Tim Ferriss: How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future | Huberman Lab Podcast

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is an author, a podcaster, an investor, and is known for having a near supernatural ability to predict the future, which 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, the Four Hour Chef and the Four Hour Body and the Four Hour Workweek not only explain his own exploration of how to optimize and prioritize his time and learn particular skills, but he teaches you those skills as well. This is really what sets Tim apart. He is an exceptional learner and an exceptional teacher and today you learn why that is. And in a characteristic Tim Ferriss way, he explains the process in a way that you can apply it. He lists 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 a 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 Tim apart from everyone else on the Internet or on the bookshelf that's giving advice as to how to become good at something. Tim Ferriss 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 for the treatment of otherwise intractable psychiatric challenges such as major depression, suicidal depression, eating disorders and addiction. And he's also brought together other philanthropists which has really galvanized the whole field of psychedelic research for the treatment of mental health, transforming it from what was recently kind of a fringe area of science to a mainstay that's actually funded not only by philanthropy, but by the National Institutes of. So he's really transformed this entire scientific field into one that now is transforming the laws around psychedelics and is providing mental health treatment for people that would otherwise suffer. Today's discussion was a particularly meaningful one because not only is Tim a pioneer in the world of podcasting, but it also marked the nine year anniversary of his podcast, the Tim Ferriss 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 10 years ahead of every 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's schedule. 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 Ferriss 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 are familiar with the Tim Ferriss Show. However, if you're not already subscribing to the Tim Ferriss Show, I highly recommend you do. I still go back and listen to early episodes of the Tim Ferriss show and I'm a weekly listener to the new episodes. We provide a link to the Tim Ferriss show in the show note captions Also in the show note captions, you'll find links to Tim's many New York Times best selling books and a link to his excellent weekly blog. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and 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 Maui Nui Venison. Maui Nui Venison is the most nutrient dense and delicious red meat available. I've talked before on this podcast about the key importance of striving to get one gram of protein per pound of body weight. Now, when one strives to do that, it's also important to maximize the quality protein to calorie ratio. In other words, you don't want to consume a lot of extra calories in order to get your quality protein. Maui Nui Venison in having an extremely high quality protein and nutrient to calorie ratio allows you to do that very easily. And in addition to that, Maui Nui venison is delicious. I particularly like their bone broth, which has an unmatched 25 grams of protein per 100 calories. I also love their ground venison and their venison steaks. All of them are absolutely delicious. If you'd like to try Maui Nui Venison, go to Mauinuivenessine.com Huberman and get 20% off your first order. Again, that's Mauinuivenison.com Huberman to get 20% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, that is the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium, but nothing you don't, which means no sugar. It's critical that we get electrolytes because every cell of our body, but in particular our nerve cells, our neurons, rely on electrolytes in order to function properly. With Element, it's very easy to ingest the correct ratios of electrolytes. They come in these little packets. They're really delicious. You mix them up with anywhere from 8 to 16 to 32 ounces of fluid. I like mine pretty concentrated, so I'll drink a 16 ounce glass of water with Element in it when I first wake up. I'll also consume another one of those, maybe 32 ounces with one packet when I exercise and maybe another one if I happen to sweat a lot during exercise or if I was in the sauna and sweating a lot if it's a very hot day, etc. If you'd like to try Element, go to drink element. That's lmnt.com huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement. Element.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities impact your blood glucose levels, or blood sugar levels as they're sometimes referred to. With Levels, you can see how the specific foods you eat, when you eat and exercise, as well as any other activities, impact your blood glucose and how those affect things like your energy level or your quality of sleep, or your level of clarity and focus for mental work, or your physical output for physical endeavors. I first started using Levels about a year ago as a way to understand how different foods and activities impact my blood glucose levels, and it's really impacted my entire schedule. In fact, I've Shuffled a number of things around such that now I have more stable energy throughout the day. Yes, I eliminated one or two foods. Fortunately, they weren't my favorite foods. I've also added some new foods to my nutrition program that have allowed my blood sugar levels to remain much more steady throughout the day and to achieve better sleep at night. Levels even provides a simple score after any meal you eat so you can see how different foods affect you and develop a personalized nutrition program that's exactly right for you. And that's really what Levels is about. It's really about tailoring things to your specific needs. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a CGM yourself, go to Levels Link Huberman. Right now they're offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's Levels Link Huberman. And now for my discussion with Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss, I am nothing short of thrilled to have you here. I've been reading your books, reading your blogs, listening to your podcasts for a very long time. And in preparing for today, I was thinking, who does Tim remind me of? Because I knew you reminded me of somebody, but I didn't know who. And then I realized it. You remind me of the neurobiologist Ramon y Cajal. 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 1906 for essentially describing the structure of the nervous system. He was the first, along with another guy, to define synapses like this fundamental connection, the nervous system. But the reason that you remind me of Cajal 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 Cajal talked about or hypothesized, and then you work on that. He had this almost supernatural ability to look at fixed, stained tissue of the nervous system. Much of it is incredibly beautiful, by the way. And think about how it worked when it was alive. And he's considered the greatest neurobiologist of all time, without question. And it's really this feature of being able to see around corners or into the future that establishes that link. For me, it's absolute truth that if you look back to what you were doing 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the kinds of things you were doing, the kinds of questions you were asking, that translates to much of what people like myself and people in the fitness space, tech space, investor space, mindfulness space, psychedelic space, all these different arenas, what they're doing now. So it's not hyperbole to say that you are the Ramon y Cajal of all those different spaces. And podcasting, of course, is one of those. So I owe you a great debt 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 Four Hour Body, Four Hour Workweek, but in particular Four Hour Body, because the protocols in that book are so very useful. They were at the time it was published, they still are now. And so many of the things like ice baths, the discussion around brown fat thermogenesis, resistance training in its 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 were you thinking at that time? If you can think back to then, what were you foraging for? What were you thinking about when you woke up in the morning thinking, oh, I'm going to go find all this stuff that at the time was really esoteric because it has all played out very well. What I'm basically saying is, if you want to know what's going to be happening hot and useful in 5 years, 10 years and onwards, just look at what Tim's doing at any moment. So there it is.

Well, thank you for the very generous comparison and intro. I'm thrilled to be here, so thanks for having me. And the Four Hour 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, say, business category. So it was a deliberate move since the success of the first book bought me permission to do something else that publishers would still want to 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 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. 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, they may very well be right. But if anything is said in absolutes, I like to stress test. And in the case of, say, physical performance or physical manipulation, tracking 2008, 2009 was a very interesting time because a number of different technologies were coming online, meaning being adopted by small groups. You had the very early stages of, say, accelerometers as 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 ferreting on my side. It wasn't immediately on the roadmap for the four hour body, but continuous glucose monitors. At the time that was, I want to say, exclusively limited to type 1 diabetics or maybe type 2 diabetics, but largely type 1 diabetics. And what captured my interest, and I can't recall how I came across it, 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's house in Pacifica, California. This is, this was around 2009, 12 people, 13 people to discuss quantifying health. But the example of a professional race car driver, I can't remember the form factor, whether it was F1 or NASCAR or other, who was using this continual glucose monitor for paying attention to glucose levels while driving. And I thought to myself, would that not be useful for healthy normals? Would that not have other applications? If this is being used by a high performer in this type of context, might it have other types of applications which then led me to use the very early versions of dexcom, 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 randomized controlled trials at a university. I do think as an n of 1, if you think about study design and you can even blind, you could even placebo control. And I knew people in the small subculture of quantified self who did this. You can, I think, approach things in a methodical way where you can make a lot of progress in trying to determine causality or lack thereof, looking at very old things, looking at orphaned things. So for instance, there are many examples in the world of doping where you have say BALCO back in the day, where famously Barry Bonds and others purportedly used things like the cream and the clear. And these were based on anabolics that were sourced from Soviet literature or older literature from the 50s and 60s that might not be on the radar of, say, the anti doping groups that would administer the testing. So all of these different buckets were of Interest to me. And I begin where I usually do, which is interviewing folks. So I would interview one or 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, all right, what are the really technical nerds doing at night or on the weekends after they've put in a really long workday or work week? Let's take a really close look at that. Another one is, and I'll 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 10 years from now? And an example of that would be, let's just say full time assistant, virtual assistant, AI, Right? So we've seen the needs and wants being addressed by different technology, but it's an iteration of the same thing on some level. In the case of say using ChatGPT tied into Zapier for various functions. And then where are people cobbling together awkward solutions? So where are people piecing 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 a few years prior to writing the Four Hour Body, I spent time at NASA Ames and was interacting with a number of scientists, some people who were working on all sorts of biological tests and at genomics and had a very frank discussion about where they thought if they had to push. Right? So I'll ask questions like push a little bit into the realm of science fiction and speculation. Because I'm sure you can't support any type of projection like that with the literature, with the scientific literature. But what do you think some of the risks are of say, publishing your genome? Because at the time a number of high profile folks had just made their full genomes available and they're like, well, I think in the near future it'd be possible to reconstruct someone's face based on their genetic data. And they're like, high degree of confidence, like 0 to 100%. How confident? Yeah, 80, 90%. I'm like, okay, I should pay attention to that. Because if you're making your data available, let's just say, and it's anonymized per se, you still might be identifiable. So it's like, okay, that raises some interesting questions. Like, okay, well then how might you get around that? How might 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 weaponry, sort of bioweapons possibilities that I was interested in. And then I would ask that person who's clearly 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 stream of development that I paid a lot of attention to is something along the lines of the following. So the very beginnings are usually in some type of extreme case. And I think the extremes, and this goes for product design as well, but the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa. So you can actually learn a lot by studying the edge cases. So racehorses, for instance, you'll often see things start with say, racehorses 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 further. Bodybuilding. See a lot of interesting behavior in bodybuilding and high level athletes, then billionaires, then rich people, then the rest of us. So my assumption is, and was for the four hour body, that along the lines of William Gibson's quote, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. So I'm never predicting the future, I'm just finding the seeds that are germinating that I think are going to bloom and end up spreading really, really widely. So that's generally where I start. And I assume 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 into say the peer reviewed exercise science papers. But it's going to have a lag time of three to five years.

