciplines that I think was the fertilizer. And the fertile ground for everything else was actually the choosing, the war of writing, physically being located in services.

go. And then when i'm structuring things, maybe i'll get into some of the needy, greedy. But I was using at the time, and I still like to use a program called script, or which is actually designed predominantly for a screen writing. IT used for many things now, novels and so on. It's expanded its reach quite bit, but IT allows you to gather research and all of your documents and drafts so that you can move them around in very novel ways so you can view, say, a split hin of your research and what you're working on simultaneously without having talk between a lot of different windows. And I was very promiscuous in my gathering of data.

So I would gather from, say, the web using a web clipper from ever note, which I was involved with his company, and basically, without bias, captures much as possible, put three s risks next to anything that I thought I really might want to revisit after I read something a second time, which I had always do, then I could control f to find just three as risks, because they don't occur much in Normal writing, just like people, authors, writers will. You use T, K, meaning find such and such a date data needs to be inserted later. But I don't, in trip, the flow of writing ably couldn't tk, because I didn't really appear in natural english much in terms of structured thinking. The way I approached IT was during that period of time in my life, IT was interviews, tracking people, down conversations, emails, reading. So injection, let's just say for the workday, then a break for training and and actually using myself as the human genii g for various things that are surfaced that might beyond the docket.

Where were you training at that time to go? Is not famous for amazing gyms.

It's not famous for amazing games. At the time, I was training mostly at a climbing gym called nisan Cliff. They didn't know much, but they barbells and and they, I also had in the, in the walkway leading from the front door of the apartment I was renting, a murban house, the front door all away to the first set of stairs, there were thirty calipers of various types.

Now was training for certification. I wanted to put myself on some type of deadline, accountability for that type of training to get a Better understanding of IT. So train for a few hours. I also had developed a friendship with Kelly starrer. So service across IT.

who I have tremendous respect. Lbs new book .

to .

move is great book. He's so good.

Yeah, he he really not only talks the top, but walks the walk and exemplifies many of the capabilities that he teaches, which I take seriously. I like practitioners, not just the people with pretty theories. Although the theories are important, I prefer to see someone who can actually put them into practice.

So Kelly, serve that function a certainly, and a worst of very close friends. And then after that, shake off the cob webs, get the body moving, get the brain moving, also eat. And then I would actually focus syntheses.

So I would write generally from, let's call IT, nine P M or ten P M. Through to four, five year. And I would ride the wave if I happen to be in the zone. If I went in the zone, I wouldn't force IT and I would try to get more sleep. But I have always performed best with my writing in those watching hours of, let's call IT ten P M to four m.

And my experience is that the writer ers, i've interviewed, the the writer friends i've become close with, if you look at when they made themselves, not what is not clearly what they do now, right? But what they did that eventually got them to escape city. They're almost always doing most of their writing very late at night or very early in the morning when the rest of the world or their social group is inactive.

Wow, yeah and I say wow because course, all of this was prior to the publication of matt Walkers seminal book, right, why we sleep. But I really see is the book that shifted a lot of people fortunate from the i'll sleep when i'm dead mindset uh too you know to really paying attention to IT. And um you know I don't think that gets enough credit.

I mean, there's there's been a revision of a few points within that book, but the majority of IT is just spot on and hyper so good. And and yet what you're just scribing is a schedule that you starting to write at nine P M. And finishing up around four years. But you talk about research earlier that day and training and eating.

So other names in there, I would sleep from, say, four to maybe eleven or twelve. So I would be getting up later. And i've had conversations with mad about this.

And there are night house and morning lurks. And there are certainly differences in the code, meaning the genetics. But that worked very, very well for me for a very long time.

IT is, however, a very chAllenging social schedule. So once you have a significant and every growth and I ve ever had this morning, person, if you want to spend time together, that schedule just does not work. So I made compromises later for the social side of things. But if you put a gun to my head and said, you need to write the best book humanly possible, that is your only priority. Outside of exercise and fuel, I would follow the .

same schedule. I know several very successful pod casters, lex freemen in particular, who I think he's trying to follow a more Normal schedule now, but he's suo nocturnal, least by my my read yeah. And there are a couple other online content creators, Derek, for more plates, more dates, whose hyper productive in his domain and is mostly nocturnal.

And then, as you're describing, you are a writing routine, and you're overall routine. I was thinking, you know, the great skateboard. Everyone knows tony hawk is obviously a great escape boarder, no doubt about that.

But roddy mollen, who invented the only on street, the kick lift, the only like rod, is basically afternoon and hasn't for a long time, and would escape word up and down the water walks and send a month at the middle the night because lack of distraction. Yes, he really was. And he's been doing that since teens.

Don't know what he's doing these days, but I think a lot of creators just need space. And and I always wondered if that because when they at least the ones that are not a socially diffunce tional like yourself, who when they are around people, there's this almost hopefully a desire to interact. So you almost have to remove the stimulus .

completely yeah IT IT removes the plausible deniability, which might not be the perfect use of that phrase, but in the sense that you it's harder to fool yourself in the thinking you're doing something important when you're checking your messages or social media at two in the morning. Who are we kidding, folks? You should be writing, in this case, right? And writers will do anything to avoid writing.

Remember, I and rode a book about writing, which is actually fantastic. I can't member the exact title. I might just be on non fiction writing something like that.

And SHE talked about polishing the sneakers of the shoes before writing. Like, I really just need to do this one thing, which is to just clean up that show, because somebody should really clean IT up. And at some point I should clean IT up.

And therefore what I want to do, there's no time like the present all to do that. It's all to avoid writing, which is the harder thing. And in my conversation of the that also, I should say that as someone who has self described as a person who struggles with onset soma, that made the point, sometimes we need to relearn things.

Maybe you should just go to bed later. sure. And that might address some of this answer. Some I and I don't know the causes for that, but I do get a second wind very late, could be related to some court is all released abNormality or just different scripting in my system, who knows?

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic c drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for good health. Our god, very important, is populated by the microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiology alth.

In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations in vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And IT tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com, slash huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d three k two. Again, that's athletic Green dot comm slash humane to get the five travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two.

I mention one other. One other may be serious. C that I used for trying to peak ground corners, which is, if I find an example of an outlier, trying to find two or three, right? Because one is an exception, two is interesting, three is worth investigating.

That sort of how I think about IT. And I recognized the organic dog does not equal data. However, a lot of interesting discoveries begin as case studies or case histories. And so there are some things we can talk about that, that i've paid attention over the last few years that are not in the for our body that I think quite interesting and raise very, very exciting questions.

But i'd love to hear about those yeah and in the long lines of what I call anew data, I mean, most of what we know about human memory stems from one patient, hm, who had his hip campaign that removed for epilepsy. And of course, i've been on millions, probably close to millions, of studies in animals and humans focusing on the hippo campy. But most of what we know about human memory is from one guy. Yeah, yeah.

exactly. So there there's a lot to be examined. Not all of IT will get funding for r CS. Let's be realistic. This is especially true if you are hoping for any type of directive data.

And notice i'm not conclusive, but if if you are human is going to be making decisions about diet, health, exercise. If you want any consensus you're doing, you'll be you not going to get any answer. Very die.

Can you say that twice so that the internet can hear an extra oud? And clear for those of you that are arguing about nutrition on twitter like IT IT might actually be life wasted. Yeah, I mean, i'm not being judgmental.

I mean, I think that there's validity and lots of those pockets, there's stuff that's wrong and lots of those pockets. Um their diets that worked extremely well, like you know for our diet is slow car. I was called the four hour day, but the slow carb diet IT works extremely well. Anytime I followed IT you I get much leaner and stronger and all that stuff ah that is proportional to do IT IT works. Um but yeah maybe you can just explain what you mean by that because I think there are some argument slash friction spaces that are truly an energy think yeah I .

would just say focus on what works for you and your family or your team. And if you're arguing on the internet, recognize that you are just doing that because you're like arguing on the internet, you're not going to convince anyone of anything. And you just gna make yourself more frustrated if you plan on changing any opinions. So for me, it's live and let live. And uh, the more people who engage that type of behavior, the more competitive advantage you have, if you don't.

So for me, i'm like OK, if you want to spend this vital non renewable resource of yours called time on that, if I ever compete against you, i'm going to win so great of this um I i'll also not even try to convince you to stop doing that unless you see the logic in IT which I have, which is why I also don't have at least for two years, have mostly had no social laps installed on my phone. And we can talk about that because I think recognizing that these things have been engineered to overcome any type of self discipline with billions of dollars at stake should lead you to believe that you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. So I just don't have the apps on my phone to begin with.

And I find that much more gratifying to see disproportionate change from small inputs i'm looking for. And i'm also looking for changes that are easy to make that can have higher hearings that have very limited downside, which is very different from proving something. For instance, in the for our body took a look at the potential effect of cell phones, or the proximity of cell phones, to say good anal function and reproductive health.

And the literature there was unavailable. The time was very limited, had some animal studies, mice, rats that I recognize, humans are not just large, my, so they don't always translate. But I looked that I said, okay, looking at this simplification is a plausible that there could be similar effects on humans. Seems to be the case also based on conversations with people who are specialists but would never go on record. Therefore, if your phone is in your pocket to have IT on airplane mode, I mean, IT does not have a high cost and and then pending any revision, we can see but while the jury still out, i'm going to a risk mitigate by taking .

this step well. And I just want to say thank you there too. I read that recommendation. I followed the recommendation of lucky being the phone on in my front pocket or back pocket and that's anethe data um my sperm alysa isn't reliant to this conversation but worked out.

But you know you can say that's bit necessarily because you have the phone off, but I did a very long detailed episode on male and female fertility. There is now what I view is a really quality met analysis. And it's pretty clear that there are effects of the smart phone on proxy of the smart phone when it's turned on that are not good force erm isn't necessary going to render somebody y's stereo, but on sperm that can be separated out from the heat effects.

And so essentially this is another instance in which a you you are right um and I think more data will come out in M I A M F conspiracy theory no um do I work ten for underwear? No but um I think it's interesting, I think it's important. And h thanks to you um give my attention to IT. In fact I teach about that in a uh course on neural circuits and biog and health and disease.

amazing. And I don't expect to get everything right at all. That would be crazy. I like to think i'm not totally crazy. And it's very important if you are going to do self experimenting or experimenting in small groups, which the quantified itself community did quite well and I think still does quite well, you should really make every effort to not fool l yourself, which is hard, is is chAllenging at times.

But read books like bad science, read books like holly was statistics, ensure that you are able to read studies well, you don't have to be the best in the world, but that you can, on some level, identify the strength and weaknesses of studies. This doesn't take a long time. Certainly our friends, Peter tea, dr.

Peter tea has studying the studies, which is a multiple part blog series dedicated to this. There are other ways to approach IT. I took one of his podcast, republished IT, on the tempie show because I talked about how to examine studies, what powering refers to things like this. In the span of one or two weeks, you could really become literate with the building blocks of scientific literacy with respect to reading studies. And that gives you such an enormous life advantage, it's hard to state.

I agree. And I also think that there are a lot of things that just simply will not ever be exploited in a analyzed control trial.

Um one of the things that Peter and I ve talked about before he text me, know what your thoughts on bpc one five, seven this is a gastro peptide, is now been synthesized so people will inject IT into a tissue that they're trying to heal or improve lots and lots of antic data on bpc one five seven, making injuries heal faster at that. Again, antic data i've used took an injection of a yesterday. In fact, Peter basically .

is not a believer .

because there the lack of published state on this, which is perfectly fine or I should say he's skeptical. And so there's always that possibility of implications o effect. But I don't think there will ever be a really nice controlled trial on bpc one five seven because the financial incentives aren't there and no smart graduates student is going to go to a thesis on this.

So that is a reality. I mean, maybe one will do IT now that we're having this conversation, but IT just doesn't that the payout isn't there. Yeah and at last.

when you mentioned is one that people miss a lot. People doing these studies are people careers who are planning their careers. And so they choose what they're going to invest time and very carefully such another limiter on what will end up in our R C, T.

Or not, right? So I think that's good for people to hear. And as you get more involved with science and in my case, to a foundation and the sea foundation funding a lot of early stage size, you realize how expensive IT is and how long IT takes.

IT is a long term investment. And if you are looking to make behavioral changes or modify aspects of yourself, cognitive, physical, psychomotor, otherwise identifying interventions for options that seem to have some lauser upside, like there is A A mechanism that might make sense in humans. If you feel fairly certain there is very limited downside, which should include talking to people who are presenting their results as antic data, then maybe you consider using eggs if you can cap your downside.

And I recall, for instance, looking at trans respiratory ual specifically, not a longing vary, but in potentially increasing endurance for for our body. And I ended up testing IT and there's a funny stories. So with that, didn't quite work out as planned, and I don't use in any longer.

But what I experienced prior to actually finding this on forms was joint pain, elbow pain. The one most consistent side effect was what felt like tender nosis in the elbows. And then I went online, and i'd already done this, but I hadn't come across.

I think he was. The five hundred group people have been using five hundred milligrams of transferral daily for long pards time. And one of the most common reported side effects is joypad. Like, okay, i'm not willing to make that trade off yeah and sense .

to me yeah I think IT would be fun if ever you are willing that we could do a hybrid podcast on supplement fails.

I have some spectacular failure.

as do I. And thinking i'm thinking about a few of them I mean something that were really um I took me off course like there's one supplement I called bulben nataly's ces this is another another one of these .

shrubs sounds like an infection.

I mean this thing will really Spike your test open and free test after and i'm talking back acme like huge train gains aggression, it's really wild. And then after about seven or ten days IT, all crashes and you go below best one, yeah, even testicular pain. So was unclear.

So you if you're a smart person, you halt use, right? So I can understand why people are skeptical of certain things. And then course, there are supplements that I would be fan of, and that will be fine of. We talked about those things elsewhere, but IT might be fun to do a supplement failed podcast, I think.

if ever you are willing that I could do. And just experimental fails, oh yeah, yeah. Of one, which include things that people might not think about. Instance, for our body had quite a bit of real state dedicated to looking at things like P, R, P.

So clearly, which classmate I think there's a role for IT is not useful for everything, but for certain types of injury repair, I think it's very interesting. But I every time you get injected, this is where you have to be careful because a very few free lunches out there, there is usually some type of feedback loop and system is very smart at all of regulating things. This, this is outside of that consideration that I hadn't made, which is, every time you have an injection, this a chance of an infection, particularly of the site, in my case, was the elbow.

And the injection was made for the P. R. P, not quite where IT should have been slightly to the rear of the elbow, where the the skin is very thick.

And so IT pushed staff bacteria from a middle of the skin into the joint capital. Not good. And that really could event IT very poorly.

I ended up having to go the r and get, get IT all moved and so on. But that could have ended up in a much, much more severe situation. So you do have to be careful with this stuff.

I would become a little more conservative with someone I do, including injection. I'm like, I like, let me think twice about the injections if i'm going to swell something. Let me make some really looking at the implications for the liver.

Yeah, smart, very smart. And just about some of the things that you talked about in the for our body in the invention today, things like accelerators, continuous glucose, st monitors, deliberate cold exposure. How many of those things are you still doing on a regular basis? And how many do you know use couple times a week or a couple times a month, or go through phases of using and not .

using cold exposure? I used as consistently as as practical. So from traveling is little harder.