At least.

At least. At least takes a long time.

Yeah, science is often very slow to catch up. You mentioned many things I have questions about. You mentioned paying attention to the new, the very old or the orphaned. So interesting. And I just thought I'd tell you that when you sit down with a graduate student or a postdoc and they're trying to come up with a project, rarely do you say what do you want to work on? And they fire back. 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, or there's a very old theory I want to revisit, or there's this theory that no one pays attention to. In fact, we had one guest on here, Oded Rashavi, who is studying it. Essentially inheritance of traits, transgenerational inheritance of traits. It's a little bit, although different from Lamarckian evolution, but it's a lot like that in some ways. And these orphan theories that everyone assumed were wrong and that there is a basis for them. So I think there's real genius in that analysis. It also struck me, as you were listing off some of your process circa the writing of the Four Hour Body, that I and many other people are probably curious about what the operations around all that looked like. So are you or were you at the time waking up in the morning going, okay, I'm going to take a walk and think about the new, the old and the orphaned? Or I'm going to take a walk or sit in a chair and think about what are the nerds doing right now? What are rich people doing right now? Cobbling together awkward solutions. Was that exploration a structured practice for you? Or is this just something that was the consequence of being Tim Ferriss waking up in the morning and just like leaning into that? Because I've experienced both. Right. But I think a lot of us are curious. I mean, there's a lot of mystique around you.

I like best to dispel it.

Whether you like it or not.

It'S there and we're not trying to pry, but pry away. Is the establishment of structure for you, something that's the consequence of structure in the first place? It's like, okay, now it's time to think. Or do you just allow things to geyser up to the surface?

I do both. And I would say that in the case of the Four Hour Body, it's a bit of an anomaly compared to my later books because I had recorded effectively every workout I'd done since age 16 as a competitive athlete. I had a lot of records and I kept copious notes on supplement use and everything imaginable. So I have what you might call hypergraphia. I just capture almost everything in writing. And that was very useful because at various points in time, let's just say I looked at a photograph of myself from making this up, but 2004, and I think I would like to look and feel like that Again, okay, let me revisit my workout logs. Let me just replicate the preceding three to six months of workouts and look at my intake and my diet at the time. And lo and 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 under scrutiny trying to replicate with other people. I do think replication is really important. And then when it came time to commit to writing the book, I thought about what types of many books would be of great interest to me personally. And that book, like many of my other books, was written in such a fashion that it could be a choose your own adventure book, did not need to be read. In fact, in many ways it shouldn't be read linearly. From page one to the end, you get to pick and choose which chapters are of interest based on breath hold, vertical jump, endurance, hypertrophy, cold exposure for fat loss, whatever it might be. And then I began talking to people. And at the very outer bounds of self experimentation, at least in the Bay Area, it's a pretty small community, so you're one or two lily pads from just about everyone. And it's not accidental that I put myself in that environment in San Francisco specifically, and more generally in the Bay Area Silicon Valley, because there's just a high surface area for luck to stick to because you have so many serendipitous 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 where of writing physically being located in San Francisco. And then when I'm structuring things, maybe I'll get into some of the nitty gritty. But I was using at the time, and I still like to use a program called Scrivener, which is actually designed predominantly for screenwriting. It's used for many things now, novels and so on. It's expanded its reach quite a 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 that you can view, say, a split pane of your research and what you're working on simultaneously without having to toggle 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 Evernote, which I was involved with as a company and basically without bias, capture as much as possible, put three asterisks next to anything that I thought I really might want to revisit after I had read something a second time, which I would always do. Then I could control F to find just three asterisks because they don't occur much in normal writing. Just like people, authors, writers will use tk, meaning find such and such a date. Data needs to be inserted later. But I don't want to interrupt the flow of writing, only put in TK because it doesn'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 ingestion, let's just say, for the workday, then a break for training and actually using myself as the human guinea pig for various things that had surfaced that might be on the docket.

Where were you training at that time? San Francisco is not famous for amazing gyms.

It's not famous for amazing gyms. At the time, I was training mostly at a climbing gym called Mission Cliffs. They didn't have much, but they had barbells and they had kettlebells. I also had in the walkway leading from the front door of the apartment I was renting, it was more of a house. The front door all the way to the first set of stairs, there were 30 kettlebells of various types. And I was training for certification because I wanted to put myself on some type of deadline with accountability for that type of training to get a better understanding of it. So I trained for a few hours. I also had developed a friendship with Kelly Starrett, so San Francisco CrossFit, who I have tremendous amount of respect for.

Likewise on multiple levels. That's terrific. And his new book, Built to Move, his great book. He's so good.

Yeah. He really not only talks the talk, 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 served that function, certainly. And we're still very close friends. And then after that, all right, shake off the cobwebs, get the body moving, get the brain moving. Also eat. And then I would actually focus on synthesis. So I would write generally from let's call it 9pm or 10pm through to 4 or 5am and I would ride the wave if I happened to be in the zone. If I weren't 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 witching hours of, let's call it 10pm to 4am and my experience is that the writers I've interviewed, the writer friends I've become close with, if you look at when they made themselves, not necessarily what they do now, but what they did that eventually got them to escape velocity, 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. And I say wow because, of course, all of this was prior to the publication of Matt Walker's seminal book why We Sleep, which I really see as the book that shifted a lot of people, fortunately, from the I'll sleep when I'm dead mindset to I'll, you know, to really paying attention to it. And, you know, I don't think Matt gets enough credit. I mean, there, there's been a revision of a few points within that book, but the majority of it is just spot on and hyper legitimate. So good. And, and yet what you're describing is a schedule that, you know, starting to write at 9pm and finishing up around 4am but you talked about research earlier that day and training and eating. So were there naps in there?

I would sleep from, say, 4 to maybe 11 or 12. So I would be getting up later. And I've had conversations with Matt about this, and there are night owls and morning larks 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 other, and every girlfriend I've ever had is a 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 some exercise and fuel. I would follow the same schedule.

I know several very successful podcasters, Lex Friedman in particular, who I think he's trying to follow a more normal schedule now, but he's pseudo nocturnal, at least by my read. And there are a couple other online content creators, Derek from More Plates, More Dates, who's hyper productive in his domain and is mostly nocturnal. And then as you're describing your writing routine and your overall routine, I was thinking that the great skateboarder everyone knows, Tony Hawk, who is obviously a great skateboarder, no doubt about that. But Rodney Mullen, who invented the Ollie on street. The kick flip. The Ollie. Rodney is basically nocturnal and has been for a long time and would skateboard up and down the boardwalk in Santa Monica in the middle of the night because lack of distraction. And he's been doing that since his teens. I don't know what he's doing these days, but I think a lot of creators just need space. And I always wonder if that's because when at least the ones that are not socially dysfunctional, 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 removes the plausible deniability, which might not be the perfect use of that phrase, but in the sense that it's harder to fool yourself into thinking you're doing something important when you're checking your messages or social media at 2 in the morning. Who are we kidding, folks? You should be writing in this case. And writers will do anything to avoid writing. I remember Ayn Rand wrote a book about writing, which is actually fantastic. I can't remember the exact title. It might just be on nonfiction writing, something like that. And she talked about polishing the sneakers or the shoes before writing. I really just need to do this one thing, which is to just clean up that shoe, because somebody should really clean it up and at some point I should clean it up and therefore why don't I just do. There's no time like the present. I'll just do that. And it's all to avoid writing, which is the harder thing. And in my conversations with Matt also, I should say that as someone who has self described as a person who struggles with onset insomnia, Matt made the point and sometimes we need to relearn things. Maybe you should just go to bed later. Sure. And that might address some of this onset insomnia. And I don't know the causes for that, but I do get a second wind very late. Could be related to some cortisol release abnormality or just different scripting in my system. Who knows?

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I'll mention one other maybe heuristic that I use for trying to peek around corners, which is if I find an example of an outlier trying to find two or three because one is an exception, two is interesting, three is worth investigating. That's sort of how I think about it. And I recognize that the role of anecdote does not equal data. However, a lot of interesting discoveries begin as case studies or case histories. And so there are some things we could talk about that I've paid attention to over the last few years that are not in the four hour body that I think are quite interesting and raise very, very exciting questions.

I'd love to hear about those. Yeah, and along the lines of what I call anec data, I mean most of what we know about human memory stems from one patient, H.M. who had his hippocampi removed for epilepsy. And of course there have been millions, probably close to millions of studies in animals and humans focusing on the hippocampi. But most of what we know about human memory is from one guy.

Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot to be examined. Not all of it will get funding for RCTs. Let's be realistic. This is especially true if you're hoping for any type of directive data. Notice I'm not saying conclusive, but if you are a human who's going to be making decisions about diet, health, exercise, if you want any consensus, you're doomed. You're not going to get any answers before you die.

Can you say that twice so that the Internet can hear it extra loud and clear? For those of you that are arguing about nutrition On Twitter, it might actually be life wasted. I mean, I'm not being judgmental. I mean I think that there's validity in lots of those pockets. There's stuff that's wrong in lots of those pockets. Diets that work extremely well, like four hour diet or slow carb. I always call it the four hour diet, but the slow carb diet, it works extremely well. Anytime I've followed it, I get much leaner and stronger and all that stuff that it's purported to do, it works. But yeah, maybe you could just explain what you mean by that because I think there are some argument friction spaces that are truly an energy sink.

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're just doing it because you like arguing on the Internet. You're not going to convince anyone of anything and you're just going to make yourself more frustrated if you plan on changing any opinions. So for me it's live and let live. And the more people who engage in that type of behavior, the more competitive advantage do you have if you don't. So for me I'm like, okay, 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. 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 apps installed on my phone. And we could 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 it much more gratifying to see disproportionate change from small inputs. So that's what I'm looking for. And I'm also looking for changes that are easy to make, that can have high adherence, that have very limited downside, which is very different from proving something. For instance, in the four Hour Body took a look at the potential effect of cell phones or the proximity of cell phones to say, gonadal function and reproductive health. And the literature that was available at the time was very limited. Had some animal studies, mice, rats, et cetera. I recognize humans are not just large mice, so they don't always translate. But I looked at it and I said okay, looking at this simplistically, is it plausible that there could be similar effects on humans? Seems to be the case also based on con with people who are specialists but would never go on record. Therefore, if your phone is in your pocket, just have it on airplane mode. I mean it does not have a high cost. And then pending any revision we can see. But while the jury's still out, I'm going to 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 not keeping the phone on in my front pocket or back pocket. And that's anecdota. My sperm analysis isn't relevant to this.

Conversation but worked out.

But you could say, well that's not necessarily because you had the phone off, but I did a very long detailed episode on male and female fertility. There is now what I view as a really quality meta analysis and it's pretty clear that there are effects of the smartphone on proximity of the smartphone when it's turned on that are not good for sperm isn't necessarily going to render somebody sterile but on sperm that can be separated out from the heat effects. And so essentially this is another instance in which you were right and I think more data will come out and am I a EMF conspiracy theorist? No. Do I wear tinfoil underwear? No. But I think it's interesting, I think it's important and thanks to you cued my attention to it. In fact I teach about that in a course on neural circuits and biology and health and disease.

Amazing. And I don't expect to get everything right at all. That would be crazy. I'd like to think I'm not totally crazy. And it's very important if you are going to do self experimentation or experiment experimentation in small groups which the quantified self community did quite well and I think still does quite well. You should really make every effort to not fool yourself, which is hard. It's challenging at times. But read books like Bad Science, read books like how to Lie with 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 strengths and weaknesses of studies. This doesn't take a long time. Certainly our friend Peter Attia, Dr. Peter Attia 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 podcasts, republished it on the Tim Ferriss show because it 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 overstate.

Yeah, I agree. And I also think that there are a lot of things that just simply will not ever be explored in a randomized controlled trial. One of the things that Peter and I have talked about before is he texts me, what are your thoughts on BPC157? This is a gastric peptide that's now been synthesized so people will inject it into a tissue that they're trying to heal or improve. Lots and lots of anecdote on BPC157, making injuries heal faster, et cetera. Again, anecdote data. I've used it. I took an injection of it yesterday. In fact, Peter basically is not a believer because there's a lack of published data on this, which is perfectly fine, or I should say he's skeptical. And so there's always that possibility of a placebo effect. But I don't think there will ever be a really nice controlled trial on BPC157 because the financial incentives aren't there and no smart graduate student is going to go do a thesis on this. So that's the reality. I mean maybe one will do it now that we're having this conversation, but it just doesn't. That payout isn't there.

Yeah, and that last one you mentioned is one that people miss a lot. People doing these studies are people with careers who are planning their careers and so they choose what they're going to invest time in very carefully. So that's another limiter on what will end up in an RCT 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 through a foundation, scise A foundation funding a lot of early stage science, 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, psycho, emotional or otherwise, identifying interventions, options that seem to have some plausible upside, like there is a mechanism that might make sense in humans. If you feel fairly certain there's very limited downside, which should include talking to people who are presenting their results as anecdote, then maybe you consider using X if you can cap your downside. And I recall for instance, looking at trans resveratrol specifically not for longevity but potentially increasing endurance for our body. And I ended up testing it. And there's a funny story associated with that. Didn't quite work out as planned and I don't use it any longer. But what I experienced prior to actually finding this on forums was joint pain, elbow pain. The one most consistent side effect was what felt like tendinosis in the elbows. And then I went online and I'd already done this, but I hadn't come across. I think it was the 500 group. People had been using 500 milligrams of trans resveratrol daily for long periods of time. And one of the most common reported side effects is joint pain. And I was like, okay, I'm not willing to make that trade off.

Makes sense to me. Yeah, I think it would be fun if ever you were willing that we could do a hybrid podcast on supplement fails.

I have some spectacular failures.

As do I. And I'm thinking about a few of them. I mean, some that were really like, took me off course. Like there's one supplement called Bolbene natalensis. This is another one of these shrubs.

Sounds like an infection.

I mean, this thing will really spike your testosterone. And free testosterone, I'm talking back acne, like huge strange gains aggression.

It's really wild.

And then after about seven to 10 days, it all crashes and you go below baseline. Oh, sounds terrible. Yeah. Even testicular pain. So it was unclear. So if you're a smart person, you halt use. Right. Understand why people are skeptical of certain things. And then of course, there are supplements that I'm a big fan of and that you're a big fan of. We talked about those things elsewhere. But it might be fun to do a supplement fails podcast if ever you're willing.

I could do just experimental fails.

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

N of one experimental fails, which include things that people might not think about. For instance, Four Hour Body had quite a bit of real estate dedicated to looking at things like prp. So platelet rich plasma. I think there's a role for it. It's not useful for everything, but for certain types of injury or repair, I think it's very interesting. But every time you get injected, this is where you have to be careful because there are very few free lunches out there. There's usually some type of feedback loop. Your system is very smart at autoregulating things. This is, outside of that, a consideration that I hadn't made, which is every time you have an injection, there's a chance of an infection. Particularly if the site in my case was the elbow and the injection was made for the prp, not quite where it should have been, slightly to the rear of the elbow where the skin is very thick. And so it pushed staph bacteria from a mid layer of the skin into the joint capsule.

Not good.

And that really could have ended very poorly. I ended up having to go to the ER and get it, get it all removed 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've become a little more conservative with some what I do, including injections. I'm like, all right, let me think twice about the injections. If I'm going to swallow something, let me make sure I'm really looking at the implications for the liver.

Yeah, smart, very smart. I'm curious about some of the things that you talked about in the four hour body and that you've mentioned today. Things like accelerometers, continuous glucose monitors, deliberate cold exposure. How many of those things are you still doing on a regular basis and how many do you use a couple times a week or a couple times a month or go through phases of using and not using cold exposure?

I use as consistently as is practical. So if I'm traveling it's a little harder. But we're in LA right now. One of the first things I did was find a few options for contrast therapy. One of the first things I did, and by contrast I do not mean infrared sauna and cold plunge. I'd much rather have hot and cold water just in terms of sort of speed of heating.

The Japanese approach.

Right. For just speed of vasodilation, particularly for injury recovery, I think it's incredibly helpful for mood regulation. Certainly that's the case. And cold water for 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 melancholy and people like the Van Goghs of the world would be prescribed cold baths. So that was something I was like, well, let's take a look at some of the old history, read about that and then look into PubMed and so on to see what might be supported. So the cold I'm still using, I become increasingly interested. This was not in the four hour body, but whole body hyperthermia, often excluding the head for depression, which I know.

There'S some research out of UCSF right now. Yeah, really interesting studies. Too early to report. I'm not involved in these, but I think these are really important studies because for all the People saying, oh well, it's ice bath stuff. Metabolism this, metabolism that. One thing that's very clear is long lasting, very significant increase in the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine. Not a replacement perhaps for antidepressant medication, but as you said, to move the needle toward antidepressant states. That's the cocktail and heat as well.