But we're an L. I right now. One of the first things I did was found a few options for contrast therapy.

One of the first things I did, and by contrast, I do not mean inference sona, and called plunge, had much rather have hot and cold water, just in terms of sort of speed of heating. The japanese approach, right, for a just speed of VISA dilation, particularly for injury recovery. I think it's incredibly helpful for mood regulation.

Certainly this case and cold mood regulation or the treatment of, say, depression, or as a preemptive intervention to avoid or mitigate depression, is old, used to be prescribed for melancholie and people like the van goes of the world would be prescribed cold baths. So that was something I like. Well, let's take a look at some of the old history, read about that, and then look into pub madden.

So on the sea, what might be supported? So the cold i'm still using, I become increasingly interested. This was not in for our body, but whole body hyper thoma, often excluding the head for depression, which I I know there's some some .

research yeah I ucsf, yes, right now have really interesting studies too early to report. I'm not involved in these, but think these are really important yeah studies because for all the people saying, no, well, you know ice bath stuff, you know metabolises metabolites. What one thing that's very clear, long lasting, very significant increase in the categories stop me an up and a nor up an f an not a replacement perhaps for entire depression medication. But as he had to move the needle toward anti depression states, that's the cocktail and um heat as well no and the hypothermia.

especially the way is formatter right now as when the researchers is very early stages, there's going to be less adherent ance. It's not as rates available, say, culture hour cold bath. So I do you think about the practical vacations up, but right now, it's very interesting. Slopper diet still used at all the time. IT is not my default twenty four or seven as IT used to be. So maybe I am just getting older and more self indulgent, but if I find myself going off the rails, but i'm like, okay, i'm getting closer and mutton top here, let's stage an intervention then I will go immediately back, slog up, died within within a matter of weeks. It's it's pretty easily corrected and .

just a cue for people I know it's um you know slow. I achieved great prominence. In fact, IT wasn't IT featured on. We're mentioned in an episode of orange, the new black.

I think IT might be it's it's made appearances on a hand full of shows. great.

I realized that i've been referred to the slow carb diet several times throughout the discussion. So for those that aren't familiar with the slow club died, I know they can go look up what that is, but so that we can keep them here. sure. For the rest of this discussion and not have to send them out and back just yet. Could you give us just a brief top counter or what the slow carb diet is?

sure. The slow carb diet is intended to be a simple, easy to adhered to diet for people who have perhaps failed other diets that allows you to recompose your body. So improve muscle mass, decrease body that percentage.

And the rules are really simple, and that's part of what makes IT work. It's not ideal for every sport and every circumstance. But broadly speaking, IT works for a lot of people who have had trouble with dating in the past.

So rule number one, don't drink calories. That's a very simple. So black coffee on sweetening, great juice out.

Anything with calories out, you could add a lumb, B, A heavy cram to your coffee, let's say. But that's that's also pending the rules in a way that I don't like. So in the beginning, it's like follow the rules, you can break them later.

So the beginning, let's just say you can't drink calories. Number two, don't need anything. White sounds pretty basic, just don't need anything that is the color of White or that could be White. Basically, that means you're going be avoiding starches and things that are are .

similar starches that includes .

things like an open al. So fully speaking, just avoiding things that are White or they could be White will get you pretty far. And yes, there exceptions like Cliffy, you can have clifter.

But again, don't get fancy, right? It's a very easy outsmart yourself when IT comes to the behavior change. Keep IT simple.

So for at least two days, forget about the exceptions, right? Don't drink galleries, don't need anything White, and then eat thirty grams of protein within thirty minutes of waking up. Okay, got that.

And then there are a few buckets you can choose from rants. You have vegetables, beans and lantos, and then some type of protein. So you are going to come up with meals that you can follow without deviating for a period one, two weeks, just come up with the same meals.

And that's gona sound boring. yes. But guess what? You do IT already. You just might not realize IT and the the lines in the beam, specifically as a prerequisite, get into some reasons, but had a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite, right? That's actually a very important component of these meals.

There may be a handful of other rules, but those are the basics. And then the redemption is take one day off per week and just go fucking and crazy. That's cheat day.

There are some epic cheat days out there, some i've captured for myself, and anything goes when I say anything. I do mean anything. So if you want to consume multiple pizzas, pints of ice cream, whatever indulge, I left one out, no fruit during the weekend, so avoid fruit void fractals sell a gov.

Actor, anything that is sort of hidden shuter avoid all that no added sweet tener obviously, but avoid, avoid fruit and practice s and again, it's not going to kill you. Guess what if you're from european ancestry, your ancestors did not have like blue eb arries in the middle are generally speaking, right? They'll be fine for a few weeks.

Then there's that cheat day. And cheat day anything goes. The amount of damage you can do on sheet day is pretty limited, and there are ways you can mitigate that. There's a whole chap called damage control and for our body.

But focusing just on that diet and having one day off where you know you can do anything means when you are controlling yourself for the six days of the week, you're not getting up your favorite forever. You can even keep a list of all things you want, eat on cheap there. And then you have free license to eat on cheap there.

And that provides you with a release of so that you can build in the cheating as supposed to, having IT occur as a failure point. There are handful of other things there. If you have domino foods in the house, for instance, if you eat a lot of omens or mixed nuts and you're just going to sit there compulsively eating them while you're sitting, your laptop don't have what I call domino's foods in the house, which are going to really create some portion control issues.

But broadly speaking, don't drink calories, don't need things that are White, take from three categories and build your meals out and those the meals that you follow do not eat fruit or four ctos and then cheat one day, week and saturday is a nice day or cheat day for most folks. And just to answer some questions that you learn have no, that doesn't an twenty four hours you can spread out over two days that will actually say you back, but the amount of fat you can store in a handful sittings over twenty four hours, which would legitimately is more like twelve to eighteen hours, pretty limited. So that's slog, right?

great. Thank you for that. I also want to ask, is that okay to take the day after cheat day and fast, or do one meal that day?

When I followed the slow carb diet, i'd benefit tremendously, loss fat, gain muscle tones of energy, sleeping great, required, less caffeine, all sorts of wonderful, stable blood sugar. I thought, so, so good. Really enjoyed the cheap days. I really, really enjoy the cheap days so much. One, at some point, there's some gusty just stress that comes from you not regulating intake, which LED me to not want to eat the next day. So I tended to do the two days on sunday in my case, and then I would fast most of monday, just water black coffee t and then I might have a small meal in the evening and then by tuesday was back on the slow curb that does does that seem like a um and um sorry of a detrimental deviation from the from the plan?

I think that if that is what works for you, then that is what works for you. So this is the smoker diet temper for me as a starting point. And generally i'll say, I think this from a asa right is like learn the rules as an amateur.

He can break them as professional. But it's like I recommend most people kind of stick with the format for a handful weeks and measure the results, right? There are there are guidelines for how to measure the scale.

Is a bit of a blunt instruments there, other ways. But if you are extremely over way, you can just use the scale and fasting, I think, is fine, or just reaching back your chloric consumption significantly. And what happens over time for most people also is for the first, say, four weeks on cheat day, you're going to go completely insane. And I remember I was doing something much stricter called the silver key to generic diet, which the whole separate thing is much more limiting in terms of what you can eat. But I was training for, ultimately, the nationals in chinese kickboxing.

This is happening, and ninety nine, so as training super hard, folding A C cocoeni diet, which meant I could eat very few things, but I did have this one cheap day, and I would do a blank age and depletion work out forehand, which is one of the things you can do to limit the damage on cheap day, to look like age into pledge work out beforehand. And then I would just go crazy. I mean, I would drive like crispy cream by twelve donuts, and they'll be gone by the time I got home.

And IT wasn't an hour away. I was like, a ten minute drive. Don't just be gone, right? I would go to safeway and I would buy a bag of those fun size snickers.

And that would be just a tiny portion of my house, a lot of sweet stuff. I also did the same every stuff. I mean, I had my favorites.

Nothing safe. Nothing was safe. My my pause got into everything. And then over time, because the next day you're going to feel like you got hit by A A direct dump truck, you start rageing back and you, okay, maybe I don't need to do that.

Maybe SHE deal, just be two meals or maybe SHE dale, just be like the pastries in the morning with the coffee. And you start to regulate a bit. Generally you don't have to, but over time you generally will.

And I think after you followed IT to the tea, just follow the commandments for, say, forty eight weeks, then you can certainly give you. And i'm not saying if you're not hungry, don't eat. However, in many cases, people have they have acclimated to not eating in the morning, and then they end up over eating later in the day. If you have that habit, right, if you're consuming fifty percent year calories or more at dinner and you want to lose body fat, I would say get some cottage cheese or something that will give you thirty grams easily in the morning. Worse case scenario, use a protein of some time, just don't make IT hyper .

choric powder protein .

could be powder powder way protein. Whole food is going to do a lot more.

And no calorie counting.

correct? No calorie counting. IT tends to be self limiting when you're eating this much fiber in this much protein. IT tends to be very self of money, what you'll want to consume and what you can consume.

Once again, I had had great experiences with slow carb diet, and i'm going .

to go back on, yeah, nobody and nobody needs to buy anything to figure this out. If you just search on change up log slog arb diet there you'll get everything that you need to get started. No, por is necessary. Well.

IT works very, very well, say that. And it's very straight forward to follow. And IT does include the the notorious h cheap day informed cheap day um um and IT can be done um on a on a very reasonable budget and so if people want to learn more about that, they should go to timm's blog on for our for our body and slower diet will provide a link. Yes, but I think it's worth highlighting again just how effective that is. As you pointed out, thousands and thousands of people using IT to great success, some whom were quite is and yeah, any updates on those folks, are they still keep in the .

way I would like to do a follow up. Uh, it's I think with diets in general, there's a lot of reversion to the mean in reversion to the mean. So I would expect that, that some have get that off and some have not there be true of, I think, every possible die, especially for people who are overcoming behavioral inertion, have, having gained hundreds pounds.

But i'd like to do some follow up. What was fun about the post I put together called hell, two hundred pounds on the slow carb diet. We had, we profiled, say, four, five people, but there were dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens.

This was a very long time ago. So I would say that a long term follow would be super interesting and that we did a one point track several thousand people through platform at the time. The thing was coached up me as they follow the solar die for the first four to twelve weeks, and that was fast.

And because I want the data and I am happy to be proven incorrect with any of my assumption tions, I I don't view that as a failure. I've view that as as a huge that game and a IT has a very hired hearing rate. So I I pay attention to not just is something effective doesn't get you the outcomes you on, not only is IT efficient from a time and resource perspective, but how high is the hearing if you take a random sampling of a thousand people from the U.

S. Across socioeconomic classes and set, how many people, practically speaking, will be able to, are willing to follow this for, say, and eight week period time or four week period time. And I try to optimize for the wider adherence ance, because I know that this looker die, people called.

But what about entering fasting? What about this? And what about entering that? Things like this is not for everybody.

In all cases, IT just happens to be a good default diet with a higher hearing rate. And like you said, it's very inexpensive. IT can be followed very, very .

inexpensively. I just started to interpret one thing that I really like about IT is that many variants on color c restriction, which is because lots of their own dynamic definitely apply. We're not trying to say they don't um but one of the issues with a lot of things, including mint fasting, which I sort of to do some very enough because i'm not really hungry to eat until about eleven.

To train in the morning if I can set, is that they can sometimes prevent best performance in terms of especially resistance training, high tensile resistance training. So very low curb diets, i've tried them. Even if you're paying attention to in other ways to restock, black aging performance drops off.

As a solo club died, I feel like I can think, I can work, I can exercise, I can sleep like everything just works well. But there's one thing in IT that I want to raise IT. When I heard this, I thought there's in a way this is true, which you is, uh, making sure that you get thirty or so grams of protein within thirty minutes of waking.

I thought, how can that be like? How can adding protein early in the day actually make a difference? And I really did work out. I still track my numbers. So in terms of drop in body fat present increasing muscle IT really does work. Now, whether not that simply because it's offsetting food intake that I would have um food that I would have taken in later in the day, I don't know. I don't am not going to make myself my own control experiment to the point that I drive myself crazy. But IT really does work quite well um to get past sticking points, to just get that thirty grams of protein early so so violent time instructed feeding component deliberately with some protein in the morning, then still train and do all the other things and Carry on as usual is just so IT seems so peculiar like eating more and and losing body fat. But IT works.

Yes, it's counter tuition and a lot of approaches can work for a lot of different people, right, to state the obvious. But this particular aspect does look our diet is helpful for less to say. The majority of the people in that thousand person sample, I was talking about the hypothetical poll from different parts of CD U S.

Or anywhere because if IT IT seems to help with a few things, first, there's just the thoracic effect of food. And for protein, there's a greater thermal c fact. You also have and I think there's there's decent at the time, there was decent literature to support this.

So I don't know it's changed that the protein intake along those lines has an appetite suppressing effect so that the net daily calories consumed tends to be less when someone has a higher protein. Al, earlier in the day and last week, at least, I will say one of the risks, and there are many people who execute well on this, be able to be very meticulous. We just true of the cuter than I died as well. You can give ourself into a lot of trouble if you do IT sixty percent right or seventy .

percent right, you're really yeah you can give yourself and soft like when I mean, kitto is really like what the hell is going on. You're going back on some complex cover hydrating IT going away? Yeah.

I think so. In the case of, say, time restricted feeding, some people who do internet fasting lose a lot of muscle mass. And there are multiple reasons for this.

And I think people should make use of relatively widely elle tools like dex a and so on to ensure that your composition is actually moving the way you think it's moving. Make sure you standardize your hydration for that as well as time of day. Just proto that's true of blood test as well.

But IT seems to get net, net Better effects than trying to teach people had a fast, effectively, which you can do. And we can talk about fasting. That's something that was not included in the for our body that were I to rewrite IT today, I would include a section and there was a bit into tightens to address that on more extended fasts. Let's just call three to seven day fast. So that's an area that's of great, interesting ming as as capos is and meta loc psychiatry a Chris palmer, who we both know.

incredible. I mean, what he's what the awakening that he's created through his book and going on your podcast, my podcast and others, you know, letting people be aware that changes in diet can impact mental health. So I think in two, three years, it's going to be A D. And we're not just talking about the difference between you slammed back horrible foods, horrible for us foods versus eating really clean and really specific that protocols to treat mental health. Yeah, incredible.

So that's one other things that i'm paying a lot of attention right now. They're handful in that realm within the just save the interplay of mind and body since the cartesian duality in separate, this two makes no sense from biological standpoint. So that's that's something that certainly captured my attention. I paid a lot of attention to even as far back as early two thousands uh for mental health and just cogniac performance.

Thanks for a revisiting some of the four hour body and slow card diet and elaborating on um some of the processes went into that. And I think the creators of all kinds, thinkers of all kinds and people who are interested in the contents of the our body, are going to be very grateful for that information. I certainly fascinated by your process. One of the things that you mention, the long lines of process was, you know, the power of places and where what happens to live I think there's a essay by pol gram that talks about this is a little outdated and IT talks about the messages that you the tasted messages of being in certain cities. I think IT was the like boston, you're not smart enough.