Yeah. And the hyperthermia, especially the way it is formatted right now with some of the research is very early stages. There's going to be less adherence. It's not as readily available, say a cold shower or cold bath. So I do think about the practical implications of that. But right now it's very interesting. Slow carb diet still use it all the time. It is not my default 247 as it used to be. So maybe I'm just getting older and more self indulgent. But if I find myself going off the rails a bit and I'm like, okay, I'm getting closer to muffin top here, let's stage an intervention. Then I will go immediately back to slow carb diet and within a matter of weeks it's pretty easily corrected.

Just a cue for people I know. Slow carb diet achieved great prominence. In fact, wasn't it featured on or mentioned in an episode of Orange is the New Black?

I think it might have been. It's made appearances on a handful of shows. Great.

I realize that I've been referring to the slow carb diet several times throughout this discussion. So for those that aren't familiar with the slow carb diet, I know they can go look up what that is, but so that we can keep them here 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 contour of what the slow carb diet is?

Sure. The slow carb diet is intended to be a simple, easy to adhere to diet for people who have perhaps failed other diets that allows you to recompose your body. So improve muscle mass, decrease body fat percentage. And the rules are really simple. And that's part of what makes it work. It's not ideal for every sport in every circumstance, but broadly speaking, it works for a lot of people who've had trouble with dieting in the past. So rule number one, don't drink calories. That's it. Very simple. So black coffee, unsweetened tea, great. Juice out. Anything with calories out, you could add a little bit of heavy cream to your coffee. Let's Say, but that's also bending the rules in a way that I don't like. So in the beginning, it's like, follow the rules so you can break them later. So in the beginning, let's just say you can't drink calories. Number two, don't eat anything white. Sounds pretty basic, right? Just don't eat anything that is the color of white or that could be red. White, basically. That means you're going to be avoiding starches and things that are similar to starches.

That includes things like oatmeal.

That includes things like oatmeal. So, roughly speaking, just avoiding things that are white or that could be white will get you pretty far. And yes, there are exceptions, like cauliflower, fine, you can have cauliflower. But again, don't get fancy. It's very easy to outsmart yourself when it comes to behavioral change. Keep it simple. So for at least two weeks, forget about the exceptions, right? Don't drink calories, don't eat anything white, and then eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. Okay, we got that. And then there are a few buckets you can choose from, right? So you have vegetables, beans, and lentils, and then some type of protein. So you're going to come up with meals that you can follow without deviating for a period of one or two weeks, Just come up with the same meals. And that's going to sound boring. Yes. But guess what? You do it already. You just might not realize it. And the lentils and the beans, specifically, as a prereq, we can get into some of the reasons, but add a lot of fiber and also inhibit appetite. So that's actually a very important component of these meals. And 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 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 week, so avoid fruit, avoid fructose. So agave nectar, anything that is sort of hidden sugar, avoid all that. So no added sweeteners, obviously, but avoid fruit and fructose. And again, it's not going to kill you. Guess what? If you're from European ancestry, your ancestors did not have, like, blueberries in the middle of winter, generally speaking, right? So you'll be fine for a few weeks and Then there's that cheat day and cheat Day, anything goes. The amount of damage you can do on cheat day is pretty limited. And there are ways you can mitigate that. There's a whole chapter called damage control in the four hour 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 those six days of the week, you're not giving up your favorite foods forever. You can even keep a list of all the things you want to eat on cheat day. And then you have free license to eat on cheat day. And that provides you with a release valve so that you can build in the cheating as opposed to having it occur as a failure point. There are a handful of other things there. If you have domino foods in the house, for instance, if you eat a lot of almonds or mixed nuts and you're just going to sit there compulsively eating them while you're sitting at your laptop, don't have what I call domino foods in the house, which are going to really create some portion control issues. But broadly speaking, don't drink calories, don't eat things that are white. Take from three categories and build your meals out and those are the meals that you follow. Do not eat fruit or fructose and then cheat one day a week. Saturday is a nice day or cheat day for most folks. And just to answer some questions that people are going to have, no, that doesn't mean 24 hours that you can spread out over two days that will actually set you back. But the amount of fat that you can store in a handful of sittings over 24 hours, which legitimately is more like 12 to 18 hours, pretty limited. So that's slow carb diet.

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

When I followed the slow carb diet.

I benefited from it tremendously. Lost fat, gained muscle, tons of energy. Sleeping great required less caffeine, all sorts of wonderful things. Stable blood sugar. I felt so, so good. Really enjoyed the cheat days. I really, really enjoyed the cheat days. So much fun. At some point there's some gastric distress that comes from not regulating intake, which led me to not want to eat the next day. So I tended to do the cheat days on Sunday in my case. And then I would fast most of Monday, just water, black coffee, tea, and then I might have a small meal in the evening. And then by Tuesday I was back on the slow carb diet, does that seem like sort of a detrimental deviation from the plan?

I think that if that is what works for you, then that is what works for you. So this low carb diet template for me is a starting point. And generally I'll say I think this is from Picasso, right? It's like, learn the rules as an amateur so you can break them as a professional. But I recommend most people kind of stick with the format for a handful of weeks and measure the results. Right. So there are guidelines for how to measure. The scale is a bit of a blunt instrument. So there are other ways, but if you're extremely overweight, you can just use the scale. And fasting, I think is fine, or just ratcheting back your caloric 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 cyclical ketogenic diet, which is a whole separate thing. It's much more limiting in terms of what you can eat. But I was training for ultimately the nationals in Chinese kickboxing. This was happening in 99. So I was training super hard. I was following a cyclical ketogenic diet, which meant I could eat very few things. But I did have this one cheat day. And I would do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand, which is one of the things you can do to limit the damage on cheat day. Do a glycogen depletion workout beforehand. And then I would just go crazy. I mean, I would drive to like Krispy Kreme, buy 12 donuts, and they would be gone by the time I got home. And it wasn't an hour away. It was like a 10 minute drive. Donuts would 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 calories.

A lot of stuff for you.

A lot of sweet stuff. I also do did the savory stuff. I mean, I had my favorites.

Nothing was safe.

Pizza. Nothing was safe. Nothing was safe. My paws got into everything. And then over time, because the next day you're going to feel like you got hit by a diabetic dump truck. You start ratcheting back and you're like, okay, maybe I don't need to do that. Maybe cheat day will just be two meals. Or maybe cheat day will just be 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've followed it to the T, just follow the commandments for say four to eight weeks, then you can certainly deviate. 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 overeating later in the day. If you have that habit, if you're consuming 50% of your 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 30 grams easily in the morning. Worst case scenario, use a protein of some type. Just don't make it hypercaloric.

You mean powdered protein?

Could be powdered whey 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 and this much protein it tends to be very self limiting. What you'll want to consume and what you can consume.

Once again, I had great experiences with Slow Carb diet and I'm going to.

Go back on yeah and nobody needs to buy anything to figure it out. If you just search on Tim blog Slow Carb Diet. But you'll get everything that you need to get started. No purchase necessary.

Well, it works very, very well, I'll say that. And it's very straightforward to follow and it does include the notorious cheat day. Infamous Cheat day and it can be done on a very reasonable budget. And so if people want to learn more about that they should go to Tim's blog on four Hour Body and Slow Carb Diet. We'll provide a link but I think it's worth highlighting again just how effective effective that is. As you pointed out, thousands and thousands of people using it to great success, some of whom were quite obese and yeah. Any updates on those folks? Are they still keeping the weight off?

I would like to do a follow up. I think with diets in general there's a lot of reversion to the mean, regression to the mean. So I would expect that some have kept it off and some have not. That would be true of I think like every possible diet, especially for people who are overcoming behavioral inertia of having gained hundreds of pounds. But I'd like to do some follow up. What was fun about the post I put together called how to lose 100 pounds on the slow carb diet. We profiled say four or five people. But there were dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. And this was a very long time ago. So I would say that a long term follow up would be super interesting. And we did at one point track several thousand people through a platform. At the time, I think it was coach me as they followed the soda carb diet for the first four to 12 weeks. And that was fascinating because I want the data and I'm happy to be proven incorrect with any of my assumptions. I mean, I don't view that as a failure, I view that as a huge net gain and it has a very high adherence rate. So I pay attention to not just is something effective, does it get you the outcome you want, not only is it efficient from a time and resource perspective, but how high is the adherence rate? So if you take a random sampling of 1,000 people from the US across socioeconomic classes, et cetera, how many people, practically speaking, will be able to or willing to follow this for say an eight week period of time or four week period of time? And I try to optimize for the widest adherence because I know the slow carb diet people come on, they're like, but what about intermittent fasting? What about this? And what about endurance athletes? I'm like, this is not for everybody. In all cases, it just happens to be a good default diet with a high adherence rate. And like you said, it's very inexpensive, it can be followed very, very inexpensively.

Sorry to interrupt you. One thing that I really like about it is that but many variants on caloric restriction, which is because laws of thermodynamics definitely apply. We're not trying to say they don't, but one of the issues with a lot of things, including intermittent fasting, which I sort of do some variant of because I'm not really hungry to eat until about 11, I like to train in the morning if I can, et cetera, is that they can sometimes prevent best performance in terms of especially resistance training, high intensity resistance training. So very low carb diets, I've tried them. Even if you're paying attention to other ways to restock, glycogen performance drops off. Whereas with slow carb diet, I feel like I can think, I can work, I can exercise, I can sleep, everything just works well. But there's one thing in it that I wanted to raise, that when I heard this, I thought there's no way this is true, which was making sure that you get 30 or so grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking. And I thought, how can that be how can you adding protein early in the day actually make a difference? And it really did work. I still track my numbers. So in terms of dropping body fat percentage, increasing muscle, it really does work. Now, whether or not that's simply because it's offsetting food intake that I would have, food that I would have taken in later in the day, I don't know. I'm not going to make myself my own control experiment to the point that I drive myself crazy. But it really does work quite well to get past sticking points, to just get that 30 grams of protein early. So sort of violate the intake, the time restricted feeding component deliberately with some protein in the morning, then still train and do all the other things and carry on as usual. And it seems so peculiar, like eating more and losing body fat. But it works.

Yeah, it's counterintuitive and a lot of approaches can work for a lot of different people, to state the obvious. But this particular aspect of this low carb diet that is helpful for, let's just say the majority of the people in that thousand person sample, I was talking about the hypothetical poll from different parts of say the US or anywhere, because it seems to help with a few things. First, there's just the thermic effect of food and for protein there's a greater thermic effect. You also have, and I think there's decent, at the time there was decent literature to support this. So I don't know if it's changed that. The protein intake along those lines has an appetite suppressing effect. So the net daily calories consumed tends to be less when someone has a higher protein meal earlier in the day. And last but not least, I will say one of the risks, and there are many people who execute well on this, but you have to be very meticulous, which is true of the ketogenic diet as well. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you do it 60% right or 70% right. You really.

Yeah, you can get yourself in there. Massive psoriasis. I mean my scalp, you know, sloughing off like when I'm in ketosis, like I'm like, what the hell is going on here? Going back on some complex carbohydrates and it going away.

Yeah, exactly.

So I don't need, I don't need a randomized control trial to know. I simply don't want to run that.

Experiment against your scalp. Yeah. So in the case of say time restricted feeding, some people who do intermittent fasting lose a lot of muscle mass. And there are multiple reasons for this, I think people should make use of relatively widely available tools like DEXA 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 pro tip, that's true for blood tests as well, but it seems to get net, net better effects than trying to teach people how to fast effectively, which you can do. And we can talk about fasting. That's something that was not included in the four Hour Body that were I to rewrite it today, I would include a section and there was a bit in Tools of Titans to address that on more extended fasts. Let's just call it three to seven day fasts. So that's an area that's of great interest to me, as is ketosis and metabolic psychiatry, a la Chris Palmer, who we both know.

Incredible. I mean, what the awakening that he's created through his book and going on your podcast, my podcast, and others, and 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 duh. And we're not just talking about the difference between slamming back horrible foods, horrible for us foods, versus eating really clean, I mean really specific diet protocols to treat mental health. Incredible.

Yeah, super exciting. So that's one of the things that I'm paying a lot of attention to right now. There are a handful in that realm within the just say the interplay of mind and body, since the Cartesian duality and separation of those two makes no sense from a biological standpoint. So that's something that certainly captured my attention. I paid a lot of attention to even as far back as early 2000s for mental health and just cognitive performance.

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Thanks for revisiting some of the four hour body and Slow Carb Diet and elaborating on some of the process that went into that. And I think creators of all kinds, thinkers of all kinds, and people who are interested in the contents of the four Hour Body are going to be very grateful for that information. I certainly am fascinated by your process. One of the things that you mentioned along the lines of process was the power of places and where one happens to live. I think there's a essay by Paul Graham that talks about this. It's a little outdated and it talks about the messages that you the tacit messages of being in certain cities. I think it was like Boston, you're not smart enough. What was it? It was New York, you're not powerful enough. And not you, obviously, or you should be more powerful. Is the message like the tacit message.

Los Angeles.

What you're doing, people aren't paying enough attention to it. Something like that. Fantastic messages. These are stereotypes about cities. Certainly cities change. The role of places is an interesting one. You mentioned small gathering, Kevin Kelly's house quantified self. And I think for people who don't know people like that, maybe we could get your thoughts on how would one think about where to live and maybe even curating their own gatherings, useful gatherings. Because it's not that I have to imagine. It's not that you guys sat back and you're like, I'm Tim Ferriss. And he's like, I'm Kevin Kelly. Let's have a gathering so we can talk about it in a few years on a podcast. This stuff happens. That word. It's a dangerous word. Organically, when people who have common interests decide to get together and talk and listen and brainstorm. And I'm yet to do that with good people and not have something really incredible come out of it. Not necessarily that day, but looking back five years later and just going, God, that was really worthwhile.

Totally few thoughts. In no particular order. I would say the first is my recommendations depend a lot on where you are in the arc of your career in life. If you are in full growth hyperdrive 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, you 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 LA or a San Francisco or Chicago or as new places develop, I'll give you one you might not expect say in Ottawa, Canada where Shopify is based. And the presence and growth of Shopify has spawned an entire ecosystem of startups. So there may be options outside of the usual cast of characters. Pittsburgh and Duolingo 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 serendipitously with many different people from many different worlds, I think is is hard to overstate the value of and my drive and my filtering function let's just say because when I first got to the Bay Area, nobody cared about me. I was nobody. I was driving my mom's used minivan hand me down that had the seats stolen out of the back.

Were you in the South Bay?

I was working in San Jose, yeah.

I mean no disrespect to San Jose. I'm from the South Bay. But there's a bleakness to the South.

There is, there is a little bit of bleakness. And then I lived across the street in this tiny apartment. Lived across the street from the Jack in the Box in Mountain View. So it's not like I was strolling onto the big stage and just blowing people away.

Oh, I, I, I, I grew up right near Mountain View. I'm very familiar. I probably skated the curves at that.

Probably.

Did you train at the Gold's Gym in off Ring Store?

Did actually. Amazing.

That was a great gym.

That's a great gym.

It was a great gym. I don't think it's still I'd go.

There super late before my writing session and it had the benefit of being open really, really late and wow. Ranked. Haven't thought about that in a long time. So 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 svase. I don't know if it exists anymore. The Silicon Valley association of Startup Entrepreneurs. I think it was Ty the Indus Entrepreneur, which is a very sort of Indian or Indian American focused organization that does a lot in the realm of startups. And I would carry water, I would take out garbage, I would check name badges, 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 to many when you are volunteering. A lot of folks who volunteer do 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 dropping 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 were planning future events. And I eventually got to the point where I was recruiting speakers and able to set the agenda for an entire main event. And then that's how I got to know say, Jack Canfield, who is the co creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul and many others who introduced me to my book agent many, many, many, many years later, Jack Canfield. But I was a nobody then. You have to play the long game, but you can be methodical on how you play that. And that is one approach. Just as an example for how to build your network which snowballs over time. Don't hump every VIP's leg within 10 minutes of meeting them. Play it cool.

And gatherings where that person has a lot of demands on them is the last place you want to do that.

The way you're going to make yourself.

No saliency to that.

Yeah. The way you're going to make yourself memorable with people like that is to be very professional, always on time, predict what they're going to need or problems they'll run into beforehand 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 note of it. Yeah.

The being easy to work with is something that I used to tell my graduate students postdocs because the opposite of that, nobody wants. Nobody wants that.

Yeah. Especially in the beginning, like later. Okay, great, you're Steve Jobs. You want to be difficult here and 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 try to stack the deck in your favor. Volunteering is a shortcut, and that would be one way of doing it. Another now, especially given the virtual communities that exist. So you have subreddits, 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.

Oh no, I don't know. I'm not saying it's gone. I remember during the pandemic there were some clubhouse gatherings that hopped on there, but I've sort of forgotten to get on there.

Maybe not. The platform affinity is really fickle, which is why I think to the extent possible, if you want to build a world class, and I use that term very deliberately, network in record time. Just to give you a nice headline, I would say focus on the uncrowded channel, which is in person. It's out of fashion, it's out of vogue. Going to a conference and actually interacting with humans in the hallway. Approaching panelists. This is another thing that I did. I'll give another tip. So very early on I would go to conferences. Nobody cared who I was, Nobody knew who I was. Fine. And I would study the panels. Let's say I'm going to a big event like south by Southwest. And I would. This is what I did in 2007, 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 could come back to that. But blogs were what podcasts were a few years ago. They drove incredible traffic. But they were undervalued by mainstream media, undervalued by mainstream publishers, et cetera, which meant there was an arbitrage opportunity in a way. And I would pick, say, a handful of panels with topics I thought were super interesting. And then the panel would end. And what would happen? The panelists would get rushed by various folks because many of them were well known. Who was not getting rushed? The moderator. I would go straight to the moderator and I would talk to the moderator. I'd thank them for the panel. I'd be very genuine, none of it was made up. And talk them for a bit. They would generally ask why I was there, what I was interested in. I would mention whatever that happened to be. In this case, it was, I'm finishing my first book or I have my first Book coming out soon. I'm here to hopefully meet people who are involved with A, B or C. And then if we hit it off, which was not true every time, but if it seemed to be going well, I would say is, I don't know anyone here. I'm really sort of orphaned here, making my way through this entire event. Is there anyone else here you think I would get along with? Who maybe I could buy a drink or a coffee. And the vast majority of the time they're like, oh yeah, you should meet so and so. And then I get the introduction and then I would meet that person. I would have a genuine interaction with that person. And if it made sense, if things were going well, I'd do the same thing. Is there anybody else here you think I should just say hi to and 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 making the intro? Yeah, 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 at this.