Um what was there was new york uh you're not powerful enough um and not you I just or you should be more powerful as the message like fantastic message um los Angeles um what you what you're doing, people who are paying attention, paying enough attention to IT something like that test messages that these are stereotypes about cities, certain cid's change um the role of places is an interesting one like you know you mention you know a small gathering Kevin kelley house qualified itself and I think for people who don't know people like that right um if we could get your thoughts on you, how would one think about where to live and maybe even creating their own gatherings useful gatherings because it's not that uh I have have to imagine it's not that you can SAT back and you know like i'm too ference like i'm Kevin. Let's have a gathering so we can talk about in a few years on a podcast, this stuff happens, the word you know, dangerous or organically, when people who have common interest decide to get together and talk and listen and brainstorm. And I yet to do that, you know, with good people and not have something really incredible come out of the necessarily that day yeah but looking five years, looking back five years later and just that was really worthwhile totally.

These thoughts in no particular router, I would say the first is IT depends. My recommendations depend a lot on where you are in the art of your career and life.

If you are in full growth hyper drive mode and you are trying to build both yourself and your capabilities in a very concentrated way where you're not necessarily focused on family, maybe have fewer obligations, then if you're serious, I think many people should consider moving to an area of high density for a period of time. IT could be three months. IT.

Could be six months, could be longer. But putting yourself in a new york, or an L A or a 3Frances go， or chicago, or as new places develop, i'll give you one you might not expect, saying OTA canada were sharply fies based. And the presence and growth of shop fy has spawn an entire ecosystem of startups.

So there maybe options outside of the usual cast of characters pitzer gan, do a lingo similar effect. So there are more options than people might recognize. But taking a journey and placing yourself in a place where you can be in a very active pinball machine, where you may interact certain dept.

eusden. With many different people from many different worlds, I think is is, is hard to overstate the value of. And my drive and my filtering functions is just say, because when I first got to the the area, nobody care red about me. I was nobody I driving my mom's used minivan handy down that had the seat stone and out of the back you in the self I I was working .

in sanoh yeah I mean, notice expect to say i'm from the south bay. Yeah, but there's a there's a bleakness to the south there.

There is a little bit of bleakness. And then I live across the street in this tiny apartment, live across street from the jack in the box in now in view, it's not like I was strolling under the big stage and just blowing people away.

So I I rob, right near mount of you. I'm very familiar to the curves at that. You try the goldgeier and offing story. Actually, that was a great gym as a great job. I was a great job.

I don't think it's still I go there super late before my writing sessions. And IT had the benefit of being open really, really late. And ww winter, having done about that, the long time, so that the point is, I also started where a lot of people are starting.

And what did I do? I put myself in a high density environment. Next, what did I do? Knowing no one, I started to volunteer at events where they had interesting speakers and interesting people coming to hear those speakers.

So I put myself in silicon valley, and then I began volunteering for groups like s base. I don't know what to exist anymore of the silicon valley association of startup entrepreneur. S, I think that was tie the in the entrepreneur, which is a very ort of indian or indian american focus organization that does a lot in the realm of startups.

And I would Carry water, I would take out a garbage, I would check name baggies, I would check people in. Nothing was too low for me, and i'll give you guys a tip that will be obvious to some, but non obvious too many when you are volunteering. A lot of folks who volunteer to the absolute bare minimum because they are not getting paid, this is not going to get you noticed.

But IT sets a very low bar so that if you volunteer at these events and someone's drop in the ball, or there's something happening that needs fixing and you just proactively do IT, the producers of these events will notice you. And this is what happened over time, over a few months. And then I got invited to join in on meetings that we'll planning future events.

And I eventually got this point, or I was recruiting speakers and able to set the agenda reign entire main event. And then that's how I got to know, say, jack canfield, who was the cocreate or of chicken soup for the soul, and many others who introduced me to my bookagent. Many, many, many, many years later.

Jack can't failed, but I was in nobody. Then you have to play a long game, but you can be methodical and how you play that. And that is one approach, just as an example, for how to build your network, which snowball ls over time. Don't hump every VIP leg within ten minutes of meeting play IT cool, you know?

And and the gatherings where that person is has a lot of demands on them is last place you want to do that. The way you're going to make no to the .

way you're going to make memorable with people like that is to be very professional, always on time, predict what they are going to need or problems, or run into forehand and address them before they even think of them and be easy to deal with. And people like that high performers notice these things. They will make a note.

I have been easy to work with for something that um I used to tell my graduate students because the opposite of that, nobody wants you, right?

Nobody wants, yes, especially the beginning, like later. Okay, great. You're Steve jobs. You want to be difficult here, there or a lot. No problem, right? But in the beginning that can be a real liability.

You can make up for that if you are the best in the world, but in the very beginning, you probably won't be. So trying to stack the deck in your favorite volunteering is a shock on, and that would be one way of doing IT another now, especially given the virtual communities that exists. So you have subs, you have online communities, you have twitter groups, you have clubhouse. You've got a million different options, which can be overwhelming.

Clubhouse still going?

Maybe not.

I have no idea. No, I don't know. I'm not gone. I just, I remember during the pandemic or some clubhouse gatherings I hoped on there, but I was not forgotten to to .

get the platform a finis, really fickle, which is why I think, to the extent possible, if you want to build a world class, is that term very deliberately network in record time? Just to give you a nice headline, I would say focus on the uncrowded channel is in person, it's out of fashion, is out of vote, going to a conference and actually interacting with humans in the hallway, approaching panellists. This is another thing that I did.

I'll give give another tips. So very early on I would go to, nobody cares who I was, nobody knew who I was, fine. And I would study the panels.

Let's am going to a big event like south by southwest. And I would, this is what I did in two thousand seven, which was just prior to the first book coming out. And I would go to these various in person events.

I was focused mostly on events that had the thematic focus of blogs. We come back up. The blogs were what podcast were a few years ago.

They drove incredible traffic, but they were undervalued by mainstream media, undervalued by mainstream publishers at ta, which meant there was an arbitrage opportunity in a way, and I would pick, say, a handful of panel with topics I thought we're super interesting and then the panel would end. And what would happen? Panels would get rushed by various spokespeople.

Many other were well know who was not getting rushed. The moderator, I would go straight to the moderator, and I would talk to the moderator or to thank them for the panel. I would be very genuine.

None of that was made up and talked them for a bit. They are generally ask why I was there when I was interested, and i'd mention whatever that happened to be. In this case, I was finishing my first book or had my first book coming out soon.

I'm here to hopefully meet people who are involved, the A, B or c. And then if we hit IT off, which was not sure every time, but if IT seemed to be going well, I would say I don't know anyone here. I'm really sort of orphant here making my way through, uh, this entire event.

Is there anyone else here you think I would get along with, who maybe I could buy a drinker or coffee? And vast majority of time that, oh yeah, you should be so and so. And then I get the inflection, and then I would meet that person.

I would have a genuine interaction with that person. And if that made sense, if things are going well, I do the same thing. Is there anybody else here you think I should just say hi to and I get along with, not who I can ask for something? And that wasn't deception.

I was being honest, like someone I could actually vibe with. And if so, would you mind I make an intro? Yes, sure. No problem. Many of those people are still my friends. And by being surgical in that way, not trying to gather business cards, to use a really antiquated metaphor, hand, yeah, people so hand about, I guess, depends where you are, just like boston. But if if, rather than trying to collect people as poking on cards, develop being safe, five, three to five deeper relationships through longer conversations and event, that is what directly LED ultimately to the hockey stick for the firework week in tech within specific s sentence ces go. So those be a few approaches for for building your network when you don't have the ability to just walk up to, say, Kevin Kelly and have a conversation that came over time.

whether not it's health practices or uh, nutritional practices or at meetings. Seems you're oriented toward the uncrowded but very interesting people in spaces. But the keyword there, I think is uncrowded.

And of course, that the other keyword is interesting, right? I'm sound like you're standing in the parking lot talking to whoever happens to be there, although that can be interesting. There is a party there.

There's always things to learn from people. But in terms of career advancement and and building new ideas and forging for information, i'm just struck how you've done that over and over again and again. Thank you for giving a some insight into the process, please.

Here's another one. So I think there's a tendency among people who want to develop their networks or their relationships to be star fuckers, not to get too technical, but to technical terms. Yeah, yeah.

They want to tell other people they are friends with someone more than they want to develop skills or learn from someone. This puts you in a very disadvantaged position because then that means, all right, you want to become friends with the elon musk, good luck. Or you want to become friends with this alister celebrity, who everyone else wants to meet, good luck.

It's gonna a crowded, bloody path to get there. And by the way, they've also certainly developed really attuned defenses against people like you. So it's gonna hard .

on have staff to get protectors .

to prevent you from ever getting good. That person. On the other hand, if you're preaching IT from the stamp point of developing skills, learning and actually becoming potential friends with someone, give me an example.

You could go after you want to become Better at boxing. Let's just make that up. alright.

Maybe not the greatest example. Skiing would be another one. But let let's stick with boxing just because of the way i'll explain IT.

If you wanted to say, get personalized lessons from flood day weather and can happen, okay, let's go. Then maybe a step down, added to the project to gold metal list. Okay, it's brand new gold metal list list.

Just say like ospital oil when he was really gold boy and adjust thrashed, everyone still going to be hard. What about the silver medalist who just had a bad day when he had that last belt against Oscar dela hoa? Potentially right from a technical perspectives, from a personal connection perspective, you may have more in common with that person or bronze medalist. And they can get you seventy, eighty, ninety percent of the way there. And by the way, you probably don't have the physical attributes to make hundred percent anyway. If you're coming to at this late and you could get, in many cases, one on one lessons, whether in person or virtually with someone who is of that calibre, they are in the same front of the pack as the names I just mentioned and maybe not as famous hundred box tour box power for a lot of people that is within rich .

yeah i'm not sure with the value of saying one knows somebody very famous is and just never been something i've oriented to.

It's a common orientation though. And I think that's true for a lot of things. Like many people use, say, psychiatric because they want to tell other people the story that they have of doing psychodeviant s right.

They're not doing IT intrinsically for what they hope to get out of that experience. Maybe there's part of them, but it's more the social signaling and validation they get when they project that out at a group dinner into a story that they can tell. That's true for many things to one of the questions I asked myself with all sorts of things. If I could never talk about this.

what I what what a great, great right thing to think about.

right? Like if if I could have left, you say we didn't know each other. I like, okay, i'm earlier in my career.

Let's apply some constraints. So i'm not where I am. I still want to do abn c in the public guide. Maybe I won to build a podcast if I could meet with you, but I can never tell us.

So what I do IT, I would I I I but I would but but .

for a lot of folks.

if this meaning i'd meet with you and nothing, i'd to meet with me.

by the way.

i'd be with me, believe me, I meet with me all the time. And sometimes it's pretty unpleasant yeah and and .

that can be applied all such things. It's like and it's it's a useful question because I have myself this for examining your motivations. And i'm not saying one motivation is always Better than another, but it's it's you should at least be aware of your driving motivations because you can end up playing games.

You're not even aware you're playing. And that's how you end up, I think, getting into a lot of trouble in life one of the ways. So that would be a question.

I might apply, apply other questions like there's a great question that sef goan applies, who really I admire tremendously and has built an incredibly unorthodox, unique life for himself and his family. He is ziege when everyone would expect him to sag and and he always has a defensible logic pointed and much like direct servers, but most people have play. Heard the hypothesis, al al question, like, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail, right? What would you do if you couldn't feel and self turns out around?

I think that's a good question. But he turns around and said, what would you do if your new year gonna fail in terms of identifying what you would do for the process? Like what would you do if you knew I was gna fail OK? You're considering these five different projects, let's say they're all gona fail, but you still have to choose one of the five.

which would you choose? Yeah that's a great question. Much harder to answer. yeah. And at the same time, i'm called back to when I was a graduate student and still now with the podcast, I have this litmus test, which is you know is the experiment that i'm working on.

The one that I want to be working on most, is the podcast that i'm working on, the one that I want to be working on most. I mean, there is truly no other podcast that rather be having today than this one right in the moment. I am saying anything I wish I I was doing that thing over there.

I realize them off target. I'm off target. And um uh, I think that asking really good questions is something clearly that you're very good at and getting a little bit deeper into your process around that. Do you write those things down the user and notebook some place in the kingdom of a of tears in Austin or elsewhere that says, you know those questions that that essentially those questions are .

written or day ah I collect I literally have a document with questions that i've gathered from staff printed out and at the airbnb where i'm staying here. So I brought IT with you. I printed IT out here and then I went through and I read IT last night as highlighting questions from past interviews i've had with him on my podcast to revisit his questions.

So I I was literally doing that last night over dinner. And I collect questions. I collect questions. If I am reading a magazine, and I come across, good question, I photo, or I capture IT somehow in notes or in every note, which I know is kind of old fashion these days, but used for everything. So the critical masses beyond for, and I do collect and revise these things. I capture them in journals as well, but I absolutely capture good questions when I find them.

Questions are so powerful for the brain I want to go into this and too much detail because I have a lot more questions for you. But uh we just wrapped a series on mental health um that will come out later this year. Paul county and he um is brilliant as we both know and does truly important work and um and he pointed to the value of asking really good questions about oneself and the because of the way that questions that are really directed at self inquiry queue up the subconscious so you asked the question and unlike a statement or a meme, the brain works with that in the days and hours after asking the question in ways that simple declarative statements probably don't pink the system the same way, which is probably why we can see so many points of wisdom and truth everywhere and IT doesn't necessarily transform us. But asking really good .

questions really does seem to transform us. Yeah there's I think judging people by their questions is so also a shortcut to assessing and learning a lot about how someone functions and what makes them take. Think is voluntary.

Who said you judge a man buys questions by his answers, something along those lines, but when in doubt, attribute te to volt ter sounds good. That sounds good. I think about this a lot.

I do think about the questions, and I refine the questions that I ask myself, especially while journey, because it's easier to cross examine and stress test your own certainty and beliefs when they are captured on paper or digitally on a laptop, for instance. So I I do routinely revisit certain questions that i've found helpful over time. I mean, one that people can play with is with whatever is really causing you conservation or stress at the moment, some kind of decision and relationship business could be anything.

Just what might this look like? If IT, we're easy. What might this look like? If IT, we're easy. If I had to be easy, if that we're possible, what might not look like?

And that could apply .

anything that could have anything you know could apply that could apply fitness stack, like if you do really intense catabolic ings twice a week with proper weight and load and time on attention, and you do push up a few times a week and handle a couple of other. Elements you can get a pretty good job is so a simple, but hits a lot and has your entire posterior chain.

Okay, I do simple shops in some core work, but if you are not exercising at all, because you've made the assumption that is for hours, five hours a week, rather than completely remove that objective and call IT, just in practical, can you reach IT down the scale? How far can you reach down scale until you have no excuses? I would just be one one example. Language learning take investing and applies everything.

making life easier, something that definitely gets my vote. Yeah, making IT easier .

and making IT more elegant, right? The more pieces in your life you are floating around, the more contacts, the more extraneous loose connections, the harder your life is going to be. The cognitive overload or overhead is really high. Some always looking for maybe like japanese a flower rangers, like OK. How many pieces can I remove while still like maintaining the essence of what i'm trying to achieve?

You and rick rubin, i'm told you two people I fortuna gh. To know personally and that I have tremens respectful and you know work and uh is self evident, you know, it's really remarkable. So rewind that and listen to that segment right there, folks. I'm telling you, i've worked hard to apply IT because it's not my default boy does IT make a significant improvement to simplify simplify mpl. Y I take some thought and question asking that you just can't delete things at random so you get down to some fixed number.

But um i'd like to ask you about another area where you really seemed to see around corners and this is one that actually Carried with a significant risk, not necessarily risk to health into life, but risk in terms of outside perceptions and that's psychiatric. As you know, i've substantially changed my view on this. We don't need to go into my former stance on I talked about that when you were gracious enough to host me on your podcast for a second time, done some psychological recreation ally as a kid, I was correlated with not so great times in my life, stayed away from them.

Then eventually we visited m dma, in particular from a therapeutics standpoint from tremendous benefit. Again, theraputics with a medical doctor. Again, these drugs are illegal. Soon to change perhaps hopefully, and we will talk about that. But um it's becoming clear from the controlled studies by robbing Carter Harris, there are many others okay no win Williams, others um that these drugs have enormous potential to help relieve depression, trauma, uh help people explore their psyche, their mind for sake of feeling Better, doing Better in the world, for leaning in the life, not to in drop out, but you know to really lean into life with more purpose and more satisfaction. In some cases they've really have saved lives, I think.

What was your mindset around psychology? X, when you first started expLoring them, what LED you to overcome the inevitable fear gap there? Because you do seem like somebody who takes value in your health, right? You're not reckless.

You may have been more adventurous in the past with things like hate the word but biohacking and self experimenting then you are now but but you obviously have some self preserve, recognize, interact, we lean, learn um what was your mind set around at the time? And then I want to get to what you've learned from IT um and and the tremendous efforts that you've put that are now translate to tremendous value for really millions of people and ultimately be I think it's going to be billions of people um by establishing funding for the pioneering research in this area, helping to promote the movement of these compounds from illegal illegal in the thai uc setting so on and so on. So take us back to um your first thoughtful exploration of psychologically.

Would that look like you like mushrooms? IT was at IT or was IT or was IT A A dedicated research process? And who do you talk to? what? What was that all about?

Let's go way back to my undergrad experience. And there are many reasons that I end up going to printer. I I think I was very lucky to get in my sit scores because I could never finish the damn test. I have so much of perfectionism, get stuck doing terribly well, but through essays and other things, ultimately was able to go part of the day.

Let me interrupting and just, I think at this point we can say they .

were lucky to have you. Thank you.

Great institution and you done great. You are a great um um poster on the wall for them. Yes, really I really really yeah I just want to say that .

because .

you're not going to and I think it's important that these are great institutions of great minds go through there and know einstein went through there and ah and there's success rests not just on the einstein but also on the student body. What they go go out into the world and do and not just in the role of site. So they're lucky to ahead you.

Yeah, thank you. I studied chinese in the room where einstein used to teach. It's pretty cool that set foot and spend time weekly in a space shared by some of these people.

amazing. IT really is really gets the imagination firing. If we go back to that chapter in my life, I was initially a psychology major with focus on neurosciences. So I want to be a neuroscientist, and there are many reasons for that. I have neurodegeneration disease on both sides of my family, so parkinson and alzheimer's.

So that was certainly a personal driving interest in terms of looking at mechanisms, understanding what their apex tics existed or did not exist, how things were developing in the research. And while I was there, which later I ended up switching years and transfering to fox on language opposition and e station studies. Hence the chinese that I mentioned, IT earlier, and japanese and cream.

But on the neuroscience side are a lot of cool breakthroughs that came out of printed around that time. Looking at the amazing discovery, I say no onal like I want want to say regenesis. But neurogenesis and hip campus and the go to exactly.

So there was quite a bit happening at that time. I was a subject, I loved volunteering for studies just to try to get an inside look at how things were done in in some of danial economy s experiments. So IT was a cool time to be there.

And within the first two years, I want to say I had my first experience recreationally with mushrooms. And looking back now, I am horrified by the lack of control and meaning, not control, but lack of supervision, right? They mean the setting, the setting, setting ended up being fine. Nothing terrible happened, but there are a lot ways that could have on side of us. But that first experience, and I must have consumed in retrospect, CT to state deciding the mushrooms to be .

in excess of five grams IT would have been more.

Yeah, just knowing what I know now, I would have been.

kids don't do this at all. Don't do that. I am like to say, don't do IT at home. Don't do IT at all. yeah. Yes, please. I don't think, I actually don't think a the Young, developing brain should be exposed to psychic about ah i'm to take my stand.

I mean in the world in which we live in the us um totally view there are some interesting cultural exceptions in other places um where there things are more set up to provide for that type of use. But I certainly would not recommend IT.

But but coming back to my my recreation experience, my my subjective experience was so bizarre and my experience of time so non lennar, my experience of self so different from anything I had experienced up to that point and therefore my construction of reality being so completely te unlike anything I had experienced, was enough to make me want to learn about these compounds. And very early on, I still have a scan of IT somewhere. I think he was in ninety eight or ninety nine.

I actually wrote a paper, or one of my junior papers, was focused on examining potential similarities between R M. Sleep and a els twenty five and looking at some of the patterns of of neural activity. Of course, we can do a lot more now with with the tools we have available. But from a scientific perspective, I was very curious about how much we knew and how much we didn't know. And I would say that latter category gets me more excited anyway.

And i'm like, okay, how how much room is there for growth here? And because if if we're just putting on the finishing touches with marginal incremental improvements on something that we feel like we've largely figured out that's less interesting to me than something that baffles most people examining them on some level. And there is a professional buried Jacobs who was doing some various thing work. He did a lot of work looking at the certain energies systems, and did a lot of work with cats. Ultimately, I could not do personally the animal work required of the asset of indentured surbiton de that I would.

I think they wrote some place when you know, you said, know, when confronted with the the prospect of installing A A computer printer into the those .

little V G airports on the back of these cats heads, because cats sleep a lot and answer their .

interesting study. Cats, very few laboratories work on cats any longer, is mostly a mouse, still some non human primate work. My laboratory essentially shut down, or the process was shaken down, even our mouse work.

I much prefer to work on humans. They can give consent and the house themselves. And the animal researching is tough for for any sense and being.

yeah, it's tough. The cat, for what it's worth, the cat seem prety happy, like they were just sleeping when the ports were for tracking. So the cats were pretty by.

There is Normal cats. The cat were fine. But I would have been, we would have been injecting retroviruses into rats and then refusing them, which means bleeding them to death to avoid bruising of the tissue.

Because then if you're gonna thin slices and scans, you didn't want to have and I just couldn't I just could not do that. I think it's important. I do think I do think there's a place for, but I couldn't do IT, so that's why I transfer out. But the point I trying to make is that I had the experience and then I had that drive the scientific interest, and then I had probably one experience per year for a few years after that. And what I noticed for myself personally, because suffered from major depressive disorder, an extended depressive episodes, let's just say, on average, three to four years, and by .

extended, even before you started on.

and I would say so just to three and four, those could last each a few weeks or a few months. And and this is this is A A very high percentage of my total year. And when I had these higher dose experiences with with mushrooms, so are talking about losses, I mushrooms and then.

If we're looking at the molecule that's being examined scientifically, Sullivan, I noticed this after glow effect that was really durable and that was an anti depression effects or a mood elevating effect that lasted far longer than the half life could explain, right? Because four to six hours, you're kind of on the other side, and I would experience this this africa effect for three to six months. And that raised all sorts of interesting questions.

What the hell is going on here is that the content? Is that some structural change? There were a lot of unanswered questions for me, and then I had a very, very scary experience that LED me to completely stop. Use of psychologists are, again, uncontrolled environment. Ended up in rural, uh, in rural new york, coming out of my trip, standing in mild road in the midnight with headlights .

coming out .

me so you don't do that and I was like, okay, too dangerous.

What do you taking them alone?

Is that how that taking them with two friends and my two friends without telling me just much for .

a walk and let me so the points to the, you know, I mean, these are powerful compounds.

Yes, you're playing with nuclear power like these. These are the, this is the nuclear power of the psychological, or, uh, psychology. Tional surgery is the way it's increasable think about them. And I stopped using any psychedelics completely.

I was still very interested in them, and but I basically hit pause, and I didn't revisit that until, let's call in two thousand and twelve, two thousand and thirteen, where I was still strugling with major depression disorder. And I saw my girlfriend at the time completely transformed by supervised, facilitated use, in this case I O osca, which uh was not quite as common as IT is in conversation at the time. And SHE did that in south america.

But SHE not only explained her experiences, but I was able to see the transformation in her that seemed absent durability over time. And that is when I started stepping back into researching psychedelics, looking at what had been published in the last, let's just call, IT, ten years as at that point time, and thinking about how I would approach IT systematically with safeguards, with proper supervision, and basically approaching at the way I would have approached to any of the topics in the for our body. And that is what let me back into, along with a number of other interventions, I should say.

So I wasn't betting the farm on psychiatrically. I also started T. M. At that point, I was.

I was good, just something I like, four to ten a retreats.

This was actually much shorter, was a two or three day training. And you're visiting the instructor. I want to say it's once, twice a day, but I want today and getting up to speed IT.

And I did this because I was going through a period of acute stress. This was finishing for our chef. This is actually going in the years proceeding that.

And I had one friend who i'd seen really change from legal hyperconnected high anxiety to low anxiety. And he said, you have the time, you have the money pay for the course. Just take IT. Yes, there are all these criticisms of TM. Yes, there are all these weird historical anecdotes, people trying to levitate and all weirdness.

Just ignore that. I don't try to levit if you actually levit, then we got to have a discuss but levit seems like you know every kid ah is like just put .

that aside because like I kept coming up with push back and he's like, look, all i'm saying is it's like a warm bath for your mind. You take twice a day and it'll chill the fuck out. So try that.

And I was like, okay, fine, it's a good indoor. I was, I was like, at this point, I was, I had been burning the canal of both and so intensely. So like, okay, so there is T, M. And then I began examining how I might approach.

Notice I didn't just jump into using them as, like, how could I approach taking psychic, delicate in a sequence and logical sequence, with proper protections, with safety assurances? And that took me probably a month or two, and I was right in the middle. Things in north n.

California have access to a lot. And only then did I start looking at having my own experiences. And long behold, I mean, I i'll cut to the chase, but the the personal outcome, and there there are many different benefits are and risks.

I should make very clear, these things can be extremely dangerous in certain ways, generally not physiological, but they can be dangerous. I would say, instead of three to four times per year, on average, I probably have one depressive episode. Every two years .

is a significant improvement.

but bright. I mean, from a quality of life perspective, those are two different people. And that then LED me too. And I, as I did with all my workouts, right, I took copious notes over the span. I mean, now we're looking at ten plus years. So if I would ever write another book, IT would probably related to all of the really fine details of the experiments and my learnings, including some of the more visit, the bizarre things over last ten years. But IT would be IT would be just a beast to create.

So with with psychiatric s experiences with .

psychology psychedelics and of psychiatric adjacent ent non ordinary experiences of consciousness uh which I think often are touching at edges of the same thing ah which which is going to be controversial some folks but to to come back to the story line is to put a ball on that when I saw the personal outcomes for me, the antic data from friends or facilitators, ors, who have worked with thousands of people, right, which is a pretty good exemplary, so still anio.

But these are people who are very smart, who keep records. And I I believe that these people have spotted patterns only going to be possible to test and verify over the next five to ten years. So at least as a, is a means of generating hypothesis.

I take these people very seriously, and then I started to connect with scientists whose work i'd read, like rolling griffith, john's hopkins, began looking at the most compelling data related tuesday, M. D. A assist psychotherapy complex.

P. T. S. D. I. I made the commitment to myself that as soon as I had enough money to move the dial, because I really felt like these tools were so outside of the Normal paradise of psychiatry and pharma logy.

And that made me very excited because I was uncrowded. There was a very little funding coming in space. IT was high leverage. And I looked at at just as i've looked at my many startup investments, um limited downside risk, really high upside potential. And I should say before that i'd already been funding in a very small way science.

So the first time I ever wrote was personally to adam gazelle lab and use great lab, which at the time was looking at software. He's not going to like the description that i'm going to simplify IT software that might attenuate reverse age related cognitive impairment, specifically related to various aspects of of attention. And that was my first foray into funding early stage science, which was very analogous to me of a to funding early stage startups.

And then later on to touch on the reputational thing. I know this is a ted to oxo. Thank you for listening.

This is great, please. You're always so gracious on your park. This is what people want. This is certainly what I want to hear.

So so on the reputational side, you're write that at the time, especially let's just call IT two thousand and thirteen and two thousand and fifteen. This was not A A comfortable national conversation of any type.

I have conversation. I don't know that I would have lost my job. I just would have raised a lot of eyebrows. And but now that such studies are happening.

the perception reception was that these are a professional third rail, at the very least, right? Also illegal. Therefore, if I talk about them, am I giving someone probable cause? Am I going to get myself in some type of really tRicky legal situation? Is that there are a lot of considerations, but I tested that, just like I was saying, and I like to capture my assumptions on paper, so I can stress this on, okay, I think that might be true.

Most people I know think that is true, but is IT true. How could we test to see if that is too? And I decided to crowd fund for a hopkins pilot study looking at Sullivan for treatment resistance depression.

And I thought to mess up. Okay, we have a couple of couple of things falling in our favor here. A number one, depression does not discriminate.

So across the economic classes, across gender, across race, this is a problem. Almost everyone knows someone who takes anti depression who is still depressed. okay? Treatment resistant depression, therefore, is the indication suicide mon is the intervention.

Let me crowd fund. And I did that throughout the time. Crowd rise, which was cofounded by Edward norton, who had become a friend.

And the action, the tor is very smart, very, very, very smart. Also one west investors i've ever met, which a lot people don't know, very bright eye and so crowd funded. And I also like to put my money where my mouth is.

So said, okay, guys, i'm going to see this like i'm putting in x the goal is to, as I think IT was eighty thousand, something like that for the following study. And then I was like, let's see, let's see what happens. And there was basically zero negative blow back.

And not only once was there no designation, negative blow back a number of people and this was delivered. I want to see this. A number of people came out of the woodwork to support in a bigger way.

And I was like, oh, okay, I see you much. A handful of folks I do. And I was like, how interesting. okay?

There are at leads, a half a dozen folks who are studying the same thing or paying attention to the same thing. And then I just got bored as, okay, if I tested that, let me push and then not see what happens. And i'll wait and long behold, I realized that the perception did not match the reality.

The reality was, if you talking about indications that cause incredible amount of suffering for a very large number of people. Even those who are anti drug persae just say noted drugs want solutions. In the current treatments for many of these do not work very well, and in the best of cases are often asking symptoms and not addressing root causes.

I would say so at that point, I just went whole hog and I said, OK, look, I like to think that I am exactly what you see is what you get, right? The person you talk to off camera person you talk to on camera, same. And if I start feeling like I have too much to protect, I want to do something to counteract that.