Point, people still hand them out.

Yeah, people still hand them out. I guess depends on where you are. Especially like Boston. But if, if, rather than trying to collect people as Pokemon cards, developing, say five, three to five deeper relationships through longer conversations at an event, that is what directly led ultimately to the hockey stick for the four hour work week within tech, within specifically San Francisco. So those would 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 or not it's health practices or nutritional practices or at meetings, it seems you're oriented toward the uncrowded but very interesting people in spaces. But the keyword there, I think is uncrowded. And of course the other keyword is interesting. Right. I mean, it's not like you're standing in the parking lot talking to whoever happens to be there. Although that can be interesting.

Right?

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

All right, 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 that's a technical term.

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 Elon Musk, good luck. Or you want to become friends with this, a lister celebrity who everyone else wants to meet, good luck. It's going to be 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 going to be hard on the other.

They have staff to prevent from happening.

They have a phalanx of protectors to prevent you from ever getting to that person. On the other hand, if you're approaching it from the standpoint of developing skills, learning and actually becoming potential friends with someone, give you an example, you could go after. You want to become better at boxing. Let's just make that up. All right, Maybe not the greatest example. Skiing would be another one. But let's stick with boxing just because of the way I'll explain it. If you wanted to, say, get personalized lessons from Floyd Mayweather, ain't going to happen. Okay, let's go. Then maybe a step down out of the pro ranks to gold medalist. Okay. If it's a brand new gold medalist, let's just say, like Oscar De La Hoya when he was really the golden boy and it just thrashed everyone. Still going to be hard. What about the silver medalist who just had a bad day when he had that last bout against Oscar De La Hoya? Potentially, from a technical perspective, from a personal connection perspective, you may have more in common with that person or a bronze medalist and they can get you 70, 80, 90% of the way there. And by the way, you probably don't have the physical attributes to make it to 100% anyway, if you're coming to it this late. And you could get, in many cases, one on one lessons, whether in person or virtually with someone who is of that caliber, they're in the same front of the pack as the names I just mentioned. Maybe not as famous. 100 bucks, 200 bucks per hour. For a lot of people, that is within reach.

I'm not sure what the value of saying one knows somebody very famous is. It's just never been something that I've oriented to.

It's a common orientation, though, and I think that's true for a lot of things. Many people use, say psychedelics because they want to tell other People, the story that they have of doing psychedelics, 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. And that's true for many things. So one of the questions I ask myself with all sorts of things, if I could never talk about this, would I do it?

What a great, great thing to think about.

Right. If I could have. Let's just say we didn't know each other. And I was 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 A, B, and C in the public eye. Maybe I want to build a podcast. Whoever. If I could meet with you, but I could never tell a soul, would I do it?

I don't know. Would you?

I would. I would, but.

I would, too.

But. But for a lot of folks, if they.

Meaning I'd meet with you. I'm not saying I'd meet with me, by the way. I'd meet with me, you know, the. Believe me, I meet with me all the time, and sometimes it's pretty unpleasant.

Yeah. And that can be applied to all sorts of things. Right. It's like. And it's. It's a useful question because I asked myself this for examining your motivations, and I'm not saying one motivation is always better than another, but 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. I apply other questions. Like there's a great question that Seth Godin applies, who really I admire tremendously and has built an incredibly unorthodox, unique life for himself and his family. He's zigged when everyone would expect him to zag, and he always has a defensible logic behind it, and much like Derek Sivers. But most people have probably heard the hypothetical question, like, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Right. Or what would you do if you couldn't fail? And Seth turns that around. I think that's a good question. But he turns around and said, what would you do if you knew you were going to fail? In terms of identifying what you would do for the process, what would you do if you knew it was going to fail. Okay, you're considering these five different projects. Let's say they're all going to 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. 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. 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's truly no other podcast I'd rather be having today than this one.

Right.

And the moment I'm starting to think, oh, I wish I was doing that thing over there, I realize I'm off target. I'm off target. And 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? Is there a notebook someplace in the kingdom of Tim Ferriss in Austin or elsewhere that says those questions, that essentially those questions are written? Are they?

Yeah. I literally have a document with questions that I've gathered from Seth printed out and at the Airbnb where I'm staying here.

You brought it with you?

I printed it out here and then I went through and I read it last night and I was highlighting questions from past interviews I've had with him on my podcast to revisit his questions. So 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 a good question, I take a. Take a photo or I capture it somehow in notes or in Evernote, which I know is kind of old fashioned these days, but I've used it for everything. So the critical mass is beyond enormous. And I do collect and revisit 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 don't want to go into this in too much detail because I have a lot more questions for you, but we just wrapped a series on mental health that will come out later this year with Paul Contian. He is brilliant, as we both know, and does truly important work. And he pointed to the value of asking really good questions about oneself and because of the way that questions that are really directed at self inquiry queue up the subconscious. So you ask the question. And unlike a statement or a meme. And the brain works with that in the days and hours after asking the question in ways that simple declarative statements probably don't ping 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, I think judging people by their questions is. It's also a shortcut to assessing and learning a lot about how someone functions and what makes them tick. I think it was Voltaire who said, judge a man by his questions, not by his answers. Something along those lines, but when in doubt, attribute to Voltaire. It sounds good.

Does sound good.

I think about this a lot. I do think about the questions and I refine the questions that I ask myself, especially while journaling, 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 do routinely revisit certain questions that I found helpful over time. I mean, one that people can play with is with whatever is really causing you consternation or stress at the moment. Some kind of decision. A relationship business could be anything. Just what might this look like if it were easy? What might this look like if it were easy? If it had to be easy? If that were possible, what might it look like?

And that could apply to anything.

That could apply to anything, could apply to fitness. It's like, look, if you do really intense kettlebell swings twice a week with proper weight and load and time under tension, and you do push ups a few times a week and handle a couple of other elements, you can get in pretty good shape. It's so simple, but hits a lot. I mean, it hits your entire posterior chain. Okay, fine, do some push ups and some core work. But if you're not exercising at all because you've made the assumption that it's four hours, five hours a week, rather than completely remove that objective and call it just impractical, can you ratchet down the scale? How far can you ratchet down the scale until you have no excuses? That would just be one example. Language learning. Tech investing applies to everything.

Making life easier is something that definitely gets my vote.

Yeah, making it easier and making it more elegant. The more pieces in your life you have 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. So I'm always looking for maybe like Japanese flower arrangement. It's like, okay, how many pieces can I remove while still maintaining the essence of what I'm trying to achieve?

You and Rick Rubin, man, I'm telling you, two people I am fortunate enough to know personally and that I have tremendous respect for and the work is self evident. 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 and boy does it make a significant improvement. To simplify, simplify, simplify, Take some thought and question asking. It's like you just can't delete things at random so you get down to some fix number. But I'd like to ask you about another area where you really have seemed to see around corners, and this is one that actually carried with it significant risk. Not necessarily risk to health and to life, but risk in terms of outside perceptions. And that's psychedelics. As you know, I've substantially changed my view on this. We don't need to go into my former stance on it. I talked about that when you were gracious enough to host me on your podcast for a second time. I'd done some psychedelics recreationally as a kid. It was correlated with not so great times in my life. Stayed away from them, then eventually revisited MDMA in particular, from a therapeutic standpoint. Found tremendous benefit again therapeutically with a medical doctor. Again, these drugs are illegal. Soon to change, perhaps, hopefully. And we'll talk about that. But it's becoming clear from the controlled studies by Robin Carter Harris, there are many others. Okay, Nolan Williams, others. That these drugs have enormous potential to help relieve depression, trauma, help people explore their psyche, their mind for sake of feeling better, doing better in the world, for leaning into life, not tune in, drop out, but. But to really lean into life with more purpose and more satisfaction. In some cases, they really have saved lives, I think. What was your mindset around psychedelics 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. You're not reckless. You may have been more adventurous in the past with things like I hate the word but biohacking and self experimentation than you are now. But you obviously have some self preservation mechanism intact.

We learn, we learn, we learn.

What was your mindset around it at the time? And then I want to get to what you've learned from it. And frankly, the tremendous efforts that you've put that are now translating to tremendous value for really millions of people and ultimately I think it's going to be billions of people. By establishing funding for the pioneering research in this area, helping to promote the movement of these compounds from illegal to legal in the therapeutic setting, so on and so on. So take us back to your first thoughtful exploration of psychedelics. What did that look like? You're like, oh, mushrooms, I'll eat them.

Was that it?

Or was it? Or was it a dedicated research process? And who'd you talk to? What was it all about?