In other words, if if I feel like I need to censor my true feelings and beliefs, maybe not share my hardships, perhaps not promote certain things because I have a reputation to lose, that's a fragile position. I want to be as anti fragile al as possible. And so I talking about this, i've viewed IT as a way of innocent late myself, against fear of reputation laws.

Like, okay, let me push this. Like, i'll ride this horse. Other people might not, but I want to remove the stigma for funding purposes, hopefully open up deal funding that starting to happen now from different agencies, and then to focus on access and reduction of cost and insurance for embassy and so on.

So I said a game plan, let's call IT, maybe five years ago, and I ve just been slowly method ally executing on that since. And uh, the reason I shows this to focus on, and i've funded other things, but i've really focused on this mental health, there are peut s, which is not limited to psychiatrically. And we can talk about some other things that I find interesting.

But psychiatrically are, like I said, what makes IT attractive? Very uncrowded. You can do a lot with a small amount of money.

Unlike saying cancer research can be very hard, like, okay, your that billions. great. Maybe you can do something interesting.

And i'm sure other people could. But if you have twenty thousand and fifty thousand dollars can be hard to make a dent there. And psychological, you can actually still make a difference.

And very high leverage, in part because these compounds seemed to chAllenge much of what we assumed to be true about treating mental health. And so that's that makes friend attract a bet. So that's where i've been been going.

Yeah i'm so glad you share that with us and that you did that exploration um and that you've been spearheading the funding efforts. This podcast has a um a premium channel is for raising funds for scientific studies. We are in the process now making our first four contributions. One of those includes working knowen Williams labat's at stanford to combining a transcendental magnetic example lation with studies of i've gin and five M O D M T maybe a few other things but basically that he's free to do what he wants with the funds. We trust him to do great work.

But that again was inspired by you right podcast with a scientific science certainly um this podcast obviously has a scientific land but the idea of doing philanthropy for the source of work that uh really deserves funding and exploration and um by the way um and thinking about other hybrid things that would be fun to do, I mean I would love to contribute join those efforts, the work to continue to raise funding for psychology studies, all these great laboratories continues, right continue. And you rally a collection of some pretty powerful people to contribute to this. And I know you have joined arms with Michael polin.

Yeah in many ways you want to talk about the fellowships. You guys put the other I find that really cool. You've got fellowships in the works or maybe already happening .

at uc berkely. You see berkeley what what I try to do and for people want to check in out it's it's the name of the foundation is say, say, foundation. And let me to explain that for a second.

So it's S A I, S E, I. So sii a foundation about word. I speak japanese.

I want there's an exchange student and speak with and write IT still to the state. Pretty wealth, I say, can mean a lot of things. Image rebirth in japanese. And i've seen what can only be described, or can certainly be described as rebirth in so many chronically outcomes that I thought I was appropriate to use.

And what I ve try to do with the foundation is, I think, do what i'm pretty good at, which is trying to pick ground corners and find something to prototype, right? So just like the C. G. M. And like, how can I just getting a hold of a dex come back? Then when I was just for type point diabetics with heart thing.

that you have to actually go under the school, it's like a barby .

you wrong and putting IT under your aba domino skin IT was .

not comfortable. Can you describe your court is all level and uh, subjective terms. When you're at home, you ve got this thing and you're about to planted, you don't have any present.

It's not like this is like levels are one of these other cgm that are out there. You can stamp the thing and you can look on instagram and see someone else. There's nothing like that. So you're at home wondering if .

you're going to secure your little yeah I met on doing myself and i'm sweating .

like a stuck sitting god and time SHE wasn't because he was screen .

mentioned you want to see IT and i'm so i'm sitting at my kitchen table I remember this gotten sweaty about IT and no videos to watch and wasn't really supposed to have IT in the first place. And a the device for read out, by the way, no iphone, right? right? So it's like this pager looking thing that had to read out that maybe think you .

were playing pong or something is Green.

So preventive and put this thing under my scan would tape H, I would cut a zip lock bag and put in on top and and masking tape IT to my skin to take showers, because otherwise wouldn't work. And I IT was great. And i'll just say that I don't use that. You realized you .

said that was great. I did. I didn't was great. I was to gave me a lot of insight.

okay. And then once I had the inside of work, of course, of a handful of weeks, and I thought like I didn't really need anymore and that was also just heavy tax to pay yeah to wear that thing around look like give a winner what does a call a close me back to something just like IT was big, IT was bulky.

Um so just like I did that, I wanted to do proof concept, right? The goal was, can I use this for healthy, Normal applications? Will the insights be actionable? And they were long belled similar arly with the foundation since i'm dealing with smaller ounce of money and i'm not in the billion or club by any stretches of the imagination and science can be expensive, i'm looking for small bets.

Where can I pilot something that, if successful, will be emulated or can be scaled? And so and see the cloud funding for the hopkins treatment resistant depression pilot study. We ended up exceeding the goal.

They were able to recruit more subjects. In the case of, you see, berkeley, Michael poland and I partnered on this, and my foundation funded IT, the fair uc berki journalism fellowship. Psychotic journalism fellowship is providing funding to up incoming journalists who want to focus on psychiatric as their beat, which to this date has not been financially feasible.

You just don't have the space to do really on form investigates and investigative work at the hope being that these journalists can apply their skills and their dedication to examine different facets of the psychiatric ecosystem, therapeutic potential, uh, regulatory issues at home in a way that can shape and inform national and international discourse in a very critical way. Because these things are not a pania. There's a lot of claims that are made about these that are totally unbound by any type of science, and there a lot of charities.

And so I want wanted to also invite really competent, really good journalists to the table who might want to watch for bad actors. I think that's really important. And so this fellowship has been um has been awarding fellows with these grants. And I think it's a relatively animists like ten thousand dollars per something like that. But the outcomes have been amazing.

We had a huge, I want to say, a seven thousand word piece that was one of the main features in rolling to magazine, huge piece of national geographic focused on I boga and fair trade and some of the implications for local harvesting and or overharvesting all the dynamics present in that which I think has some incredible promise for particular forms of um oppoa uh oppoa use disorder in particular but uh that has been a huge success. So the hope is that other journalism schools, well, so that a great idea and I will have d risked IT for some other was your foundation or government, say director and agencies say, okay, i'll Green like that, right? Because i've done that and it's been received very well and it's had a real impact on how things you're moving along.

Another one would be, say, at harvard popular. This is at harvard law school. The first is the first dedicated team focused on law, policy and regulation related psychotics from a legal perspective. Super, super, super important. Also, another pilot was just call IT proof concept that sized foundation funded was helping to develop curriculum for, I think IT was yale johns hopkin n. Yu effectively and a creditor module they could put into their existing psychiatric md um programs such that people could develop the skills necessary and the understanding necessary to administer psychotherapy if and when they become legal proscribed.

which is the understanding correctly IT ounds like within the next twelve to twenty four months. M dma assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma is likely to become legal in the hands of psychiatrists, at least that maybe certain clinical psychologists as well in the us. Is that right through the through the efforts of the maps group.

yeah through through the efforts of maps that the work and were doblin many others, that is the tip of the spear. So I think anyone who is interested in psychology ics should have a vested interest in supporting those efforts, not because we know everything works. I want to be clear, not because we know a priori that all these things do all the things no.

But if if M, D, M, A fails, it's going be very hard to draft, would be impossible to draft on that with commands that are more difficult to minister like, which would be next in line for alcohol use disorder, also major depressive disorder. So I, I, I really feel that just like everything i've talked about, whether it's networking, putting together for our body or trying to change national policy and say, a uh, we classification of these compounds, getting them out of schedule one to some extent. You want to break IT down into its constituent pieces.

You want to, and twenty analyses, figure out what the critical fur, and then put them in a logical sequence and execute to plan. One of the greatest weaknesses in the psychotic ecosystem is there are a lot of people who just want to do all the things and save all the people and all the animals and all the places all at once, and that just doesn't work very well. There are also some really good people who are executing.

And we can talk about the four profit side and so on. But i've been very, very, very pleased with the outcomes that I safe foundation has been able to achieve with very limited money. I'm proud of, of those outcomes that I am of the start up record. And the start up record is pretty good and it's the same length i'm using the same the same filters in the same approach, which kind of what am always looking for, looking for stuff that i'll translate across fields if possible. And then you mention one like ti, then tms, very interesting transactions .

lation yeah. Which at one point was more commonly used to inhibit specific brain areas. This is a non invasive technique, have had, had done warriors over my motor cortex, you tapping your finger and all so you can tap your fingers. It's pretty early now. IT can be used to stimulate a particular frequencies, enhances neal plates and in combination with psychiatric is the the burning question.

Now can you get a uh a synthetic effect of T M S and h psychology maybe um not just during the the solve and or uh e boat journey, but in the days and weeks after, when we know for sure a lot of plastic is still occurring. Keep the plastic on board. D R.

yeah. So T T M S, uh, also is a month there be very interesting to me for depression, anxiety, even substance use disorder. S super interesting.

And there are many different protocols, all sorts of different technology. Uh, I would say low intensity or low power ultra sound also super interesting uh, for various, various applications potentially to addiction. So i'm not to be clear, a card Carrying evAngelist for psychedelics.

I am a proponent of looking for high leverage on crowd ded bets with limited downside and testing amount and very optimistic about psychiatrically if anyone listening has a family history of, say, schizo renna port line personality disorder, which we might, which this is being very simpler stic. But categories are described as small, chaotic conditions compared to hyper rigid conditions like noc, d or anax a chronic depression. Is that then we can talk about why some of these psychological s listen in the classical psychotic seem to have cross efficacy with multiple conditions.

But psychology seem very helpful for certain types of hyper rigidity when you get into in the skids, free and borland personality disorder, that they can be really heavily contraindicated, not to say they cause those those conditions, but they can precipice the onset of those symptoms and for that reason to be very destabilize and dangerous for for certain people. However, that's where something like meta psychiatry comes in. And the use of ketosis and kt shank diet, which appears to be very effective in some patients for that grouping of the mochaoi conditions, which is very exciting. So i'm interested in in any tools that are off the bin path that seem to raise interesting questions that have not been answered in a satisfying way yet in medicine ah and I think we're still largely in the dark ages with respect to psychiatry.

I think the best psychiatrists would agree .

with you yeah and and the best psychiatrists and the best scientists and the best film the blank, are acutely aware of the limitations of our current methods and limitations of our current knowledge. So I think the mark of a good thinker, the mark of a good scientist, the mark of a good film, blank anything is someone who says, I have no idea or we have no idea a lot.

And hopefully they also say, let's go figure IT out or try something. 现在 i really want to thank you for sharing um that narrative， especially because that makes clear that you brought the same systematic process of using and asking excEllent questions to arrive at solutions, to arrive at more questions, to fund areas of inquiry and to do IT all in this really structured ways. You from policy all the way down to like how many grams or uh you know x of of some substance somebody might take I mean, I think Matthew Johnson s laboratory at hopkins, a wrong griffis, a robbing card haris U. C S F no one Williams, the maps group .

din c universe, ama vision.

other things yeah you Michael polin, um you know on leaving some named out here and I don't want to take anything away from the um classic as they're called um explores of psychiatric xs and and writers about psychiatric xs. But we are in the moment of a renaissance and it's important that this have a lot of fuels.

So we'll put a link to um your philanthropy efforts and and the journalism fellowships as well because I think there's going to be a lot of interest in he's supporter. What you're doing is, as you know, and just think it's the way great science and clinical progress is made. So you, yeah yeah, which brings me to another parallel topic. You know, used to be that meditation and psychiatric have nested in the same territory. This would be in the late sixties, early seventies, the birth of places like assault, eta, or the consequences, the dual exploration of those things.

Meditation sort of escaped from the psychedelic umbrella and vice versa um starting sometime mid two thousands when neuroimaging became a little bit more accessible and you know I think nowadays he told anybody, okay um you know meditations good for you can help ratchet down your anxiety, give more self awareness to improve sleep and on and on maybe even give some insight into conscious ness. No one's going to bulk. There's just a lot of study or thousands of studies.

My laboratories done a few of them. The other laboratories we've done far more. The book alter traits is the one that comes to mind and the group out of was concern was early to early to the game on this.

Um in any event you talk about T M. Um i'm curious from a practical standpoint, do you still meditate daily? Do you do meditation retreats? What sorts of meditation practices do you have? Because I realized this can be done walking, writing as some former meditation. What sort of formal practices do you still engage in now?

Yeah, I do tend to twenty minutes in the morning, so I am not currently doing the TM twice daily twenty minutes I think theyll be Better remain do .

set o'clock and you ah o'clock uh which .

would be more of the concentration practice of, say, A T M where you're repeating a montreal honestly IT could be any in my opinion some temp is to bulky at this but uh, IT could be really any nonsense. Syllable could be a word, although I think something without any attach meaning is primary or beneficial for a host of reasons. So could be a concentration practice with twenty minutes of sitting.

IT might also be a guided meditation and I have no vested interest in this APP, but I think they are waking up up by saharas. fantastic. I have to, I have used the introductory course, which is sam elating you through my cat nap, which is logical progression of skill development from day one, two, three and and forward.

I have gone through that course multiple times when I am getting back on the horse for meditation as a bit of a reboot. Once you develop, I think, a certain degree of awareness and mindfulness. I do think there are other activities that probably allow you the parallel experience of doing one thing while experiencing some of the benefits, meditation.

And so for me, I wonder at times, are the benefits of meditation. The concentration tracking itself is IT just sitting still with my eyes closed down, regulating my system a little bit, activating my paris sympathetic, and not rushing or doing anything for twenty minutes. Is that IT maybe? Is IT simply correcting my posture for twenty minutes? How do I wait these different inputs? And the shorter answers you probably don't need? no.

But I have found that spending time in silence in nature without anything to do this, allowing myself from doing things, no, no taking, no reading at that room, and spending I, i've spent a number of extended fasts in nature, water only by myself, no talking, no reading, no writing. What's extended seven days? generally?

wow. So you're camping in nature with just .

water by myself and the risks associated with that, right? I got to be careful. Not stupid about IT, but that does a lot for me with some persistent benefits are there's .

some favorite places that you've gone into nature doesn't have to be too fast like princess, a big fan of on the national parks up in pacific northwest because it's like being transport to a different planet. Seven is obviously amazing. But any favorite spot where we won't people won't go looking for you that I don't worry yeah, you live in Austin all the time.

yeah. So I would say a colorado, utah, new mexico, spending time in mountains around rivers, lakes, I find very theraputics. And just gord, as I do think we suffer from odd efficiency disorder, you know, a bit of A D, D, when we're trapped in the munday for too, along with too much distraction, with too many to do with too many relationships, and there is no space for other.

There isn't the room necessary. All isn't, from my perspective, generally a quick hit that you get in the thirty seconds between using two apps. There's more breathing room required for genuine, transcended experience of all. So I tried to, on a yearly basis, as one of my top priorities, block out these weeks of time in nature.

And last IT was the first year I did that. I went out to colorado in August and just took daily hike. I stayed in a hotel.