So let's go way back to my undergrad experience. And there are many reasons that I ended up going to Princeton. I think I was very lucky to get in my SAT scores because I could never finish the damn test. I was so much of a perfectionist, I would get stuck and ended up not doing terribly well. But through essays and other things, ultimately was able to go. Part of the drawback.

Well, let me interrupt you and just say, I think at this point we can say they were lucky to have you.

Well, thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that.

Great institution. And you've done great. And you're a great poster on the wall for them. I hope so.

Really?

Really? Yeah. I just want to say it because you're not going to. And I think it's important that these are great institutions of great mind scope through there, and Einstein went through there. And their success rests not just on the Einsteins, but also on the student body and what they go out into the world and do, and not just in the realm of science. So really, they're lucky to have had you.

Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. I studied Chinese in a room where Einstein used to teach. It's pretty cool to set foot and spend time weekly in a space that was shared by some of these people.

Amazing.

It really gets the imagination firing. If we go back to that chapter in my life. I was initially a psychology major with a focus on neuroscience, so I wanted to be a neuroscientist. And there are many reasons for that. I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family, so Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. So that was certainly a personal driving interest in terms of looking at mechanisms, understanding what therapeutics existed or did not exist, how things were developing in the research. And while I was there, which later I ended up switching gears and transferring to focus on language acquisition and East Asian studies, hence the Chinese that I mentioned earlier, and Japanese and Korean. But on the neuroscience side, there were a lot of cool breakthroughs also that came out of Princeton around that time. Looking at the amazing discovery of, say, neuronal. I don't want to say regenesis, but neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Gould's way. Exactly, 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 some of Daniel Kahneman'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'm horrified by just the lack of control and meaning, not control, but lack of supervision. Right. I mean, the set and setting ended up being fine. Nothing terrible happened. But there were a lot of ways it could have gone sideways. But that first experience, and I must have consumed, in retrospect, just a dizzying amount of mushrooms.

I mean, it should be in excess of 5 grams.

I would have been more. Yeah. Just knowing what I know now, it.

Would have been, kids, don't do this at all.

Don't do that.

I'm not gonna say don't do it at home. Don't do it at all.

Yeah, yeah, please.

I don't think. I actually don't think the young developing brain should be exposed to psychedelics.

We could talk about that.

We could talk about that.

Yeah.

I'm. Take my stance. I'm going to take my stance for now.

I mean, in the world in which we live, in the us I would totally agree with you. There are some interesting cultural exceptions in other places where things are more set up to provide for that type of use, but I certainly would not recommend it. But coming back to my recreational experience, my subjective experience was so bizarre and my experience, experience of time, so nonlinear. My experience of self so different from anything I had experienced up to that point, and therefore my construction of reality being so completely 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 it was in 1998 or 99. I actually wrote a paper. One of my junior papers was focused on examining potential similarities between REM sleep and LSD 25, and looking at some of the patterns of neural activity. Of course, we can do a lot more now with the tools that 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 in a way. I'm like, okay, how much room is there for growth here? Because 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 was a professor named Barry Jacobs who was doing some very interesting work. He did a lot of work looking at the serotonergic systems and did a lot of work with cats. Ultimately, I could not do personally the animal work required of the sort of indentured servitude that I would.

I think you wrote someplace once you, you said, you know, when confronted with the. The prospect of installing a computer printer into the head on a cat head, on the back of a cat head.

They literally had those, like those little VGA ports on the back of these cats heads because cats sleep a lot. And so they're interesting study.

Yeah, a lot of that. Cats. Very few laboratories work on cats any longer. It's mostly a mouse still some non human primate work. My laboratory is essentially shut down or is in the process of shutting down, even our mouse work. I much prefer to work on humans. They can give consent and they house themselves. And the animal research thing is tough for any sentient being.

It's tough. For what it's worth, the cats seem pretty happy. They were just sleeping. I mean, the ports were for tracking. So the cats were pretty. I mean, they were just normal cats. The cats were fine, but we would have been injecting retroviruses into rats and then perfusing them, which means bleeding them to death to avoid bruising of the tissue. Because then if you're going to take thin slices and scans, you didn't want to have bruising. And I just couldn't do it. I think it's important. I do think there's a place for it. But I couldn't do it. So that's why I transferred out. But the point I was 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 I suffered from major depressive disorder, an extended depressive episodes, let's just say on average three to four a year. And by, by extended.

Even before you had started.

Oh, even before.

Yeah, from a young age.

Yeah, from a very young age. And I would say, so let's just call it 3 to 4 on average a year. Those could last each a few weeks or a few months. I mean, this is a very high percentage of my total year and when I had these higher dose experiences with mushrooms. So we're talking about psilocybe mushrooms. And then if we're looking at the molecule that's being examined scientifically, psilocybin, I noticed this afterglow effect that was really durable. And it, that was an antidepressant effect 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 afterglow effect for three to six months. And that raised all sorts of interesting questions. What the hell is going on here? Is it the content? Is it 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 psychedelics. Where again, uncontrolled environment ended up in rural New York. Coming out of my trip, standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night with headlights coming.

At me, goodness gracious.

So you don't want to do that. And I was like, okay, too dangerous.

Were you taking them alone? Is that how that is?

I was taking them with two friends and my two friends were, without telling me, just went for a walk and left me alone. So don't do it.

Points to the, you know, I mean, these are powerful compounds.

Yeah, you're playing with nuclear power like these. This is the nuclear power of psychological or psycho. Emotional surgery is the way I encourage people to think about them. And I stopped using any psychedelics completely. I was still very interested in them, but I basically hit pause and I didn't revisit that until, let's call it 2012, 2013, where I was still struggling with major depressive disorder. And I saw my girlfriend at the time completely transformed by supervised facilitated use of, in this case, ayahuasca, which 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 experience, but I was able to see the transformation in her that seemed to have some 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 10 years as of that point in time, and thinking about how I would approach it systematically, with safeguards, with proper supervision, basically approaching it the way I would have approached any of the topics in the Four Hour Body. And that is what led me back into, along with a number of other interventions I should Say so. I wasn't betting the far farm on psychedelics. I also started TM at that point.

Some people might Transcendental Meditations. These are like four to ten day meditation retreats.

This was actually much shorter. It was a two or three day training and you're visiting the instructor. I want to say it's once or twice a day, probably once a day and getting up to speed. And I did this because I was going through a period of. Of acute stress. This was finishing the four Hour Chef. This was actually probably in the years preceding that. And I had one friend who I'd seen really change from, let's just call hyperkinetic 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 of people trying to levitate and all this weirdness. Just ignore that I'm trying to levitate.

Nothing against them. If you actually levitate, then we got to have a discussion. But trying to levitate seems like, why not? Every kid tries all sorts of things.

Give it a go. He's like, just put that aside. Because I kept coming up with pushback. And he's like, look, all I'm saying is it's a warm bath for your mind that you take twice a day and it'll chill you the fuck out, so try it. And I was like, okay, fine, that's a good endorsement. I was like, at this point, I had been burning the candle at both ends so intensely, it's like, okay, so there was tm. And then I began examining how I might approach notice I didn't just jump into using them. I was like, how could I approach taking psychedelics in a sequence, in a logical sequence, with proper protections, with safety assurances? And that took me probably a month or two. And I was right in the middle of things. In Northern California, you have access to a lot. And only then did I start looking at having my own experiences. And lo and behold, I mean, I'll cut to the chase. But the personal outcome, and there are many different benefits and risks, I should make very clear these things can be extremely dangerous in certain ways, generally not physiologically, 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.

That's a significant improvement, right?

I mean, from a quality of life perspective, those are two different people. And that then led me to. And as I did with all My workouts, right. I took copious notes over the span. I mean, now we're looking at 10 plus years. So if I were to ever write another book, it would probably be related to all of the really fine details of the experiments and my learnings, including some of the more bizarre things over the last 10 years. But it would be just a beast.

To create with psychedelics.

Experiences with psychedelics, psychedelics and sort of psychedelic adjacent non ordinary experiences of consciousness, which I think often are touching at edges of the same thing, which is going to be controversial for some folks. But to come back to the storyline, just to put a bow on that, when I saw the personal outcomes, for me, the anecdote from friends who are facilitators, who have worked with thousands of people, which is a pretty good sample size, still anecdotes. But these are people who are very smart, who keep records. And I believe that these people have spotted patterns that are only going to be possible to test and verify over the next five to 10 years. So at least as a means of generating hypotheses, I take these people very seriously. And then I started to connect with scientists whose work I had read, like Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, began looking at the most compelling data related to say, MDMA assisted psychotherapy and complex ptsd. 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 paradigm of psychiatry and pharmacology. And that made me very excited because it was uncrowded, there's very little funding coming into the space. It was high leverage. And I looked at it just as I've looked at my many startup investments. 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 check I ever wrote was personally to Adam Ghazali's lab at ucsf.

Yeah, great lab.

Which at the time was looking at software. He's not going to like this description, but I'm going to simplify it. Software that might attenuate or reverse age related cognitive impairment, specifically related to various aspects of attention. And that was my first foray into funding early stage science, which was very analogous to me to funding early stage startups. And then later on to touch on the reputational thing. I know this is a TED Talk, so thank you for listening.

No, this is great. Please. You're always so gracious on your podcast. This is what people want. This is certainly what I want to hear.

So on the reputational side, you're right that at the time especially, let's just call it 2013-2015, this was not a comfortable national conversation of any type.

I wouldn't have had this conversation back then.

No way.

I'd lose. I don't know that I would have lost my job. It just would have raised a lot of eyebrows. But now such studies are happening at Stanford.

Yeah. The perception 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, et cetera? There are a lot of considerations, but. And I tested that. Just like I was saying, I like to capture my assumptions on paper so I can stress test. And I was like, 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 true or not? And I decided to crowdfund for a Hopkins pilot study looking at psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. And I thought to myself, okay, we have a couple of things falling in our favor here. Number one, depression does not discriminate. So across socioeconomic classes, across gender, across race, this is a problem. Almost everyone knows someone who takes antidepressants who is still depressed. Okay. Treatment resistant depression, therefore, is the indication. Psilocybin is the intervention. Let me crowdfund. And I did that throughout the time. Crowdrise, which was co founded by Edward Norton, who had become a friend and was the actor. Edward, the actor, who's very smart, Very, very, very smart. Also one of the best investors I've ever met, which a lot of people don't know. Very bright guy and so crowdfunded. And I also like to put my money where my mouth is. I said, okay, guys, I'm going to seed this. I'm putting in X. The goal is to raise, I think it was 80,000, 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 blowback. And not only was there no discernible negative blowback, a number of people. And this was deliberate. I wanted 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. A handful of folks I knew. And I was like, oh, interesting. Okay, there are at least a half a dozen folks who are studying the same thing or paying attention to the same thing. And then I just Got bolder. I was like, okay, if I tested that, let me push and then let's see what happens and I'll wait. And lo and behold, I realized that the perception did not match the reality. The reality was, if you're talking about indications that cause an incredible amount of suffering for a very large number of people, even those who are anti drug per se, just say no to drugs, want solutions. And the current treatments for many of these things do not work very well and in the best of cases are often masking symptoms and not addressing root causes. I would say. So at that point, I just went whole hog and I said, okay, look. But I like to think that I am exactly what you see is what you get. The person you talk to off camera, the 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 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 antifragile as possible. And so by talking about this, I viewed it as a way of inoculating myself against fear of reputation loss. Like, okay, let me push this. Like, I'll ride this horse. Other people might not. But I wanted to remove the stigma for funding purposes, hopefully open up federal funding that's starting to happen now from different agencies, and then to focus on access and reduction of cost and insurance reimbursement and so on. So I set a game plan, let's call it maybe five years ago, and I've just been slowly, methodically executing on that since. And the reason I chose this to focus on, and I've funded other things, but I've really focused on this, mental health therapeutics, which is not limited to psychedelics. We could talk about some other things that I find interesting, but psychedelics 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, you're deca billionaire, great, maybe you can do something interesting. And I'm sure other people could. But if you have $20,000, $50,000, it's going to be hard to make a dent there in psychedelics. You can actually still make a difference and very high leverage, in part because these compounds seem to challenge much of what we assume to be true about treating mental health. And so that makes for an attractive bet. So that's where I've been going.

Yeah. I'm so glad you shared that with us and that you did that exploration and that you've been spearheading the funding efforts. This podcast has a premium channel that's for raising funds for scientific studies. We've got. We are in the process now making our first four contributions. One of those includes work in Nolan Williams Laboratory at Stanford, combining transcranial magnetic stimulation with studies of Ibogaine and 5 Meo DMT, maybe a few other things. But basically 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. A podcast with a scientific slant. Certainly this podcast obviously has a scientific slant, but the idea of doing philanthropy for the sorts of work that really deserves funding and exploration. By the way, in thinking about other hybrid things that would be fun to do, I mean, I would love to contribute and join those efforts because the work to continue to raise funding for psychedelic studies and all these great laboratories continues. It continues. And you've rallied a collection of some pretty powerful people to contribute to this. And I know you've joined arms with Michael Pollan in many ways. Do you want to talk about the fellowships that you guys put together? I find that really cool. You've got fellowships in the works or maybe already happening at UC Berkeley. Is that right?

At UC Berkeley, yeah. So what I try to do, and for people who want to check it out, the name of the foundation is Saisei Foundation. And let me explain that for a second. So it's S A I S e I. So saisefoundation.org I speak Japanese. I went there as an exchange student and speak, read and write it still to this day pretty well. Saisei can mean a lot of things. It means rebirth in Japanese. And I've seen what can only be described or can certainly be described as rebirth in so many clinical outcomes that I thought it was appropriate to use. And what I've tried to do with the foundation is I think do what I'm pretty good at, which is trying to peek around corners and find something to prototype. Right. So just like the CGM and like. All right, how can I just. Getting a hold of a Dexcom back then when it was just for type 1 diabetics, was. Was hard.

It's not something that you have to actually go under the skin. So it's.

It's like taking a barbecue prong and putting it under your abdominal skin. It was not comfortable.

Can you describe your cortisol level in subjective Terms, when you're at home, you got this thing and you're about to implant it and you don't have any precedent, it's not like this is levels or one of these other CGMs that are out there. Stamp the thing in. You can look on Instagram and see someone else do it. There's nothing like that. So you're at home wondering if you're going to skewer your liver.

I'm at home doing it myself and I'm sweating like a stuck pig. I'm sitting there, I'm like, oh my God, I don't even know if I can hold it.

Is your girlfriend there? Like to support you in case you died?

I think at the time she wasn't because she was squeamish and didn't want to see it. And I'm so. I'm sitting there at my kitchen table, I remember this. God, I'm sweating just thinking about it. And no videos to watch and wasn't really supposed to have it in the first place. And the device for readout, by the way, no iPhone, right? So it was like this janky pager looking thing that had a readout that made you think you were playing pong or something. I mean, it was very.

The green tint screen.

Yeah, green tint screen dot font. It's so primitive. And put this thing under my skin, would tape. I would cut a Ziploc bag and put it on top and masking tape it to my skin to take showers because otherwise it wouldn't work. And it was great. And I'll just say that I don't use.

You realize you said it was great. I did, I did say it was great because I was sweating and it was. I was afraid.

But it gave me a lot of insight.

Okay.

And then once I had the insight over a course of a handful of weeks, then I felt like I didn't really need it anymore. And that was also just a heavy tax to pay. You have to wear that thing around, look like you have a, you know, what is it called, a colostomy bag or something? It's just like, it was big, it was bulky. So just like I did that, I wanted to do proof of concept. The goal was, can I use this for healthy, normal applications? Will the insights be actionable? And they were, lo and behold, similarly with the foundation. Since I'm dealing with smaller amounts of money, I'm not in the billionaire club by any stretch 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 in say, the crowdfunding 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 UC Berkeley, Michael Pollan and I partnered on this and my foundation funded it. The Ferris UC Berkeley Journalism Fellowship. Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship is providing funding to up and coming journalists who want to focus on psychedelics as their beat, which to this date has not been financially feasible. You just don't have the space to do really long form investigative work. The hope being that these journalists can apply their skills and their dedication to examining different facets of the psychedelic ecosystem, therapeutic potential, regulatory issues, et cetera, in a way that can shape and inform national and international discourse in a very critical way. Because these things are not a panacea. There's a lot of claims that are made about these that are totally unbacked by any type of science. And there are a lot of charlatans. And so I 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 awarding fellows with these grants and I think it's a relatively small amount of money. It's like $10,000 per, something like that, that. But the outcomes have been amazing. We had a huge, I want to say a 7,000 word piece that was one of the main features in Rolling Stone magazine. Huge piece in National Geographic focused on iboga and fair trade and some of the implications for local harvesting and or over harvesting. All the dynamics present in that, which I think has some incredible promise for particular forms of opioid use, opioid use disorder in particular. But that has been a huge success. So the hope is that other journalism schools will say that's a great idea. And I will have de risked it for some other philanthropist or foundation or government, say director at an agency to say, okay, we'll greenlight that because I've done it and it's been received very well and it's had a real impact on how things are moving along. Another one would be, say at Harvard Poplar, this is at Harvard Law School, is the first dedicated team focused on law, policy and regulation related to psychedelics from a legal perspective. Super important, super important, super, super important. Also another pilot, let's just call it proof of concept that that Saisay foundation funded was helping to develop curricula for, I think it was Yale, Johns Hopkins and nyu, effectively an accreditation or module that they could put into their existing psychiatry MD programs such that people could develop the skills necessary and the understanding necessary to administer psychedelic assisted therapies if and when they become legal prescribable.

Which, if I understand correctly, it sounds like within the next 12 to 24 months, MDMA assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma is likely to become legal in the hands of psychiatrists at least, and maybe certain clinical psychologists as well in the U.S. is that right? Through the efforts of the MAPS group?

Yeah, through the efforts of maps.org, and Rick Doblin and many others. That is the tip of the spear. So I think anyone who's interested in psychedelics should have a vested interest in supporting those efforts. Not because we know everything works. I want to be clear. Not because.