I'm not as bc as you doing the water fast. I was eating every day, but IT was spectacular. One thing I noticed, and i'd like to know your process on how do you handle going back into life? Great question. You know, because those days were in our amazing right, you do aged and you know, maybe one text message here there in between hikes or something. And you just really even the the process of watching a show at night like one felt so rich and like enough. So I wasn't as a static as you are and like a really clean to all the clutter, but once he returned to life, it's almost, I get IT being a washing demands and and I can see from a place of more economical, how one could make Better choices. But how do you handle this transition?

The reentry yeah is that before getting to the reentry, I think that might make sense for me to talk about what comes before. So let's say it's tree during post. Part of the reason I do this one week or longer periods off the grid.

Is because IT forces me to put Better systems in place. So there's the benefit that you derive from, say, that week and I have three weeks coming up right after the interview where i'm going to be off the grad to set myself up for three weeks off the real va team. I have the podcast I have a lot of things are in motion at any given point time.

If you disappear for, say, a two to four week period, generally you cannot let the whole house cut on fire, then come back and put IT out effectively, which means you need to put some policies and rules and so on in place in advance. And there is a Carrier of fact, that has a host of benefits and makes things smoother for the entry. So they're related like the more you set up the pre, the easier the post is gonna.

And then have this beautiful, expensive experience in nature, whatever IT might be, whether you're making IT to suffer fest, my guy do, or at a hotel at night. Either way, these things can work. And nature in to know itself is super healthy.

I do things a lot of the time we like to imagine because we're driven smart collige people that our problems are very complex. And I think of the days like you just need some time in nature and a cold shower and some fucking and market amends and you'll be fine. You don't need to solve like all the existing tile dilema of human kind actually or fancy pharmaceutical.

So you have this experience over this week. And what I will do that is said at least a lift call integration period of two to three days, where I will slowly edge back in to my previous routine, I will not. Within twelve hours of getting back to the have a day for of calls meetings, I will not.

It's too much of a shocked to the system. And I think IT robs you of a talent of benefits, which would also be the case with a faster kilter jack diet or any number of interventions. You can freeze out a long fell of benefits if you make a handful of changes, for instance, after an extended fast.

What if you started with a sub chloric ketogenic diet for a few days, you get to extend some of the benefits as supposed to going straight back to, say, a diet that includes a lot of car of a hundred ds. Similarly, when you create more of a vacuum, more space for all insight, reflection, recovery, I think you're doing yourself at this service if you jump from park in the six year. So I planned for that, and it's a function of scheduling.

I also have a predictable weekly schedule, so I tend to the schedule podcast recordings on monday's fridays in preparation for an extent trip. I will batch a lot of similar activities that we have. Save unto episode the bank that are presumed dule.

Everything is figgered out in advance. And over time, the more you take these breaks, the Better your system has become, and the more liberated you are from the data day, which means when you get back, you also don't need to rush as much into hyperactivity. And if you do, you know that that is more from a compulsivity than from a necessity.

While you are on these nature retreats, are you writing on a daily basis for you just thinking and allowing thoughts to enter? Leave your system .

depends on the restrict says, sometimes i'm writing, but writing, I think, can underscore for me a desire to be compulsively productive. And I think that is inversely correlated to my happiness or a sense of well being a lot of the time. So there are many areas in my life.

Now, if you had asked me what has changed significantly since the time that you wrote for our body, I would say that rather than looking for areas to optimize, I am looking where I can very deliberately d optimize certain areas to increase sense of well being. We're can I D optimized? We're can I stop measuring? Where can I stop reading books? Which areas can I ignore completely? What types of information can I just exercise from my life altogether for a period of time? Delete twitter. Stop reading about books in x related to, say, A I, or whatever IT might be like. Where can I D optimize selectively to set, optimize the whole?

Does that make? And before we .

started recording, I gave you a book, which is a sure collection of poetry by holiday zed, a good phi, which called gold, this collection of room. My poetry, reading poetry is an activity almost by definition, which is is the antithesis of optimization. So i've tried to also integrate more of those activities into my life. And this relates to your question, because there are times when I will force myself to sit on my god dam hands, and not right, not read. Just do the thing that is so uncomfortable sometimes, which is just sit in there with yourself.

so IT can be incredibly uncomfortable, in part because of the fear that IT could be comfortable yeah, proactive people with a strong to use pause counties word's generative drive know you're yes, that which is a good thing. Live.

it's a good thing. And IT IT can be a good thing. IT can indicate really incredible adaptations. IT can also sometimes, I think, indicate mal adaptations, right? And so I think it's it's helpful to take a break from that general drive or at least just could IT in part position to see if that generative drive is is perhaps indicative of you leaning towards something in a healthy productive way verses running from something in a long term destructive way.

Yeah well, I think paul would say that part of the general drive process is peace, you know not as necessarily even as a still state but as a being able to experience PC even in the transitions. And there's a lot more to say about that and he would say far Better than I have ever would. It's all leave IT at that yeah I mean.

for people who have the option getting in nature, IT doesn't ought to be out every day on the water fast. I just take certain things to an extreme because that I am.

but sorry, when you say water fast, that means fasting with water.

right?

Just asking.

But yes, drinking water IT just means you're like death .

water and nothing else. For a long time, I thought I meant that you're not drinking water. No, yes, some people do that right. They do these crazy food, water fast um as a wait I think they believe that clears sentence cells or something but um pretty clear S A lot more than just .

sentenced cells yeah, there might be something to IT I mean， like they're people recycle about during you there on you and not my dream, but I would say take three hours with that shelter, three days without water, three weeks of that food, general wortham. So be careful with dehydration. You can go a long time without food.

You, if I don't care, how ripe are you get a percent body that men, you got plenty of time. You can go a couple of weeks, no problems. Propounders body that you got plenty, don't worry. Uh, so for people who have the option to be in nature and just exercise several hours a day to exhaustion, see how many problems seem to just go away. Just try that.

My sunday routine um is to try and get outside and move as much as possible. I don't always succeed, but i'm going to try a longer retreat into nature. I think olympics national forest is calling me again IT seems like once a year I just want to get back up there.

should get back out there .

and spectacular. I have a question about mentors, and i'm a big believer. Mentors, either mentors that know us and we know them, or people that we assign as mentors without them realizing IT um this sort of thing.

Do you have mentors at this stage of life for particular areas of life for you? You mentor yourself. Are you flying with a few voices in your head that serve you well? Who your mentors?

I definitely have people I consider mentors, and I think at this point, rarely one way, in the sense that they tend to be friends I spend time with. They get something from IT. I get something from IT. Not a transactional way, but they find IT fun or beneficial or amusing in some way, redeeming to spend time with me. That's no.

But how is that different from the traditional friendship? You know, just send your friendship. Are you are you spending time with some orientation toward like they're emboss areas of life that you would like to emulate? total?

I mean, I think I spend time around people I hope to be more like in some way because guess what you're going to average to say the the the the some holistic hole of the fiber, six people spend the most time. But so you should choose very carefully, includes virtual para social relationships. Okay, you're listening to a film, the blank person for four hours week, five hours week, two hours week.

Whoever that group is comprised of is going to influence who you become. And for me, then I think carefully about my friendships. And they could be older, like Kevin Kelly has become a good friend who has a wealth of life experience that I don't have.

And so I might just call him given a question for, but I do that with my Younger friends too, and they could be Younger than I am. I might still view them as a mentor. And X, Y, S, Y, I think mentor has a have you wait to IT? IT has a consequence of maybe never ending time consuming obligation.

So I I would never, for instance, and I A lot of people will try to ask someone to be my mentor. It's like, would you like to be my free life coach forever? No, I like that kind of .

how IT sounds to the recipe sound.

IT sounds very formal. yes. IT. Sm, al, so for me, I would say there have certainly been mentor's. I've had restful coaches, i've had teachers, i've had resin advisors for reference who had a huge impact on my life and followed up with me and paid attention to me and cared for me in more of a one directional sense. And I I view myself as the benefit ary.

Of course, they hope they certainly got something out of IT if they had that job, and they provide found IT to be very gratifying in its own way. And teachers like professor at show at princeton, I feel incredibly and added to these days and for a long time, I have believed that you can learn something powerful from almost anyone, probably anyone you interact with, could be an uber driver, could be someone taking garbage out of a restaurant. If you really take the time to do, you can find something.

and. The before you can, I think, as an adult, effectively think about who you would like to learn from if I put in that way, is helpful to have a baseline or self awareness that you know what you might want to work on to either amplify strength, develop skills, address weaknesses. And so, for instance, one of my close friends, mp.

Moon way, is you than I am, is the, he's the founder of automatic, which runs were breast a com. He is the the developer of word press. All that was an open source project, of course, with many, many contributors.

He was one of the lead developers, now powers something like thirty two percent of the internet. And he exemplifies a cool and calm temperament, even in the most chaotic periods, marginal during the most chaotic events. Image able.

And when I find myself getting this regulated, these a fancy term, losing my shit, or getting Carried away by emotion, getting ride ously angry, whatever might be. And I recognize at some point that is really not serving me, that I am being owned by the emotion, right? Like on the dog, on the leases, not the other way around.

Then I think a map, what would mad do? What advice would map give me right now? How would mad act in these circumstances? And I do that with with, with many friends. I also think a lot about, and this is borrowing from someone in catchy zero a long time ago, focusing more on just in time information is supposed to just in case information.

So just in case information as I am going to read these twenty books because in two years I might be interested in X, Y, Z, Z, that I think is often a waste of time, because if you ever becomes release, you just going to reread those books. People do the same thing with humans though, like I want to meet so on, so and have them as my manta, because maybe five years from now, i'll do X, Y and z, and then i'll be useful for A, B, C. That's too specular.

And I think IT ends up in a lot of wasted energies. So the podcast for me, writing the books, doing the interviews, even prior to the podcast becoming involved with startups, delving into the world of science and scientists, all helps me to develop a confidence that almost any question I could ask, I can find some sembLance of an answer for by just reaching out to a few people and saying, who do you know who might build answer this? And that's very reassuring.

And IT relieves some of the anxiety pressure that people might feel to assemble some personal board of directors of, like x men and women who help them with everything. And and then there are people I hire to be accountable to. And so I might work with coaches, therapists and so on, who I would view as mentor as they just have been getting paid for him.

Yeah, the reason I asked the question is because we were talking about the meditative process going into nature and even with psychiatric s so, you know, I can be viewed a lot of different ways but I think of them largely is going inward to explore and in your out in nature and learning from nature um there's such a court truth to nature and know that sounds a little bit you know wish wish but it's a it's true like if it's there is concrete, it's really something IT was there long before any of us, and we there a lot longer than any of us will ever be.

We hope certainly if IT goes, we go so but the process of learning from others and paying attention dollars is israel an outward looking? I mean, have to bring that in. But I was just curious how you baLance those in as a way to really understand not just your time allocation, right? To think we could talk about that.

You know, is your morning structured at at at which I think there's great value in in knowing but more what what's your mind allocation made? I think about this. You know, like where's my brain? Is IT my focus on what's going on in here? And you know is that is there a need to excavate? They are sure you know about how much time in my out of my head and bringing things in from the outside world and back and forth. So do you have some sense of um across the year, across the day, how you mind allocate out of that's the best phrase. But I can think of any Better one if you can think of a Better one, please table IT because I am happy .

to to use how do I think about mind allocation or attention allocation? I try to. And most frequently, think of my mind share across a year and across week, a weekly time for him.

And I find that to be manageable in the sense that on a early basis. On the eve or roughly around two years every year, i'll do a past year review, P, Y, R. Past year review, where i'll go back.

I'll look at my tire last year, a peaceful aper in front of me lying down the center, plus negative. And I will go through every week in my calendar for the previous year. And i'll write down the people, places, activities, commitments, seta that produced peak positive emotional experiences. So right, we're doing in eighty, twenty analysts here.

And what are the big rocks that really move the needle in a meaningful way? And conversely, who are the people? What are the things? What are the places that just made me go and we're draining, produced peak negative experiences? Why the hell that I commit to this type experiences? And that presents me with a do more of, do less of list.

Then I look forward to the next year. And I did this suppose just a handful a months ago, around two years with the positive of my okay, here's my list of do more of it's not real intil't in the calendar. Let's get these things in the counter and then I will start talking to people, booking things, having people help with organizing if that is required, and getting things blocked out.

So I have already this year, and we're in the reasonable beginning stages of the year, I have things blocked out until november of this year. And those provide the breaks in the action, not just the breaks in the action, but the fun stuff. Because, by the way, guys, I thought for a long time, like, yeah, take care, baby and see in the good stuff just takes care itself.

I I do not any longer believe that to be true unless you schedule these things that you claim are important. They're gonna a get crowded out by motion, and maybe not bull ship with just less important things. The urgent will crush the important.

So I get these things on the counter ter, and then I back up and I look at optimal weekly mind allocation, right? Attentional allocation. And there's a there's there's an incredible cost to cognitive switching if you're just test switching all day.

So I will try my best to format a weekly random, a weekly sequence that allows me to focus on certain types of tasks. So monday is very frequently, admin of some type, just bits and ends flots some jetson, all the missile eneus pieces that are part of life, you got to deal with them. That tends to be monday whenever possible, and especially if i'm focused on physical activity. Lets just say in a place like colorado, I will try to schedule most of that for after lunch to ensure that I get in a lot of exercising movement in the first portion unal the day. Not everybody has that ability, but I will say more of you have that capacity than you might think because most of what we all do is just .

not important time on social media. First thing in the morning is probably the most poisonous activity that I could take part. And I I don't want to be point fingers to anyone else, but no, I think if people asked, you know, what is the, you know, a mind of time IT takes to get in a really good work out? It's gonna about an hour, you know, but a lot can be done in forty five for even thirty minutes. Anything about how quickly that time he was by me?

Like i'm sure i'm not the only one that this brother's. I'd deleted a lot of these. As for my phone is like I would be I go to the bathroom to take a quick bit of business. And then forty five minutes later, I like, how have I been looking at eight.

forty five minutes? Yes, lines. And for restrooms. I've ve gotten very long in the last ten, ten years. Has anyone noticed that the wait for the .

restaurant rooms? Goten, you have time for the important stuff. Think and just look at some of the extreme over cheers out there.

They have the same kind of time that you do. These companies very smart. They're very good data scientists. They're very good UI specialists. If anyone out there thinks they can be like maybe, maybe jaco can discipline his way through them, sure he can because he's he is jogo. But in my case, in the case of most people, like you're bring in a knife to a gunfight, if you think you can use yourself control to keep your use of instagram to, say, ten minutes at a club, good luck yeah and even if you can, people say, ah, but I do that anyway like how much time do you spend sending memes and links from instagram or film the black platform to your friend and group chat? How much time is that consume?

I spent a fair amount of time on in a twitter posting things relayed to the podcast. I don't have something to do that for me, and I actually enjoy doing IT and IT chAllenges me in certain ways. But I completely agree with .

everything you're saying. Twitter has its use cases I find IT useful in some respects. That has become much less useful and much less practical in the last year with a lot of the product changes.

But IT has its place. It's not on my phone. IT was on my phone for a very brief period of time. I do not want. I find that my ability to be still in calm is eroded.

If i'm too easily able to escape boredom, if you cease to have the ability to be bored for five to ten minutes, I think that makes you very fragile and makes you very easy to manipulate also. And there are a lot of forces at play online that want to manipulate or shape your behavior in different ways. So I feel like IT is imperative for me to cultivate the ability to do t still and not consume the five minutes in line waiting to get into a restaurant by having a twitter instream. So that's part of the reason they're .

on my phone. Could you tell .

us about cocked punch? Yeah, I can tell my cocks bunch. So cock bunch is a creative project intended once again to make me less precious about protecting whatever brand I think I might have.

And this is an investment, my long term mental health also. And I think in my career flexibility, my willingness to experiment cock punch could be a long story. But the gist of IT is I wanted to experiment with fiction writing.

I've been saying this for years and i've never done IT. That's the backdrop. On top of that, I have wanted to get back into illustration and work in the visual, which I did for a long time, and I was Younger and i've not done that consistently.

Why not? Because I haven't had accountability. I haven't had deadlines. IT hasn't been in the counter. This should sound somewhat familiar by now. And at the same time, I was becoming very interested in web three and what was happening in the world. This is probably twenty, twenty.

And I know that we've developed a fairly negative connotation for a lot of good reasons, but I started to think about fundraising for early stage science. And if I could do, if I could conduct experiment as a proof concept with different novel approaches to fund reason. So rather than just calling the rich friends who might not have banned to the pressure or be willing to fund, I wanted to look at the crowd funding back in the day.

Then I wanted to look at different options for perhaps art options. And I was going to do this with with contemporary art. This is many years ago in the process of wanting to fund the the hopkins center focused on psychology and consciousness research, which which was the first of its kind in the united states.

And the technology gave me the opportunity to learn about a new licious call, IT set of technologies. So to develop skills and knowledge, IT would give me the opportunity to reconnect and deep in friendships with a number of my very, very smart friends who are playing in that area, also test fundraising, also get back into fiction, and are, in all that combined, this thing that end up calling cockpen ch. Because IT made me laugh.

And you know what, man, if you take your work too seriously, you're going to burn out before you get the really serious work done. And I think IT was bertrand Russell is said it's a sure sign of an impending nervous breakdown. If you start taking your work too seriously, are believing you're work to be very, very seriously.

And for that reason, I wanted to give IT in a surd name. They would also have some word of mouth benefit and that to see what would happen, honestly, just see what happened. Because something like, I like, what is honestly the worst thing that happens like people write a bunch pieces, rather like shaking their fist at the sky. How dare him? There is.

you can turn IT around on them and just say they were doing is a cockpen ch attempting that was kind of the thing.

That was a part of the thinking that I would just be entertaining to watch people seriously trying to critical. Some called great bunch. And the upshot that is, IT raised almost two million dollars, sold out in something like thirty minutes or forty minutes for the foundation.

All that money went to size foundation. All that money has already been distributed in the form of grants. wonderful. And along the way, I got to work with artists, with programmers, learn new technologies, reconnect with old friends, and now back in touch. And it's it's extremely fun to be back in touch with the spokes.

And i've written the equivalent of a short book in fiction, in the form of short stories that are this fantasy world building exercise for me. And i'm having a blast. So i'm exercising new creative muscles that has LED me back into the world of comic box jam created yet.

Let me back into the world's of gaming. Let me back into my fascination of table top gaming. S I played D N D for everyone else, a kid that was my as a run, who got the crap kicked out of the left and right.

And I am having just a blast. And the. The takeaway, I think, on some level is that you should do things is a low to term.

It's helpful for me to consider doing things that give me energy, right? Because if we say our time ageing is fine, but time doesn't really have any practical value unless you have attention more than there's tension management. But that attention is limited also physically and sort of metaphorically by energy, right? See like substrates, diets, no transmittance and so on.

If you do not have the basic batteries required, the rest of the things that are higher up on that hermit can't really be executed properly. So for me it's like, okay, let's sik talk punch doesn't do anything. Total failure, right?

Coming back to that raise two million dollars. science. And that could you? So sorry.

Yeah, sorry. So cockpen ch. Is, at least thus far, a .

success IT is. But coming back to south golden's question, I asked myself what I do this, even if he turns out to be a complete failure financially, I, yes, because I think the relationships and the skills, even if this quote, what fails from the outside looking in those, will trans send this project and be life affirming and helpful and fun in other areas? And that's proven to be true, even though the project is ongoing.

And I have more energy now because of this ridiculous project, and very proud of the fiction, actually, this ridiculous project called cockpen, people can find the legend of cock punch on a any fine provider of podcasts and higher voice actors to the scripting. The production I A hit number one fiction worldwide on apple projects for a while. The whole thing hilarious.

And if you could you explain a little bit about the characters and cockpit? Ch, yeah, who's punching? Whose cock? Yeah, or which cox .

are punching? Yeah, which cops are punching? which? How does this work? So here we go. So the leg cock punch takes place in this ARM called vota. And vota is being described through the naratu, who we know as the seven describe. We don't know much about seven scribe, but seven scribe makes an appearance in episode one as the reliable, but possibly sometimes unreliable narration of this space.

And there is there's a mind ending time component, whether is something called restarts, something like the edge of tomorrow, if people have ever seen this movie where time restarts, maybe like ground, how big time restarts, and unclear as of yet in the story, why that is the case. But people basically snapped to being, they know who they are and what they do, but they have no real memories to speak of. So the world is constant being reconstructed and piece together by describes, the seventh of which is the naratu.

So you can you you might read into this that I am a fanta fantasy token. You, amit, a win the visit of earth. Then there are eight primary houses. These are the greater houses. Some might call them plans, and they have different characteristics.

Just prior to this, seven scribe beginning his piece together, which turns into the story in the podcast, there is a warring states period, this much he's been able to establish. And the peacekeeping mechanism that was devised is something called the great games. And the great games is a combat competition.

And the eight greater houses send their best fighters have been beed through preliminary competitions to the great games, which is in the free trade zone, which is this one place where all of the races mingle and trade and on. And all these characters happen to be answer promotional ed roosters. So they have generally each one gottman of some type, and clearly they punch each other with this gotland.

There are many other types of weapons, so the colloquial nickname for this olympics of combat is cot punch, and that is the, that is the etiology ah. So the scholars say of cockpit ch, the legend of cockpit ch. And there's a lot more to IT.

And there are many wrinkles, a lot of easter excess. In this entire story, the idea came to me, and I started off as a bit of far right. There was just gonna something funny.

See if that works. Maybe IT raises some money. Very light lift.

But once I got into the fiction I started doing, its super seriously. So it's become very, very elaborate. It's become really, really vibrate and i'm loving IT.

It's great. So who knows where it'll go? I have no idea that part of the reason why I called IT an emergent long fiction project I didn't call IT in the F T.

Project because there isn't emergent long fiction project where i'm taking inputs from the audience. I'm watching very closely what people understand and don't understand and find understand. I'm looking at, for instance, what is generated when I and A I assisted art competition, which I did with the fans. And a lot of these bits and pieces get integrated in some fashion into the thing that chapter by chapter is coalescing. So that's Scott ch.

amazing.

And i'd to buy a cockpen ch dog. Come and the ad cockup twitter.

You had to buy IT for somebody.

oh yes, process. I don't want to ask .

what he was being used for a priority, your purchase.

He was not being used for fantasy world building. Hope of that. We got IT.

amazing. And for so many reasons, I have so much to say. But first of all, of your excitement about IT is tangible and the energy you have around IT is infectious. Um and well, I don't want to go into the total depth control of what paul he has been telling me over the last week preparing this mental health series about what's really great in life that we all should cultivate. IT has a lot to do with this generative drive has a lot to do with positive energy, not just sive thinking, but of energy but this um this triad of peace, contentment and delighted as you are explaining IT, it's clear that IT brings you great peace, contentment and delight as action terms not like sit there and just hover in asking in IT is just so clear that this was a great idea and I love that you started IT as a way to kind of, I don't know, like knocked the fear out of yourself a little bit by knocking a little fear into the whole thing like what would happen if you let your mind go and and allowed yourself yeah to explore this .

and what permission would IT buy you if it's not a told disaster? This is true for the, for our body to like, what if this harshly works? It's not even a home room.

But let's say, I get on base. What permission does this then? Buy me what other impossibles in quotation Marks, and I willing to chAllenge.

And I was able to make the hop from one category in the book store is to in a completely different category. And then the guy is limit as like, I can do anything, I can do whatever I want. I've given myself permission, and the market is given me permission.

But the most important first step is you giving your self permission. And with, say, cockpen ch is little. That is now that i've done that, my career hasn't ended, hasn't had any negative impact on my career whatsoever. Like, okay, that's actually kind of surprising to the contract.

Seems like that gives you energy IT raising money for science. Is IT still raising money?

There are not there are still .

an opportunity for people to know it's contact.

It's sold out. Um if people want to contribute to say, the early stage science and let's just say specifically psychology, I would say it's very, very hard to get a very solid understanding of the field and the shifting sands and the projects and saw on its its very rapidly changing. So I would say just provide money to a foundation that's already doing good work that could be rivers's foundation and could be backy foundation, my foundation, I C foundation, I think that's pretty good work.

And I say is not just the the journalism fellowships. There are also funding for psychedelics. Oh.

there's times of stuff. There's a project page on sea foundation, that org. You can see the projects.

They're probably fifteen to twenty of them, and they can see the basic science all the way from really basic science, looking at possible mechanisms of action for something like D I P T, which is a very strange compound that D I P T, yeah, most people aren't going to know that. That produces profound auditory distortions and horizontal in humans, very hard to animal model. And from that all the way up to release, investigated imaging studies.

From that to say, at least year two ago, supporting face three trials for M D M A ist psychotherapy. Then the journalism then do this them in that, but a lot of a lot of different a scientific studies that are they are being supported. So that's that's very exciting to me.

But the the cogent side of things is all done mony's been distributed. Uh and maybe i'll do more of this kind of thing, but I might take a different approaches. I feel like, okay, I learned what I feel I wanted to learn from that and maybe i'll trust them new next time.

One thing clear, nobody tells you what to do except you. And but that's veit through many important filters like structured filters and um very thoughtful filters are the words that come to mind when I think about .

yeah your process as your sharing y more thing which is one of the sources of joy of cock punch is that IT is not over planned. I set some initial conditions and now it's emergent. And as someone who has hyper analyzed and particular sly planned most of my life for decades, I think it's helpful to have an improved component.

So if you are a hyper planner, you are hyper measure if you like a that degree of control, maybe just try something it's a little less controlled taking, improve class, try fiction writing, do something that isn't totally scripted where you don't know the outcome. I think it's really good medicine for people. Just like if you spend all your time and you go class, maybe you should spend one day a week lifting weight.

See what that's like. If you spend all your time in the gym and you can barely touch your toes, maybe you just down our dog. Try in yoga.

Similar, I think the spectrum of hyper planned to completely free flowing and improve provides ample opportunity to enriching myself and maybe addressed some weaknesses at the same time. So for me, cog punch has been incredibly thermuthis quality. The first time that anyone's ever udeze that sentence. But yes.

probably but that's part of what makes you so cool. Yeah totally. I love IT. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit about your mindset, maybe even in your motivation, but i'm certainly your mindset around sharing some of the hard personal tribulations that you shared in preparation for this discussion today.

I went back to some of those posts that you did and the um podcast that you did around this, and i'd listen to them at the time. And they deal with quite serious violations of childhood and of self and. They're hard I mean that they are they're hard to listen to and I can only imagine they must be even far, far harder to to experience and curious what LED to your willingness to do that. And um yeah I mean I have my own ideas about what might have motivated. I like to hear IT from you.

Sure happy to talk about IT. Um and I think there are two particular examples that come to mind. So one is my near suicide college and if people search some practical thoughts on suicide and my name at will pop right up.

And if you just search my name and suicide will probably pop right out, pretty well indexed at this point, which is very deliberate. People can look at the URL structure for a little wink and uh, hat tip. I'll tell you something about optimizing for google. If you look at IT, i'll just tell you the U R, L is 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 and 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 of your feeling suicide obviously call suicide hotline please right um that sometimes the last thing that people want to hear when they are in a place of suicide edition. And the reason I ended up writing a long post about this, which was terrifying, the right, because I had never told my parents, I had never told my closest friends this was a secret.

This was a dark, dark secret. And I wrote about IT because I went an event in safran ces go. I was interviewed on stage by Jason kl.

Kanna, who's a friend and a very good interviewer at event. And after I got off stage, bunch people approached me in our shanghai and taking photos, signing things into one. And there was one Young man.

They are very well dressed, which is an early, relevant. I just IT was striking, because in services go, sometimes people are very underdressed. And he was, he had dressed up for, like he taken seriously, and he was in a suit time.

He asked me if I could sign a book for his brother, and I said, sure and no problem. And I asked him, what would you like me to write to your brother? And he kind of blank.

He didn't kind of blank. He totally black, but the 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 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 sound the book. sure.

And he explained to me, as I walk to the elevator, how his brother had been a huge fan, ammon, and that i'd really kept his brother a float for a long time, and eventually his brother killed himself, and that they kept his room exactly how I was. And he wanted me to sign the book so that he could put the book in his brothers room. and.

He asked me if i'd ever considered talking about mental health and mental health chAllenges publicly, because he thought I would really help a lot of people, and that just, I am black, killing myself. Europe right now, I think I was so crushing, hear the story and totally unbounded ed to him. I had a lot of history with depressive episodes, and when I say in near the suicide, I had IT on the calendar.

I had a plan. I wasn't to kill myself. I knew exactly I was going to do IT. I know where I was going to do that. I knew all of the variables that I needed to account, ford, to get IT done.

And the only thing that didn't happen for people that don't have the context, which most people want, is I had tried to reserve a book at fireside library. This is at which had something to do, a suicide. IT was like assisted suicide, like the clinicians guide to use in asia as something I got and IT wasn't in, and I forgotten to change my address of the registration off as I was taking a year away from school.

And that was to focus on fishing. My thesis was to try a few jobs, but I had ended up in a very bad place, and this 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 want bore people with. But I got to the point where I decided not that objectively, objectively, my life is bad.

I think this is where people who haven't experiences depression get a little confused, or that it's hard for them to identify when they give advice to 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 depress 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 dis functional 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, like they don't want to kill themselves, but they're jumping out of a burning building. And so I had 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 and panic and called me, and I lied.

I said I was for a friend. I went to rot girls who was doing a project than abeniaf IT. IT was just enough to kind of snap me out of the trance and realized that IT killing yourself is like putting on a suicide vest with explosives and walking into a room of all the people who you care the most about and end blowing up up.

So that snot me out of IT. But no one to this this guy, certain ly, didn't know them. And that is when I went home and thought about IT and just decided, okay.

There's a chance, if I write, this is not certain, but there's a chance this might help someone that 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 and I know for a fact that is saved minimum dozens of lies, and there are other things in, including a very extensive list of resources.

And so that gave me, I suppose, not a toe e in the water, but sort of jumping feet first into the deep band, an experience of being that vulnerable. And this was a long time ago. Mean, this is, I want to say at least eight to ten years ago when I put that post on and then um I want to say I was just before covet locked down.

I was in custody of visiting friends now with my girlfriend at the time, and he knew a secret of mine. And he was one of maybe two or three people who know that i'd been sexually abused when I was a kid by a babysitter. Sun, from two to four, roughly, and routinely all the time kind of thing.

And like what you're visioning is is, is, is, is what happened. So IT was not good, and that had been compartment ali zed, and locked away from my whole life, like that in the past, were focused, done, but forward. And, uh, nothing to be fixed, nothing to fixed.

And that was my my perspective on things. IT turned out wasn't quite that simple. And so I had done a lot of work, a lot of therapy, use cyd exist therapy 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. If there was something about the bother, man, I couldn't quite put a finger on IT.

And I was talking her about IT. And SHE said that's going to take a long time, which is like I never thought about how many people are going to pass away or die or suffer between now and when you back. And I thought about IT and he was at that dinner that I decided to at least record the podcast covering this touring.

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 a hurtful commentary online. Who knows? Like people are, they're lot ideas out there and a lot of otherwise find people who are idiots on the internet.

So very hesitant, ultimately decided I 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 daddy millman, who had been on my podcast, he is an amazing graphic designer and teacher, but he had unexpectedly, on my podcast, based on some of my questions for the first time, publicly told her story about being sexy, abused.

And so I had leaned on her in years after that, in private. And I asked if you would 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 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 up 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, got emails, I didn't want to see anything other than positive feedback, which is not my defector. I'm usually eager to solicit constructive feedback, but in this case, I I knew that my own position was too vulnerable.

I, I, I, I didn't want to open up the possibility of of destabilizing myself. And I put IT out and I think it's the most important poggi ever put up. 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 first hand experience of being casually missed. The percentages were mindless, like 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 ripping my back? And for a lot of those guys, i'm sure it's true for a lot of women too, like they they find medication through intense focus and achievement, uh, which is super adaptive in a lot 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, not going to interest calise. it's. Both both of those aspects of your history that you shared are huge, and they really are there obviously huge for you. And there are huge in terms of the positive impact in the world. I know this because I have read the comments right, and I and i've talked to people who have listened to those podcasting, read those blogs and and have similar or maybe different stories of trauma.

But I think as with you're work in a psychiatric space, as with your work in um the physical augmentation space, whatever you want to call IT, um 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 in these categories of revealing trauma in my mind. Anyway, so much more substantial in terms of their impact, positive impact in the other aspects for our body and syc delic work that is also tremendously impacted. So that lot so so I say thank you for for your bravery. And thanks.

sander. Yeah.

it's crazy because I think that a lot of people can imagine telling a story or to a close friend or something but to put IT out into the world is like it's huge like you don't know how that's gna ripple and you ve been a real pioneer and example for um for me for for relax other people in revealing things not like that but different Peter T S recently been opening up about some serious chAllenges that he's had in his and his book he does that on podcast.

He's been doing IT. So you yet another category um arguably the most important category for um exploration and sharing your thoughtful bravery right because you didn't just put IT out there in any form. So one thing I do know by experiences, 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 I didn't because IT IT really has its impact and enforcing again here today because um so .

yeah that huge thanks for doing that yeah my my pleasure and i'll also say I got advice from bury their experienced psychiatric facilitator one point who said, take the pain to make a 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 another. And that can consume you. I mean, I can consume you, but it's like fire, but they 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 hatch. I'll say I know for a fact that there are people i've spoken to her suicidal and by the i'm not inviting a everyone is listening. If you are reach out ticks, that won't work.

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

People, folks to 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 very redeeming IT provides some meaning to the suffering that I experiences to say, 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 are talking to, because those people don't know what it's like.

But I can look at this person, the eye and be like, oh, I know and that's just a different thing so you can you can find a way to transmit te that pain into something meaningful all into a gift that hopefully you can share in some way, honestly, 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, doesn't really impact a single person very much. So even if you don't have pot gas, do you don't have books if you have the ability to sit down one person and really make an impact that's actually more meaningful than most of the crap tickets put out there? So take her meant to that.

I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about the roles you see yourself in. You d this a list coming in here of that you've done the exploration of the health sphere, self experimenting. You've in an investor.

You are an investor, your pod caster. You know, I think these are more than titles. I think .

titles .

are great, but titles are what we get from other people telling us what we do or deciding what we do. I'm more interested in how you think about yourself, like your own role identity. And I have to assume, spend a little bit of time on this, like a one where to go through the checklist of possible rules, right? Okay, I confess I do this. I think, like, okay, like, I, I think I call, I think I chek the box of animals because .

we were animals after .

absolutely not. Are you still .

tying dancing? I'm planning getting back .

into IT that I don't h no .

tank O O T T .

in the Green room. My uh grandparents uh tango into their eighties I think ah ah eight stay and cigarettes and lived until nine. Chap exactly. But i'm curious about the roles that you see yourself in like you know role identity to me is so important in terms of where we see ourselves now and where we see ourselves going forward. And who knows maybe don't have any role identity plan, but ah what are some boxes that you see yourself in now that you really strongly identify with? And then what are some boxes that you'd like to check off going forward?

So current boxes, I would say the two that I probably identify with most maybe three, but I i'll focus on to experimentalise, which can take a lot of forms and that can that can apply to a whole, a lot of different fears. So experimentalise.

And then teacher, and for the longest time, long, long time, I thought eventually I would go back and actually be a nine, three, a teacher, because I feel like that is such a critical window for so many kids, where they can either hit inflection point in going a really good direction, or they can go to a really bad direction. And I certainly saw that online, long island, with a lot of my friends, a lot of overdoses, bunch of friends who've died of opiate addiction in various things. And I had some intervention with mentors early on that that to the flip switch on the railroad track and send me a different direction.

So I thought for a long time, and i'd go back and be a nice, great teacher. And my impulse to experiment leads to enthusiasm for teaching, if that makes any any sense, because I feel like as good as I might be, a decent at taking a complex subject, deconstructing IT, applying eighty twenty, putting things in order and learning things very quickly, which includes stress testing assumptions in that assumed progression for scale. Like language learning, there are so many Better language learning.

As an example, if IT takes me, say, six months to become reasonable, confident in field X, I can usually get other people to that same point of competence in a third of that time. So for me, it's very gratified to teach. And I view all the books as teaching tools.

I'm no tool toy. I recognized not the world's greatest, and I take the writing seriously. I don't have asset. I do many, many, many revisions, even for cock punches, like twenty seven revisions for a short street cop. So I take IT seriously.

But I recognize that i'm not the world's greatest word smith, but I am looking for outcomes in readers or listeners ers. And I view my job is out of teacher, so i'd say experiment list and teacher or the two and those both go a long way and applies to, say, dog training. You know, lots run, lots of experiments.

And for those listening to m just looked under the table. One thing I should say the beginning and I did not as that um this is the first you were in the podcast to feature a guests who brought their dog so we had more is here as well and were absolutely delighted there has not been a dog at on the huberman la podcast since costive passed away and practically floating in in the light that malley here today. She's she's amazing and you ve done amazing job training her too.

Thank you. And she's lying right next to my feet like my hand as I speak. So good. And i'd say if I were to expand that by one, I would probably say explore. But the expLoring goes hand in hand with the experimenting so I can be geographic exploration.

IT could be spending time with people who are excEllent at anything in any field and seeing where that gingerbread real leads me. And I think the the, the exploration and the experimental are, for me, bedfellows. They go together.

What about roles that you would like to explore, potentially see yourself in? I mean, I don't have a magic one. What if I did as a fellow podcasting, and I consider you a friend, I would okay like you I could warn you to success in giving all and that I wouldn't be the way would work and that wouldn't be as gratifying as having to figure IT all out because that's part of your your machinery um as you just told us so yeah, what are some role life roles that you're interested in expanding and or stepping .

into that you more artists, more artistry, uh, especially in the visual sense because I want to be a comic with pencils. Lor for a really long time, got paid as an illustrator towards the end of high school and during college, so little treated books and magazine and so on. I just drop dropped when I graduated because I was kid stuff and was time to get serious and being adult. I just called turkey to stop all of them. So the skills of battlefield a lot, but there's still there's still a bit in there.

I've seen some posts on integram that were quite good.

I'm still mess around here. I'm still messing around. And especially when I have some structure, I do well. So i'd like to pursue that. I would like to experiment with animation.

So I don't know if animated or be the right label, because I most like we would not be doing the animation myself. But playing a role in visual art would be one father, would be another one venture, and try not to be attached to IT. But we all play games of various types.

And if we get really good at certain games that are socially rewarded, when you make money doing a podcast or investing or whatever might be, but when my. The sort of ramp of my learning starts to flat out a bit. I tend to get bored of those gams.

And I think that certainly one of the biggest adventures must be parent od. So at some point I think father would be on there and I should say this is a judge mental need to say, but I think this is a big difference to wanting to wanting to be a parent and wanting to have kids. I'm a very cautious about saying I want to have kids because that doesn't automatically implies you want to be a good parent, which is also why that is very important for me to spend a lot of time training .

Molly and out of learning there.

Yeah, I am. I going to do the heavy lifting in the hard work recognizing that kids are not defer dogs. But I do think they're actually a lot of similarities in terms of just predictive ability. If you see someone who has dogs that are terribly trained like other kids might see some similar .

my good friend, my good friend, all owe him here. Who's A M, D, P, H is a chair of theology, stanford. Jeff gold berg once asked if he has any pets, and he said that he and his wife had three children as preparation for having a dog .

that's in there. There is a quote also from a book called don't shoot the dog, which is terrible title but excEllent book written by a current prior, who was a and equality memo trainer. So she's training dolphins and whales and so on, which don't respond to negative reinforcement.

You can't really hit them with the world of newspapers. They don't do what you want. And is a quote in that book, which is something along the lives on a camera. The attribution another trainer and IT was people should not be allowed to have children until they've successfully trained chicken, because also chickens like they just don't have the brain power to respond to a much negative reinforcement. So you have to coach them to do what you want them to do with positive reinforcement.

And I mean Operating classical condition, it's kind of same across the board, whether you're like CIA trying to train coco aches to flip lights, which is not making that one up, by the way, or training whe or training a cat or training a human. Training sounds bad. Cultivating a wonderful human yeah. Then I think there's a lot to be learning across the board. So i've successfully proven to myself that I can keep a dog alive .

and happy and trained up another happy, nervous system.

Yeah, yeah.

Create another nurse system that's a big deal.

is like my external nurr system. So we sort of work. And tana, I pay a lot of attention to how this relates to different people.

It's all clear today. I someone who is the honor, a bulldog master who knew one come, and which was wait, which is, which is by defauts, the easiest thing to train a build. Because IT, when you buy the way, folks, if you stop a bulldog on the street to scrap them, when they looked delighted, they might like you, but chances are they are just really relieved that they get to stop.

So and costello, he had a four brain, and he was smart about what you need to be smart about. But moly is exceptional. SHE knows where he needs to be and share super connected to you, and he knows a ton of command. IT was ridiculous. Our staff was like delighting in the number of things that tim can get hurt to you just by looking at her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is. She's also quite calm out of the box, which helps, although IT makes IT harder in some respects to train because there is not much food drive.

if you like those .

mary news SHE were just my newses SHE loves the marie news vanish sticks but SHE okay, i'll i'll give outside two things. So first is if your dog is a space about food, that's actually great news. IT will make your dog easy to train in summer aspects.

Ah we don't shoot the dog. Its its excEllent and there are some others I could recommend. I had a woman named uh a Susan garrett on my podcast. I want an objective measure of successful dog training, and competitors have objective measures. So he was an dog agitated champion for many years, which has a tomei x so anyway, I had her on.

The people are interested, but the the the tip that I got from one dog trainer early on, because I was trying to train Molly and I was using just some of her kib, i'd like put some kibble in a bag and Carried around and she's like, what are you doing? And I said, what? What am I doing? She's like that cable.

Yeah, it's cable. She's like, hey, pal, like you're at a crowded bar. You got to tip twenty years to get your dogs attention.

You take your day to the dog bargees like corals, other dogs, grass, piss on the pavement. Whatever happens to be, you have to have good treats. So if your dog isn't responding, chances are maybe you .

trying to tip a singles. I ve IT. I love IT. Well, thank you for sharing the roles you see yourself in, in the ones that you'd like to step into more.

I certainly feel I have the jurisdiction to say that you are an exceptional experimentally and a phenomenal teacher. We've seen this a cross, so many your welcome and and i'm not just speaking for myself. I'm speaking for so many other people as well.

We seen this across so many domains. It's like blog in podcasting, book writing, stage lecturing, being a guest on a podcast, you know, and on and on. And in terms of the roles that you want to expand into more, I can't wait to see the illustrations that emerge. Yeah, please do grow that flame because I am excited for what comes out cocked punch being .

just the first .

of them leading the charge yeah and you know I can say because I know because I have one and because I um I observed many kids and friends who are fathers, you're going to be an exceptional father. I'm absolutely confident of that.

I appreciate that.

And I want to say thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. I've been looking forward to this so much. My team knows this.

We start buzz like we've had some heavy hitters on this podcast. You we only looked to the top one percent in field, and they're incredibly credential by whatever standards we happen to be expLoring. And they have to be feel people that I really wanted talk to you.

So I have so much respect for what you do and the way you do IT. You ve certainly inspired me. This podcast would not exist. I don't think the genre of podcasting would exist. And look the way that IT does that you not made the decision to start podcasting. And um in anticipation of this episode, I did put out of ping on twitter for questions and there were many, many of them um that we will do A Q and hey sometime maybe not who knows but you know one of the questions that really stood out to me was, know how does tim feel about all these other people coming into all the spaces that he's work and doing successful work that builds off so much of what he's done and um i'll let you answer.

But for me I can say that um i've been positively inspired and built so much what what we've been doing here and and what I think about based on the ways that you've podcasting and communicate with the public and maintain your stance and integrity in the way that you interact with people. It's really inspiring and you've always been so gracious to me, so humble and so giving and and at the same time, I know there's a fear sky in there who likes to get IT done. So once again, thanks for being first man, and thanks for taking on all the rules that you have and that you are and that you will. And thanks for bring a giver. We all benefit.

Thanks 之。 I appreciate you saying all that, and I want people to just get after IT, take things seriously, have fun and be really, really good. So watching, for instance, what you've done, which has been so spectacular, so well executed, makes me super happy.

And I don't view anyone as competition in the podcasting world, for instance, in the books world. I don't feel that way either. And I just hope that people keep experimenting, pushing the enable.

And if people aren't, say, getting Better over time, if people aren't following who are substantially Better than me in all of these ways, uh, then I would be stupid, disappointed every time I see someone doing something really impressive for doing something i'd never would have thought of. I get so streaming excited. I find IT really fun to watch.

So appreciate you also get out there and hard charging and taking your podcast seriously as you do. I mean, i've seen the notes, i've seen the set up. I met the team. It's it's very inspiring for me also makes me wanna dust off my lets and get back on the field.

And you have never left the field and you've had a hand in IT. Also, thank you so much and hope you come back in visit again here.

Yeah, I hope so. It's been a real flash and looking forward to this for a long time as well. And I appreciate you inviting me on till next time, till next time, man. Thank you for .

joining me for today's discussion with tim terris. I hope you found IT to be as informative and as actionable as I did for links to his books as well as for a link to his weekly blog. Please see the shown note captions.

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